[brandon272]

Maybe I'm not paying close enough attention; is there some evidence that Uber is "blowing up" outside of Silicon Valley conjecture and blogs? People I talk to outside of SV don't know anything about Uber's recent internal issues.

[scarface74]

I wouldn't say uber is blowing up but there business model has a lot of unknowns.

Right now, Uber is subsidizing each ride and their marginal cost is high compared to their marginal profit. The only way they can become profitable is either cut drivers pay, increase the cost per ride or both.

If they cut driver's pay, will the drivers stay with Uber? The other side of the coin is how elastic is the demand?

[tedmiston]

The third option is to automate drivers. I don't really see what the unknowns are. Uber has always seemed to approach it as a long game a la Amazon.

[rspeer]

The unknown there is their automation arm being sued by Google.

[wapz]

And it looks really bad if you read the deposition by the WayMo (staff/manager?) employee.

[tedmiston]

Thanks. Somehow I hadn't heard about this yet.

[brandon272]

Right, but that's always been the case with Uber and the employee in this case knew that going in. Uber's overall business model doesn't seem to be his or her concern, but rather recent bad press.

[scarface74]

I agree. That reply was more in context of worrying about "3000 Uber employees" in the market at the same time.

Unless he is a high level executive, I don't see why anyone would tar him with the ethical lapses of Uber

On the other hand, someone mentioned Yahoo. I would definitely ask someone technical why they stick with Yahoo.

[hsod]

> Right now, Uber is subsidizing each ride

How can this be true? I thought Uber takes a cut on each ride. Are you suggesting that they actually pay the driver extra money on top of what the riders are paying?

[wapz]

It's based on total operating costs--not the cost of the driver only. If you include how much they have to pay for everything else (developers, management, advertising, etc), the "cut" they get from each fare is less than how much they spent in other areas. (I could be wrong so please do correct me if so but I believe this is the case here).

[scarface74]

Scale only helps if you have high fixed costs, the ones you mentioned, and the marginal revenue - marginal costs is large. But if your marginal profit is small, scale doesn't really help.

People like to compare Uber to Amazon and how long it took Amazon to become profitable. The differences are:

That Amazon was putting money into expansion and could turn a profit anytime it needed to.

AWS is their most profitable division - a category with high fixed costs and high marginal profit.

They are already using a lot of automation for their warehouses. It will be decades before driverless cars are ubiquitous.

[alasdair_]

In many markets, Uber will pay bonuses based on hitting a particular number of rides.

[anexprogrammer]

Well there's been several pretty negative pieces on the Guardian front page in the last month. OK they're left of centre, so will undoubtedly have a view on the sexism aspect of recent events, but it's not been just those aspects they reported.

I think most also got picked up by Metro.co.uk and the Daily Mail etc - like the CEO argument - so reporting is well outside SV. Not forgetting the whole #deleteuber thing. A couple of months back the only mention of Uber outside of HN, Tech Crunch et al was reports of the driver self-employment case or expectation of driverless cars.

What I can't guess is how influenced non-techies are from current events. It does feel like they've hit a certain mass that those negative events are now being widely reported in the mainstream.

I'm the wrong side of the Alantic to be well up on the SV jobs market, but as I say, were it me I'd be concerned by the apparent change in mood. I'd have been equally concerned by the change in mood, and endless bad press, just after Ratners CEO called one of their products "cheap crap" as a joke [0] - 12 months later Britain's largest jewellery chain was no more.

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/aug/22/gerald-ratn...

[waxspin]

Yeah, I am in Chicago and don't know any programmers here who DON'T know about Uber's issues.