| It's not an easy question to answer, but the majority of the cost were salaries and marketing. We didn't consider the one-off costs of e.g. legal, from what I remember. It was in the order of thousands (I think either $2k or $22k, sorry for the rounding error) per user signup that Uber paid in terms of marketing and advertising - and that was regardless of if they generated any money. It was way more for driver signups since the driving bonuses were pretty sizeable. The amount of staff Uber has is way too much, in my opinion. Uber's internals are the definition of "over-engineered", to the point things were just too complicated for any single person to really work with, let alone understand to any degree. We had teams internally that were making the same thing but had no idea each other existed - and this happened pretty frequently. There was a lot of turn and restructuring in upper management, not to mention pulling out of China and then having months in a row with almost daily sexual harassment/discrimination/bad CEO news stories breaking out. So the rest of the company was just kind of left to fend for itself for a long time, just burning even more money despite nothing getting released. I knew one other engineer that... to this day, I'm not sure he even wrote a single line of code. He was always hanging around other people, wanting to chat. When you'd casually ask "so what are you working on these days?" he'd just shrug and smile. Never got a straight answer out of him. He was higher up in the ranks than I was, younger, assumedly paid more. Couldn't answer basic questions about writing code, but loved to brag about his new designer shoes and stuff. Just an anecdote. It was insanity. Everyone I personally interacted with hated working there, and it was clear it was way too crowded. That, along with the marketing/ad spend, made me convinced Uber would never be profitable. |