Lyft's Business Is Growing Faster Than Uber's | Hacker News Reader

Lyft's Business Is Growing Faster Than Uber's

bloomberg.com

27 pointsdanso21 comments

Lyft grew 25%; Uber grew in mid-teens.

Growth percentages are useless. I could start a ride sharing service, have my mom as my only customer, add in my dad, and I've grown 100%!

The more important numbers are market share and share of market growth. Considering how much larger I suspect Uber is, it's likely Uber's market share didn't take a hit and are likely still capturing far more market growth than Lyft.

Sure, it's easier to go from 100 to 110 rides than it is to go from 200 to 220 rides. As they say, there are lies, damned lies and statistics.

From what I can tell, this is more like 100 to 120 vs 200 to 215. The article starts off saying lyft increased bookings by 200 million while Uber is claiming a "mid-teens" number.

Keeping in line with gross booking figures: Easier to go from 80 to 100 rides than from 825 to 990

My exact thought. I'm getting so tired of these titles. I almost wish there was a nice system for de-bulls*itting the titles once they hit the first page of HN. Or stop articles like this from bubbling up entirely.

Of course. It still conveys useful information about the two companies.

I'm glad Lyft is going strong, and all fans of Cab 2.0 (who aren't invested in Uber) should be. And even if you like Uber, everyone needs strong competition to stay (or in their case, become) healthy.

For some comparison, here's how the costs stack up:

Lyft: $1 billion gross bookings, $130 million loss. Loss of $0.13 per dollar of gross bookings.

Uber: $8.25 billion gross bookings, $708 million loss. Loss of $0.086 per dollar of gross bookings.

Any previous period data to compare to?

Lyft 2nd Quarter Gross Bookings: ~$1 billion

Uber 2nd Quarter Gross Bookings: ~$8.25 billion

Uber told investors it had a growth rate in the "mid-teens". Assuming a 13-17% growth rate, Uber increased its gross bookings by $1.2 billion or $900 million.

Lyft claims it increased gross bookings from $800 million to >$1 billion, a rate of over 25% or an increase of $200 million.

So Uber grew 4-5x more than Lyft, but Lyft is growing faster than Uber.

People have been crying foul on the analysis here, but I wonder - is there a sort of expected growth curve here that Lyft is beating?

By that I mean, is it impressive that Lyft grew 20% at $1mil bookings? Is it better than how Uber did when they were at $1mil? Just curious.

Either way, Lyft gets a nice puff piece ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Too bad they won't escape the same fate as Uber, which is likely bankruptcy due to it being impossible to subsidize losses forever.

Uber has a non-zero chance at figuring out self-driving cars first and not only surviving, but being one of the world's most valuable companies. Lyft's chances at that are zero, which implies either bankruptcy or a merger of equals with an equally doomed, non-differentiated competitor.

As somebody who gets immense value out of Uber I disagree. They can at least double the price in my location and still be in business. It's easier for me to do business through an App.

They can't do that in just about every major city in the world, which is where they'd have to not only compete, but win in order to justify their valuation.

Right now in NYC they're roughly equal with taxis during non-surge hours, and they can only do that by subsidizing about half of the cost.

That is not a recipe for success.

Uber and Lyft like services will need to survive for the next 10 years then buy or lease Ai cars and bank in larger portion of the revenue. But for that they will need huge investment rounds and no competition from car manufacturers or large pocket companies like Google or Apple. That could buy and put in a few million ai cars on the road with the amount of cash they are holding.

The subsidies in ridesharing seems to be shifting or easing due to the scale at which these companies now operate. Subsidizing riders is a lot easier at 100m rides/year then at 1b rides/year or 10b rides/year.

Two great businesses, having positive impact on people.

Two great products, sure. Businesses? They are horrendous.

Great businesses don't lose like, thirty cents on every dollar they make.

I disagree. Uber does not having a positive impact on its own employees, although they're proactively trying to change. Lyft seems to have a much stronger reputation of treating people the right way.

Can they be better, yes. Uber is an transportation company, I will compare them with other companies in the same industry. If you keep that in mind surely they are better than a Don in NewYork.

You're being told exaggerated lies by the media. We're not perfect, but the experience for employees is comparable to the other tech giants.

I've been at Uber for about 3 years now and it's been the best place I've ever worked by far. Based on what other current and former colleagues that have worked at other tech giants, it's actually better than most in terms of quality of life.

All those that are formerly Amazon, Apple, LinkedIn engineers far prefer it here at Uber, hands down. It's especially better than LinkedIn and Amazon.

For Google, it's a mixed bag. Some liked Google better and some liked Uber better. Which you prefer depends on your personality and what team(s) you worked on at each of these two companies.

For Facebook, it's actually pretty comparable. If you like Facebook, you'll like Uber and vice-versa.

The only big company that I think truly treats its engineers better than Uber across the board is AirBnB. That said, I personally would never trade the engineering problems I get to solve here for the engineering problems I would be solving at AirBnB. The engineering challenges are more than an order of magnitude more interesting and fun at Uber and the room to grow professionally as an engineer is far greater. Between Uber and AirBnB, both are good choices and you should optimize for the one that best meets the needs you want to satisfy.

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