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Comment by ransom1538 | Hacker News Reader

Of course they can be profitable. Uber doesn't have overhead. There are no Uber factories or millions of rotting vehicles in a warehouse. At the core it is a iOS/Android app (4 guys could maintain this), a call center (India), and a law firm (outsource it). They would have to cut their staff, remove the ping pong tables and get real but profitability is there. They are on a land grab.

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You really don't know what you're talking about. There's more to Uber than just an app. There is a large set of backend services responsible for everything from authorization to billing, promotions, logging, road directions, ETA forecasts, driver portals and so much more. I've never worked there but ventures like this tend to be very complicated with lots of moving pieces.

More than a team of four can manage certainly.

Maybe but this still seems like something that could be run out of one well maintained data center. Certainly fewer than 6,700 could manage it?

Scale, payment processing, and customer service all take manpower.

OK customer service I get, but why the first two? I mean yeah you'd need an IT staff obviously but certainly not that many.

Just dealing with the different laws about taxi services in different countries/cities itself would require a staff that size or more. And there's a lot more than that behind the scenes, like security checks on drivers, managers for each city to decide incentive plans for drivers etc. It's a very massive endeavour, and the size of the company is justified.

It takes a constant number of engineers to push a single feature, no matter the number of users.

It does not, however, take a constant number of engineers to maintain the infrastructure that lets a single engineer push a feature to millions of users. (P/I)AAS can help, but you still need people to monitor performance, find regressions and bugs, and track them down.

Call center in India ? But but but ... you guys said Indians are taking jobs away from the US. Why cant business be profitable with call center in the US itself. Greedy corps wants profits, outsource it and then innocent Indian employees gets the flak for it. Just wow !

it's also a massive recruiting and advertising campaign, since they have no product without hiring huge numbers of drivers

That's the point. Their technology costs are pennies per ride, revenues dollars per ride. They are only spewing cash trying to grow faster by buying more drivers in more countries. They could hire organically for much less.

They could hire organically for much less.

Uber only works if there are enough drivers so that I can always get a ride. If I get told that I have to wait 30 minutes for a ride more than a tiny handful of times I'm uninstalling the app. Growing organically in region would be very tough since it would take too long to get enough drivers in place that users could rely on the service and conversely drivers would be unwilling to sign up because not enough users where bothering to use the service.

Especially when there are competitors. Its what seemed to happen with Lyft in my area. A lot of people I know preferred using Lyft, because of the morally shady nature of Uber, but Lyft would take 15-20 minutes for a ride, and Uber would have one in 5. Pretty quickly everyone (myself included) just started checking Uber first.

Sure, which is why Uber has invested so much in driver acquisition in expanding it's territories. But once those territories are established they should be able to spend far less. If driver times start to become longer, it means existing drivers have a higher utilization and will make more money, drawing more drivers to drive for uber, and solving the problem in a virtuous circle.

> iOS/Android app (4 guys could maintain this)

Those 4 can handle everything backend related too?

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