[Tanjreeve]

I mean sure it's more complex than "hurrdurr bad engineers, not enough Rust etc etc" but to succeed a company needs products of a suitable quality level delivered in a suitable time scale to meet the needs of their customers. The failure to do that the buck stops at the engineering group.

[jnwatson]

Engineering isn’t usually the impetus of new product categories, which is what Lyft needs to survive.

Ride share isn’t sufficient.

[Retric]

The time to pivot was several years ago.

If ride share can’t break even very soon then the company is fucked either way. At this point the VC money trucks are long gone and public markets have little interest in unprofitable companies long term.

[lumost]

How is it possible that the money trucks kept coming for nearly 15 years on a business that has no path to profitability?

In finance, such situations usually imply that someone in the middle of the transaction made money while grifting others - is that all that was going on in VC?

[Retric]

The general assumption by their investors was they had a path to profitability. Critically they don’t need to convince most investors just enough to keep going.

If you really want to understand VC’s from a finance perspective it comes down to trying to value intangible assets. Having ongoing customer relationships is inherently valuable. Lyft could for example sell their customers email address to scammers, but the goal is to leverage those relationships more sustainably thus extracting vastly more money.

For a rapidly growing unprofitable company it really just becomes a question is the long term value of those intangible assets (software, customers, patents etc) worth more than the current burn rate. If it is then you have a profitable investment in a company that will eventually become profitable or get bought out by someone else.