Uber's Losses Reach Double Digits in IPO Debut | Hacker News Reader

Uber's Losses Reach Double Digits in IPO Debut

finance.yahoo.com

110 pointsAndrewBissell162 comments

I don't know why this is portrayed as a negative -- this is the whole point of an IPO. If the price goes up significantly, it means that the company lost out on capital that it could have raised. If the price goes down, then it means that it extracted more capital from early participants than the market at large thought was justified. It's far preferable, for the company, to be in the second bin than in the first.

If they need to raise more capital in the future, then the higher the stock price is the less dilution is needed for the same amount of money, so eventually they want the stock price to recover, but for now they're sitting pretty on top of a pile of cash that they got despite what the market seemed to indicate.

If you are looking to liquidate the company, then yes, the goal is to get cash when you can. But if you are looking to create a growth story to attract employees, partners, future investment, you may want people to think there is an upside to the stock.

> If you are looking to liquidate the company, then yes, the goal is to get cash when you can.

Not liquidate the company, raise money to fund user growth or tech development.

> But if you are looking to create a growth story to attract employees, partners, future investment, you may want people to think there is an upside to the stock.

In that case what matters is what happens over the next year, not what happens over the next week. If they fell to $20 this week and then stayed there for a month before gradually starting to go back up, all the better for future employees and investors who get to buy in at the lower price.

While you're right that long-term matters more, you have to think about the short term implications:

- People who joined late-stage, and that may have taken a lower salary for the upside once they IPO'd.

- Recruiting new people could be come a lot more difficult if the perception is that the stock is worth a lot less.

On top of that, after patiently waiting for years that an IPO is going to be when the fruits of their labor are reaped, but no actually it could be much later than that is not likely to help retention.

Yeah, there's also general morale among the rank and file.

Everyone's locked up for six months (except a few directors who are selling into the greenshoe). You can tell people to not even look at or think about the price for six months but human nature is what it is. Everyone's going to look at the IPO price and mentally anchor that as the minimum that they'll be able to cash out their options for. Most people will mentally come up with a range of IPO price as the min and some much larger price as the max.

To have the price immediately start dropping like this is not great for employee morale.

But isn't it likely that their strike price is much, much lower than the current price? If so, it's probably not that bad if the stock is down even 20% when they are able to sell. Obviously it's better if the stock price is higher, but it's not like they're going to be selling at a loss.

Eh... Uber gave me a job offer in October 2019 claiming an internal valuation of $120B. I found it to be completely unjustified and passed on the job, but I'm certain many others bought it hook, line, and sinker.

There were some really incredulous claims around the TAM of Uber Eats (and other efforts) that were proven outrageous in the S-1 filing.

I don't think they can just do that with ISOs? Pretty sure the valuation has to be audited iirc

The 409A valuation was $70B or whatever, but they were selling the equity as though it was already worth 70% more than the paper value. (Hence the distinction between their "internal valuation" and the 409A). It was super sketchy. Basically trying to argue that the offer they were giving me was already worth a ton more than it was.

I think (hope) you mean October 2018, and aren't time traveling.

Nope. It was October 2019! The paper valuation was whatever their last raise was (~$70B or whatever), but they were sandbagging on the equity and framing it as being worth far more than it was on paper.

(October 2019 hasn't happened yet)

Ha! I read that three times and it didn't click. October 2018 is correct. Thank you for the clarification.

Probably not for anyone who joined around 2016 or later:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19880249

The execs can't, like, force the underwriters to exercise the greenshoe, so they'll be stuck holding the bag until the price rises above the IPO price, in that regard.

If you are only looking create value __only__ for early investors, then extracting all there is at IPO makes sense. But if you are looking to create value for employees who have given their blood, sweat and tears, it would be helpful to leave some money on the table to generate more demand and signal market confidence.

In the case of $UBER, from reading the axios piece, they seems to have extracted all there is from private market and the demand from public market appears to be even lesser.

Keep in mind that employees whose RSUs settled on IPO day are taxed at the IPO price, not the price when the lockup period ends.

Is that really true? Hard to believe since they are facing potentially millions in taxes!

It is true and I also find it amazing that the company seemingly did nothing other than withholding 22% (below1M$). It seems like the switch to RSUs did not take into account the downside risk.

> ... did not take into account the downside risk.

Web 2.0 companies in a nutshell

It's correct. In the case of Uber, the company withheld shares according to the supplemental wage withholding rules (22%) at the federal level. Employees would still be liable for the extra 10-15% of the IPO price if taxed in the highest tax bracket.

> withheld shares according to the supplemental wage withholding rules (22%) at the federal level

Is the difference refunded through tax returns?

Yes, though most Uber employees (and tech company employees in the SF Bay Area in general) are going to be above the 22% bracket, and thus will owe more tax instead of being owed a refund. This is especially likely if the employee is mostly vested and thus settling a large block of RSUs all at once.

What % of employees with stocks would that apply to, in your estimation?

Since the lockup expires in the same tax year, can't they just sell after the lockup, take the loss, and then use the loss as a write off against the RSU gain so they only pay taxes on the actual realized gain?

The initial RSU settlement is taxed as ordinary income. If they sell below the IPO price in future (e.g. to cover their remaining taxes) they'll indeed realize a capital loss but it can only be carried forward against future capital gains from e.g. longer-term holding of UBER or another stock, or using the $3000/year deduction for ordinary income.

Price goes up: This is good for Uber. Price goes down: This is good for Uber. Price goes sideways: This is good for Uber.

I consider the Uber IPO to be a 'bookend' on what has been a dozen years of insanity in Silicon Valley. It started off so promising with the sale of YouTube to Google in '06, but it started to feel increasingly 'off' in the early '10s with Groupon and Zynga. Color app was the first canary from my perspective.

Again, this is just one guy's opinion but it has been a hell of a spectacle. May we all find chairs when the music stops...

Color! What a wonderful story of failure. Thanks for the reminder.

Remember when it raised $50 million and people thought that was a lot of money?

Lots of people have commented on this impacting retention of current employees negatively, and that this will make it hard to invite new employees to Uber.

Aren't both assertions off base?

If I'm a current employee, I'm underwater. And my tax implications are scary. So, am I not motivated to stay and let things recover, rather than walking away when I vest after six months? Like golden handcuffs, but made out of feces or something?

Given the alternative, for Uber management, isn't this moment of the stock going down a good thing generally for retaining the big fish at Uber?

And, for new people, isn't the calculus for the recruiter pretty easy: hey, jump in now, the stock is really low, get in while you can?

Long term this has big implications for Uber if they need to raise a few more billions, but that's a big problem no matter what, right?

> If I'm a current employee, I'm underwater. And my tax implications are scary. So, am I not motivated to stay and let things recover, rather than walking away when I vest after six months?

You have to weigh that against the realistic chance that the stock will never recover. That happened to SNAP and it could happen to Uber too. How long are you willing to wait?

You may be doubling down on a sunk cost, and missing out on the opportunity to get a job at another company with more valuable RSUs.

Good point. But if you go anywhere else, you are waiting 18 months for those RSUs. If I stay at Uber for a year and see how things go, isn't that a decision more people will need to make now, rather than doing the math on "I'll leave in six months with new job offer in hand..."

In other words, didn't Uber extend the life of lots of people there by a six months or so beyond the six months they need to wait to sell after the IPO? That's a long time in the tech world.

I think a lot of people will stick around for 6 months, and even longer, and that’s perfectly fine if they want to be there, but it’s not fine if they are staying because they feel trapped by their RSUs and taxes.

I’m not saying you should leave. I’m just saying that you should not feel trapped into staying by your RSUs.

For said big fish, they can say to the new company "hey, I have this much value locked up, which I'd lose by moving to your company, you'll at least need it match it, for your offer to be competitive."

Isn't that something easier to do when the company is private? Now that it is public, recruiters will know more or less what the stock has to hit before you can safely take that out. The employee is at a disadvantage now, to Uber management benefit. No?

"My Uber stock is currently worth -$3.2 million." Is probably a value that many competitors can meet. :)

My point exactly: the competitor can say "Let's give you a $0 signing bonus, it's a $3.2M bump over the value of your Uber stock!"

What is Uber's competitive advantage anyway? Subsidizing rides with Saudi money? The mobile app is pretty simple and competitors are popping up wherever you look. There is almost no cost to switch for the end user and all the taxi companies will end up competing on price. I don't get it.

It's true. There is not any technical bars of ride-sharing app.

Its going to get worse too before it gets better - you know the underwriter was in there manipulating the market the last couple of days trying to prop the stock. When that's gone, look out.

The same could be said for the Facebook IPO (propped up, etc), but Facebook recovered after they demonstrated success in mobile advertising.

Not really offering a counterpoint here so much as I'm saying this has played out in the past with an ending quite a ways different from what's being foreshadowed here.

Uber could possibly find an opportunity like that by expanding their delivery options beyond restaurants.

Like bike-messengers, but with vespas and 4-doors? Isn't that a super crowded and niche market anyways?

Last mile logistics is a huge market (FedEx, UPS). On-demand last mile logistics as opposed to once/twice a day delivery is likely a lot smaller.

Only because it's so expensive. There's probably a lot of demand to pay $5 to skip a trip to the store or get food delivered. If Uber gets it to the point where a driver's trip encompasses retail goods, restaurant food, and a passenger at the same time the business looks pretty good. Tough to get there of course.

Maybe larger scale, like competing with Instacart. Maybe partnering with Best Buy or phone carriers to enable fairly low-cost same day delivery for electronics, etc.

The market as a whole has done really bad during the period Uber has been trading, which is unsurprising as someone is introducing uncertainty in the form of a trade war.

The steep decline (vs. the market at large) so far today seems like a reflection of an investor flight to security (and away from risk) during a highly volatile situation the stock market.

Curiously, another recently IPO'd company, Beyond Meat, is currently up 3.75% on the same day that ride-share companies are down 7-11%, and the market at large is down 3-5%. That suggests that investors at least, have some pretty high confidence in alt-meat companies.

Honestly everyone needs to chill out. The markets on Friday and today are extremely negative and volatile in general. This was a very tough week to IPO. Market negativity or positivity is amplified with freshly listed stocks. We won't really know what the market thinks of Uber for a few months at least.

Will a perception that IPOs are now quite risky cause VCs to push for earlier or later IPOs?

I can't figure out if it's in their interests to keep funding these companies privately for a longer period, or bite the bullet and push for an IPO sooner.

Investors want to IPO when they think the time is right to get a high ROI, as soon as possible that might be.

They likely want to IPO ASAP in response to expectations of a looming recession.

Good job Uber for maximising capital raised for development of the company.

Unfrotunately for them (this is not sarcastic) they have built a machine that hasn't had a focus on profit. It's hards to change that after years.

That's what every round of VC incentivizes: Here, take our money and spend it in 12-18 months, so you'll need to raise more money from next-round investors and we can mark-up the value of our stock to show to our LPs, so we can raise our next fund and collect more management fees....

So they raised something like 8 billion (I forget the exact number)? So they have that cash.

Are there any immediate impacts for a company regarding a price drop after an IPO?

Once they burn the $8B and have to return to the markets for more capital, the terms start to look much worse. It's also pretty bad for employee morale if the only people who get a decent exit from their shares are the VCs & founders.

Might you or anyone else know how big their float was on the IPO? Wouldn't the market punish the stock if they went back to the markets for a secondary offering too soon? For that matter what would even would be considered too soon? If they were to sustain their current loss rate wouldn't they have to return to the market sooner than later? Or are there some other instruments available to them that would be preferable to a secondary offering so soon after the IPO?

> Are there any immediate impacts for a company regarding a price drop after an IPO?

From what I understand, nothing _direct_, but there are a bunch of indirect issues it raises:

- Ability to raise later capital

- Happiness of current investors (who may have board seats)

- Happiness of employees who have stock grants/etc, and may not be making much, if anything...

- Retaining talent and hiring new talent

Finally, I'm not sure, but I wouldn't be surprised if very significant drops can open a company up to increased auditing or attention from the SEC. I don't know what form this would take, and I could be wrong, but if there is something along these lines that could take up company resources or cost money in fines if they are found to have mis-sold some aspect of the company to investors.

One impact: no articles complaining after a “pop” how much money they left on the table.

How long before they get acquired by Amazon? Also what are the chances of that deal getting blocked?

Getting all of these uber drivers to deliver packages, groceries and food for amazon customers makes too much sense.

EDIT: Looks like Amazon is already making moves in that direction with their own employees https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19901196

The drivers are not loyal, they are already on Lyft and whatever app offers them a better deal that day/week/month (depending on incentives they sign on to).

Yes, they're loyal to whoever pays more and has more work. Slapping Amazon deliveries on top of Uber pool would mean more work and better unit economics, which should ideally translate into more money for the drivers.

Surprisingly the background of drivers who do deliveries and food is very different from what is legally required to transport humans. What has been found is that there actually isn't much overlap in competing "supply" as those who are clean on background and DMV checks will always pick transporting people first because its more profitable.

Source?

The Uber drivers I've talked to set specific hours for when they're cruising around the city waiting for rides.

The Amazon delivery approach would require them to drive from the city, to a remote fulfilment center to pick up goods, and then drive back to the city to deliver them. Is there a different way this can be done?

Amazon has started to build fulfillment centers in cities to make this work. It's also why they bought whole foods and are now buying up old shopping malls (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k53IDbtP-58).

They could probably even use amazon lockers to optimize the process.

This seems to insinuate that there's some reason to be loyal to Uber.

How so?

FedEx is still cheaper in terms of market cap than Uber, if Amazon was going to make any major acquisition to deliver parcels it surely would not be Uber.

I doubt Amazon would want to deal with all of those employees. I'm not even sure that they'd want to handle deliveries for other businesses.

With Uber they have a 24/7 flexible contractor workforce and physical interaction with millions of potential customers.

Amazon could help them save a ton of money by moving their infrastructure onto AWS and reduce their marketing spend by promoting it on their properties.

Tying an uber subscription to Amazon prime could also help both businesses. I'm sure both Lyft and Uber are already working on some monthly membership model.

> I doubt Amazon would want to deal with all of those employees.

Amazon is the second largest private employer in the US, they seem to be fine with paychecks. I was just pointing out that buying Uber so you can deliver stuff is a phenomenally dumb idea, it would be cheaper to buy a company like FedEx that is valued by real assets and has proven capable at delivering stuff.

> With Uber they have a 24/7 flexible contractor workforce and physical interaction with millions of potential customers.

Amazon already does this and since Uber relies on contractors, they could sign up every driver in the country without paying a penny for Uber.

> Amazon could help them save a ton of money by moving their infrastructure onto AWS and reduce their marketing spend by promoting it on their properties.

Uber also already uses AWS. Getting paid for it seems better than spending billions to not get paid?

tl;dr I don't think Amazon buys either company, but there is no way in hell they buy Uber.

> Amazon is the second largest private employer in the US, they seem to be fine with paychecks.

I think the bigger issue is unionization. In Canada, many Fedex workers belong to a union. Pretty sure that is non-existed at Uber.

Yes, it looks like unionization is the reason why they ran away from Long Island City.

> Amazon is the second largest private employer in the US, they seem to be fine with paychecks.

Everything that I've seen from them in the past few years leads me to believe that they want to get rid of as many blue collar jobs as possible.

> I was just pointing out that buying Uber so you can deliver stuff is a phenomenally dumb idea

I'd agree with that but I'm arguing that combining ride sharing and delivery makes a lot more sense for both sides than being a courier.

If Uber and Lyft survive they'll have to do it on low margins and high volume. Nobody understands that game better than Bezos and Amazon.

Uber has built a great engineering team, including a ton of top notch machine learning / self driving researchers. They'd be a much bigger value add than anything they'd get from FedEx.

> Amazon already does this and since Uber relies on contractors, they could sign up every driver in the country without paying a penny for Uber.

You're describing postmates, which is too expensive for their average customer. By overlaying door to door delivery on top of something like uber pool you get the riders to eat a large portion of the cost.

Uber is already making progress in that direction with Uber Eats (https://www.forbes.com/sites/bizcarson/2019/02/06/ubers-secr...)

> Uber also already uses AWS. Getting paid for it seems better than spending billions to not get paid?

Oh I could have sworn I just saw someone mention that they migrated off of it recently.

> tl;dr I don't think Amazon buys either company, but there is no way in hell they buy Uber.

As long as both of them are around they will continue to bleed. They might start looking like a good acquisition target in a few quarters.

Way ahead of you:

https://www.uber.com/newsroom/ride-pass/

https://blog.lyft.com/posts/subscribe-and-save-with-the-all-...

What magic beans does Uber and/or Lyft possess where Amazon would need to buy the company instead of just rolling their own system?

They could probably crank up an Uber-style service quicker than anyone else, do it 100% internally, and be instantly integrated into Alexa and whatever else they have going on.

Then the service speeds on Uber's AWS instances start to slowly drop...

Uber has their own infrastructure and don't use AWS. Amazon has already tried an Eats replica in 'Restaurants' and delivery with Flex and both have been scaled down after not succeeding.

Why did they buy Whole Foods? They could have easily opened up a few hundred grocery stores too.

Uber has around 4 million registered drivers and millions of daily users and a huge team of engineers working on these problems. With Lyft and Uber in this space it makes no sense for amazon to try and compete with them.

Uber is trying to turn itself into a logistics business and Amazon is investing a ton into making 1 hour delivery work because perishable goods are a huge slice of commerce and a big growth opportunity for them.

The question was "when will Amazon buy Uber?" and my question in response is "does Amazon need to do that or can they do it themselves?"

Making a copy of Uber doesn't require Amazon to buy 4 million cars. They just need to launch a website and an app. Like another poster said above, Uber drivers aren't loyal to Uber and will swap to Lyft wherever and whenever. A third company doesn't cause any friction at all.

It wouldn't make sense for them to compete with Uber and Lyft while they're busy losing money on each ride. They could launch a delivery only platform and attempt to leverage existing ride sharing drivers but then they'd have to compete with Ubers of the world on price per mile.

They already have this, you can sign up today to deliver packages for Amazon.

https://flex.amazon.com

> Why did they buy Whole Foods? They could have easily opened up a few hundred grocery stores too.

Opening up a few hundred stores is an expensive, time consuming endeavor. In contrast, creating a ride sharing app and promoting it a bit seems like something that a large tech company could pull off much easier.

If it's so easy why did they spend billions on Zappos, Audible, Twitch, Goodreads, Pillpack and etc?

Existing customer base and data

I said "much easier", specifically in comparison to creating a profitable high-end national grocery chain.

Amazon bought Whole Foods because they will upend its cost structure with robots in the stockroom and better logistics.

Groceries, while being notoriously low margin, are the second largest retail business in the US (after gas stations). Launching a new grocery brand, especially one with Whole Paycheck's great brand reputation isn't cheap or easy. See Tesco's Fresh & Easy debacle for an example.

The public markets aren't particularly efficient, but they can be ruthless in sniffing out irrational enthusiasms.

if everything is a debacle then nothing is a debacle. what word are journalists going to use when there’s an actual debacle?

debacle-gate

Way OT, but that's one of my pet peeves: stop sticking "-gate" on the end of every scandal. Watergate was called "Watergate" because that's the name of the office complex that was broken into. Sticking "-gate" on the end of unrelated words very literally, and perhaps also because it's become such a tired cliche, makes you sound less credible and intelligent.

I’m not OP, but I’d still argue that was meant as a joke. OP was riffing on the media’s sudden overuse of debacle.

Now there’s your comment. You missed the point and chose to tell OP they seem less credible and intelligent? That’s not very kind and frankly, people remember kindness far longer than pithiness.

> You missed the point and chose to tell OP they seem less credible and intelligent?

Yes, it was a joke, and I think you missed the point. I was agreeing with the poster I responded to, not insulting them.

> Sticking "-gate" on the end of unrelated words very literally, and perhaps also because it's become such a tired cliche, makes you sound less credible and intelligent.

If that’s the case, this sentence is very poorly written.

Eh. There’s no such thing as “chocohol” or “workohol” but you know what chocaholic and workaholic mean.

In IPO terms, and given the huge amounts of money and valuations involved -- not to mention all the VCs nervously watching and wondering whether they'll get to pass their own cash-burning investments off to public investors -- this is unquestionably a debacle.

Top 10 debacles of 2019.

This one is certainly a debacle. Uber was the 1 unicorn left. There is no other darling startup that's gonna be scratching $100b anytime soon. This IPO failure ended the crazy run of cash since the '08 crisis.

It was also a debacle because anyone who is not an idiot sees that Uber is doomed. You think their little GPS app is actually an advantage with respect to self driving? There is no barrier for entry, none. They are as likely to lose as they are to win, if full automation is actually a viable technology in the next 10 years (it isn't).

I thought "unicorn" referred to anything >$1 billion. Slack IPO is rumored to come soon, their last valuation was >$7 billion.

I have heard that but it is my opinion that companies valued >= $1B are becoming a dime a dozen. I work at one climbing that ladder and we could be displaced in 6 months by a better implementation.

>what word are journalists going to use when there’s an actual debacle?

fiasco.

Based on past events, likely some pun or other spin on the word "recession" or "apocalypse". I've begun to think that if the media doesn't try to make up a new word or otherwise get you to laugh, it's not yet that big of a story.

>if everything is a debacle then nothing is a debacle.

Most things appear to be in a bit of a debacle right now. Also, to my understanding of debacles, if everything is in a debacle, then everything is still in a debacle, as a debacle is more of a state than a relative term.

Is there an objective sliding scale that journalists can refer to to avoid making this heinous error? Maybe one that goes like this:

- gaffe

- snafu

- debacle

- fiasco

- ?

clusterfuck

The problem is people joining Uber only for becoming rich quickly.

Has there been a big IPO that didn't fall? It seems like shorting these is the obvious thing to do, but I admit ignorance when it comes to investing.

Google's IPO rose from $85 to $100 on its open.

The vast majority of IPOs are successful and pop on opening.

Failing IPOs are the exception , not the norm. There were two very high profile failure lately (Uber and Lyft) so I understand why you are feeling so though

Uber stock will touch $25

About time a profitless company gets what it deserves. I've been concerned with endless VC funding for years.

From what I've seen, most current tech companies are not doing well going public. I remember a similar lukewarm response when Snapchat went public.

In fact, I probably would've advised them to stay private. Tech companies have seemed to survive indefinitely bleeding VC money.

My guess is the stock will probably recover after a couple months.

Why would it recover?

Most "profitless" tech companies do just fine on the public markets as long as they show consistent revenue growth. Take a look at multi year charts for HubSpot (HUBS) and Twilio (TWLO), for example.

The problem with Uber (and Lyft) is that their losses are also scaling with “growth”.

As an alternative take amazon: they made a loss for years and years, but the size of their losses were reducing every year as they grew. The demonstrates a path to profit.

Of course for all these companies who have lost value post-IPO have already got the cash they were after. Post-IPO changes to value don’t change that and only impacts people who purchased at the inflated price.

Yes, and the same is true of many of these public SaaS companies. Their losses are increasing proportionally to their revenue, mainly due to huge marketing spend.

Not really. When you take a look across the landscape of companies such as CRM, NOW, WDAY for enterprise SaaS, or even DBX for consumer-facing SaaS, their margins and free cash profiles tend to be around the mid-teens on Non-GAAP op. margin and 20-30% for annual free cash flow margin. Most institutional investors in growth software are looking for a blend of free cash generation and margin improvement, and out of those enterprise SaaS names all but Salesforce have been consistently delivering this.

That's not true RE: losses scaling with growth. Uber's losses last year narrowed while revenue still grew considerably. I think with the public market's emphasis on profitability, Lyft and Uber will both raise prices and cut incentive spend in sync, making them both more profitable over time.

No, that's not true. Uber's losses in 2018 were about the same as 2017, if you take out the income they raised from shutting down Russia and SE Asia and selling (merging?) those operations to Yandex/Grab.

This is quite clearly a one time event.

Go look at the p&l... top line revenue was up ~3 billion while costs were only up ~2 billion.

Really? My perspective is that I use Uber as a substitute good for owning a car. If the cost of uber > car, I'm gonna go and buy one. So they can raise prices, but likely there's quite a bit of price sensitivity, particularly from their high volume users.

Twilio took $255M in funding, not $17.5B. Entirely different set of expectations for a backend software company and a company that is trying to redefine transportation.

"Redefine transportation" is going a bit far. Maybe the public realizes Uber's basically a taxi company without any taxis...

>About time a profitless company gets what it deserves.

Yes, a 63 billion dollar market cap is sure showing them!

>Tech companies have seemed to survive indefinitely bleeding VC money.

That's somewhat of the issue here. The outcome for VCs at this price is still somewhere between massive return and breaking even. It's the public at large that bought into the IPO via retirement funds that is hurting the most.

I highly doubt in the few days Uber has been on the market the "public at large" has purchased any significant share of Uber using their pension accounts. It's not in an indices so they're certainly not exposed through that.

I said the public at large via retirement funds. Teachers get less because CalSTRS lost money* either via direct purchase or through asset managers.

* Just an example I don't know if they bought into the IPO or not.

Large index weighted funds don't buy into IPOs until significantly after the fact.

Really? For the CalSTRS example, they issued PR that they bought into the FB IPO, and had also bought into pre-IPO private companies.

eg:

> CalSTRS has owned shares in Facebook, Inc. since its initial public offering in 2012, as well as through privately held assets prior to the IPO.

https://www.calstrs.com/statement/calstrs-ongoing-engagement...

Something run by California was mismanaged you say? I'm terribly shocked

Market caps are horribly inflated/underinflated and not a accurate representation of the companies finances and viability due to it being based on total share price. Looking at their equity is. It's also important to view its profit vs. expense ratio because that tells you what the company is doing with its money.

> I've been concerned with endless VC funding for years.

Their goal is to build monopolies by out-funding every other entrant in the space.

Reid Hoffman calls it blitzscaling.

It doesn't work if you don't build a moat.

That tends to not work so well when the product is a commodity.

It worked for Amazon.

Amazon's warehouses and logistics network provides scale effects that create a moat.

Contemporaneously, this was not seen as an advantage. Notoriously, Webvan invested heavily in these two line items and didn't get any moat from them.

Amazon had a 5-10% pricing advantage for years over everybody else because nobody was paying sales tax on their purchased items.

Uber and Lyft do not have that kind of advantage.

It's funny you say that. I've been having discussions with people who are making the claim that Uber & Lyft have an unfair pricing advantage because VCs are subsidizing them, and because they have ignored local licensing rules.

Amazon is the single successor out of many, similar failed attempts - including many that were arguably "better".

Amazon innovated with better logistics, a smarter UI, and robots -- all hard and expensive problems to solve. Uber's "innovation" consists of a simple and easily replicated app.

That's all in place now. None of that was in place enough to be a profitable competitive advantage by 2004, 10 years after Amazon was founded. (Uber is 10 years old.)

The first 10 years of Amazon were blitzscaling at all costs (or as they said at the time "Get Big Fast!").

Who precisely is getting what they deserve? Can't the employees cash out their stocks? They may be worth less than projected, but they can still get a pay-off now?

I am not a tax person or a stock person, but what I have been told at the start-ups I have worked at, you have to wait 6 months after an IPO before you can sell or something along those lines. So, yes, the employees can sell their stock, but not right now. They didn't get the chance to sell at the potential high.

Before you continue... Yahoo is part of Oath. [...] Select 'OK' to continue and allow Oath and our partners to use your data, or select 'Manage options' to view your choices.

More Oath BS, where Manage Options leads you on a merry dance and does absolutely everything except allow you to manage any options.

I'd love to see Oath sites banned from here.

Yes. I am OK with accepting tracking cookies on other sites but I just close the tabs if they I see anything related to Oath as a matter of principle.

It would be nice if paywalled sites and sites with mandatory tracking were banned, yeah.

I always open these links in a private window, accept all the tracking, read the article and close the window.

Piggybacking on this (as I do it too) how robust is this method?

You've just given them permission to fingerprint you. If they're good at what they do then the private window trick had no effect.

Moderately. From a few years ago, I remember Yahoo was still able to triangulate pretty well on whichever device you were using, but had more difficulty across devices. Deduplication was a bit of an art at that point.

Can't they still track you by IP address? (assuming you have a unique address)

While it'd be nice to ban sites that exhibit negative behavior, Oath sites represent some of the largest news properties in the world. Yahoo News is the #1 news site in the US, HuffPo is also in the top 10. Together, they have more traffic than the next 3 or 4 largest providers combined.

Further, several of their properties are specifically relevant to the HN community, including TechCrunch and Engadget. Not saying these are the highest quality sites out there, but they are the original source of reporting for many things discussed on HN. In fact, I see 3 different TC articles in the first 2 pages just right now.

One of the reasons I love my catchall email is catchall + password manager* throws a wrench in a lot of tracking. Even if you don't use Oauth, a commmon technique is to hash the email and compare the hashes. You can strip out periods or plus signs (ex: dontbenebby+hn@mydomain.com) but it's hard to track a person who gives a unique username, email, and password to every site.

(Though I guess they could intuit I'm the only one who uses my custom domain, but that'd be hard to do at scale)

*use PW manager because each site needs a unique PW

> Uber Technologies Inc. shares extended the free-fall on Monday

Everything was in free fall on Monday. Nothing noteworthy about Uber going down too.

Found the Uber employee.

Personal attacks aren't ok here. Would you mind reviewing the site guidelines and following them when posting to HN?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Uber fell about 10-11% and the broader market measured by, say, VTI, fell about 2.5%. Big difference.

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