Uber strips power from ousted CEO Travis Kalanick | Hacker News Reader

Uber strips power from ousted CEO Travis Kalanick

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83 pointsempressplay37 comments

I don't know whether it's real or imagined, but there has been a drop in my subjective experience with Uber in the last few months since Travis's removal.

- While in a rush, I've had back-to-back mid-day waits of 15+ minutes for any and every Uber I called (hailed a cab instead).

- A day where I experienced $50+ non-surged fare estimate from downtown SF to the Sunset, something I've never seen before (usually $22-ish... I took MUNI.)

- Increased rate of bad driver behavior: I've had drivers straight up cancel calls if I'm not outside immediately, drivers start a fare before I get in the car (and then lose the ability to find my true pickup point), and worse.

- Inability to pinpoint my location when there's a conference or venue nearby - I had to call a Lyft yesterday because Uber insisted I was at an Oracle conference (I wasn't even that close)

And more. Pretty much every reason I've had for not taking cabs over the past few years is now becoming a problem with Uber. If they can't regulate the quality of their service, there's no benefit to Uber in a major urban center (hailing a cab is far, far faster).

I hadn't used Lyft in three years until about two weeks ago. I've started using it more frequently and have had a fantastic experience. I'm unbelievably disappointed - internal company politics aside, I had been a huge fan of Uber. I haven't fully converted to Lyft yet, but every experience I have continues to push me in that direction.

When talking to lyft drivers here in New York, they all drive for Uber exactly as long as it takes to pay off their car loan for that day and then switch to Lyft because it pays more.

So I wouldn't be surprised if Uber is a lemon market when it comes to drivers.

I'm confused by that. Why do they drive for Uber for part of the day if Lyft pays more?

Some sort of lease arrangement stipulation on the vehicle with Uber for people who didn’t own / couldn’t afford a car?

I'm just inferring, but it sounds like it's possible to get a car loan/lease through Uber. It might be more tax efficient to have Uber take repayments directly from your earnings? So if first $X earned on Uber that day go to your repayments, it's worth earning $X on Uber to pay off the car, and then drive on whatever app pays the most.

most drivers in NY drive for multiple companies. Uber, Lyft, and Gett are the most common.

Yeah I've had a similar experience.

A year and a half ago a driver didn't pick me up, so I asked for a refund and got it immediately.

A couple months ago a driver pretended to pick me up. I couldn't cancel because I was "in" the Uber. So my friends waited on me for an hour. Then when I requested a refund they wouldn't give me one.

This was even though the ride was $9, I'd spent $200 on Uber in the previous month, it was only my second time requesting a refund, and my GPS would have validated my story.

I've since then only used Lyft.

Sounds more like there is more demand of rides than there are drivers. Whether that's from less people driving or more people riding is the question. Maybe Lyft is starting to become more popular. In my area, Lyft wasn't popular at all for a long time. You would wait forever meanwhile there was always an Uber driver in the next neighborhood. Now, they are pretty much the same in experience, wait times, and prices. Only time I've ever had "bad" drivers are when they call me before pickup and ask me where I'm going and demand I cancel since my destination would take them too long which I somewhat understand. There should be some sort of system to help drivers limit the amount of non-fare driving (giving them fares that might be a little further away to pickup but the drop off is right near the driver's home, kind of like pooling where the driver's home is the last "drop off").

I think both companies need to make sure that their drivers are happy. There will always be a demand for cab services so making sure you can keep drivers to match the demand will keep the fares coming in.

> Only time I've ever had "bad" drivers are when they call me before pickup and ask me where I'm going and demand I cancel since my destination would take them too long which I somewhat understand.

You understand this!? What? I haven't experienced this (thankfully), but this is ridiculous. This is the kind of behavior I experienced from cabs the led me to be an Uber evangelist to begin with. -20C, downtown Toronto, 2AM, cabs (illegally) outright refusing to drive you because they want to go a different direction. Uber was a godsend in comparison, at the time.

If that behavior is making its way onto these platforms, I have to wonder whether the initial innovations in safety and value for the consumer are just getting absorbed and destroyed by the scale at which these companies have to operate (lack of ability to regulate and vet their drivers).

You can either have being driven somewhere as a public utility, or as a private venture. You want to be driven somewhere very inconvenient? Fine, but you may have to pay extra for it.

Uber is still a godsend in the relatively rural area I'm in, where there are effectively no taxis, and the only alternatives are A.) calling a friend, B.) hitchhiking, C.) driving anyway when you really oughtn't, for whatever reason.

I don't think you understand: cab drivers in Toronto (and other cities) frequently turn down freezing cold passengers that just want a ride back home (still in the city) because the cab driver wants a route that brings them close to their home.

They will not accept your fare. This is illegal in most major cities (or at least Toronto), but impossible to track and enforce. It has nothing to do with wanting a ride to somewhere "very inconvenient" - convenience is priced into the fact you pay by mile. Enabling this sort of behavior is outright regressive to Uber's value prop in some of their largest markets - not to mention a public safety concern.

FWIW: I think both Uber and Lyft now have features designed to help drivers pick up fares towards their own homes at the end of a "shift" in order to make their drivers happier, I'm just saying that the behavior of cancelling fares shouldn't be considered "understandable" and undermines the value prop of these companies in major city centers.

I do understand. My belief would be that if you are running a for-profit, private business, and not a public service, you have the right to refuse service if it's against your best interests.

I don't go making websites for everybody that asks me to, when I have more productive things to do, and I would bridle a bit if anybody suggested that I had some kind of moral obligation to do so.

I always thought it was a little idiotic that Uber doesn't just tell the drivers where you want to go before they come pick you up.

Uber could add an option to specify your destination, and provide the information (or lack of info) to the drivers.

? I always have to specify my destination before booking.

neither uber nor lyft share that with the drivers till they register that you are in the car, presumably to prevent just this sort of thing.

That makes little sense to me, if they can't get drivers to go to certain routes, then the fare should increase as an incentive should it not? Some sort of market matchup between drivers and passengers is part of what Uber/Lyft should be supplying in their platform.

If a driver has say 15 mins of time part time, or left on their intended shift, as a passenger I really don't want that driver for a 45min trip thinking they need to be somewhere else..

i used to feel that way, but then i started thinking of the "bad neighbourhood" problem. it's historically been a huge problem for people living in certain neighbourhoods (and typically poor and/or heavily non-white ones) that cabs don't want to take them there.

The most I've run into route avoidance is with drivers who don't want to spend 2 hrs on a trip to the airport during rush hour.

Is the "bad neighborhood" problem a race problem, or a problem of not enough fares in that area (i.e. by taking a fare in, if the density is too low then you lose the time/cost of fares getting back out of that area...). and of course, if historically, if fewer fares go there, that problem is exacerbated.

I suppose one way to rebalance that issue without changing fares, is to preferentially schedule a driver for later fares until the earnings/trip/time etc are rebalanced. If Uber itself valued getting more uniform coverage, it seems like it could offer drivers to "undesirable" areas more, and shift some of the profits over from other areas into the low coverage areas too.

But all of this seems more complex and less transparent than increasing fares. The whole point of a market is to exchange information and come to some double ended voluntary deal that is good for both parties. If you fix bad neighborhoods by imposition onto drivers who don't know what they're getting into in terms of start/end points.

It's a hard set of tradeoffs.

it's a race problem in that it disproportionately affects communities of certain races, due to historical systemic issues. so even if no single uber driver specifically thought "i don't want to go into a black area", all the other factors affecting that decision would tend to affect black people more than white people.

this is nicely illustrative of how these things can feed off each other: https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2016-amazon-same-day/

As I understand they don't provide to driver until pick up to prevent drivers from cherry picking only rides they want to give. I think they used to tell them on the way to pick up passenger and found a higher cancellation rate.

I have had drivers ask me to cancel because they didn't like where I was going and wanted to stay in a downtown surge area. Rarely am I in a hurry so I told them they are welcome to cancel and I sat for a few minutes while he sat outside and refused to cancel.

This is just the Uber market normalizing. Cabbies normalized a long time ago and we got: aggressive driving, taking the long route to jack up the fare, claiming the card terminal is broken to get cash, denying a ride if you're black/latino.

Take your pick!

>- A day where I experienced $50+ non-surged fare estimate from downtown SF to the Sunset, something I've never seen before (usually $22-ish... I took MUNI.)

I agree in my personal subjective experience.

They recently estimated a fare for me at $50 for something that was usually about $17 - there was no surge going on - at least they didn't say there was. It was not a typically busy time either. I hailed a cab and the meter read $21 when I got home.

And yes, I'm aware that they changed how they tell you a surge is going on and there was no "Fares are higher because of demand" message.

For me, it's getting better and better.

And by better, I mean cheaper.

I always buy the uber "passes". So for 20$ a month, you get unlimited rides that are first $5 free. In Boston, I basically go get a meal, park my car, etc. all around the city for free. Just today I dropped off the car at an autoshop and Uber'ed my way to work... how much did it cost me? $0.21. Usually when I'm at work I'm hopping here and there, just a couple of miles -- it's almost always free for me. The wait-time is never more than 5 minutes. It's completely unbelievable. I will be sad when these deals go away.

I do feel shitty though that drivers get paid crap... I rationalize my taking advantage of the system by convincing myself that I will stop when I'm in a financially better health myself and will start leaving big tips (I'm in academia, I'm pretty sure I get paid less than they drivers overall).

Oh, and Lyft is ALWAYS more expensive. I used to check prices for both when I needed to go somewhere... since Uber was always cheaper (and that's leaving Pass discounts asides), I actually uninstalled Lyft app a month ago.

I think we're heading for a massive bubble, if Uber collapses investors everywhere will be spooked, "too big to fail" comes to mind.

Every ride Uber loses money. If they raise prices, then people jump ship, to Lyft, to a local service, to taxis. If self-driving cars don't start being used they can't cut down the cost... Of course, they also have lawsuits hitting them, and the Waymo lawsuit pretty much halted their self-driving car program.

Combine all this with the ridiculous number of lawsuits, investigations and criminal proceedings outside of IP that they are facing ("Grey ball" for instance) and I just don't see how they can maintain their status. Even with another $1 Billion or $10 billion.

How can they come out of this?

Couple that with having a large number of "chefs in the kitchen" so to speak and well... you get the idea.

>I think we're heading for a massive bubble, if Uber collapses investors everywhere will be spooked, "too big to fail" comes to mind.

I don't think a company that's had a ton of controversy around it is going to suddenly spook everyone if it fails.

I would expect an Uber failure to already be priced into the market.

I think the bigger spook will be if the entire market for on-demand drivers suffers a big decline in demand. Izabella Kaminska of the Financial Times has written several articles arguing that the Uber / Lyft model is fundamentally uneconomic. Without arguing for or against her, if that turns out to be true you are going to terrify a large number of investors. Nothing else has really looked as much like a sure-thing disruption opportunity as the taxi market. Anecdotally, my most recent Lyft driver recently told me that Lyft has started playing a lot of the same games to shaft drivers that she left Uber to get away from. It does make me start to wonder if the entire thing is largely subsidized by a market flooded with cheap money.

I don't see any real sign that the Waymo lawsuit halted their self-driving car program. It may yet, but so far, what it's forced them to do is "fire Levandowski."

I do think it was always ridiculous to imagine that Uber would create a durable advantage in driverless cars.

For better or for worse, Uber is the paramount example of the post-social-media dominated tech startup scene. If it turns out to be massively overvalued, I think you're right that it will absolutely spook investment in tech. Everyone's going to be asking, "If these investors were so massively wrong on Uber, after dumping billions and billions into it, how much insight could they possibly have?"

I don't know that that will mean a tech "bubble" or collapse, but I think it'll be way harder to raise money in tech for a while if Uber's ultimate valuation is, say, south of $10B.

I don't see how Uber is considered "too big to fail". They aren't the banking system, they are a ride hailing app. If they go away, people go back to using cabs.

I don't mean in that sense. In my mind, investors are having to deal with the sunk cost falicy. Every investor is bringing more investors in, which will drag everyone down.

One ride from another app, and people will forget Uber ever existed.

I think you're reading tea leaves, trying to create industry meaning where it's quite obviously a pathological case of Uber's leadership being scumbags.

> Every ride Uber loses money.

That isn't true - they're profitable in a lot of markets[0]. They're subsidizing rides in new and developing cities where they're capturing market

[0] https://www.businessinsider.com.au/uber-profitable-in-hundre...

I think the most remarkable thing here is that Benchmark voluntarily gave up their own weighted voting rights. It tells you just how bad they think Kalanick's influence is that they think they're better off this way.

17 person board. Are there other examples of startups that have been taken over like this with a successful outcome?

Lots of examples of investors succeeding in diluting a founder's power in their own startup.

One person's takeover is another person's power restructuring.

EDIT: Tesla is a good example (Elon Musk pushing Martin Eberhard out).

The question was are there any that are successful for the startup [longterm]?

Apple is an example that comes to mind although the outcome isn't exactly successful. They nearly went bankrupt before they acquired NeXT to bring back Jobs.

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