Lyft says its revenue is growing nearly 3x faster than Uber’s | Hacker News Reader

Lyft says its revenue is growing nearly 3x faster than Uber’s

techcrunch.com

205 pointsfstuff124 comments

Sounds nice from a PR standpoint but you can't really compare the two companies based on revenue growth. Lyft is still a smaller company so in a global industry it's much easier for it to grow faster on a percentage basis. They're still expanding to cities where Uber already exists. If you started a rideshare company and gave 11 rides this month you'd be growing 10x faster than Lyft.

I agree. They just recently entered Canada (and it seems only one province), so of course they are going to have bigger revenue growth than Uber as they enter new markets.

A stretch: is Lyft going to use these metrics to go public before Uber to hype itself up?

Incidentally, my experience with Lyft here in Canada has been pretty dismal. On average pretty terrible drivers. I have a feeling Lyft is getting all the Uber rejects. If that's the case, this is going to derail Lyft's Canadian debut pretty badly. I wonder if this is a common problem when they come into an Uber-dominated market.

I've seen these anecdotes one way or the other (pro/anti Uber/Lyft/whatever) and I think they're all pretty useless when trying to extrapolate to the broader population. One thing that is abundantly clear, at least in the US city where I live, is that Uber and Lyft are pushing hard for the same pool of drivers; many drivers drive for multiple ride share services. I'm extremely skeptical of "one company's drivers are better" stories given they're all largely the same drivers.

> many drivers drive for multiple ride share services

This has absolutely been my experience in a city where both have operated for awhile. Things may be different in cities where one service is newer.

Drivers may express a preference for one or the other, but ultimately they drive for whichever one earns them more income at a given time of day.

Agreed, every driver I’ve asked is on both apps and switches freely to make money.

They might stick with one for a bit to get certain bonuses but there’s no long term loyalty for any of them.

So we need a car sharing aggregator app now? How do I know which is cheaper, Lyft or Uber, when I ask for a ride?

You can try Apple's Maps app. (Does Google Maps have it to?) There is a 'ride-share' choice (or some similar terminology) when choosing route methods, and selecting it presents both Uber and Lyft (if you have the apps installed) and side-by-side price comparisons with the ability to book right there. It should be noted that integration with the Maps app is handled by Lyft and Uber themselves - they can choose what values to present to the user.

Google Maps absolutely has this as well.

Definitely. Lately I see more vehicles in my area with both Uber and Lyft decals than with only one or the other.

It seems there's even a market catering to these people now: https://www.amazon.com/Driver-Light-Removable-Suction-Ridesh...

I live in NYC, however I'm from Toronto and spent a couple of weeks there last month. I don't use Uber, don't have it on my phone and I was surprised to learn how new lyft is to Canada. The lyft drivers I experienced seemed really good, however, when I asked them about why they downloaded lyft, they consistently said it was because of the 30 day no commission take from lyft, but they had no loyalty to the company. One guy even said he plans to delete it and move back to Uber once the entry offer is expired.

My experience is with the other end, I have been querying Uber drivers about their feelings about a possible upcoming entry of Lyft in my province's market. So far, on my small sample 10<n<15, it has been unanimous that they would adopt Lyft since they have a reputation among drivers of taking a smaller margin. Some of the drivers also told me that they plan to serve as drivers for both at the same time.

This is an interesting question - who loses by IPOing first? The company who did it first or the company who comes next?

It seems like it Lyft has everything to gain and little to lose by building a growth story and rushing out to IPO. They get to set the price, they could be used as an Uber proxy which would increase demand for their stock, and more.

It's funny you mention this. I know Uber has a lot of bad PR but my friend at Lyft was telling me how it's kind of an awkward situation where yeah sure Uber is a competitor for them but they have done so much for paving the way for ride-sharing being allowed in many different places.

but if they are entering markets where Uber already exists, wouldn't there users mainly be ex-uber users ? unlikely that all of them are new users. Unless people user both at the same time, but it could still eat into ubers revenue in those regions.

... and ex-Uber drivers — meaning drivers who were kicked off Uber due to poor user ratings. This would explain what's going on with Lyft's intro to Canada right now. Awful customer service every time I've used Lyft.

A similar situation was seen in India, when Uber entered the market. Most of the then-existing hail-taxi users were users of Ola (the home-grown service). Users here use both apps at the same time (comparing ride prices to make the choice). This meaning Uber and Ola eat into each other's revenues and markets across cities in India.

This is how you can lie with statistics.

Clearly, Techcrunch should know better.

they're becoming the "Buzzfeed" of tech

I remember when Uber was clearly dominant. That was over a year go. For the past two conferences I've been to, including the one I'm at now(Ember Conf), EVERYONE has been using Lyft.

It really is possible for a company to piss off enough people.

Anecdotally I haven't found this HN-wide negative sentiment of Uber (and narrative of its decline) to be shared anywhere else in the US.

My extended family in the southeast and northeast US is familiar with Uber (without using it), but they haven't heard of Lyft. When I lived in Chicago, most of my peers had Lyft, but Uber was the always the first choice.

Does anyone else see the same trend? The bay area certainly seems to be Lyft-dominant, but I haven't seen that anywhere else.

True. Here in Europe in general, Lyft is uknown, but, at least here in Greece, everyone sings the praises of Uber, in comparison to the terrible service normal taxis provide.

HN is not only a regional but also an ideological bubble, and it seems to hate companies that are doing well for themselves (except Apple and Musk-affiliated gigs).

> at least here in Greece, everyone sings the praises of Uber, in comparison to the terrible service normal taxis provide

There. It's not only in Greece, it's pretty much all over the world except a few places.

I know, the taxi drivers work hard, but the standards before Uber were really abysmal. Why? Because monopoly.

For the young ones and those with poor memory, the overcharging, taking 5 times the normal length "shortcuts", geographically challenged, downright scammy taxi drivers were a norm. In the States, they also expect a tip of 20% for deigning to do their job; one thing I never understood in Boston is how it is physically possible to accumulate so many fumes in a modern car. In places where the taxis are in demand, they wouldn't bother picking you up.

Today the horrible ones still exist, of course, but their number is dwindling.

> and [HN] seems to hate companies that are doing well for themselves

Well, that—and, maybe, a pinch of Company-wide culture of sexual harassment.

Also source required where the number of sexual harassment cases at Uber > the number at a comparatively sized company. Otherwise you are just going off of who gets the most publicity in the media.

I believe it's less the number of claims (though from all the stories, I'd give them 50-50 on being an outlier) and more the seniority of the claims.

If a large org has junior employees harassing other employees, that's bad.

If the CEO and executive level is actively participating in and covering for same, that's organizational policy.

You’re asking for something impossible, I.e. proof of something that cannot be proven. After all, any sort of statistic I could find would be tainted by your “media bias” catch-all.

> Well, that—and, maybe, a pinch of Company-wide culture of sexual harassment.

Source required (specifically about company-wide culture, x != entire company fwiw where x is the number you are claiming).

Why do you think HN hates companies that are doing well for themselves?

Doing this is way more exhausting than cheering them on (see SpaceX, people have fun in those posts). "Oh this company is doing well and I'm jealous"? Seriously don't know how that's enough.

There's a slightly less nefarious interpretation which is that people have different values, and disagreement happens.

So many people are extremely happy to see other people's success here, for example Lyft here. But what you might think is unimportant virtue signalling is something other people actually care about, sometimes deeply

Are you sure about your first assertion? It is well known that HN is gratuitously negative about everything. SpaceX is the exception, rather than the rule - and you'd be hard pressed to find another company with quite such a positive reputation on HN.

Personally, I think the causality here is flipped.

People by default will be excited about stuff that's "good news". But the community is pretty big, so there will usually be a set of people that see an issue, and comment on it.

So in the end many things coming through will be negative or cynical. The fact that people tend not to just comment "neat" but will write the paragraphs of research saying how X is wrong doesn't help in the impressions. But for things like research papers, most people tend to just comment on the contents.

I think the reason so few companies on HN have this reputation is because many of these companies are problematic. Google is the symbol of ad networks. Facebook does a bunch of privacy-busting stuff. Amazon exploits many workers on the lower end and it's not certain that their monopoly will be benificial in the future.

If anything I think it's an indictment on the kind of company that succeeds in SV (and, well, capitalism). I think we all remember old "do no evil" Google financing a bunch of awesome stuff. And when they turned out to be like every other company.... well that sucks.

Inversely loads of smaller businesses tend to get a lot of good press on this website, because people can see the passion and the "not about quarterly revenue" attitude.

I attribute SpaceX and Tesla love to the "ask a kindergartner what they want to be" phenomenon.

Everyone, regardless of field, can relate to rockets and cars.

Far fewer people would relate to, say, optimizing insurance benefit payments.

It's deeper than that. People here like Tesla because it's forcing other car makers to build decent electric cars. That's something that needs to happen if we're going to move away from fossil fuel dependence.

SpaceX is cool because there's a really good chance they'll be more successful at missions to the moon and Mars than NASA has been recently. They're both forward-thinking companies.

My point being there are thousands of companies doing interesting and "good" things. But Tesla and SpaceX definitely seem to get more of a positive reaction than the others.

Not saying they aren't doing good things. But they get more credit than the good things they're doing would merit. And probably more than even effective PR can explain.

Agreed. Whether you think it's worth changing your habits for, with the numerous examples of shitty behavior (that their new CEO has even copped to) from Uber it's not hard to see why people wouldn't want to support them.

You can speak for Europe in general?

In my European bubble people are generally aware that Uber is a morally questionable company (without necessary knowing about the details, just a reputation) and some have heard of Lyft, even though it's not available.

This guy doesn't know what he's talking about. Uber is banned in Greece, Italy, Finland and a host of other countries. It's also legally banned in London afaik and heavily regulated in a lot of other places.

Actually in Greece 4 drivers have been criminally charged for violating the law by driving for Uber and falsifying documents (as per company instructions).

In the countries of South Europe (Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal) in which I have personal experience, although there are some Uber drivers operating illegally or in gray zones, penetration is minimal. You can only get rides in capitals and major cities, and they're not much cheaper.

The main reasons are 2: people hate Uber because they know they're exploiting workers, and taxi drivers have strong unions. Uber IMHO is the only entity that managed to become more hated than taxi drivers.

The reason Uber is banned everywhere can be summed up by the European Court of Justice: Uber needs to stop pretending to be just an app. It's a transport company, and it's using the app as an excuse to operate illegally, bypassing regulations, responsibility and avoiding tax.

I can second this. Uber did have a positive effect on local taxis, forcing them to upgrade. We now have taxi companies that are reinventing themselves - apps are good, you can pay with CC in the app and the drivers need to adhere to some standard of professional ethics.

Imagine that - they are able to do that without the "Uber" model of ignoring regulation and doing the fuck they want regardless.

Atleast where I live, southern germany, Apps for Taxi have been a thing for a while, to my knowledge predating Uber and the standards for them have been extremely high for decades at this point.

In my experience, previous to Uber, apps for taxis were just a mobile webview of their website. You could request a driver, they would give you an estimate in blocks of 5-10€, and feedback was nonexistent. Uber, you knew who your driver is and what they were driving, estimates are accurate to the cent, feedback is annoyingly encouraged, and payments are done in app and automatically. None of this, “the CC machine is broken, you have cash?” garbage.

I never once had a "CC broken, cash?" question, granted, in germany it is also more common to pay in cash anyway.

The apps involved weren't bad either. You entered your location (or had it located via GPS), told the destination and it would give you the exact price that you could either pay directly at the taxi (before you drive) or via Paypal/CC/etc.

It was quite pleasant though apparently not very popular since a lot of people simply prefer public transport or their own car here.

For what it is worth the situation in Finland is changing, and Uber will be back in some form:

https://metropolitan.fi/entry/uber-returns-to-finland-in-jul...

> seems to hate companies that are doing well for themselves

Wow. Can you back that up?

I noticed the same thing about my family in Phoenix who has nothing to do with the tech industry. They think they're very savvy for having the Uber app and knowing how to use it. In fact my uncle was bragging about some uber benefit he gets via his amex platinum card.

They've never heard of Lyft and don't know anything about any Uber controversy other than the fact that 'taxi drivers hate it!"

Everyone I know gets an "uber" regardless of whether they're using Lyft, Uber, or any other ride sharing service which is not a taxi.

Great! Now let's get out there and educate, because Uber is truly a disgusting organization at the top. I am sure once they have died, their engineers can find spots at Lyft as something will need to pick up the void, so no need to worry there Uber devs reading this.

What do you have against Khosrowshahi?

Actually, pretty much everyone at the top already left Uber about six months ago or so

Some are still board members, I believe.

> I am sure once they have died

Just because you want them to “die” doesn’t mean they will.

> They think they're very savvy for having the Uber app and knowing how to use it. In fact my uncle was bragging about some uber benefit he gets via his amex platinum card.

In fairness, it’s a great benefit.

All of my friends in the states take Lyft. My friends in other countries use Uber.

Lyft's international expansion has only started recently into Canada about 5 months ago.

Yeah, and I keep seeing ads for Maven around. But public consciousness is very high for Uber. The average user that I see doesn't know or care about its internal problems.

If ride availability has anything to say about it, there are plenty of Lyft drivers in San Antonio. I say "take a Lyft" or "Lyft there" when I talk rideshare. I don't preach it or say "Uber sucks" but when I am asked, I mention that Uber had a crummy internal HR program, has committed multiple shady business practices, none of which I can remember, but I can remember disliking.

‘People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.’ - Maya Angelou

Your last sentence reminded me of that.

This is anecdotal, but I'm also in San Antonio and have generally had better experiences with rides from Lyft, even without considering the issues you mentioned. Even wait times have been pretty similar for both. I know someone who drove for both Lyft and Uber, and that person only received any sort of in-person training with Lyft.

I do see the appeal with using Uber internationally that others mentioned in this thread, though.

I'm currently in the Triangle area in North Carolina, there seems to be plenty of lyft users here.

This seems to be survivorship bias. Since you like lyft, you are more likely to be friends with people who also like lyft. OR to phrase it better, you and people who like lyft have more in common.

I'm visiting the area, and know little to no people here. I downloaded both uber and lyft, and so far have had far more success getting a lyft than an uber.

In Seattle, most people I know choose Lyft for ethical reasons.

the funny thing is most people criticized Uber for destroying the taxicab industry and displacing jobs, yet don't do the same for Lyft.

The other stuff such as Uber's sexual harrassment, i get, but the above boggles my mind

Anecdotally, in DC the typical wait time for my Lyft rides has about doubled over the past year. Since I can't imagine why fewer people would be driving for them, I interpret that as evidence of increased demand for Lyft.

My impression in the bay area is that it is Uber-dominant too.

Travis Kalanick is still Chris Sacca's boy

In Southern California, Lyft is always the first choice among my coworkers. It's consistently cheaper than Uber, often significantly so.

Pissing of people is not a problem. Pissing of _customers_ is a problem, especially customers who have a choice.

Contrast e.g. Equifax, Comcast, SAP, etc, who've pissed of plenty of people with little consequences.

Google wasn't the first search engine...

Apple didn't sell the first smartphone or tablet...

Facebook wasn't the first social media site...

Amazon wasn't the first to sell shit online...

And Lyft wasn't the first ride-sharing app.

Maybe being first to market is overrated?

This may be semantics but technically Lyft was the first to come up with the Uberx model of anyone becoming a driver.

Not really. They head Uber was about to launch it and pre-emoted by a few days. Still to this day haven’t been able to suss out who was really first with the idea.

Interestingly, I used to work for a company that worked with the London Black cab manufacture to developer ride-hailing from a mobile phone. This was back in the early 00's. I always wondered if there was any patent portfolio that is relevant to Lyft/Uber. It was called Zingo, sadly the only reference I could dig out from a cursory Google was a story about it going bust: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2004/nov/25/transportin...

I thought SideCar was first with the idea.

That's totally true, sad you're being down-voted. Second market mover advantage is equally as strong as market makers. As a second market mover, you just better be prepared to wake build.

> Maybe being first to market is overrated?

Sometimes being first to market yields an unshakable dominance in that market for a long time to come... Mostly not though :)

What you're pointing out is often called 'second movers advantage'. Apples iPhone is a pretty decent example: by not being the first phone provider Apple got to enter a maturing market with a mature offering, use their own core competencies, and dominate. That's hard to do if you're bogged down with backwards compatibility and fighting to make the tech possible.

I'll give you the other ones, but I'll challenge the Amazon example. Sure, there may have been other small sites selling stuff online, but Amazon definitely was a first mover in selling lots of stuff at volume. With all your other examples I can name the companies the later movers overtook (e.g. Google -> Yahoo/Alta Vista, Apple -> Blackberry, Facebook -> Myspace), but I think the first time I bought something online it was a book from Amazon.

When Amazon started they were far from dominant. For a long time they only sold books. Then they only sold classical music CDs. Bit by bit they added other things, like other music, DVDs, and eventually basically all retail goods.

But for years they were basically just one among many sites, and not even terribly notable in the overall retail space. There were lots of other companies selling lots of other stuff at the time. Buy.com, for example, and ebay of course. Of all the ways to buy things online amazon was pretty far down the list until the mid 2000s.

What Amazon brought to the table was a unique combination of good web dev / services skills and top notch fulfillment logistics. And highly competitive pricing. Buying things on amazon was just a better overall experience compared to other sites. For example, when you put something in your shopping cart on amazon it stays there, it doesn't magically disappear for some artificial reason. And the overall experience of search/browse, read reviews, add to cart, then checkout, which today is commonplace throughout online retail was really particularly well honed by amazon. They didn't invent the form but they shaved off all the hard edges. This meant that amazon had much better customer retention than other sites and as amazon added new product lines existing amazon customers often decided to just use amazon for those things too. It took years and years for that momentum to snowball into the online retail juggernaut that Amazon is today.

A lot of other companies at the time had more revenue and invested more money into their stores than Amazon did, but they didn't win because ultimately they didn't execute as well. Amazon was helped by being online early, it gave them the experience necessary to build into what they became, but it's a stretch to claim they had first mover advantage.

> Of all the ways to buy things online amazon was pretty far down the list until the mid 2000s.

That's just not true. Yes, they focused largely on books and music originally, but they were still a first mover in ecommerce and a huge presence. Heck, their 1 click patent was published in 99.

Amazon was a leap up from other online booksellers, just as Google was a leap up from other search engines...

Lyft isn't a leap up from Uber. But I do stick with Lyft because Uber's been so cold.

What other online booksellers were there in 1995? I don't remember any.

Barnes and Noble was around, but they just did not take it seriously enough

According to wikipedia B&N's website was launched almost 2 years after Amazon.

Uber is a household name in many cities in India now. Surely, the same is the case in many other countries.

Uber has been ridiculously overvalued. They're core offering an app for hailing taxis. There's a dozen copycats that do it exactly as well as Uber. They are #1 by being first to market and establishing a strong brand. Their product is extremely vulnerable.

They also have no moat on either the consumer or driver side. Apps are trivial to install. Drivers can easily run multiple. It really is a race to see who can get another related business off the ground first.

> There's a dozen copycats that do it exactly as well as Uber

Can you name 3?

Disclaimer: I work for Grab

The competition in ride-hailing industry is pretty intense right now actually. You have several big players:

  - Ola (India)
  - Didi (China + Brazil & perhaps Japan soon)
  - Grab (Southeast Asia)
  - Go-Jek (Indonesia, a very populous country with 250 million by the way)
  - Uber (global but has retreated from certain markets already, see Uber/Didi deal in China)
  - Lyft (US/Canada)
  - bunch of startups in Europe but not sure if any of them are big enough to mention

You just listed why Uber is so valuable: none of the others have anywhere near the global range Uber has. Even if Uber banned in a couple European countries they're still widespread enough worldwide to be a better alternative than <no similarly-sized competition to insert here> because of a simple fact: I already have the app setup and running on my phone, which isn't true for any other ones you listed, which either don't operate in the continent at all or are regional to the point of near-uselessness.

In other words: when I travel somewhere, be that a different city or country, I'll by default have Uber already running on my phone; I don't have whatever regional equivalent there is there. This also works the other way around: because I have Uber setup for whenever I travel, I end up using it over any local apps because it's already there and another taxi app offers me nothing that Uber doesn't. I'd love for Lyft or anything similar to get off their asses and expand internationally but I suspect I'll be an old man by the time that happens in any serious capacity.

edit: for example you said you work for Grab. Ok, granted that people from other countries are likely just a tiny market not worth chasing so you don't particularly care whether I use Uber whenever I visit SG, that's fine. But users in SG surely care about only needing one application whenever they travel abroad, which drives adoption towards Uber in Grab's detriment; that's a big reason why Uber is so valuable. From reading the Grab website it looks like that's exactly what Grab is chasing too: expansion into other markets (and props for already supporting multiple countries, along with the app being totally fine with my unsupported country phone number).

> I don't have whatever regional equivalent there is there

I imagine you would install it if Uber is not very common in that market; waiting for an Uber to come might take much longer than for you to install that regional equivalent.

Lyft, Gett, Juno, Via are the big ones in NYC. Also, Arro lets you have pay for a yellow cab with an app.

Problem is only Lyft is somewhat big. When you say "There's a dozen copycats that do it exactly as well as Uber", that includes operating in several markets too, no?

If you look at markets outside of America. There’s a few. Most people don’t use Uber in singapore. They use grab. Then in Indonesia there’s grab and a local brand. And Thailand is grab and a local brand. Too lazy to double check the names.

Yep, I've never used Uber because of the issues I've read about, admittedly I'm not the most informed person ever, just my experience.

> Lyft provided this stat shot, which also includes some highlight numbers on its performance thus far in 2018.

Where's the data for this?

> with a particularly strong Q4 during which its revenue outpaced Uber’s by 2.75x

How much revenue did Lyft pull in? Or Uber? This article isn't very good.

+1, was looking for these comparisons. Very vague article.

Agree with all the comments here about how the actual statistic here shouldn't lead one to the conclusion that it may on the surface. But... Every time I've visited a big city of the last few years, "Uber" has been the verb for just grabbing a ride-share. My last 2 visits to a big city over the law few months, "Lyft" has been the go-to that people talk about. I'm pretty sure the tide is shifting in Lyft's favor, this specific statistic and its flaws aside.

This is very anecdotal. I really wish we had data on market share, costs, revenues, etc. Obviously we won't have even most of the picture until both companies are public, but at this point it seems like all of these articles are just speculation. When I interned at Uber, media estimates were pretty inaccurate.

> When I interned at Uber, media estimates were pretty inaccurate

How confident were you in the accuracy of the internal numbers being shared? ;-)

Devil's advocate question for sure, but I've been at companies where real numbers of all kinds were casually inflated internally during communications for morale (or just to flatter management's ego)..

Well of course. What a dumb title. Lyft is smaller than Uber (drivers, user base, and operating markets). They have more room to accelerate their revenues because every time they add a market it has a larger impact on their added revenue. The title is just stupid because I can buy a cab tomorrow and also claim that my revenue is growing faster than Uber.

If you're in the US it's easy to forget that Uber is very world-wide and as a frequent traveller I use it nearly everywhere I go. Lyft is mostly US-only right now.

It's much nicer and easier to get an Uber at most airports and know you're not getting screwed, communicate your destination easily when you don't speak the same language and know that they take payment by card -- rather than arriving at the destination, having already asked if they take card payment, they said yes, then suddenly they don't.

Achieving 3x is easy when your revenue was lower to begin with.

I've had difficulty getting Lyft's in DC. They may have to increase prices to encourage more drivers to fill demand.

Where and when in DC? I haven’t had a problem in the least, around DuPont, admo, or even SE, never bothered checking Uber prices/availability.

My gut says Juno is dark horsing and about to make a splash. I have no proof for this outside of my gut, but the way they are laying up reminds me of early day uber. My main point of reference for this feeling is the drivers, if I get a lyft driver with 4.9 or 5.0 rating, they inevitably try to push Juno during the ride, however the value prop to the rider is somewhat compelling: the drivers are compensated to a higher degree (lower fee) however, the must maintain a 4.9 on other apps, and an equivalent on their app, consequently, the caliber of chauffeur on Juno is quite high.

the last i heard of juno, they were acquired and drivers were upset about being screwed over in the deal (their RSUs were almost worthless). Just googled around and couldn't find any updates, do you know what happened? Are they seen as driver friendly again?

I mean I'm seriously not shitting you when I say every single rider I've gotten on lyft in the last few months who have a 4.9 or above and genuinely provided great service (one dude still had candy/water!) has pushed Juno on me. I asked the lady I had yesterday why she isn't using Juno and she said she wants to, they treat the drivers well, she just can't get an interview to be accepted as a driver till.. uh... April?! I was pretty surprised.

This is the first I've heard of Juno as something other than a dial-up ISP.

I always thought of Juno as an email provider. Looking up your reference, TIL that it was/is both.

I'm not sure what's impressive about growing revenue in an industry that has no obvious economies of scale. This seems like a case of "sure we lose money on every ride, but we'll make it up with volume!"

Looking at it another way, given a huge funding pool (say $10B) a modestly competent company could outpace both Uber and Lyft in revenue growth by the end of the year simply by subsidizing rides even more. The initial skepticism towards ride sharing services is gone and there's little keeping customers and drivers loyal to either Uber or Lyft.

UBER has already cemented a path around the world. He is facing legal battles in an attempt to demonstrate that his business is legitimate and beneficial to society. All others will have the facilities to travel in this vacuum.

But it will reach a point where the dispute will not be with the old business models related to mobility. And at this point, it will make sense to compare these companies. But at the moment it makes no sense to compare revenue.

Nitpicking: Does "3x faster" mean at 300%, or at 400%? I would say 300%, but when you say 50% faster I would interpret it as 150%.

It is a expression with no clearly defined meaning, and really shouldn't be used.

> Does "3x faster" mean at 300%, or at 400%?

It's 300%. If company A is growing 10% every month, and company B is growing 30% a month, people would call B's growth 3x faster (30/10=3).

I understand, but the expression is nonsense.

I can improve my running speed 3x than Usain Bolt in next week if I want to.

[xkcd: Fastest-Growing]: https://xkcd.com/1102/

Who cares ? Is it profitable or not ?

That doesn't matter right now. It eventually matters, but when you're in a new category and fighting for marketshare and brand awareness, it's fine to invest in the form of losing money today. Nearly every company more complicated than "selling hours of labor" goes through such a phase.

(No doubt that some companies take it much too far, but profits are not critical in this stage of any online/mobile ride-hailing company.)

It's not

I launched my new app last week, calculated the growth rate this week and I am growing INFINITY week over week yoohoo!

Is INFINITY the new MOON?

After I rode in an Uber with a self-proclaimed rapist driver, and Uber's response was "we'll consider limiting his access to uber", I uninstalled. Fortunately, the police took the case a little more seriously than Uber did.

Pardon the micro-rant, but this is yet another great example of fake news. It's everywhere.

Factually accurate, but none the less closer to bias / propaganda than truth. Unnecessary and inappropriate.

Techcrunch (and all others who choose to deny their journalistic responsibilities) should be embarrassed for being so willing to publish such click bait-y headlines.

Perhaps greed isn't so good after all?

Uber could (and eventually will destroy) Lyft in one fell swoop. They're just holding back to appease the government atm.

> They're just holding back to appease the government atm.

Perhaps Uber should first try to get profitable.

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