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Comment by malvosenior | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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