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Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

Maybe I don't remember it well enough but Amazon's business model seemed a lot more ... tangible than Uber's don't you think?

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You don't think selling taxi rides is a tangible business model?

The traditional system did, I don't see Uber doing it.

At a loss without any notion of how to make it profitable in the near future? No, I don't.

I see no evidence that they lack a notion of how to make it profitable. Are they doing it in the near future? No, but why do they need to? There are clearly plenty of people happy to fund for the long-term payout.

From what I saw in the S-1, their core platform -- which I assume is ride hailing -- was profitable until Q4 2018. They offer heavy incentives in order to compete, but once they're sufficiently established in a market, looks like they can become profitable on that front by no longer offering promotions in order to fight Lyft/whoever.

They just need to stay solvent longer than the competitors, and being in more markets than the competition should help with that.

Their R&D is also massive, but they could stop most of that if they needed to.

As a heavy early Amazon and Uber user, I'd say not really. Both are pretty revolutionary and I certainly have been paying Uber a lot more than I was paying Amazon when they just sold books.

I get how Amazon can be seen as revolutionary, but not how Uber (or even Lyft) is. I mean, when I think of catching a taxi back in the day, the only difference is that I made a phonecall instead of using an app to get the service. If it's the "gig economy-ness" of it, we had hacks in my hometown. Maybe there was a license requirement to be a hack, but it always felt like hacks were just regular schmoes who would charge a flat fee to take you somewhere.

I've had very extensive and very negative taxi experiences around the world. Uber is night and day from a UX perspective. Being able to see where the car is when it's on the way, pre-inputting your destination, paying through the app... The gig economy aspect was definitely revolutionary as well. It's essentially changing the nature of work (love it or hate it).

As much as I love Amazon and always have, in the early days it was "just" ordering books online. Yes, that was great and again the UX was great but it didn't seem as revolutionary as Uber.

I don't see how the UX thing is so revolutionary. I live in a city with 120k people, and the app of the local taxi company here does all of those things as well.

That's not been my experience and definitely not before Uber existed and forced people to start copying them.

That's some exemplary public service by Uber, actually. They may actually deserve their status as a non-profit.

But did they do that before Uber?

Not OP, but if they weren't doing it before, and just copied Uber, doesn't that show how weak their moat is? The same could happen with autonomous vehicles as well then.

The topic is revolutionary UX not moats.

Ok, if the UX is revolutionary, then what prevents others from copying it? It still seems like the moat for the UX isn't that great.

Yes you might be paying Uber more, I pay them about $300-$400 a month between our occasional use and my teenage son getting around (still cheaper than a car + insurance), but they lose money on each ride. Amazon has high fixed costs while they were building infrastructure. Uber has negative marginal profits.

Edit: negative marginal costs -> negative marginal profits.

Marginal profit, rather. Negative marginal costs would be pretty sweet.

I can't get a clear reading from Uber's most recent financials filing in Feb to determine that they have negative marginal profit. It looks the opposite to me. Given their substantial gross profits, I have to think that they last ride they sell is profitable.

What gross profits?

For FY2018, Uber reported $5.6 billion in gross profits and gross profit margins around 50%.

https://craft.co/uber/metrics

So they made money as long as you ignore stuff like operating expenses..

That’s the definition of gross profit. Within operating expenses, advertising is close to a cost of profits in a way that R&D isn’t.

It’s why we use multiple metrics to evaluate a business, but it’s clear that Uber has large positive gross margins.

When it comes down to it. The only thing that makes a company viable is whether they are making more money than they are spending.

Ignoring all other expenses and saying that a company is a good business is ignoring reality.

I’m not just choosing a method that makes Uber look bad. They are not profitable or successful based on a legal GAAP definition of profitable.

If we just cherry pick numbers, we might as well think that WeWork’s made up metric of “community adjusted EBITDA” is valid.

https://news.crunchbase.com/news/wework-details-run-rate-rev...

Selling a $20 bill for $18 is unsustainable. Selling a $20 bill for $40 and having $15 of advertising expenses and $15 of R&D expense might be sustainable. I think Uber is comically overvalued here, but still is a viable business which is profitable in its core operation.

In the 1997, Amazon's proposition of "Online retailer" was also pretty far fetched. It wasn't obvious that their model was going to make them one of the largest retailers in the world.

I duno, buying stuff online seemed like the way of the future at the time IMO. When, how much and etc was just a matter of timing.

So is gig economy. Jobs will continue to decline.

TechCrunch did a good job looking back at Amazon's IPO and it's a good read to clarify what Amazon was when it went public (a bookseller, not general retail), how insane its growth was (revenue up about 3,000% YoY from 1996 to 1997, more revenue in the quarter before its IPO than the entire previous year), and how fast the IPO came together (12 days to S-1). Even for all that growth, revenue was still around $15M. It was a minnow but it played all of its cards about as right as it could for an IPO.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/28/a-look-back-at-amazons-199...

The idea of "people won't buy things they can't judge by holding it in their hands" was still strong back then. That's why Amazon was successful selling books where quality was trusted implicitly without that physical judgment being necessary.

Doesn't ride sharing seem like the way of the future in your opinion?

Not necessarily.

Who's doing ride sharing? Certainly not Uber

> Uber Technologies Inc. is a transportation network company (TNC) offering services that include peer-to-peer ridesharing, ride service hailing, food delivery, and a bicycle-sharing system.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uber

Online retailers wasn't far-fetched at all. It wasn't obvious they were going to become the everything store and dominate the market, but it wasn't like people were perplexed by a business plan of selling books online and sending them to consumers.

If people are perplexed by uber today it's because the unit economics look horrible, and it doesn't seem like they will improve without a major technological advance.

Edit: TBF, I was curious so I checked out AMZN's first year of trading: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AMZN/history?period1=8528832...

They dropped 20% on day one. I don't think that reflects investor skepticism re: shopping online, but skepticism re: the myriad risks they faced as one of many money losing online retailers.

Even with a major technical advance it's not obvious that they'll have a moat to defend their margins. All of the ride sharing platforms might just end up competing to the death on price without anything else to differentiate on, and in that future I'd imagine the person with the cheapest supply chain will win, and I don't see why that would be Uber.

It wasn't farfetched, everyone had the same idea, there were dozens of online retailers that IPO'd in those years. Amazon was just better managed so it was one of the few that survived the dotcom crash.

They also started with selling media, which is the perfect industry to get people comfortable with shopping online as quality is nearly assured.

Right. At the time, I thought Sears would dominate that business. They had the big-catalog fulfillment thing down, and had for a century. All they needed to do was take it online. But Sears gave up on general mail order in 1993, when they discontinued their huge print catalog. They thought WalMart and the malls had won.

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