Uber’s Operating and Marketing Chiefs Step Down in Leadership Shakeup
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
It looks like Hartford walks out the door with at least $10M (based on IPO price) in immediate stock vesting due to his termination.
Under Potential Payments Upon Termination or Change in Control.
I have personally noticed that overall average cost of Uber/Lyft for me has gone up over the last year or so unless there's a promo going on. It's now to the point where I think twice before hailing a ride instead of driving myself or looking for another option.
I took a taxi last month for the first time in something like 6 years because uber was 15 minutes away and surging. The taxi was already there and cleaner than almost any uber ive ever taken - and cheaper than the surge.
Essentially, unless I’m traveling in rush hour, I’m always better off taking a metered cab, and it’s usually faster to boot.
Which is the same damn taxi dispatch problem that Uber was originally created to solve, so I guess now they can't use "we're different because internet!" to argue against regulations anymore.
1. https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/05/hubert-horan-will-th...
Only an industry that is doing almost everything wrong could have suffered the fate of the taxi industry.
Seattle was the worst. Cabs were super late and never knew the city and gouged you. Took a cab 12 miles at 3am in Seattle once and it was 97$ another time (like 2012) the guy couldn't find the place 3 times and was 2 hours late. Finally showed up when I talked him there and fucker had a gps but claimed he didn't need it.
Uber and lift show up on time have good dispatch and reasonable fares.
However in Portland I always used radio can cause it was clean and had good dispatch and fair prices.
I use cabs in SF all the time from the airport cause company pays and I don't have to deal with the cf that is getting a rideshare there. Just walk out and pay $50 to downtown. It's $15-20 over rideshare but no wait. And yay moral hazard.
Anyway I love flywheel and radio can (I think related companies) cause they do it as well as Lyft and have fair prices. Cabs shouldn't be like healthcare for pricing.
If you have different numbers, I'd love to hear them.
I think you're both kind of right. Reuters writes:
>In 2015, Uber passengers were paying only 41 percent of the actual cost of their trips, according to an analysis by transportation industry consultant Hubert Horan, based on financial statements from Uber. [0]
Of course that's four years ago. What about 2018 numbers? An interesting article makes some allegations about Uber deliberately inflating their profits [1] and making it difficult to tease apart the details:
>When Uber abandoned its failed Chinese, Russian and Southeast Asian operations, the dominant local companies gave Uber equity and debt instruments to partially compensate it for providing them an easier path to market dominance. These non-tradeable instruments only exist because of Uber’s decision to discontinue operations, but Uber includes their $5 billion value in “Net Income From Continuing Operations”
>The current accounting value of these assets is based entirely on Uber’s judgement as to what paper issued by companies currently losing massive amounts of money might be worth someday. [5] If one takes Uber’s judgements at face value, one could conclude that Uber’s only profitable activity is getting paid off for discontinuing staggering unprofitable markets.
..as well as..
>Lyft’s IPO prospectus presented ridesharing unit revenue data but Uber did not. Uber only presented the sum of car service and food delivery trips, so prospectus readers couldn’t figure out what customers were paying for the two services separately, or how prices for the two services have changed. The combined data suggest that both growth rates and pricing was declining in the second half of 2018, but prospectus readers have no way to identify the underlying problems, or whether those problem are likely to get worse.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-profitability/true-p...
[1] https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/04/hubert-horan-can-ube...
You sound sure. Where did you get this number?
When it became clear Uber’s self driving cars weren’t happening, and Travis personally had greatly compromised the possibility of it working out, Travis was forced to leave.
IOW, Travis’s leaving was driven by the increased scrutiny when it became clear Uber needed to IPO, and needing to IPO meant Uber couldn’t continue losing money like they did which led to them having to make changes which meant customers weren’t as happy with them anymore.
I doubt very much that Travis was making the UI good.