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Comment by randomacct3847 | Hacker News Reader

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randomacct3847

Well apparently you can play baseball and make $330m.

Yes, it’s a lot, but to build a $30b company and make 90m pre-tax (maybe 50m post in CA) is something...

The obvious comparison is Travis Kalanick, who is definitely a billionaire and retained much more of Uber.

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> The obvious comparison is Travis Kalanick

That's why I said outside objective measure. By any objective standard 90M is an insane amount of money for one person to have. One billion is so far off the scale it is impossible to describe.

I’m making the point that you have two cos whose main US product is virtually indistinguishable from one another. The founder from one became a multi billionaire and the others are 1/20th of the way of becoming one.

I'm making the point that when you look at both objectively rather than in comparison they are both absurd amounts of money.

But you're injecting that point into a discussion about a different point as though it provides more insight. It's not particularly interesting; we get it, they're fabulously wealthy. But no one contested that, which is why several people are trying to explain that it's not what they were talking about.

An S-1 filing encourages relative financial comparisons by design and intention. It's not surprising that Lyft's founders are extremely well off now. What could be surprising is the degree of dilution they experienced. Those kinds of financial technicalities require us to engage in discussion that treats objectively fantastic returns in terms of relativities.

We're about four replies deep into a conversation chain by now. I would have imagined that if people didn't want to talk about my original observation they would have simply not replied to it! "Interesting" is an obviously subjective term, I find the relative measures that Silicon Valley apples to wealth absolutely fascinating.

If you had a billion dollars, would you immediately give away $900mm, since you appear to be arguing the difference is meaningless? Just because they're both a lot of money doesn't mean it's not important to the people who have said money.

Lyft and Uber's revenue numbers are quite distinguishable from each other.

> The obvious comparison is Travis Kalanick, who is definitely a billionaire and retained much more of Uber.

That's because Kalanick got screwed by VC's previously and made sure that wasn't going to happen again.

On the other hand, the baseball player will create much more than that in value while Lyft has lost billions of dollars. If someone here is underpaid it's not the Lyft founders.

Lyft has enriched its investors far more than any baseball player could even dream of. You're just looking at accounting losses. But when this IPOs, early stage investors will have all made billions.

But that's not creating value. Unless the lottery creates value for people who buy the right tickets.

The current price is the market's expectation of value throughout the existence of the company. The market believes that these past cash flows are not indicative of the company's future ability to create accounting value. And you may choose to value a growth company by its historical cash flows, but the market doesn't.

The value was created on the company itself, thanks to the early funds of the investors. Value was definitely created..

What value is exactly a baseball player creating? Lyft has provided WAY more value to society over its lifetime.

Drawing viewers' eyes to lucrative television timeslots for advertisers, selling tickets to local stadiums, and selling merchandise such as jerseys and figures.

Those are all wealth transfers, though, not really value creation. The only value creation by the baseball players is the entertainment provided (which is definitely not nothing).

How about getting a massage? “Wealth transfer”? Or “value creation”?

Value creation, they're fixing/entertaining the customer.

The baseball player brought joy to other humans, which is the whole bottom-line point of the entire economic system.

Lyft has burned piles of investor cash to give people artificially cheap taxi rides; the wealth-transfer is zero-sum and it's actually worse than that because their dumping distorts the real transport market (and exacerbates the negative externalities of cars). You could argue they've done some genuine value creation by being a more efficient taxi dispatcher, but if there was any substance to that then they'd have a profitable business.

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