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by bradhilton 624 days ago
Kind of feels like the ride-sharing early days. Lots of capital being plowed into a handful of companies to grab market share. Economics don't really make sense in the short term because the vast majority of cash flows are still far in the future (Zero to One).

In the end the best funded company, Uber, is now the most valuable (~$150B). Lyft, the second best funded, is 30x smaller. Are there any other serious ride sharing companies left? None I know of, at least in the US (international scene could be different).

I don't know how the AI rush will work out, but I'd bet there will be some winners and that the best capitalized will have a strong advantage. Big difference this time is that established tech giants are in the race, so I don't know if there will be a startup or Google at the top of the heap.

I also think that there could be more opportunities for differentiation in this market. Internet models will only get you so far and proprietary data will become more important potentially leading to knowledge/capability specialization by provider. We already see some differentiation based on coding, math, creativity, context length, tool use, etc.

6 comments

Uber is not really a tech company though - its moat is not technology but market domination. If it, along with all of its competitors were to disappear tomorrow, the power vacuum would be filled in very short order, as the core technology is not very hard to master.

It's a fundamentally different beast from AI companies.

How is it not a tech company? They're literally trying to approximate TSP in the way that makes them money. In addition, they're constantly optimizing for surge pricing to maximize ROI. What kind of problems do you think those are?
A good meditation on that: https://www.readmargins.com/p/-the-zombie-apocalypse-scale

> I call this scale the Zombie Apocalypse Scale. It is a measure of how many days a company could run for it all its employees were turned to zombies overnight. The more days you can operate without any humans the more of a tech company you are.

If someone would be able to solve TSP and surge pricing better than Uber, do you think they'd be able to dethrone them?

The reason surge pricing exists and works the way it is isn't some capitalist efficiency mechanism - in fact it's quite the opposite - it's algorithmic price fixing enabled by Uber's quasi-monopoly, and it is the very thing that enables Uber to exist in the first place as a very profitable company.

A scenario in which competition exists would drive the margins of drive sharing apps to the ground, making it a highly unprofitable exercise. I suspect investors knew this and secretly colluded to promote Uber to become a monopoly. It has very little to do with technology.

> it's algorithmic price fixing enabled by Uber's quasi-monopoly, and it is the very thing that enables Uber to exist in the first place as a very profitable company.

If this was true, they'd have the surge pricing set for always.

Is Uber profitable already or are they waiting for another order of magnitude increase in scale before they bother with that?

Amazon is the poster-child of that mentality. It spent more than it earned into growth for more than 20 years, got a monopoly on retail, and still isn't the most profitable retail company around.

Uber the company was profitable last year, for the first time[1].

But I am doubtful that the larger enterprise that is Uber (including all the drivers and their expenses and vehicle depreciation, etc) was profitable. I haven't seen that analysis.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/8/24065999/uber-earnings-pro...

Because they put ads on their UI.
I haven't used Uber any time recently but this both made me laugh and feel deeply sad.
It took 15 years for Uber to turn a profit. Will AI investors have that much patience?
Why wouldn't they? Uber is just cabs but without the overhead.

AI offers WAAAAYYYYY more money in the future.

You're perhaps forgetting Waymo at $30B
Bolt? Fairly big in Europe I think.
Not all businesses have that first mover or network effect advantages.