As Uber Prepares to Go Public, Its Lead Lawyer Races to Clean It Up

yes, but the Ola app (last I checked) required access to all your emails and SMS messages and didn't function if these are not granted. When one of my friends contacted customer support he was told " but all your data is safe with us, why are you worried?"

(this was some time ago, I don't know what the status is today)

I've found the same to be true for Uber Eats. If my order is wrong, they give a full refund no questions asked (and a meal is typically $20-25). And orders get messed up a lot (maybe 1 out of 5). Even something as small as missing ketchup, I'll get half off.

Did you complain to your consumer protection bureau?

Uber's US support number is 800-593-7069. You can also tweet at their twitter account, which usually gets you a quick response. @Uber_Support ‏

Chargeback.

Google Maps already does that.

There are also Taxis in most places.

Good luck. You aren't the first to try this. Uber's terms of service expressly prohibit displaying their prices next to a competitor's, and they've sent their lawyers after anyone who has tried. You don't make money as a marketplace by competing in the market for marketplaces -- you do it by being the marketplace and charging the rent that the market will bear.

Same thing in my case. I had a few mishaps - one guy didn't terminate the trip once I got off, so I got overcharged, another failed to pick me up to begin with (!), but started a trip anyway, etc. In every case the issue was financially resolved in terms of hours.

Totally. I use Lyft wherever I can but I can virtually always use Uber whereas Lyft is spotty.

> This might be the silicon valley bubble here though.

I'm well outside of SV, use Lyft occasionally, and never use Uber out of principle.

It might be (as long as we expand that definition to cover tech workers or tech industry aware people in other areas as well). I live an hour North of SF, and even there, if I mention I don't like to use Uber out of principle because of their past behavior and misdeeds, the question I invariably get is "Oh, like what? I haven't heard anything."

Whatever Uber did to paper over what news of their misdeeds reached general cultural consciousness (if any...) seems to have worked for the most part. That's a shame, since I truly believe there should be much harsher repercussions for their blatant disregard of the law over an extended period and the pain and problems it caused to many.

I suspect if the market was working efficiently, Uber would have a lot more problems and be in a much worse position than they are (efficient markets assume good information, and if people don't know what Uber's done, they can't make an informed decision).

I live quite a few states away, and in fact Uber has a terrible reputation here too.

Going public, they can get better at respecting local laws and regulations, and still sacrifice their customers (and of course employees) at the altar of their shareholders. (At least that is what I read the Op is saying).

One criticism, from a philosophical angle, would be that you have foundered on the is-ought problem.

The government (or sufficiently powerful corporations, which effectively take on some aspects of public governance) sets up the framework that the market operates in. Corporations operate in a society which may break down if sufficient pressure is applied to people (e.g. employees, customers).

Down vote baiting is discouraged by the site guidelines.

There are many places where we know that a free market doesn’t properly function. Specifically, there are certain types of goods that end up priced wrong: those with externalities (positive or negative). So if all a company cares about is maximizing shareholder value over time they are drawn away from products with positive externalities (like a public park) towards those with negative externalities (like cars that pollute)

Note: I use these two examples because they are classic cases of positive and negative externalities but they are so well known that the government has already stepped to make public parks and tax or regulate of the externalities related to the pollution from cars.

There is no constraint that companies must maximize shareholder value. Companies can be set up for any number of reasons (including non-profit reasons).

The concept of a corporation existing solely to maximize profit is a new development coming out of the Chicago school of economics. For most of our legal history, any company that received limited liability was required to consider a broader set of constituents; including shareholders, debt holders, employees and society. Often they were given an explicit charter from the king or the sovereign and were engaged in highly risky behavior that was believed to be extremely socially valuable but which most investors and managers wouldn’t pursue unless they weren’t personally liable.

This is as opposed to a general partnerships, which most businesses were until the 1980s, where the owners were personally responsible for all debts and harm the firm caused. Delaware didn’t even have LLCs until 1991 and corporations were much harder to form.

We don’t have to live in a society where a fundamental structure organizing human activity ignores the well being of many of the core constituencies it interacts with; we write the rules. We could decide that corporations and their officers have to balance their effort maximize value for shareholders, employees, debt holders, their local community and the country. The social contract can be negotiated.

I say this as a start up founder, entrepreneur, and capitalist.

Finally, your argument assumes competition exists to reap the benefits of competition; but monopolies and dualoplies such as Uber/Lyft exist specifically to achieve network effects and the pricing power they allow. That is clearly great for shareholders but inefficient for everyone else. Being a capitalist doesn’t mean being pro business in all its forms. Monopolies are destructive to innovation, wealth distribution, efficiency, and over the long term capital appreciation.

Anyway; No down vote from me.

> How is that “evil”? Isn’t that the crystallization of the teleological purpose of a company?

> The ideal company works to maximize shareholder value. And not just short-term value, but the amortized value of the company in perpuitity....

> The ideal situation is that the company pays employees as little as possible and charges customers as much as possible....

It might be for some people, but I wouldn't say that view is universal. In my view the teleological purpose of a company is to strive to act morally and ethically while providing value to society. I think trying to replace that with a mechanism driven by a map-model is pretty dystopian.

> And not just short-term value, but the amortized value of the company in perpuitity.

But this is what they characteristically fail at, or are given strong incentives not to do.

For example, one of the best things a stable, mature company can do is to just keep operating its business, making profits and returning the profits to the shareholders. Then the shareholders can use the money for whatever is most efficient, e.g. investing it in other companies with better growth potential. But the tax laws in the US punish that severely as compared with wasteful empire building or subsidiary shell games that warehouse cash in foreign subsidiaries in lower tax jurisdictions. Returning profits to shareholders gets taxed twice. Hoarding or wastefully/inefficiently spending the money doesn't get taxed at all. So they do the dumb stuff, and Apple holds onto a pile of cash the size of a mountain even though they're not actually doing anything productive with it.

You also have all kinds of problems with time frames. There are many things you can do to a company that will increase quarterly profits, like raising prices on customers that require a long lead time to switch to a competitor. Things like that may increase profits for years as the locked-in customers pay the price for as long as it takes them to transition to another vendor. But then the business starts to implode as the customers gradually all leave, and the same long lead time that kept them from quickly switching away (plus the damage you've done to your reputation) keeps them from quickly switching back. You can see this in, for example, Oracle's share of the database market slowly descending down a cliff.

And in general there are just information problems. Shareholders make decisions based on public information, but there is so much more involved in a company's operations than is described in those statements that it's easy for bad managers to waste or steal resources or otherwise make short-sighted decisions without ever getting held to account, and many incentives for them to do so, particularly when their current bonuses are tied to current-term numbers and not long-term numbers.

> At this point it's easy to keep it up.

Define "easy"; they lost $1.8 billion last year. My investors made more money and my company doesn't exist.

I think from a tax and accounting perspective, “hire” is probably the appropriate term.

Whatever the proper word is, Lyft and Uber (and the others) are affirmative action for bad drivers.