How Lyft screwed me out of a $350 referral bonus

Uber and Lyft chose to leave Austin. You can argue endlessly why they were forced out, but somehow other services managed to pop up and make the business work.

Yikes.

At a high level:

"Margins" typically refers to what is left over after you take all of the revenue from selling a product and subtract all of the per-unit costs (ie, ignoring fixed costs).

"Profit" is then whatever is left over after you take all of your revenue, subtract your per-unit costs, and then subtract all of your overhead (salaries, office space, etc.)

So, whether you are a non-profit or a for-profit, the accounting there is the same. The difference is that for-profit companies can choose to use that profit to issue dividends to people who hold shares. If they don't, that money stays within the company (ie, it's "reinvested"). Non-profits don't have a choice: they cannot distribute dividends.

Many notable for-profit companies don't distribute dividends. From an accounting perspective, if they also reinvest all of their money back into the company before year's end, they are essentially equivalent to a non-profit company.

There are some caveats to this, but that's the general idea.

> The advantage of non-profits is that they don't have to make a profit in the long run

No company "has" to make a profit in the long run, as long as they break even. But again, whether or not they are able to break even is determined the same way, whether they're a non-profit or a for-profit company.

> and might have to pay less taxes.

This is jurisdiction-dependent and is a relatively minor effect, because taxation on profits just encourages the for-profit company to reinvest its capital anyway. Most of the other taxes that a company pays are paid by both for-profit and non-profit companies.

In any case, the difficulty that non-profits would have in raising comparable amounts of money to venture-backed competitors is much larger, by several orders of magnitude.

Yes, and this is a bad usage of the term, because whether or not there are people "at the top" profiting from ownership has nothing to do with whether the company is structured as a non-profit or a for-profit company. People "at the top" can profit from a non-profit, and you can run a for-profit company without "people at the top profiting".

It's unfortunate that the term we use to refer to companies which cannot distribute dividends is "non-profit", but it's really bad to project conceptions of what those companies should act like onto them simply based on how the term sounds in common vernacular.

And again, whether you are using the term with its precise meaning or with its colloquial one, non-profit status has no impact on a company's margins:

> Presumably by doing everything Lyft or Uber do but without the need to ever pay out to investors.

"Paying out investors" does not impact their margins. They can pay out investors from their profit margins (if they have any), but the fact that non-profits don't have any investors to pay out doesn't mean that their margins magically go up.

And, yes, it's true that you never need to pay out investors if you never have any. Of course, if you never have any investors and your competitors all do, you're starting off at a huge disadvantage.

  It would be nice if they could also provide a document with the
  differences, but I guess that would be a lot of work

  and still, no one would read it.

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As an example, Apple prompts one to send the terms upon upgrading the OS. This is a good step. Although it'd be better if they could highlight the changed text in the terms.