A commenter in another thread put it very well: you can have as many voting shares as you like, but you aren't in control of your company until you're profitable.
It is productive to discuss how founders like Zuckerberg and Kalanick retained majority voting rights, because that's meaningful even if you use a pithy definition of control that makes it virtually impossible to achieve. Similarly we can talk about the class of shares Snap issued which do not allow shareholders to control the company.
When you abstract legitimate insights like "executives at pre-profitable/public companies can't rely on voting rights for security" to "no one has control as long as customers are a thing", you preempt a lot of very useful discussion. You've defined away the controversy.
My company over the years has transitioned from no employees, to employees, to no employees again, and back to employees. The only time I have been in control (despite having 100% ownership) is when I have had no employees.
When you are thinking about starting a business the decision to employ or not is even bigger than deciding to take in investors.
Oh, please. Some argue that those drivers are employees, some argue that they are contractors providing a low-level service, but calling them "entrepreneurs" really is a bit of a stretch.
Except McDonalds can't make you pay for your own fry station. Or lease it from McDonalds at high rates:
For examples, Experian estimates the average weekly payment for a new car
lease is $96, while a 2013 vehicle through Xchange costs $130 a week.
[...]
After reviewing the terms of one lease, experts estimate that a driver would
pay $25,210 plus $5,000 for the residual value for a 2015 Honda Civic, far
more than the Kelley Blue Book fair purchase prive of $18,142.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14577840- McDonald's forcing people to buy a special salt shaker
"In early September, McDonald’s announced it would start offering all-day breakfast across the U.S. Customers will soon be able to order a limited selection of breakfast items past the usual 10:30 a.m. cutoff. That will require changes in the restaurants, such as finding room on the grills for eggs and in the fryer baskets for hash browns when most customers are ordering burgers and fries. Those changes cost money—including a potential $500 to $5,000 for equipment—that will fall mostly on franchisees."
https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-mcdonalds-franchises...
Whether their calculations will pan out is another story. Whether such tactics should be allowed - yet another.
The Uber model is anti-econonmy-of-scale. It is a non scalable human wave approach.
For investors, the promise of profitability is continually just over the horizon, as long as you keep investing money. Everyone can see the company is potentially very profitable, but nobody can see a route there.
Though for the drivers, it looks a lot like a multi-level marketing scheme. Be your own boss, choose your own hours, work hard and you will be rich.
I always believe their intention was to become big enough and ubiquitous enough that they could become a monopoly supplier and therefore set profitable prices without the risk of being undercut, having consumed or removed their competition through subsidised rides.
I don't know, if this is true then they could have expected that some of his innovations may backfire.
- reduced drunk driving rates by 1/3
Not going to argue with that one, it is good.
- enabled nearly 200K drivers to become entrepreneurs
I used to work in direct sales, aka multi level marketing. They too called the people there "entrepreneurs". Those very people your describing as "entrepreneurs" have been suing Uber for missing money. When confronted by one of these drivers about money Kalanick embarrassed himself. It is a gig, barely a job and not "entrepreneurial"
- provided a valuable service to millions of customers
So do tobacco companies, but we wouldn't qualify that as something good. Doing buisness and having customers requires that you do this.
- Accelerated the shift to self driving cars. That deserves serious credit.
Newco/waymo lawsuit? Is that what your suggesting? The only one who is getting close to this in a meaning way is tesla. They are the only ones with the data and the drive to do it.
Lets talk about other things uber has done
- sexual harassment issues (theres a lot here unpack it at your leisure)
- India rape case and the file floating around corporate offices
- Its creepy data surveillance programs
- Its programs to avoid law and code enforcement (greyball)
- Its program to track lyft drivers (hell) also totally counter to the "entrepreneurs" idea of them
- Its continued flouting of regulation and the law (just file the paperwork like everyone else)
These are the less than stellar things that uber has done to burn through investors money in an attempt to secure their market share. Was it needed? I don't know? Does it paint a pretty grim picture that Uber is a company that is willing to do anything to get ahead? It sure looks like it. Kalanick is the ONE constant in all of this, for him to be unaware of all or most of this would make him derelict in his duties as CEO, for him to be aware of all of it doesn't make him look like a good human being.
The icing on the cake is the lactation room incident (see: http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/06/08/uber-ceo-does-a-riff-o... ). At this point we go from sketchy possible evil CEO to something that looks like it is right out of HBO's Silicon Valley, only in the show the scene would end with him throwing out a woman who was using the room for its intended purpose to put a fine point on its insanity.
Kalanick might have done a lot of good, on a lot of fronts, he also might have been aware of all of the above and either done nothing or actually encouraged it. Uber might succeed, but at this point it is living under a microscope and the odds are that it will be one of the biggest private implosions in the valleys history.
Is it purely a price sensitivity thing? Is it a simplicity/convenience thing? Is it just because summoning an Uber became hip among a certain demographic whereas taxis weren't? It would be useful data because there are possibly useful public policy responses that could address why people drive drunk in some cases.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/07/business/uber-drunk-drivi...
- Accelerated the shift to self driving cars. That deserves serious credit.
If you consider corporate espionage and theft of IP "accelerating the shift" but how much of what Uber was marketing were they actually responsible for?
Yup. Telling grunts that they're "entrepreneurs" as an excuse to not pay them is a very old scam.
Back in 2010-2011, I was unemployed, and I was constantly getting messages (mostly via CareerBuilder) from life insurance companies saying they had sales positions for me. They sounded sketchy, largely because they were all hitting me up when I had no sales background whatsoever, so I looked some of them up.
The reports were... not pleasant. Ripoff Report was full of complaints about these companies [0]. Some examples:
- You had to pay to receive training.
- You are expected to drive around to lots of places as part of your job, at your expense.
- You are legally classified as a franchise, so they don't have to pay you like an employee.
- Compensation is 100% commission, plus the money you make by recruiting other people (pyramid scheme much?).
- People complained that their job largely consisted of repeatedly harassing unionized companies who went with the life insurance provider associated with their union. They were ordered to attempt union busting as part of their job.
- Sales goals were set up to be impossible to meet, you are given no support whatsoever to help you reach your goals, and the people above you in the pyramid would frequently berate you, call you an idiot, and tell you that you're a hopelessly terrible salesman.
Oh, and here's the real kicker: once they got wind of people using Ripoff Report to complain, they would astroturf fake reviews. The reviews are often striped: every negative review is immediately followed by a positive review accusing the previous reviewer of having a personal vendetta against the company because they sucked at being an entrepreneur and didn't know how to grow their own business and said that they were just jealous of all the successful entrepreneurs the company has grown.
[0] Here's one of them: http://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/liberty-national-life-in...
Hardly true: http://fortune.com/2016/07/28/uber-drunk-driving-study/
> enabled nearly 200K drivers to become entrepreneurs
Going self-employed doesn't make you an entrepreneur.
> provided a valuable service to millions of customers
Looks like true: http://fortune.com/2016/10/20/uber-app-riders/
> accelerated the shift to self driving car
Not true. Uber's entered the game very late and since then lagged behind most of the competitors in this space: http://uk.businessinsider.com/the-companies-most-likely-to-g...
I think that apart the "less drunk drivers", "entrepreneurs", and all that fandom talk, Uber went ahead to bump heads with one of the most "exclusive" professions (taxi drivers are the favorite voters for any government), and managed to carve out a portion of their business, out-of-nowhere.
It's like, me starting a soft-drink company and, take on Coca & Pepsi and carve out 10% of their sales globally within 5 years.
They, of course, achieved this "by hook or by crook" but hey you need a ruthless team to succeed this.
Business-wise, a job well done.
Sexism, rape, stealing, avoiding taxes, etc... a big fat NO - thou shall not pass.
Closest aggregator of data I found seems to have a very anti-ride-sharing view ("We are an initiative of the Taxicab, Limousine & Paratransit Association"), but here it is nonetheless: http://www.whosdrivingyou.org/rideshare-incidents
This case had an even worse history than I thought though:
Uber had investigated the complaint, obtained her medical records and speculated that she made up the claims to hurt the firm's business.
So Uber also steal peoples medical records, and only fired the guy who instigated that after it became a news story: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-40196055
https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/04/25/boston-uber-dri...
http://nypost.com/2017/05/10/uber-driver-accused-of-kidnappi...
This has a list of sexual assaults (both Uber & Lyft): http://www.whosdrivingyou.org/rideshare-incidents#sexualassa...
No. They damaged the move forward with self driving cards by putting them on roads before they were ready and without permission and breaking the law. Not to mention the part about how it's all using stolen tech.