Uber Hires Former Google Search Chief Amit Singhal as SVP of Engineering
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
edit: also, im pretty sure google pay him big money.
>Eventually there will be self-driving cars, and there's no special reason to think that Uber will be the best at building them, or that its dominant position in the ride-hailing-app space will protect it from better self-driving-car businesses.
Which also needs to factor in Uber's biggest liability: their attitude towards flouting laws and regulations. It worked okay for the ride-sharing markets, as municipal regulations are varied and slow to catch up, but they were forced to stop their self-driving car project after just a week because they didn't even get the necessary permits. [3]
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-01-10/bank-bloc...
[2] http://www.vox.com/new-money/2017/1/9/14194202/uber-lost-22-...
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/21/technology/san-francisco-...
Uber has the opportunity to revolutionize not just logistics but also on-demand employment, but has lagged in the latter, leaving the door wide open for Lyft and other services that carve out a big niche of Uber's market.
I think Uber should immediately offer the following services to its drivers:
- Tax planning, withholding even if it's 1099 income or if the driver has other sources of income.
- Matching IRA contributions with one year vesting.
- healthcare subsidy
- continuing education, or some way to level up in life by driving with Uber.
- Some incentive for being a loyal, exceptional driver.
- Car financing/leasing/sharing and insurance packages tailored at would-be Uber drivers who don't own a vehicle.
I know that more and more of these sorts of ideas are being tried by both Uber and Lyft, but investors need to realize that the workforce is being trained to be opportunistic and disloyal.
Many of the drivers I've interviewed (during my ride) despise Uber the corporation or boast about their fair weather support. Many reflect back on how Uber used to be better for drivers, etc.
Uber's main battles have been fought with regulators and with Lyft, but now the best strategy is figuring out how to become the Uber of on-demand employment.
I recommend checking out this demo video that showed up on Kyle Vogt's twitter feed yesterday. The news barely touched it, it's a dashcam timelapse of a 20 minute autonomous drive through hectic downtown San Fransisco traffic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Tp6Ubf6mE4
Nobody really knew where the GM/Cruise/Lyft arrangement was at until this demo dropped, and it turns out they are advanced. Kyle Vogt is some kind of fucking dude. This industry is going to go kaboom. There's Apple, Zoox, Ford, the Germans, they've all committed massive resources, it's hard to know exactly where the state of the art really is, but they all read the same research papers papers, they all have talent onboard, they all have deep pockets, they're all moving with a sense of urgency.
If Trump keeps the full stack operation within our borders, it'll be a vital new industry. If that 1 trillion dollar infrastructure budget goes through, we'll be rejiggering our cities and everyone will have a good job that hopefully doesn't require a $50,000 degree. If Trump can make friends with the world and scale back the military industrial complex we might be able to pay for it.
I had Uber eats delivered the other day by a guy driving a beautiful newish BMW who seemed like an out of work white collar worker, not a livery driver. There is tremendous value in having short-term, minimal commitment structured employment options available, the services I recommend offer more value to employees than they cost because they are hard to find in a turnkey fashion for someone who needs them.
This is a tragedy of the commons problem: Uber is footing an addiction to cheap transport nobody knows how to satiate.
Just ride a bike. Not an option in the burbs, for sure, but taking an uber is not an efficiency gain the way public transit or bicycles are.
IMHO low density communities will die. They cannot be saved.
It ends with Uber running out of money. Higher interest rates would end Uber very quickly, unless it has some very wealthy patróns that aren't actually interested in making money.
The taxi industry pioneered the 'independent contractor' business model. Some of the services you suggest cross the line between 'contractor' and 'employee', especially 'healthcare subsidy'.
The owner/operator whom I drove for says that the company only provides liability insurance (to cover the cab company's liability) as a part of her contract with the cab company. If she wanted collision coverage, she had to buy that separately, because insurance == employment.
When I signed up I was told that I should buy my own worker's compensation policy, but I never did this.
Most people don't want 'on demand' employment, they want stability. Because of outsourcing and automation, the economy doesn't need as many workers anymore. Uber's business model is entirely dependent on this phenomenon.
Drivers -- taxi drivers, 'rideshare drivers', trucking drivers, etc -- would benefit from a union. Arizona is not a union-friendly state; I don't know if taxi drivers elsewhere have unions.
Do you see this phenomenon going away anytime soon? My grandparents' generation worked at a single company for life. My parents switched companies maybe 3 times in their careers. I have worked for 9 companies in the last 12 years. The trend has been toward shorter and shorter stints, with less and less benefits. My daughter's generation probably won't remember a time where people spent years working for companies, and it will seem natural to string together a series of gigs and odd jobs.
The economic paradigm has to change. I think something will shift, eventually.
Searching for 'john gatto livelihood' just now brought up this link:
http://www.wtp.org/archive/transcripts/john_taylor_gatto.htm... - John Taylor Gatto (1991 New York State Teacher of the Year) Interview By Jerry Brown, March 25, 1997
It's probably worth reading the whole thing, but if you're pressed for time just search for '[break]', and read his take on two groups who have been able to implement mostly 'independent livelihoods' for virtually all of their members.
> My grandparents' generation worked at a single company for life.
And their grandparents were probably much more independent.
> it will seem natural to string together a series of gigs and odd jobs.
"You see that house on the hill? If you work hard enough, some day I'll live there." (This was not said by Travis Kalashnikov).
'Gigs and odd jobs' are not the path towards a fulfilling life.
Edit: My friend recently pointed out to me that I value freedom more than anything else, which is why I stuck with taxi driving for so long... But the whole time I was working on something bigger...
My grandparents' grandparents were slaves. On my dad's side in North Carolina, on my mom's side in the Caribbean. Not too much independence there.
Why can't they have both? Broadly speaking, the forces of supply and demand are quite stable. Right now it's difficult to find jobs for 10 hours per week or 80 hours per week, if you happen to want one.
While I appreciate the historic role of unions, labor laws are unfortunately the reason that Uber has not made drivers W2 employees. It's sad that one of the most innovative and promising startups has to exert so much effort to claim that its employees shouldn't meet the W2 definition and thus shouldn't be eligible for the protections it affords. If the protections were more reasonable, Uber (and all startups) would be much less likely to try to circumvent them.
Without defining the time horizon you are referring to for profitability, you are making a non-statement, one that is easily demonstrated to be both trivially true and trivially false.
Firms forego profit all the time when they invest in uncertain R&D rather than returning profits to shareholders in the form of a dividend.
Similarly, firms often invest in building their brand even though it is very difficult to quantify brand marketing ROI.
My argument is that Uber is making a foolish choice by trying to get away with 1099 status for employees... or in other words, Uber is betting on the wrong horse, or investing poorly in its future. The same folly would apply to any short-sighted business decision.
This is where time enters. Uber's strategy makes its financials look better in the short term at the expense of a sustainable long-term strategy.
Market forces don't get much chance to help discipline this decision, since the only actors are Uber's investors and board and those of Uber's competitors. Regulators haven't done anything to force the issue yet. So like any other decision that might be made in a shortsighted way or a more appropriate long-term-value-based way, Uber is simply making a suboptimal business decision.
It is not a foregone conclusion that regulators must be the ones to nudge Uber into the "right" decision. Firms make mistakes all the time, and other firms are ready to step in to correct the mistake and generate profit in the process.
So only if you view Uber as a permanent fixture does regulatory involvement seem necessary. Uber is far from a permanent fixture. In my view, Uber underestimates the importance of winning over high quality drivers vs paying drivers fractionally less simply to make its books look better in the short term.
The only one of your bullet points Uber has pursued is the last one -- they rope drivers into car leases in hopes that when they eventually ramp up the amount of money they collect from each fare their drivers will be locked into driving for Uber so they cannot leave.
This is what is generally called "attempt to survive".
This is no different than any other for hire industry though. They are making the choice that best benefits them financially. Uber knows this, lyft knows this, basic economics and human instinct to better their own situation. There will always be more drivers though so I doubt they are concerned about the problem to be honest. The barrier to being an Uber driver is so low.
Me: I'm torn between doing something new and staying where I'm at.
Random Uber employee: Hey, you should join Uber. Hit me up and I'll refer you.
Me: I can assure you I'm not interested.
Random Uber employee: Wuss...
I apologize for the behavior of the random douchebag employee you encountered, I would hope most of us wouldn't act like that.
Unfortunately, I wasn't able to join Blind since I don't have a work email that they're available to.
You're right that self-driving cars would be a major challenge/opportunity. Re: what's stopping an upstart, letting self-driving cars loose on the street is inefficient. There is a huge amount learned/accrued intelligence involved in how those self driving cars are orchestrated for optimize the marketplace. So that's where a key capability is going to be important even in a world where self-driving is commoditized.
I think it is the opposite... Uber's only real way to turn a profit while staying competitive is to get rid of the cost of drivers.
> What's stopping an upstart company to buy/lease 10,000 self-driving cars and let them loose on the street?
The fact that Uber is already working on this, has a platform, has tons of data?
Because deploying Robotaxi fleets will be so capital intensive, no single company is likely to dominate the way Uber has in rideshare. There is enough demand spread out across enough different cities that they won't need to compete directly for a long time.
If they can't maintain their market share in a driverless car world, it's difficult to imagine how they can justify their current valuation.
https://newsroom.uber.com/san-francisco-your-self-driving-ub...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/16/uber-self...
The most serious obstacle here is the fact that there is no such thing as a self-driving car.
Companies undervalue low-probability, high-risk events like that.
Is it still not RICO?
Edit: Im pretty sure they could get money laundering related charges to stick well enough to charge (and settle or bring to trial, rather than dismissed), based on banking with money they know was earned in violation of various state and city laws. Money laundering law is bad (and so is RICO), and often can be applied in counter-intuitive ways by aggressive DAs.
With all due respect, unless you are a practicing attorney, you are not qualified to make statements like this.
I have tried to be polite, but you are either incredibly ignorant or you are a troll. There is simply no way that it is acceptable to accuse any company of money laundering unless you have a serious amount of evidence.
I am disengaging from this 'conversation' as it is completely useless.
That suit could be conspiracy, it could be RICO applied rightly or wrongly or it could be some other broad and vague statute out there.
Example: Zenefits
Edit: And vulnerable doesn't mean doomed. Plenty of folks continue the approach of skirting the law until they don't have to anymore (Youtube etc). But skirting the law forever it is not a good business plan.
With respect to Uber, regardless of anything else, they have lots of cash with which to compensate key hires, and plenty of interesting problems to work on. That might be enough.
Depending on how large these economies of scale are, even the fact that a new entrants would be doing less volume (and therefore losing more) may not be enough to help them compete.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/11/can-uber-ever-deliver...
However, in a given city, I would expect there to be economies of scale as you optimize your cars better and decrease the amount of time they have no passengers. It's most clear to me in the case of UberPOOL where the more passengers you have in total, the more likely two of them will be going in the same direction. We may not have reached a cheap enough price point yet to hit these economies.
Depending on how much you trust anything Uber says, they say they are profitable in SF, and some other US metros, which the article you linked ignores.
I think people are right to be a little skeptical, given how loose Uber is with the truth, but I see a possibility for them to succeed and smart people keep giving them good money so I want to give them the benefit of the doubt on the issue of actually making money eventually.
I was skeptical for a very long time as well, but I've been won over.
The challenges are fantastic, the work intense (yet I still have time for family) and I'm part of the best team I've ever been on.
The last year or so has been the best of my professional life. I would highly recommend a closer look.
Lots of people here seem confused by this question, so it would be nice to hear an explanation from somebody inside.
There's Matt Cutts' long leave of absence, his departure, and the announcement that he's not really being replaced. A much lower volume of communication from Google on initiatives in the space (they used to talk endlessly about Panda, Penguin, etc). Amit's original reason for departure was "his next journey will involve philanthropy"..that seems to have changed.
My guess is that two things are driving the declining interest...
a) The marketshare battle is done. Google won. No competition.
b) Their various initiatives to push organic results down the fold (more ads, knowledge graph, various widgets, and so forth) has made the quality of the organic results not as important. Good enough is the target.
I hear that Google search has largely moved to machine learning techniques. When I was there in 2005-2009 there was a bunch of hand-tuned stuff, and hand-tuning was definitely Amit's preferred strategy at the time. One side effect might be that a machine learning black box has fewer big, externally-perceptible shifts. It also just might require less ongoing interesting engineering work. Hard to say, though.
Edit: I wonder if Amit changed his tune regarding machine learning, at least for his new space.
I think you may be falling for the SV cult of personality fallacy. There are still literally thousands of individuals you've never heard of working on organic search quality at Google who care very much about quality organic results. :)
So yeah I totally agree, be it Google, Apple, Microsoft, ... A large amount of people around here are so used to small team startup represented by their founder that they always feel the need in similar stories to make a cult of personality for / against someone as if he was the product he worked for.
Edit: And, I did mention more focus on ads and widgets versus the actual organic results. If those weren't more important, why are they at the top, crowding organics down? The revenue isn't really coming from the organics themselves.
(And while Google keeps adding heuristics I wish some of those many developers and researchers would simply occasionally try the product and ban, purge the very obvious content farm and spam sites)
Guess this is the point where we short Alphabet?
Is there an analog to this? Is there another market where marketshare has "been decided"? My instinct tells me that companies who fall for this are in trouble.
Edit: Yes, mobile is hitting desktop, but that's the market itself changing...not the market share for desktop. Comparable in the search space is more people using Amazon directly for product searches versus starting with Google. Related markets and effects, but Amazon isn't a general search competitor.
c) "Search" is changing towards giving information rather than to websites.
Think Siri/Cortana/Alexa. Even Google tries to give you an answer rather than a website.
Also information is moving from "spread thin" websites to social graphs and more centralised locations
Personally, at this point I'd rather pay Google a monthly subscription and get everything ad-free. That would align their interests with their users who would then be the customers vs the product and free up Google to do what is best for them in cases where ads may not make sense.
Do they care less than they used to, though? Their placement on the screen as opposed to KG, widgets, and ads..and how that's progressed over time, seems to imply it.
That's impossible to measure, but the arguments you have employed regarding personnel changes do not demonstrate your point.
What of the decision to not replace Matt with a specific role or person? Is that not interesting?
And, again, I mentioned many other observations, not just Amit and Matt.
Edit: If the primary driver was lack of expertise in the ML direction, Uber seems an odd place to land, doesn't it?
I work for Google but this is pure speculation on my part.
Again, Amit may not have been aligned with the direction they're taking search. That doesn't mean Google doesn't care. In fact, it could mean just the opposite.
http://venturebeat.com/2016/11/02/uber-is-rolling-out-a-big-...
https://newsroom.uber.com/inferring-uber-rider-destinations/
There's other references, but you get the idea.
It has done this by a) Actually improving its spammy backlink detection, and b) Scary webmasters away from spammy SEO tactics through sudden updates like Panda/Penguin and straight up propaganda.
Once you solve the spam issue, Google's search results organically become better. Ergo, it doesn't need to spend that much time monitoring and improving them
I wonder how much they actually improved the webspam thing.
The search results you see today, versus years past, suggest a sort of "cheat" to do that...something like a seed set of trusted sites (big brands, universities, government sites, etc) , and weighting based on distance from those seeds.
I say that because I'll often get results that are heavy on authority, but low on relevance. What I'm looking for is on pages 2 and 3, on more niche, less prominent sites. It didn't used to be that way.
And KGs aren't mutually exclusive with ML -- e.g. https://arxiv.org/abs/1612.04844
Google might be still all in on search, but what's important here is the outside perception. They won the search war and desperately tried to recreate the success with other products. So far they haven't had another hit (some big misses, though).
If you're asking for non-ads products that have done pretty well -- Android, Youtube, Cloud doing pretty well.
Next possible moneymaker is Waymo.
The replies mostly seem to be saying that I'm equating just the two departures with a declining interest at Google in organic result quality. Of course, I mentioned more than that, but it's an easy way to dismiss me versus educating me on how I've got it wrong.
When I've been asked what keeps me going this is it, I really like interesting puzzles and I'm sitting there stuck trying to solve it.
It also says a bit about what Uber thinks their big problems are (or where their value add will be). I was expecting them to go with someone more operations focused like Urs Hoezle.
Looks like Google dodged a bullet there.
(Which is great for another reason -- I don't give Uber access to my location when I'm not using the app, and the Uber team has apparently decided to basically brick their own app for users like me. But hooray, Google Maps is now a functional replacement for the Uber client!)
Given their deals with tons of local businesses through UberEATS, they've got operating hours and location data that's fresher than what anyone else can provide on the scale that they're operating on. Would be nice to see them improving the OSM dataset and partner with e.g. Maps.me.
Edit: my comment no longer makes sense, parent was edited
In the sense that a working model airplane gives me a space program that's halfway off the ground.
And why would they improve OSM at all? Actually collecting and cleaning mapping data is not cheap. There's no incentive in contributing to OSM, it doesn't build a moat, it doesn't further their access to markets,...
It's in their business interests to make sure their fleet and their delivery drivers have accurate mapping info. Is there something unclear about the way I worded this in the comment you responded to?
But while we're on mapping data - I don't think "higher quality" data is in any way crucial to their business. (Owning the data so there's no dependency on third parties is another question). Uber's routing is accurate enough to work reliably.[1] What does higher quality buy them?
From where I stand, you're proposing that a company that's already bleeding money like it's going out of style should spend a ton of money, on building technology they have little experience with, to collect data that is of dubious value to them, to then give it away freely.
I get that you'd like OSM improved, but I really don't think Uber will be the one to do it.
[1] Based on purely anecdotal reports from my friends and my own experiences, the usual case for misrouting is Uber drivers not paying attention to the map, or thinking they know better than the map.
I'd understand if this were 1987 and you were asking this question. But it's not, and even Microsoft is on the public collaboration bandwagon.
We begin by recognizing that if you want to get into mapping and not pay out the nose for it, then OSM is your starting point. From there, it follows that we defer to the lessons of the last two decades which show that when given the choice between either maintaining a private fork or upstreaming, then upstreaming is overwhelmingly the best thing to do, even from a position of pure self-interest.
I hardly think their competitive edge hinges on high quality mapping data at the exclusion of others. Accurate mapping data is an enabler for them to go faster, do better, for the things they are doing now. If that means drivers are making 3 deliveries per hour instead of 2, then the proposition holds true. Or if someone can be picked up/dropped off at the curb in front of their building, rather than the clubhouse bearing the street number for their sprawling apartment complex, then the proposition holds true.
> data that is of dubious value to them, to then give it away freely.
No. My position is precisely that they do have a business interest in this kind of data. I've said as much. This is the third time now.
And it's not as if Uber themselves don't already have similar initiatives to release their datasets. They've had a program for the last ~two years for sharing trip data, and two weeks ago they put a public face on their "Uber Movement" initiative to make it more widely available. And that's a dataset that's even more proprietary—there are tons of people in the mapping game, but almost nobody besides arguably Google has access to trip-level data at the scale that Uber has and is chosing to give away.
The CEO is just one person, the President is just one person, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve is just one person, etc.
this is often times can be confused with a cto's role, but i believe a cto's role is more independent, has less organizational obligations, in other words, manages much less people, at least at large companies. a cto's main role is to work more with customers, partners, evangelize products, and think about the longer term vision of the technology, this could be internal technology, like datacenters, to things like the next 5 year's software products.
at small companies, i think you'll find cto's also doing the job of a svp along with marketing, sales, support, etc.
What I don't understand is the multitude of students who STILL want to join Google, even though they will likely be munging data from one format to another, for years.
Lot of wealthy people work for Buffett because they like their jobs running companies and they like Buffett.
Laugh.
Cab companies aren't innocent bystanders, but the drivers generally are. But All Hail Uber anyways, I guess.