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Comment by dguest | Hacker News Reader

> I don't think it's too big to fail.

My gut reaction: There's no company the size of Uber that could die more quietly. The world's reaction would be a muffled "meh".

Uber doesn't even own their most important asset, which is their drivers, and if they collapse catastrophically their drivers will simply turn off the Uber app and download one of a half dozen competitors' apps (if they don't already have it). For Uber customers, the transition will be even easier.

Maybe I'm missing something: This isn't like a car company that owns and manages factories, or like a tech company that has labs or does significant R&D, or even a bank that has lots of employees and owns other assets.

So genuine question: what do we loose if Uber vanishes tomorrow?

(Don't get me wrong, I'd be sympathetic to their employees who need to find new jobs, but my guess is that their skills are in relatively high demand.)

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I think you're 100% right, and there was even natural experiment confirming this when Uber (and Lyft) left Austin temporarily. Basically the city council wanted rideshare drivers to do City background checks. There was a public referendum, and Uber/Lyft said they'd leave if it passed. Then it passed, and they left. Pretty much overnight there were 3-4 Austin-centric Uber competitors. Riders and drivers just switched apps. Colloquially, people would even still say "get an Uber" while using these other apps.

Eventually this was superceded by a Texas law, and Uber/Lyft came back, but the rideshare apocalypse that was predicted never came to be because there are very few barriers to entry in this market: build a relatively simple app, paste up some fliers or billboards advertising your new company to drivers and riders, and you're in business.

Admittedly, Austin has more ambitious app coders than most other random cities, so it might not be literally overnight like it was here, but it won't take that long for somebody to do the same in the rest of the country/world. On the other hand, those places likely won't lose Lyft at the same time like Austin did, so it may be a wash.

>>what do we loose if Uber vanishes tomorrow?

VC(s) will have to write off several billion dollars worth of investment. Its will be lost permanently to never return back.

Yes exactly. The only ones who stand to lose if uber fails are the investors who put money into it. Oh boo.

And rank-and-file employees.

I hate Uber's shitty stunts as much as you do, but lets have some empathy for regular folks who work there.

Employees are paid quite handsomely. Their equity may go to trash though. Given that, that was always a gamble- It should've been factored all along.

I disagree that the regular employees are innocent here. You support the company you work for. Most employees there could easily get jobs elsewhere. Sure, they forfeit options, but they stop powering truly one of the worst companies we have seen in some time. Not to mention the sexual harassment and bad work environment, which is at least partially on rank and file employees.

I have no sympathy for well-off workers more or less choosing to work for shitty companies and supporting them in a complicit manner. We have ethical duties to work for companies that make a positive impact when we have realistic options. If there are no options and you're doing the job for reasonable comfort of life that you can't get elsewhere, different story. I don't think most employees at Uber fall into that category.

Uber employee here: Give some thought to what you'd expect to see over time if the company genuinely had changed internally. Hold Uber to it. I suspect it'll meet that bar.

Future actions do not excuse past ones. A right and a wrong don't cancel out, they both exist. I have noticed small improvements with the introduction of tipping and I'm sure it will get better, but that's not very hard to do from the starting point. Becoming not a shitty company doesn't make it any better to support anyone who possibly was a part of the old Uber. The damage is done. It's not likely the company fires everyone in the old Uber, and even if it does, the people who funded it still profit. That's not proper justice for the original actions that they still consistently avoid accountability on at all costs.

I don't want to skate over the moral grey area here because obviously improvement is better than not. But, you have to consider alternatives.

Let's rephrase the question: Why should anyone use Uber if Lyft is available and they can afford any small price difference, if any?

I think most people are concerned with making sure they're not actively supporting and organization currently behaving badly (and I pretty strongly believe that Uber isn't).

I've been at the company for 2.5 years. I'm solidly within your firing range. I've seen a company with a behavioral distribution that was slightly shifted from the societal mean. My job has almost exclusively involved interacting with people whose behavior fell within societally normal. Nevertheless, the upper tail of Uber's behavioral distribution was, retrospectively, clearly in a bad place.

I believe that that behavioral distribution has shifted to being mundane.

> I think most people are concerned with making sure they're not actively supporting and organization currently behaving badly (and I pretty strongly believe that Uber isn't)

I don't think that's morally right to only consider that. Even still, I don't see a reason not to use Lyft. They are more or less identical products at this point. One is owned by a company that used to do some pretty bad things. Why support the people that funded that and people that supported those people? Why take the risk it could ever happen again (even if you assure us it won't)? If you fall within those original parameters I set, I think there's no excuse for not using Lyft.

Yep, totally get what you're driving at here.

To the extent that you're asking about product differentiation: scale, eta, and price are reasons people choose one over the other.

To the extent that you're keen on punishing people who have behaved badly in order to disincentivize future bad behavior, good on you, that seems reasonable. I think it's hard to draw the line as to where this is actually useful/practical, and obviously it'll be a different line for different people. I'd guess that you're not boycotting every other startup that Benchmark has put early money into, for example.

Hi Uber employee, this is an unrelated question, do you have any thoughts on the recent Uber Visa card?

I have it. It's not metal :(

I'm a simple man.

I agree, not everyone has the luxury of choosing a job they believe in, and back before Uber became uncool I can see how people would sign up. That said, we're talking about a few thousand people compared to over a million drivers, and most of them are probably quite employable.

Note that in many areas within the US, the only competition to Uber is Lyft and taxi cabs.

it could have a massive effect on tech valuations in general. so from a real economy perspective you may be right, but the stock market and VC market might start to see this as an event to re-evaluate everything.

An event they would entirely deserve, if that's the case.

And it would be a gain for the society, too - because currently it seems the more absurd a valuation is, the more there is something wrong with a company - either it's doing useless crap, antisocial crap, or behaving immorally while doing something potentially useful.

I would love to see the valuations go down, to reduce the incentives for smart people to grow harmful businesses.

"...but the stock market and VC market might start to see this as an event to re-evaluate everything"

You are saying it as it is a bad thing.

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