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Comment by ckastner | Hacker News Reader

> Kalanick is a jerk, but he created that insane valuation.

I don't think Kalanick had much to do with it. He created the product, but it pretty much sold by itself -- similar to how Zuckerberg created Facebook, which sold by itself.

I'm very optimistic about this change. To me, Kalanick, and the culture he bread, were toxic to Uber.

I'm reminded of how Microsoft's share price jumped by 12% the day Steve Ballmer's retirement plans were announced. Microsoft has been on a major run ever since. Let's hope that we see something similar here.

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> I don't think Kalanick had much to do with it. He created the product, but it pretty much sold by itself -- similar to how Zuckerberg created Facebook, which sold by itself.

Nope, This is wrong. Kalanick stood in front in the fight against the City officials and Taxi unions across the globe. Uber could've been done and dusted had it been left as a product to be sold by itself. Kalanick pushed Uber up high against the current of water, which is not exactly similar to running a Social Media Company.

That might be a big deal in America, but it has not been part of Uber's appeal in Australia. Uber here is absolutely focused on the product experience.

If anything, there's a proportion of people who supported local government rules and existing taxi services over the American interloper, a counter-balance to the anti-union and anti-municipal crowd.

Please be mindful that the American experience does not translate globally, even to other english-speaking western countries!

I think you're really just reinforcing the point. He's been willing to do whatever it takes. In the US that meant testing how far he could push and how many regulations he could bend and break before people called him on it. In Australia, apparently, that means first pushing the product experience as far as possible to convince people Uber is much more desirable than taxis.

And regardless of that, it doesn't matter: by the time Uber started operating in Australia (or any non-US country, for that matter), they already had a history of pushing hard against existing norms. Uber would have never even gotten to the point where expanding outside the US would have been possible if it hadn't been for Kalanick.

Sure, he's a jerk, but to claim that he had nothing to do with Uber's expansion after launch is just absurd.

But this was done globally though.

'Software company, Not a taxi company' argument was used extensively to circumvent license and medallion regulations. On top of it they used VC money to drive down the prices by 4x-5x.

Several tens of thousands of drivers in every state in every country they went to got shafted because of these moves.

So yes he was very brutal and ruthless upfront. You can't replace that kind of human quality easily.

Drivers didn't get shafted. Medallion owners did.

Drivers did get shafted. Imagine if tomorrow somebody comes with some model which flushes 10x the current number of programmers into the market.

Your wages will dilute to a point it will be hard for you to make a decent living.

Medallion owners charged huge amounts of rent from drivers. The barrier to entry wasn't on the driver side.

As an Australian - I thought Uber's main appeal here was price. The taxi product experience, from everything I've heard, is far worse in the US than here.

Uber's appeal in most markets is exactly that, product and pricing. Speaking from a place where taxi service was terrible, inefficient, expensive, often corrupt and dangerous, Uber came in like a savior, when the government went after Uber people came to Uber's defense because now we can't go back to the way it was. To be fair I think that is the same as most places Uber has been to.

> Nope, This is wrong. Kalanick stood in front in the fight against the City officials and Taxi unions across the globe.

Don't kid yourself, this fight was fought by lawyers and lobbyists.

Uber financed one side of this fight, but seeing as the outcome of this fight was critical to Uber's business model, that wasn't some genius insight, that was self-preservation.

> it pretty much sold by itself -- similar to how Zuckerberg created Facebook, which sold by itself.

Haha don't know where to start. Facebook could have gone to shit in so many ways just like all the predecessors like Myspace and Friendster, but they made all the right decisions and won. Same goes for Uber.

No no, you've got it a little bit backwards. Right now, the biggest profits for capital are in being bearish about Uber and shorting Uber. This is in the nature of amoral capitalist investment: all the right decisions are 'supporting and enabling Uber' right up to the point where the bubble of valuation pops and then the only right decisions are 'bailing and running away from Uber'.

Kalanick's right decisions are now based on how much he was lying when he said he hadn't divested the slightest bit from Uber. I'm guessing that everyone read his character well, and that he was in fact lying on a massive scale and has many lifetimes worth of stashed-away wealth. Right now, winning for him means avoiding prosecution and jail (probably easy to do) and Uber is over, already.

So Uber lost, and anyone still clinging to Uber has lost (but there will be amazingly few of those). It's the frog and scorpion fable, really. Travis isn't the scorpion, and Uber isn't the frog. Uber is the scorpion and Wall Street is the frog.

Wouldn't investors be able to look at ownership information to see if Travis's shares decreased? I doubt all of the investors would take him at face value, especially the ones who publicly criticized him.

Are you shorting Uber or wall street?

You can't really short/long the stock before it goes public. I'm not sure if there is a derivatives market that speculates on pre-ipoed companies.

It's essentially the same mechanism: the terminology is immediately understood. The market is public opinion, in a rather special public. If these people all 'short' Uber, it might not even go public. I guess the equivalent would be trying to take all the VC money back? And obviously the equivalent to a long position would be investing more VC money in Uber.

Nobody would seriously argue that there's no difference between the two because Uber doesn't exist yet in 'stock' terms. They need to translate the initial investor enthusiasm into an IPO, so short/long spells out the likely climate for said IPO.

What do i have a little bit backwards? You are free to talk about your opinion but it's kinda confusing when you just reply randomly to an unrelated thread.

I am talking about how execution matters, because parent said Uber just worked on its own to get where they have, just like Facebook worked on its own to get where they have. None of these are true.

My comment has nothing to do with wall street or shorting or whatever concepts you bring up.

You've said 'Uber and Facebook made all the right decisions and won'. I think you've got that backwards (and was indeed replying to you): I think it only looked like they made right decisions because Wall Street looked at those decisions and went 'hot damn, one of us!'.

Facebook may have won. I think you'll find Uber didn't win, because Wall Street needed Uber to remain the Travis Uber, in spite of any laws or limitations, and that's clearly no longer true.

Ok, what is Facebook's Lyft then?

There doesn't have to be a single global monopolist. There probably won't be.

People do move, and the convenience of one app to hail taxis everywhere is appealing. But then again, people don't move that often that installing the local taxi app is too much of an assle.

Uber and Lyft operate in a space where there's a huge barrier to entry capital-wise.

This is not the case for 100% Internet based businesses like Facebook.

So they're really completely different models and therefore the competitive landscape can't resemble each other. It's more fair to compare the Uber-Lyft dynamic to rental car businesses like Enterprise-Hertz.

Microsoft had a storied past with decades of profitability behind it. They were shedding an operational CEO who failed to succeed in Mobile and made expensive mistakes in tablets (Windows RT) along with the Windows Vista debacle happening under his watch.

Uber has lived in Unicorn land thus far. The potential to turn a profit has buoyed them but that cash bubble seems to be running out of fumes. They could sell for 1/10th of what they raised money at. Time will tell.

It's a bad time for Travis to be handing over the reigns because he clearly hasn't built a command team to takeover and the fraternity atmosphere is toxic enough that as these new leaders step in I'm afraid the middle management will view them as "illegitimate" leaders.

Time will tell. I hope for the sake of all the people who hold Uber stock as part of their compensation that they get a pay day but it's a gamble.

Facebook did many things right. How many people really thought Facebook would be a $450B company in 2017, good for top 5 most valuable company, and pulling in over a billion in profit a month. Yes most of the money is being made on mobile which likely wasn't the master plan of Zuckerberg or others. But things had to go right up to 2013/2014 to allow Facebook to become huge in revenue and profits with its mobile business.

We don't know exactly how much influence Zuckerberg had in all the decisions. For example the common theme for years was for there to be uproar after any major feature or change.

Like the news feed that is now ubiquitous. A worse company might have feared the backlash and slowed down on features and growing the news feed.

I assume Zuckerberg was also fundamental in acquiring Instagram and Whatsapp. Instagram is worth tens of billions now. Whatsapp has 1.2B or so monthly users. There were many comments on how overpriced and silly the Whatsapp purchase was. But most of it was in stocks and the cash at the time may have been a lot ($4B), but Facebook gets that much per month now. Whatsapp tripled its users since its acquisition.

A lot of tech people disliked the Messenger split off. But that seems to be working out for the business too. It is becoming its own platform now and can also boast 1B+ users per month.

Maybe anyone would've done all this. I don't know. But I do know it was Zuckerberg in charge when all this occurred.

Facebook had a major ace in the hole by starting at Harvard. That's the network pretty much everyone wants to be a part of.

The irony is that in growing, FB traded down that cachet -- but managed to transition from cohort value to network value fairly successfully.

This is an argument I've made for years, I'm happy to see that I'm not the only one -- danah boyd has mentioned it several times as well.

I'm not saying Zuck didn't execute well -- the advantage still could have been blown (and I've only just learnt of a similar network started IIRC at Columbia University which didn't go as well). But for all the things Zuck can claim, building Harvard's social appeal is not one of them.

>but it pretty much sold by itself

It's called execution...

... an execution that Uber's investors apparently could no longer tolerate.

My comment that Kalanick didn't have much to do with it seems to be generating a lot of downvotes. This is surprising to me.

The reason I compared Uber's success to Facebook was because demand for the product was so great, it was viral. It's hard to mess up a product that is so incredibly popular.

Perhaps Instagram would have been a better example to communicate my point. Its initial success was clearly not anticipated even by its founders, and its success continued despite numerous hiccups and screwups in its early days. I posit that its founders ability, which was clearly limited (by their own accounts), had much to do with its success.

https://www.slideshare.net/iammutex/scaling-instagram

Kalanick had everything to do with the valuation. This, however, is a problem: what you might think of as premature optimization. Yes, Kalanick is why Uber got an impossibly high valuation from the collective fantasy known as Wall Street: they were operating based on personalities and primitive ideas of conflict, rather than a real understanding of how systems work.

But it was a premature optimization because those responsible for turning 'viciously competitive evil guy' into raw capital failed to acknowledge that he'd screw them in turn as soon as he needed an exit strategy. You simply cannot turn to childish human dominance battles as a model for what will work in large systems and interdependent markets.Even propping up your 'pet winner' with near-infinite capital won't save you forever.

I think its wrong that facebook sold by itself, in the beginning there was lots of competitors and I dont think it was by chance facebook won.

Overnight success, years in making.

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