[agentofoblivion]

I remember reading plenty of thought pieces a few years ago saying this was impossible, and that Uber was a house of cards gaining market share by subsidizing rides with investor money. That there were no economies of scale to bring costs down, etc., etc. I would love to see a "what we got wrong, and what we still have right" post from one of these people, but I won't hold my breath.

[sschueller]

So you have a profitable company but at what cost? These drivers are working at slave wages unable to pay into any retirement funds or have health insurance.

In countries where there was a reasonable taxi system uber gutted them and went around regulations taking away the few guarantees the people had like a retirement and sick leave.

In the end we the tax payer have to help these people down the road when they get sick or old and all of this for the profit of a few share holders.

In Switzerland Uber still owes drivers half a billion Swiss Francs in unpaid wages/retirement and sick leave. Where do people think this missing money will come from when these people need it later on in life?

[srge]

I have met and talked to several Uber drivers and I was surprised that the « slave » narrative was totally unfounded (on that sample at least).

Drivers were generally very happy about their Uber earnings. When I realized it I bought shares and they are now at +60% over the buying price.

Let’s just be careful with pre-digested narratives. I am not saying that every driver is happy. But many are certainly quite happy!

[tomdell]

Some are happy for now because they largely aren't accounting for the deferred costs that are being pushed down the road - once you account for wear & tear on the car and associated maintenance and eventual new car purchases, their earnings are much less than what it seems in the short-term. Uber relies on drivers not running all the numbers before signing up.

[fshbbdssbbgdd]

This argument is demeaning to the drivers. They are grown adults who do their taxes. A reasonable prior would be that people who do something for a living tend to know more about the job than people who don’t. You can surely find examples of unprofitable Uber drivers who are driving in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong car, but that doesn’t make it the norm.

There’s a lot of discussion among the driver community about how to operate to optimize earnings. People are leasing or buying cars specifically to use them to drive for Uber and depreciation, maintenance, and fuel economy are all part of the calculation.

[liamN]

I dont think it's demeaning. Uber (and others) are not very upfront about the longterm costs and risks, causing (often) desparate people to make serious decisions without critical information. This mostly affects people who drive for these companies as their full time job.

They make it seem like it's a job you can do at your own convenience, but you can't actually do it like that and expect to make consistent money. All of them start penalizing you (by giving you fewer jobs in the future) if you turn down jobs for any reason, driving down their profitibility. It also looks like youre making more money than you are because you have to do all your own taxes (which is mostly just a hassle, but did blindside my poor friend who didnt know anything about taxes and had to go into debt to pay his taxes since he was living paycheck to paycheck).

And its very easy to not make the connection that driving all day for Uber et al increases chances of getting in a car accident, which will increase monthly insurance costs, not to mention car repairs and car maintainance from driving 8-12 hours a day most days of the week. And if your car ever needs to go into the mechanic for repairs (a famously slow process often times) thats lost wages every day youre without your car. It's like being a truck driver; Uber et al just move all the costs of fleet maintainance to the drivers, which really eats into what looks like a decent wage on the surface level.

Of course, there are going to be some people who do all the research and are ok with these risks, or game the system someone. But most people who do these driving jobs full time do it because they dont have a lot of other options, and dont bother to do all the in-depth research because "it looks easy" and they didnt have another readily available choice anyway. This isnt Uber's fault per se, but they benefit from it and do nothing to inform drivers of these risks.

(cite: have a friend who worked for all the delivery and ride share apps before losing his car and being too poor to buy a new one.)

[skinner927]

This is quite a strong opinion from a sample size of 1.

[remote_phone]

Every Uber driver I’ve had in US and Canada are happy with driving for Uber. One guy I had the other day drives under as his second job and He says it pays his rent, his car payment and gas and his primary job goes straight to savings. The idea that these Uber drivers are slaves is a lie.

[carlosjobim]

You didn't deserve to be down voted for this comment.

[mentos]

Devils advocate, what will these people do if/when Uber/Lyft/etc replaces the driver with automation?

[fckgw]

Why would they do that? If you automate the drivers then suddenly Uber needs to buy and maintain a fleet of thousands or millions of autonomous vehicles and their costs balloon astronomically. Kiss any profit out the window for another decade at least.

The current system is GREAT for Uber. No vehicles to purchase, maintenance is the burden of the driver and you only need to cut off a small slice of your profits for the driver in order to keep the whole thing going. If you need more profits you simply raise rates or lower driver pay.

[smcl]

They invested a tonne of money in self-driving vehicles. If they didn't intend to utilise them then what on earth were they doing, lighting money on fire for fun?

[adeelk93]

Uber sold off that division years ago, and is no longer focused on self-driving

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2020/12/uber-sells-self-driving...

[harambae]

> no longer focused on self-driving

Not quite. More like they're partnering with others and staying internally focused on their core competencies, like any good company does.

Section "Get to know our autonomous partners" https://www.uber.com/us/en/autonomous/

[smcl]

Weird, I remember a lot of talk around that time of self-driving cars being their future and the reason why they had such a sky-high valuation. Guess I missed this news mid-Covid

[thworp]

Lighting money on fire to increase valuation. Getting a cab dispatch service to get valued at insane multiples was a master stroke.

[HDThoreaun]

Uber can just use idle self driving cars. How many hours a day are you using your car? Most people are at like 2 or 3.

[fckgw]

Those don't exist. No one is taking their self driving car to work and then lending it out to Uber. Not to mention if a company like GM gets their self-driving tech off the ground, why wouldn't they just spin up an app and beat Uber at their game?

[crazygringo]

> No one is taking their self driving car to work and then lending it out to Uber.

To the contrary, tons of people will be doing that.

There's going to be a big group of people who logistically need "their own car" for various reasons (live out in the suburbs, need stuff in a locked trunk, can't risk a delay in getting to work, etc.) but couldn't be happier to make money on it by lending it out as a taxi downtown during business hours. Or when they're traveling for a week, or whenever.

Especially when you don't even need to worry about messes/damage because internal cameras will catch and bill whoever was responsible, and the car will drive itself to the nearest garage for cleaning/repair.

Just as we now have hotels and AirBNB, I totally foresee different self-driving taxi services that are either fleet-owned or consumer-shared. I can't imagine why this wouldn't happen.

[renewiltord]

I use GM's cars all the time. Pretty good in SF. They're slower but sometimes when you're not time sensitive, it's nice to grab the ride since they don't cancel or anything.

The first ride was novel. Everything after felt so routine I didn't even look at the road. As far as my girlfriend and I were concerned, we got in and then talked for a while and hung out and then got out elsewhere.

The speed is the only constraint right now.

[louzell]

> No one is taking their self driving car to work and then lending it out to Uber

Sounds like a business opportunity

[cykotic]

Perhaps some day we will live in a society that does not allow exploitation because we can’t think of what those who are exploited would do if not for the exploitation.

[flangola7]

They will probably suffer even more, why?

[Zetice]

I think his argument is that slavery benefits the enslaved, or something like that.

[pessimizer]

How would my child slaves eat if I released them?

[efields]

omg this place sucks

[sabas123]

They might move to easy to entry positions where shortages exist though.

[austhrow743]

So the anti Uber argument is that uber drivers are drooling idiots that are too stupid to act in their best interest?

[gigatree]

Well goal of any company is to increase profits, not to increase the wellbeing of its employees. So I’m sure they’re not worried about making people miserable or being a public burden.

[piva00]

It was subsidising rides, just look at the steady increase in prices, reduction in quality, while the drivers are still paid peanuts. Is this a sustainable model? We don't know, it's the first time ever a profit has been posted, what was the cost of acquiring this profit? Will it drive ridership down (due to aforementioned quality and price issues)?

You are expecting that because a profitable quarter happened, that it will continue to happen. It might as well not if the changes to bring this profit create a lot of churn, anecdotally I've been seeing this churn happen in real time around my social circle in different countries. I think we all need to wait and see what's the trend instead of jumping into "you naysayers were all wrong, haha"-rhetorics.

[altacc]

Maybe wait and see if it really is a sustainable business first. Making a profit for 1 quarter after 50 quarters of loses whilst having over $9 billion of debt isn't strong proof that it will be profitable from now on. The numbers are positive though, it doesn't seem to be just a bookkeeping profit as they have a good rise in revenue & use. Personally I think if they keep running a tighter ship than they did pre-pandemic they might make a sustainable profit. Using profits for buybacks and dividends will be more attractive to shareholders than paying off debts as that's what most have been waiting for.

[smcl]

Is a profit of $394m one quarter sufficient indication that this kind of criticism was wrong? As far as I recall, Uber lost quite a bit more money than this each year since 2016 so they'd have to repeat this a few times if we're to believe this is them hitting long-term profitability.

Also my memory of Uber critiques weren't that they'd never be profitable, but that as a business they aren't quite as unique and untouchable as their valuation suggested (which, given the number of competing companies that operate in my city, is correct).

[mjburgess]

I don't think the claim would be about quarterly profits. It has had profitable quaters before.

Consider, eg,

>Uber on Tuesday posted a profit of $394 million during the second quarter, compared with a loss of $2.60 billion a year earlier

This really doesn't answer or refute any questions around their business model.

The final question is: what's the moat?

It's trivial to create these "automate contract labour" apps, and many now exist. It seems an industry designed to reach, at its height, tiny profit margins.

I suspect regulation is heading in the direction of making it easier for people to move their data between apps too -- if that happens, the "social-data" moats of these bizes will disappear.

They'll be left with IP that teens could compete with

[nordsieck]

> The final question is: what's the moat?

I mean, it's a 2-sided market. That's inherently a moat.

There's a reason why it took Amazon to displace Ebay, and Facebook to displace Craigslist. It's a very expensive and difficult market to get into.

> It seems an industry designed to reach, at its height, tiny profit margins.

There are plenty of industries like that. Grocery, for example. That doesn't mean that the business is a bad one by itself.

> I suspect regulation is heading in the direction of making it easier for people to move their data between apps too -- if that happens, the "social-data" moats of these bizes will disappear.

IMO, that wouldn't change anything.

If I could export all of my Facebook data (maybe I can, I haven't checked), it wouldn't cause me to abandon the platform - I'm there because of the other people on the platform.

Riders use Uber because it has the drivers. And the drivers use Uber because it has the riders. The ability to export ride history or reputation isn't going to change that fact.

[hiq]

You're not on Uber because of all the other users. Heck, you're not really there because of most the drivers, you're only there because there are enough drivers such that requesting a ride won't be a hassle. It's quite different from Facebook (I think WhatsApp in Europe is a better example these days) where you just expect everyone, including somebody you just met, to be.

> And the drivers use Uber because it has the riders.

You make it sound exclusive, but I've seen many drivers use a few different apps at the same time, often with different phones. You just need some temporary incentives and you've bootstrapped your network, because as explained above, the problem is only the initial bootstrapping.

Concrete example: two months ago I hadn't heard of "Free Now". I've now used it twice in two different European countries, last time because Uber was exactly four times as expensive (maybe that explains their new profits? They just raised their prices, hoping users won't notice?). I'm not often in a taxi so this is just anecdotal, but there's very little friction when switching to another service.

[pclmulqdq]

There's no foundational IP at uber that prevents a competitor from copying them (and many do), but the network effect is a non-trivial moat in itself, particularly for a two-sided market like that. Ebay has no foundational IP either, but it has been the marketplace for online auctions for a long time because of that network effect.

[mi_lk]

> It's trivial to create these "automate contract labour" apps

Just another HN Tuesday I see. It’s so easy that it’s still duopoly in US since the inception of the market.

[larksimian]

It's so easy that there's like 5 or 6 of them that I know of in Romania alone and drivers will swap between 2-3 of them every day. So yeah, it's pretty trivial. While there's no reason to start one if you can't undercut Uber or whoever's already cutrate prices, that doesn't mean Uber has a lot of room to increase prices/profits.

[jeltz]

It is pretty peak HN to assume the world is only the US. Outside the US there are plenty of taxi apps. So, yes, we know from evidence that they are easy to build. The trick is getting customers and drivers for your app.

[relativ575]

Do this exercise. Pick any country. See how many taxi apps available. They may not be called Uber and Lyft, but I bet there are only a handful at best, anywhere you pick (see Careem). That's the nature of the business.

[tzs]

It's not easy if you want one app that deals with a market containing many different legal jurisdictions with widely varying tax and safety and labor and consumer protection requirements. Plus different countries might need different payment system and need localization to different languages.

But if the market you want to deal with is just one city or metro area or similar then it is not a difficult app.

[disgruntledphd2]

There's not a huge network effect between cities though and there's high fixed costs for each one so it's not a great technology business.

[JeremyNT]

> Just another HN Tuesday I see. It’s so easy that it’s still duopoly in US since the inception of the market.

I'd suggest that this is not necessarily related to how hard the tech side is. Both major incumbents have (until now!) been throwing away VC money without any clear path to profitability, so there hasn't exactly been much of an incentive to build yet another money pit.

[ImPostingOnHN]

> I remember reading plenty of thought pieces a few years ago saying this was impossible

I'm not sure many actually said that

> that Uber was a house of cards gaining market share by subsidizing rides with investor money

they were

> That there were no economies of scale to bring costs down

the criticism I heard was, at then-current prices, _profits_ wouldn't come

turns out they had to severely jack up prices to profit, proving such criticism correct

> I would love to see a "what we got wrong, and what we still have right" post

see above

[relativ575]

>> that Uber was a house of cards gaining market share by subsidizing rides with investor money

> they were

They no longer are, and they don't lose customers. So no house of cards, because they didn't collapse when subsidy disappeared.

> the criticism I heard was, at then-current prices, _profits_ wouldn't come

Turn out users don't seem to mind. Bookings is back to the pre-pandemic level. Food delivery is at the record.

> turns out they had to severely jack up prices to profit, proving such criticism correct

They are not more expensive compared to the competition. So no, the criticism isn't correct, unless you're saying consumers are stupid. If anything they were able to control cost and increase booking. People come to them despite the increased price. Keep in mind also that they didn't have major layoff like other tech companies.

[ImPostingOnHN]

> > turns out they had to severely jack up prices to profit, proving such criticism correct

> They are not more expensive compared to the competition. So no, the criticism isn't correct

They are more expensive than they were. So yes, the criticism is correct.

Price vs. competition is a red herring, we're discussing if the prices they initially had could be sustained in the long term while still generating a profit.

Turns out, they couldn't, hence why they were jacked way up

[moralestapia]

Uber has burned 32B to date, so I don't think investors are super stoked now.

[fullshark]

Sure they are, after IPO they got a nifty return. Uber is a VC success story by any reasonable metric other than "was it the next google/fb/amzn?"

[moralestapia]

???

IIRC they got about 8B from the IPO? Still a long way to 32B.

[rfrey]

How much Uber took in from the IP isn't relevant - the point is the investors could sell on the open market at the current valuation, which was a higher (in some cases much higher) valuation than what they invested at.

[fullshark]

I think I see it's last pre IPO valuation was 62 billion? It IPOed at 82 billion valuation, currently sitting at 95 billion. Late round investors maybe could have done better investing elsewhere but this is a success story. I'm sure many investors have divested some shares post IPO at a profit.

[moralestapia]

Lol, no, that's funny money. The 32B I'm talking about it's actual cash that is gone and has to be recouped.

[fullshark]

If the investors have turned bearish on Uber they have give or take 10 years to sell that "funny money" at a profit. I'm sure many have and again, my primary point is that for our industry, for the large range of possible outcomes, Uber is a success. Once you understand that, a lot of decisions VCs make and certainly did make in the low interest rate environment from 2010-2022 make a lot more sense.

[missedthecue]

As long as you haven't been holding from day 1, those are someone else's losses

[jseliger]

I've not been bearish on rideshare, but Waymo is operating in the greater Phoenix area: https://waymo.com/blog/2023/05/waymo-one-doubles-service-are... and that seems like the biggest medium-term threat. It's so good!

[MichaelNolan]

It wouldn’t surprise me if Waymo/google decide they just want to remain on the tech side, and avoid all of the headaches that the operations side brings.

Waymo and Uber have a partnership. Soon in Phoenix, when you call an Uber, you might get a waymo car.

We might see a three group market:

Waymo, Cruise, etc provide the driver. Uber, Lyft provide the platform. Hertz, Avis, Enterprise manage the physical cars/cleaning/etc.

https://waymo.com/blog/2023/05/waymo-and-uber-partner-to-bri...

[Analemma_]

I still think this is true and this result is basically random noise. If they do this for another 20 years and erase the $30 billion of operating losses they've incurred up to this point, maybe I'll change my mind and do a lengthy postmortem on why I was wrong.

[spaceman_2020]

Uber will have to post profits like this every quarter for 20 years to just break even on the investment they've received.

At least in my country, the business is dead already.