Is the Ride over for Uber?
smartcompany.com.au
smartcompany.com.au
It feels like the right call, around 2017, was to either:
(A) double down and build a platform for every kind of physical multisided marketplace (matching as a service, maps+routing+locations+geofences as a service, physical product ops as a service, etc) Where Amazon went from books->everything->AWS, Uber could have gone rides->platform-for-all-the-multi-sided-marketplaces.
OR (B) fire every engineer except the 15 or so it takes to maintain the rider and driver apps and a few services, with no new features, port everything over to common cloud companies instead of their DC (shoutout to DCA, the ugly stepbrother of SJC), and just pivot to value extraction and just maintaining it as the simple taxi app it should be.
Instead, they did neither, muddling around building random tech as if they had ads/search/social media margins while losing sight of the customers needs. There's a reason DD crushed them in food.
Edit: Since the primary response seems to be "You don't understand!" I was there 5 year, saw how the sausage was way over-made.
As a customer, I would get the wrong food about half the time in NYC even pre-pandemic. I complained and got a refund the first couple of times but then they stopped refunding me when it kept happening. Clearly thought I was fraudulently trying to get meals for free. Thing is, I’ve been a customer since the black car only days. Been Uber VIP for my high rating as a customer. Problem wasn’t with me. If they can’t get quality control done with their restaurants then they don’t deserve my money. I’d rather go direct. I’ve never had a problem go unresolved going direct. In fact, I’ll often use Uber to find a restaurant near me and then call them direct to order to avoid their lousy customer service.
Why should it be the customer's problem to figure out the implementation detail (delivery for new places, not in-house)?
I know because I once drove delivery for a few apps for about 6 months. The vast majority of restaurants treat delivery apps as easy side cash and don't take it very seriously. Depending on the restaurant, since the employees don't see you as a real customer, they'll rush things and miss items. They almost never report orders as being ready through the app, which would make it easier for drivers to schedule their drives and get in and out faster. The result is drivers show up and end up waiting because even after 30 minutes the food still isn't ready when they arrive. The tablet the restaurant is using could be completely off or dead but they won't bother signing on to the GrubHub/Doordash website to stop taking orders. Most of the time, restaurant staff doesn't give a fuck, which is stupid because restaurant staff also tends to hate delivery drivers. Why the hell would you not get the manager to sign in to the website and prevent drivers from coming in and wasting your time?
On the other side of the coin, these delivery apps also don't give a fuck. I was way above average in terms of the effort I put in as a delivery driver, but no matter what you're gonna get customers blaming you for things you couldn't have prevented. A bunch of times the customer opened the bag at the door (this was before the pandemic), find an item missing, then scowl at me while telling me they're gonna complain to the app. Not once did I ever get reprimanded by an app or receive fewer orders. I kept in touch with a bunch of other delivery drivers, many of which were far lazier than I was and admitted to screwing things up, and none of them every got so much as an email for forgetting drinks too many times or being way too late. The only way you can really get fired from these apps, absent doing something illegal, is if the area the driver is in just doesn't have enough people ordering food to make it worth paying the driver.
Oh yeah, I did a little driving for Uber Eats, btw. Most delivery drivers I knew at the time looked at Uber Eats as the "slut" of delivery apps. It paid the worst, the customers were cheapskates, but you also got lots of McDonalds and KFC orders through it, so it was only really good for if you could fit one of those orders in on the way to another delivery. I stopped doing it pretty early on because Uber Eats effectively had no meaningful driver support. At least GrubHub could be reached, even if it wasn't always helpful. Good luck reaching Uber as a driver in 2018. IMO, Uber had no business competing in the food delivery space.
I think people overlooked all these issues because we've been in the honeymoon phase of the post-2008 economy with all these "innovative" mobile apps doing amazing things, so we largely overlooked both the bad customer service and ridiculous pricing. Gradually, the rest of the economy will adapt to not rely so much on the likes of Uber unless something changes. And I would say the same thing about a lot of other aspects of the food economy as a whole. Much of it is of underwhelming quality and the customer service tends to suck, and now it's more expensive than it's worth. If you're gonna eat a bunch of carbs and glorified dog meat with some fake cheez product, you might as well do it at home for a third of the price, if not less than that.
My conclusion is that these services are based on the idea that the customer will "eat" (pun intended) a certain amount of wrong or missing orders. Completely illegal and in breach of card network regulations (I won a chargeback against Uber for the same reason) but the law doesn't apply to big companies.
Unicorn tech companies generally don't realize this, which is why they all redesign their apps over and over and add poorly-thought-out features all the time. They're still paying for a build-an-entire-iPhone-app-from-scratch-sized team, and all those engineers are desperately looking for stuff to do!
You still need a non-zero number of people who know how the iOS app works, but the number you need is smaller.
However, The moment that you discover that your AWS bill exceeds your engineering budget, you will have a different view of maintenance. People will now start calling it resilience, scale, optimization, etc. And then one day, the db will need to be partitioned (almost always, if the product is successful) and then the people who created the mess [almost always using a nosql database as it was available ]will run for the exits. You (or the poor unthanked ‘maintenance’ engineer ) will start learning about why distributed systems are hard to maintain.
Most line engineers often realize it too pretty quickly, which is why we end up with so many new frameworks every time there is a huge boom cycle.
1. With more customers, you find your code is much buggier than you thought. Most code has a long-tail of weirds bugs that may be a non-issue at current scale but absolutely crippling by just increasing the number of users by 1-2 orders of magnitude.
2. As you increase the number of business functions within the company, cohesion breaks down. People start losing more and more context and you start needing full time jobs just to keep everyone pushing in the same direction without stepping on each others toes. I don't know you in particular, but most engineers seem oblivious to how many business functions a company trying to operate internationally often needs.
3. As engineers, there's often a wall between us and huge amount of effort that goes into sales, marketing, and customer service (even if the last is only provided to enterprises). One way to keep headcount down is keep this to a minimum, but you're usually leaving most of your profits on the table.
My previous role in the big company was actually post-sales customer support so I'm actually pretty familiar with those functions and somewhat aware of all the coordination and power politics that come with increasing numbers of people - there's a reason I'm trying something pretty different these days. And so far, I have to say I'm happier with the surroundings.
> If we increased our users by an order of magnitude or two, I doubt we'd need to increase headcount by anything near that much
Two orders of magnitude would land you with a few hundred thousand users.
Uber has ~93 million users in 80 countries.
Just supporting payments in all those countries is a full-time job for a dedicated team.
Uber's 93 million in 80 countries means that (very roughly) in each country they have three orders of magnitude more users than you: 93 mln/80 countries = 1+ mln in each country = 1000 times more than you = 3 orders of magnitude.
As I said, just dealing with payments in each country is often a full-time job for a dedicated tema even if you process payments through a third party like Adyen.
Are Uber operating at 100% efficiency? Hell no. Will you have several orders of magnitudes fewer people than Uber when you grow to Uber's size? I very highly doubt it.
Of course, there are exceptions like WhatsApp, but WhatsApp in itself is a very simple product (that is very hard to scale), and was (and still is) very slow in rolling out features.
What makes it particularly hard to scale?
Netflix has over 1000 engineers, maybe close to 1500? Uber has ~3,000.
If we assume these companies are handling similar amount of work, Netflix has only managed to do 2-3x better in terms of headcount to work ratio. (talking to friends at these companies, I think this paints a rosier picture of Netflix than is reasonable).
As another commenter pointed out, there's also a real step change when you go global. The requirements in terms of governmental compliance and engineering effort to outcompete local software shoots up headcount significantly. With a global audience you generally need to be providing an excellent experience in more ways as local values and tastes can vary more significantly than you expect.
One guy/girl was doing stuff, might be quite a bit, so it's decided it is really needing 2.something people, so they send two more, because you can't have part of a person.
Then they need a manager, and a doc controller and maybe an admin. Then the service people need a manager, and you need a manager of the managers, and they needs an assistant and who knows who else, maybe a HR and next thing know what one person was doing is all of a sudden a ten person team.
And instead of going to just talk to someone in another team, it's no "my manager will confirm with your manager" etc etc
I worked in one place where to send a document to the guy in the next office from me for official review had to go through a document control office in a another country. That was not unusual, apart from being unusually frustrating and time wasting.
At big organizations, it’s often 90% or more of all work the entire organization is doing (depending on how you calculate kt).
And many of the largest ones use the same app. Because they aren’t in that business, they are in the taxi business. If there is a margin to be found in scheduling or pricing, then their app supplier should provide it.
This is perhaps what Uber should be doing: making the white label apps for local companies doing ride services.
Not sure how many taxi markets are that unregulated that they allow it.
Even within this vertical it seems you’d need a lot more than 15 engineers.
I would know.
The app says there are rides within 10 minutes, shows me a cheap rate and I hit yes. In 10 minutes no matches have been found. In 10 more minutes it finds someone 20 minutes away. 15 minutes later the driver cancels and I’m back to square one.
Now the thing is the cost of the ride is a pittance and I would gladly pay double the cost just to get to my destination in a reasonable timeframe. Instead I just call a cab now, request a pickup at a certain hour and they send a driver.
FWIW I’m 20 minutes drive from downtown Montreal, so this is not like I’m out in the sticks or anything, and couple years ago it was much easier to find a ride. Unfortunately I don’t think it’s even another ride sharing company taking the drivers, it’s just a lot of drivers pivoted to doing Uber eats instead.
Uber's app was still hands down the best to use, and I had so many issues with the others, like credit card registration being flakky, or the app straight crashing on specific screens. It looked a lot like they paid a dev company a lump sum to make the app and would proceed to pay for some more fixes every six months instead of keeping an ongoing maintenance contract.
I kinda wish that now that the legal frameworks and service viability has been explored, Uber dies completely, and the gap is filled with local startups working closely with the local market to maintain ride services from there.
Uber is nothing more than a rent-seeking middle man and no one cares about how complicated their rent-seeking activities are behind the curtain.
Why can my ISP string up fiber optic all over my city and put routers and switches or whatever in boxes that can survive all kinds of inclement weather and end up charging me $100 a month for gigabit internet? Isn't that a much harder business than Uber?
The term rent-seeking gets thrown around a lot more lately, mostly from the web3 crowd. Most times its not used right.
It's only rent seeking if the middleman isn't providing any value. Otherwise they're just getting paid for providing a service that people value....
Think about what you're saying. You don't "care how complex it is". Well that complexity determines whether or not it is rent seeking. You say ideally a transaction between two individuals. The major problem being solved here is finding the two best matched individuals based on their current location and destination over time. You need some system to aid this discovery no matter what.
Here's the definition of rent-seeking:
Rent-seeking is the effort to increase one's share of existing wealth without creating new wealth. Rent-seeking results in reduced economic efficiency through misallocation of resources, reduced wealth creation, lost government revenue, heightened income inequality, and potential national decline
Uber and Lyft generate 70 percent more pollution than trips they displace[0]
>reduced wealth creation
Uber and Lyft are pushing drivers into poverty[1]
> lost government revenue
How Uber dodges paying tax in Canada[2]
I don't care about the complexity of the the black box algorithm that Uber implements because I know what purpose it serves. The whole purpose of Uber is to make people entirely dependent on it by driving out alternatives like local cab companies and public transit through low prices subsidizes by Saudi money.
I think it's great that Uber has forced cab companies to modernize and make their services more convenient but we both know what will happen if Uber gets a stranglehold on this market. You'll see jacked up prices for the captive market and declining service.
This is how it always goes.
[0] https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/25/21152512/uber-lyft-climat...
[1] https://www.nj.com/opinion/2020/03/uber-and-lyft-are-pushing...
[2] https://troymedia.com/technology/how-uber-dodges-paying-taxe...
Their skill lies entirely in breaking laws in a way that allows them to make more money than the fines they pay.
In addition to their legal entrepreneurism their next skill lies in hiding externalities. They push costs to everyone else (drivers, riders, cities by massively increasing traffic, everyone who lives in those cities who have to deal with the noise and pollution of the additional traffic, etc) without having to bear any of it themselves.
Almost like AirBnB's model.
Why do I need to involve a middle man from another country to facilitate a trip across town?
For better or worse I think that Uber destroyed the cab industry in my city.
Either way, I still think that we could have some sort of decentralized ride sharing platform that doesn't suck so much money out of local communities.
I think that this would be better for communities and therefore society a a whole.
So the real benefit of Uber was enabling mums to drop off children at school and then work until time to pick them up again (one example), casual self determining work not available to many in other ways.
I live fairly central, guy around the corner from me is retired, hangs at home picking up the odd job as he feels like, great for him, plus he can control his income relative to impacts to benefits.
In other words, benefits abuse?
For someone that has worked all their life and paid a shitload of tax I find that a little offensive and have no problem with them optimising their returns in their golden years.
But there is a grey area where you partially qualify, the ideal retirement strategy can be to spend your savings at a rate to allow a comfortable life then at a certain point you drop down into pension eligibility and then you supplement your own savings with the pension.
Unfortunately, in the parts of the zone of grey the way it works out is if you earn too much the combined impact of income tax and reduced payments is equivalent to a tax rate of 70 or 80%, so it sort of makes it an incentive not to work in those cases unless you really like it for some reason, but there is every chance you are 75 or 80 by then so I think you've probably done your bit by then and entitled to take it a little easy.
This is a weird forum. An argument that a company is big and successful so must have some process for making decisions that works well, so criticisms of those decisions by internet randos are necessarily badly informed and egotistically presumptuous because they can't have the understanding of the people directly involved yadda yadda yadda i.e. a standard status quo argument, generalizable to dismiss any criticism independently of the specific facts of any situation or the institution being defended - when you're making that argument, you could be making it to someone very highly placed or otherwise knowledgeable about the institution that you're defending.
But does that really justify 30 thousand employees?
I'm not at all saying that there isn't a good amount of "fat to trim" at large companies, but often times the hard work at these big companies is making a difficult problem (or, rather, set of problems), especially at scale, look trivially easy.
An example I think proves this: In Austin, TX, Uber and Lyft stopped operations in the city for about a year in 2016-2017 when voters passed a law requiring fingerprint checks (the state legislature eventually overrode this law, which is a common feature of Austin city-Texas state relations). During that time, Austin was flooded with a host of startup rideshare apps, some funded by some technology high-fliers. Even though I liked to use the RideAustin app because it was a non-profit, paid drivers more and funded a charity I support, there is no denying the apps were a far, far cry from Uber and Lyft's apps. Even after a full year there was really no comparison in the quality of the apps.
Just the ride-sharing part of Uber does about 15 million rides a day, in thousands of cities, each with different regulations and legal frameworks. Uber on-boards about 50,000 new drivers a month. Anyone who thinks this can all be managed with "15 engineers" has not thought through the problem.
Simple looking things are very complex at large scale.
Even if no new features were built, the current api and apps won't scale to meet the demand as the user base continues to grow. And at any point in time there are thousands of bugs that need to be fixed within months before they cause big issues. 15 engineers will take years to fix them.
Another big factor is cyber security. This alone will require more than 15 people. Monitoring and defending against active threats, updating libs with patches and migrating from deprecated dependencies spanning 100s of services.
If “it could be done in a weekend with less people” is true for anyone it’s true for Uber. They should be replacing systems with ones that may scale worse but are cheaper. Scaling=complexity comes from companies like Google/Meta where the engineers practice promotion-based development.
Uber, AirBnB, Amazon FBA and other globally active marketplace companies deal with the same thing - their business is in facilitating other people's business without having to think about local laws and regulations.
Payment alone is a real hard thing: people wish to pay with whatever payment card scheme is most popular in their specific home country - which may not be the usual Mastercard/Visa duopoly -, they may wish to do so in wherever country they are at the moment, there may be international sanctions at play, different regulations about CC fees, clawback periods, taxes, VAT...
And FBA appears to be borderline fraudulent for both producers and consumers as Amazon comingles inventory with no guarantees.
That said I can see the legal-based marketing pitch. Not sure how well companies who advertise that actually deliver. There's also the risk it becomes theater or regulatory capture
If it's instead a "every market" company then it should be doing that with its considerable on-payroll staff.
It also wasn’t just a single weekend thing. These other apps had almost a year to fix themselves and they couldn’t. I guess they just couldn’t muster the capital to build something really solid. But in any case it just made it very clear that this isn’t an easy problem. And when Lyft/Uber came back, the other apps were dropped immediately lol.
They really didn't have time or money because everybody simply assumed Uber/Lyft would use their gigantic piles of VC cash to come back shortly and sweep everybody aside even at a loss.
And everybody was right.
This is the fallacy of completeness and sounds vaguely like Wassily Leontief's input-output planning and has been proven to not work [1]. In the absence of complete information - demand and supply, "appropriate modeling" will always fall short. Economics has again and again showed that sophisticated models always fail and simple heuristics based models work far better. I suspect a simple rules driven system would work just as well.
Uber big innovation IMHO was making supply extremely flexible by massively lowering cost to become a driver and making it possible to be a marginal driver. As a society, we should run with that innovation. The rest of stuff, the fancy app, the car tracking, the dynamic pricing is fluff hiding the real value add.
This is the fallacy of completeness and sounds vaguely like Wassily Leontief's input-output planning and has been proven to not work [1]. In the absence of complete information - demand and supply, "appropriate modeling" will always fall short. Economics has again and again showed that sophisticated models always fail and simple heuristics based models work far better. I suspect a simple rules driven system would work just as well.
Uber big innovation IMHO was making supply extremely flexible by massively lowering cost to become a driver and making it possible to be a marginal driver. As a society, we should run with that innovation. The rest of stuff, the fancy app, the car tracking, the dynamic pricing is fluff hiding the real value add.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input%E2%80%93output_model
They reached too far, raised to much money, raise too much ire, sang too big a tune.
If they had of stayed 'visionary but rational' they'd be doing just fine.
And they will probably end up doing just fine in the long run, expectations have to settle down somewhere.
On top of that, Uber is constantly working of features to maintain regulatory compliance
And then there is the need for security teams to ward of hacking attempts and keep the system secure over time
For dealing with growth, there are two kinds of growth to deal with. One is growth within a given metro area that they already serve. The other is growth into new metro areas.
For things like ride scheduling, driver scheduling, routing, and similar they only have to grow their software to handle that in the largest single metro they serve. Multiple metro areas could then be handled by running separate copies of that software in each metro area. That would require an IT staff that would grow as they expanded into different metro areas, but wouldn't increase the number of developers needed to maintain the app and service code.
It would be the things that are shared between multiple metro areas that might need a growing developer staff even in maintenance mode. That would be things like the login system and payment processing. But note that these are things that a bazillion other online companies have to deal with too. It's well known how to do them and there are a ton of libraries and frameworks and services to support that. These are things you get working and then rarely have to touch.
It's the stuff in the first category, dealing with the details of what Uber has to do that isn't something every other online site with a large nationwide user base has to deal with, where the hard problems for such a business lie.
As far as security goes I think the number of developers needed to deal with security goes up much slower than the number of users. It is mostly a function of the amount of code you have, not how many people use it.
So, aside from dealing with regulators, I think a company like Uber could if it wanted go into maintenance mode and greatly cut the number of developers (although not down to the 15 voz_ used in his comment), once they have gotten the parts unique to their kind of business to the point that they can handle the largest single metro area they are in or want to be in, and they have a good enough debugged enough feature set that there isn't room for someone else to come up with a better enough feature set to matter.
This isn't specific to Uber or other taxi-like services. It is that way for nearly any nationwide business where the actual goods or services provided are essentially local.
Yeah. Things are * that * easy to do at scale. You need just '15' engineers.
Uber operates in multiple countries, each of which have very different rules.
There's millions of rides happening in each of those places.
It's difficult to keep everything running with just a few engineers.
Can people please stop making statements true for America as if they are true for the world? In my country we have UberEats, Deliveroo and a few others, but DoorDash doesn’t even exist.
Plumbers and masseurs and dog walkers didn’t build up reservation books because it was hard to make real-time bookings (phones enabled that), they did it because it’s the most efficient way to plan working hours so you’re not sitting around your entire life waiting for work.
Now if they were selling platform for other people to operate, I could see them being tech...
On May 5, 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Uber announced plans to layoff 3,700 employees, around 14% of its workforce - Ahh I see what you mean, that is a lot of employees
Really hard disagree. Their software development model is amongst the best in the industry. That needs strong low-level tech leadership.
Smaller team, focus just on the ride hailing software, take a cut of the revenue and that would actually be a decent business that doesn't try to make money by either monopolizing markets or atomizing the taxi business and destroying labour rights. Of course if you do that you can't pretend to be a gazillion dollar technology giant.
Just fucking create a killer product and work on refining that product to the best of your abilities. If you get bored, start a new company. You don't have to grow every company into the next Apple.
Previous discussions here have repeatedly told me that it's a condition for or result of getting vc funding.
There is also such a thing as "HN bias".
Uber already took a huge amount of VC funding, so mid-size strategies won’t work. Investors would rather risk the whole company on a 1% chance of becoming Google or Home Depot than take a 50% chance of becoming Applebees. Even though Applebees is presumably a nice, profitable business, those kind of numbers are not useful for the portfolio position they have Uber in.
That’s just the reality for the folks running Uber today. If they try to turn it into a mid-sized business, the board will fire them.
If I read the discussion charitably, someone up-thread wanted to shift the conversation to “what should’ve Uber done in 2012?” while their responders think they’re talking about “What can Uber do at this point?”
I don’t think you need to act like we’re incapable of thinking about building businesses smaller than Google.
I'd argue that that is the exact reason why Apple is where it's at today.
If you don't want to grow that's fine, but then don't go public and don't seek VC funding. Investors make money when you grow; they generally don't make much when you don't. Ergo, they will always be pushing you to grow.
That said, I think they always should have planned that sort of transition. They bet on self driving cars instead, which hasn't panned out.
"Economies of scale" isn't a magical spell. There has to be a function by which a large companies turns its scale into an economy. Walmart and Costco both negotiate much more attractive deals with their suppliers than their competitors can, because they can place larger orders with those suppliers, due to their scale. Because Uber connects one rider with one driver (or one meal-eater with one driver for Eats), its ability to create a useful economy of scale is sharply limited.
Uber has some mild advantages against an up-and-coming rival in terms of constancy of demand, but since drivers will happily turn on multiple gig services at a time, that's not a very big deal for it. Things like Uber Pool are an attempt to turn its scale into an economy, but (predictably) not enough people actually want a ride service that puts them in close proximity with strangers and also takes a vastly unknown amount of time to finish the ride to make Uber Pool a major differentiator. Things like Uber's car loans problem comes face to face with the fact that there it's competing against other, larger entities that have better scale (like, you know, actual banks).
I noticed that in the past, you'd get the pool discount even if you travelled by yourself. They've changed the terms to "up to 30% discount if someone rides with you".
As a customer, the benefit of using Uber was that they would absorb the risks, spreading it out across millions of customers. Now, I have to individually wear the risk of a pool trip not having multiple customers, while simultaneously being enormously disadvantaged in my ability to estimate the chances of other people joining. Uber has billions of times more information at hand for their estimates than me as an individual.
When I saw this change, I realised that it's a sign of the beginning of the end...
I mean, it's not like Uber is buying cars in bulk at a discount smaller operators can't match, or anything like that.
And it's not like they're running a lean technology operation, with just 50 engineers globally, to get economies of scale on tech expenses.
The only economies of scale Uber has on their side is marketing.
If it was a small team of good engineers, designers humbly building a product, then keeping it attractive to investment would've been a lot easier.
Now as you said, there's so much competition, it's not really sustainable at it's current size.
Could they charge enough delivery fees to actually build a sustainable business?
How much fees would you need to charge? $4/delivery means having to make a delivery in 15 mins to be able to pay the delivery person minimum wage. Plus Uber’s profit, plus the cost of the car and maintenance expenses + tickets, accidents, etc,
It’s hard to see how a monopoly can also make money, without charging so much that people would rather pick up and restaurants would rather offer their own delivery.
IIUC, 30% is the top end, with rates ranging from 10-30%.
That said, many (most?) restaurants that aren't high-end (which won't be preparing orders for delivery anyway) have gross margins of at most 10-15%.
The cut that DoorDash, GrubHub, etc. take has driven many lower cost restaurants (a number of which had provided their own delivery and been in business for decades) where I live (NYC) out of business over the past 10 years.
The only choice for these folks is to raise prices enough to cover the extra costs, often killing their business (note that GrubHub requires restaurants to charge the same on their site as on their in-house menu, not sure about other services).
The result is fewer independent low-mid priced restaurants. And that's a loss to any community.
Now, I mean, would it be a good business that was used by 80% of the population multiple times per week? No. As you point out, it's intractably expensive. But there's nothing wrong with a business that sells a relatively expensive luxury, and it's not sooo expensive to have a meal delivered that only a tiny fraction of the population would ever use it.
Nowadays, I see restaurants charging easily $5-10 above their in-person list price on delivery apps, and some have left entirely now that normalcy has returned and they don’t have to put up with it.
During the pandemic, there was certainly more pressure on the restaurants. After it, the restaurants may get a better deal -- none of that is a particular reason not to comply with the service, it's just one to negotiate more of the costs onto the end user instead of the restaurant.
If they're not, in a world where some mix of users and restaurants get charged the true costs of delivery service, then you're left with a service that gets people to order things for you, which is basically just Postmates, and they're also not doing hot.
It seems clear to me that there is plenty of demand to justify the service. Doordash's revenue was about $5B last year (I believe that's revenue and not GTV, which is probably 5x that). Doordash also only has about 50% of the market. Even if you believe that some of that demand is illusory, brought about by subsidized prices, that still seems like there's a pretty straightforward business there if you can charge a sort of "ordinary business profit."
And, again, there's been delivery food businesses since time immemorial, it would be weird if we thought that there was no kind of business here. Pizza companies used to be more or less the only ones because pizza delivered so well that pizza restaurants could absorb the fixed cost of entire delivery employees, but a food delivery app lets you pay for just part of a delivery-person.
It seems pretty straightforwardly the case to me that the problem in food delivery apps has never been that the fundamental business makes sense, the problem has been that from the very beginning there have been a large number of companies ferociously competing in the space, with nothing to differentiate them, which has squeezed margins to nothing.
Pizza delivery works because there is only one place you need to go to pick up the food that needs to be delivered, and there is a very high volume of food to be delivered. There's no additional traveling cost to flit between restaurants, most of which don't churn out food at high production rates like a pizzeria.
App delivery drivers spend a lot of their time not traveling directly to customers, or waiting around for food to be ready for them to deliver.
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> Even if you believe that some of that demand is illusory, brought about by subsidized prices, that still seems like there's a pretty straightforward business there if you can charge a sort of "ordinary business profit."
This remains to be seen. MoviePass was never able to successfully both retain customers and raise prices, streaming services are starting to see the same issues. The premium over pickup is often $10-20 already, if it increases anymore that probably starts having a negative exponential effect on market size. (How many people are willing to pay $30? $50? over pickup?)
Also, bigger margin doesn't always mean less effort to cook. It might depending on labor costs and the cost of goods (gravy mix is more expensive than the ingredients, but takes a bit more time to prepare) and you might also wind up needing consistency: Waffle House (a chain restaurant) probably wants its gravy to taste the same in two different cities, and it doesn't matter so much if it takes away a bit of margin.
Restaurant margins are already thin. So they hike the prices to pay UberEats and co. their share.
Amazon won online retail, and changed online retail behavior, by getting rid of shipping fees. The price you see on the product is the price you pay (sans sales tax, but at least in the USA no one is used to seeing tax included).
you actually mean "by hiding shipping fees in an annual subscription model carefully tuned to deal with real world customer ordering behavior".
Non-Prime customers still see shipping fees for everything.
At that point, though, you're not gigging out delivery people. You're just hiring short-term couriers to move stuff to people from the central kitchens. This is, basically, the model that big city Chinese restaurants and pizza places had anyway before the apps muscled in by swamping them with superior SEO.
There's also a lot of cuisines that simply don't travel well and these Doordash/uber eats business are indifferent. Pizzas travel well, Chinese travels well. Sushi kind of does too assuming you can be quick. But ramen? French fries? Lots of stuff just isn't meant for it.
Automation could be disruptive here…someday in the form of food delivery land and/or air drones. It really is the same with ride share: it just isn’t economical considering how much human labor is worth, self driving vehicles are more than likely required to make it economical enough to be ubiquitous.
It works great "inhouse". They tend to know all their regular customers and area and know exactly how to get there, where to park, which bell to press etc. They will also know if there is bad traffic or an accident closing a major road and adjust wait times and order frequency accordingly.
The person that runs the delivery joint can also wait until he knows his/her driver will be making his way back, and only start cooking then, so the next order doesn't get cold waiting for a pickup.
It all goes to shit when you put a tech platform which has absolutely no real interaction with the kitchen and outsource the riders entirely, with virtually no quality control and no local knowledge. Plus they also want to take 30-50% commission for the privilege.
Ubers margins are comically bad. Uber Eats did $13bn of revenue and they made $30m of EBITDA - 0.2%. The credit card networks are probably making 10x the money that Uber on each order. And that EBITDA will be with them pulling out all the stops now they have realised they need to get profitable fast.
>They will also know if there is bad traffic or an accident closing a major road and adjust wait times and order frequency accordingly.
irrelevant in the age of GPS navigation with live traffic (ie. google maps)
>where to park, which bell to press etc.
while I don't doubt delivery drivers accrue such knowledge over time, I doubt that the turnover is low enough for this to actually make a difference. It's certainly not enough to make such a service unviable.
>The person that runs the delivery joint can also wait until he knows his/her driver will be making his way back, and only start cooking then, so the next order doesn't get cold waiting for a pickup.
This doesn't seem very hard to do. Restaurants can let the delivery platform know how long each dish to prepare, and the delivery platform can tell them ahead of time when to prepare the food (after factoring in driver availability and distance).
This is one of the reasons uber eats often delivers horrendously cold food (with no refund option these days). If you got cold food from a local joint with inhouse delivery they'd usually refund or redeliver for free, because they know it was their fault. They can't offer that through these platforms as it is rarely their fault and even if it was they don't get an option to interface with the customer like that.
On the final point - firstly, it's not as simple as that as not 100% of orders are coming through uber eats, so they don't really know exactly how busy the kitchen is. Secondly, uber was so desperate to grow market share they would push kitchens to take orders regardless of capacity to serve them. The only option AFIAK was to shut off Uber orders entirely, there was no "take 4 orders per 30 minutes max" option (maybe they have added that now).
The confused phone calls I get from delivery drivers just about every time I order begs to differ.
And that's assuming they bother to call rather than just leaving my order with the basement apartment or one of my neighbors or in the same address only on Northeast [name] street 8 blocks away rather than Northwest [name] street.
These drivers churn so much they never learn their way out of routine dumb mistakes like that.
Meanwhile, you are hungry and tired and you just spent $50 on $30 worth of takeout. You really really want someone to care about your dinner as much as you do. But next week when you're hungry and tired again, won't you roll the dice again and hope they get it right this time?
If I lived in a Chinese Puzzle Box I would have to get used to people wanting help to open it. Because they don't actually give a damn about the puzzle box. They just want to drive straight there.
but
> Plus they also want to take 30-50% commission for the privilege.
If food delivery works great in house then why do restaurants pay Uber so much? I'd wager employing drivers is impractical for a lot of restaurants.
All this seems to mean in practice is I get a crappy Uber Eats delivery but have to order it through the McDonalds app, which is somehow even worse than Uber Eats.
I've just looked at the McDonalds app, and it says my local McDonalds is 24/7 and lets me order to collect from there. I know for a fact that it's shut right now, and the official store locator also says it's shut.
I stick to Deliveroo and Just Eat where possible because their apps and service tend to be pretty decent.
Doordash would offer a restaurant before partnering with them by calling in the orders so they could have sales numbers to pitch to the restaurant owner when they want to take the 30%.
Uber, Doordash, etc get away with charging such premiums not because delivery is so costly but because they've made themselves into a new phone book. Hungry customers open the app to look for a restaurant, and the restaurant wants to be listed there.
However that's not really a win for the restaurant. It might not increase their business, just stop them from losing it. If the app didn't exist at all, those customers would find them another, less convenient way. But because the app exists, the customers stopped using those ways.
That's not true where I live (obviously, YMMV). Granted, I live in a very urban area (NYC) and most deliveries are done on bicycle, as the distances are shorter and it's much faster for the delivery folks.
Most restaurants near me have had delivery services for decades. Depending on the restaurant, they might have dedicated delivery folks, but others would just send a busboy as needed.
In fact, the big problem used to be all the restaurants leaving their delivery menus in building lobbies or even slipping them under the doors of non-customers.
Now the problem is that many of these restaurants are going out of business because the fees on the "delivery" apps eat up their entire gross profit margins.
Absolutely. Which is why I qualified my statement with "YMMV."
That said, I think one aspect is broadly applicable: Most low to mid-price restaurants (not chain restaurants) operate on pretty thin margins. And the 12-30% (just for "listing" on their website) can often eat all the profits from the business.
And that doesn't include the "service" fees and delivery charges either. Making the whole enterprise a bad deal for everyone except the UberEats/DoorDash/GrubHub/etc.
Edit: Fixed typo.
Does that make it a bad deal for the consumer? Maybe, but lots of people seem to be willing to pay the premium for the experience and convenience of ordering through the app.
Locally I've seen plenty of restaurants have different prices on UberEats than online.
I'm talking about service fees to the customer, not the restaurant. The restaurant is already paying 12-30% on every single order. That includes phone orders via the fake websites these services set up with a VOIP number (not the restaurants' own numbers) that forwards to the restaurant.
As for upping the menu prices, IIUC, these services (GrubHub definitely, the others I'm sure do the same) require restaurants to charge the same prices as their eat-in menu.
You're welcome to disagree as to whether or not it's a good or bad deal for anyone, but I've seen (and had it confirmed by several former restaurant owners) restaurants go out of business because they, can't make a profit via the delivery services. Even ones that had been doing just fine for decades.
>Locally I've seen plenty of restaurants have different prices on UberEats than online.
Fair enough. I wouldn't use UberAnything even if it was free, so I wouldn't know. But I am certain about GrubHub/Seamless.
I expect you're still "unconvinced." Which is no skin off my nose. I'm loathe to tell anyone what to think, do or say, as it's neither my business nor my concern.
It's cheaper and more convenient to pick the food up myself.
But pizza and chinese delivery was a thing in the US long before delivery apps were a thing. Clearly it was practical at some small scale in the US. I don't see any reason why it can't be expanded to other restaurants (eg. by sharing delivery drivers so a restaurant doesn't have to have an entire FTE on payroll).
it scaled pretty well, I would just take 3-4 orders per-ride depending on distance ended up with a decent chunk of change just from the weekends, and there was a decent amount of downtime and socializing waiting for pizzas to be cooked
with the gig stuff drivers are shuttleing between multiple resturants non-stop in ill-defined areas to random customers and probably walking away with less cash it's a stupid system
Uber gets away with charging one side of the market 30% of food prices and charging the other side of the market a delivery fee, a service fee and a tip. This typically comes out to 50% of food costs if you use an average tip.
What on earth are you talking about. Pizza and Chinese restaurants have been profitably delivering food for decades.
The UberEats model in particular may be unprofitable, but there are absolutely profitable models that have existed for far longer than I’ve been alive.
A company starts a web site and sets pricing on their service at a very low rate, while subsidizing it's financial loss with investment money at a loss. The company gradually increases costs and pricing over time for suppliers, employees, and on users until it finds a sweet spot in hopes that no one will notice, while also protecting itself carefully with PR and legal moves and careful management of overhead costs for operations... Most often the company manages minimal customer support, insurance, lawyers, a web site, marketing teams, and an office of public affairs, and that's the primary focus.
Often times, ownership frequently funnels profit out through selling shares, and though executive pay, until eventually the company succeeds or fails miserably.
These are not commendable business ventures like the press would have you believe, they're time sharing schemes that victimize almost everyone who invests in them, and they undermine vital services that would normally be regulated like the taxi cab industry, which was doing quite well before Uber came in and scorched it to ashes.
Many cities gave ride share companies huge subsidies and concessions to operate, few of which benefits they've passed on to drivers and riders, and surge pricing is about as scandalous and opportunistic as monopolizing a river then selling the water to the villages it used to lead to. I wouldn't be surprised if these companies are also pushing campaigns and lobbies against individual car ownership as well through employees, and brigading in places like reddit, because that only furthers their death grip on monopoly status.
The corporate world is wildly toxic these days, I'm skeptical of everything companies tell me because everyone is opportunistically dictating prices and terms, and they've abandoned customer service and all of the principles the present at orientation behind the scenes.
How Uber is a $50bn business is beyond me
- they have never made a profit - they’re unlikely to ever make a profit unlikely to ever reduce costs enough - they need to reduce expensive headcount rather than squeeze drivers and restaurants - the early money sole out at a profit while passing their losses onto new punters via IPO
Wow, no, it's a 2-sided market problem (drivers and customers) that's incredibly difficult to reproduce.
And then there's brand synergy, economies of scale with regulatory issues etc..
Regular taxis are 'easy to reproduce'.
Food delivery is hard because there actually isn't any margin. It's all VC money paying for everything.
Other options do exist - things like Gett in the U.K. for example, not sure how profitable they are either though and some large taxi companies have their own apps too
It seems like the former gap in user experience between Uber and taxis has largely vanished. This may partly be reflective of the great resignation as well: a lot of people who are working have still just given up.
Though on that note, I had a driver acting sketchy in Nashville last week exhibiting similar behavior though no one attempted a mugging. I wonder…
I just got rejected for a short ride from a cab at the airport in nyc. Dude was very angry I was only going a few miles. Hopped out, ordered a Lyft, got a great ride from a dude with a wife and kids.
This is the problem with being the middleman in a low margin world. I don't want to pay a fortune to get somewhere, and the driver has other jobs they can do if Uber effectively pays below minimum wage.
Uber just needs to survive until the self-driving car thing is fully online, which means they are the Stripe of self-driving car micro-rentals. Then they will do very well and be very profitable, IMO.
In today's low-unemployment-rate world, there's pressure to pay drivers more and VCs aren't going to pick up the costs, so... it's expensive.
I'd imagine the software licensing of self driving cars would be so that when you bought a self driving GM/Ford/whatever that is only for personal use and using it for taxi rides would be against the ToS. Which they could quickly catch people out on, and maybe a "taxi" version of the car costs $xxx/month more.
Unless you are suggesting that Uber actually wins the race to self driving, which I really can't see happening. Do they even have a program anymore?
Maybe Tesla sell the cars to individuals / businesses, and now the individual wants to find a way to get some extra money from it so they rent it out via a platform.
Uber already has the mindshare and the tech.
Maybe Tesla just wants to sell / rent the cars and not get into the market place.
Tesla could try to compete on that, but they could try right now and compete with Uber, right? It is the same thing.
All that financial risk is now pushed down to individual 'franchisers'.
There's a lot of variables but the car-makers are probably better positioned espcially when it comes to moving around fleets of self-driving cars and servicing them at a nationwide scale
I'm guessing they may be better at dealing with the legal and regulartory issues that could emerge
Otherwise it is race to bottom. Maybe if they are lucky generating 2-10% profit on the vehicle. With certain operators having massive fleets and very high capital investments.
What if not going costs you more money than Uber? For example, it costs you your job, or visitation with your child? Then you will go.
> or find another (non-ride-sharing) way to get there.
Oh, you'd just do the other thing that is available to do. Why doesn't everyone think of that?
> But then regular cabs are still a thing too.
That would mean that Uber didn't have a monopoly. The goal was for Uber to dump deeply discounted service into the market until the cab companies died. They were pretty successful, because I can't hail a cab on the street anymore. They weren't as successful as they needed to be, because people who drive cabs can do Uber and Lyft at the same time.
> the driver has other jobs they can do if Uber effectively pays below minimum wage.
But if Uber has driven the industry wage down, the other job they do will not be driving you around. They will get a different job, and you will still be paying more.
What do you mean by “pretty much”? Where in the prospectus do they say this?
You can ctrl-f "self-driving" to find their strategy in that venture.
edit: Should be easy to find the prospectus via search engines, but here's a link: https://d18rn0p25nwr6d.cloudfront.net/CIK-0001543151/f0dcd9a...
Since they're banned in several countries, good luck to them.
The underlying business can, obviously, be profitable. There is a guy near me who runs a taxi app, town has a population of ~5k people (no city with an Uber taxi service for miles around), and he is profitable. The problem is that most tech companies are run by morons who have a big stack of other people's money to burn (it really is that simple, all of these companies thought this day would never come...it has come, it is today).
No need to insult me, you can read my response to another comment in this thread where I direct them where exactly in Uber's prospectus they make these claims.
Whether they actually do what they said would make them profitable is another matter.
If you look at Uber’s drop in valuation, it’s commensurate with the drop in all tech companies. In fact, the article is seemingly singing the praises of DoorDash but Uber is down roughly 50% since Nov 2022 but DoorDash is down 75%.
And there’s nothing new that this article brings. Same old “Uber shouldn’t exist” meanwhile it’s set to become profitable.
You seem shocked that these two things could be true at the same time, when they are often true at the same time.
They don't pay very well, so there aren't many drivers. The drivers that are around will accept a ride, then fuck around for a while, driving further away, doing whatever (no, there are no scheduled drop-offs, they deliberately waste time). Then you cancel, then when you try to re-book to get a different driver ... oh look, surge pricing, it's an extra $20 for that journey now.
This is the point at which I pull out the (crappy) app for the local taxi service, that uber nearly drove out of business, who now offer a more reliable and usually cheaper ride. In fact increasingly I don't look at the uber app first any more.
It was never a good idea to allow a VC funded loss-maker to compete in pretty much every market worldwide, using this subsidy to undercut the local firms while somehow dreaming of extracting 20% on every ride.
It was always going to have to raise prices to succeed, and the only way it was going to be able to do that was by using its stacks of cash to run at a loss for long enough to destroy the competition completely. I'm just glad it failed to finish the job.
On other hand, I wouldn't include RnD and management to that.
I don't know if this is confirmation bias, or just a lie to add weight to the thesis, but it's obviously absurd, as anyone who has ever worked for, or even ordered directly from a local restaurant knows.
Your local pizzeria does not have the driver go back to the restaurant for every order and deliver it directly to you. They certainly don't have a fleet of people ready to pickup your order. They pickup every order that's available, it's completely unoptimized in every way, and you get your order on the luck of the draw. Maybe the driver had no other orders, and is a block away from you. Or maybe your fifth in line.
The key difference is they don't have an app that records every step in the process, the precise times involved, and show you the delivery driver's location on a map.
Hard to even keep reading after this.
Whereas, 75% of the time 'app' drivers dont.
Doesn't matter if I'm first or last in line, if the food is cold either way. Its gotten so bad, we're actually surprised when we order straight from say..dominos, and get hot food, instead of cold.
I've gone completely off Uber since about a year ago due to their ridiculous price increases (per item fee + delivery fee + service fee), and I order direct from my half dozen favourite local places now, who absolutely do deliver personally and directly and usually for free if it's over a certain order size. They usually rock up on an e-bike or e-scooter just with my order. It's faster, way cheaper, and always fresher.
I'm not sure if it's just certain parts of Australia that I and the OP have in common, or what the reason is for the different experiences, but our happiness with the experience of ordering food has gone higher than it's been in many years. I won't miss Uber at all.
So, I worked as a delivery driver, and when it wasn't particularly busy, most deliveries were one at a time, and when it was busy, there was both am assigned limit on deliveries taken at once and incentive to optimize by proximity, because not being time inefficient was money out of the driver's pocket (since the bulk of pay was tips + fixed per delivery payment).
(And these days, more of the pizzerias with in-house delivery do have apps with location & status information on deliveries.)
Uber also has a basic disadvantage, which that their delivery drivers are rarely at the source building already, but that's often true for a pizzeria.
This in very small restaurants or when things were slow was handled by the actual drivers/bikers/walkers for their own deliveries, and in large restaurants or during rush was handled by a person who didn't leave the restaurant.
The metrics were repeat business and tips. First orders were given priority, business meeting lunch orders were given priority, drivers would give big tippers priority. The methods were timing when orders were given to the kitchen, keeping on top of orders that were not coming out of the kitchen fast enough, and grouping orders that could go out with the same person. Orders that had problems leaving the restaurant would result in calls to the customer. Things stayed on the line too long without being delivered and got "trashed" (which probably meant somebody took them home after shift.)
Everything needed to be flawless, because mistakes got expensive quickly. The cheapest mistake would be to forget a condiment/sauce, where you might be able to satisfy the customer by offering them a discount, or you might be able to give the sauce to somebody going out immediately. This cheapest mistake probably obliterated all of the profit from an order. If you have to replace an entree due to a mistake? That's better to consider a new delivery order that you're not getting paid for, in addition to not charging for part of the one you already sent out, and if it was a really stupid mistake you had better send some free desert along with it, and if you fuck up again you're going to lose the customer. Worst case, you get everything wrong, you have to remake and redeliver it again, they get it all for free, and you offer them a credit to beg them to come back. Instead of 1 sale, you've had -4 sales.
The process was actually so choreographed and practiced that I'm realizing that it's a lot to remember. I think the assumption that people would do something for 6-12 hours a day and not optimize for least effort and maximum income is weird. You get that by not doing everything randomly, by not getting complaints, and by getting your big tippers to love you. It's not like a tech business where you can just pivot to a different customer - you are locked in a geographic area, and your available customers are your available customers.
The key difference? Now restaurants can just blame the delivery app/driver.
edit: the big takeaway I would put out there is that delivery orders got a lot more attention and processing than inside orders.
It is never intended to make a profit. EXCEPT for the guys in management, who are soaking the fool investors and non-businessmen drivers alike, while they laugh all the way to the bank. It's a business-model straight out of the dot.com bubble of the late 1990s.
If the investors wised up, and the drivers wised up. Uber would evaporate away like the morning mist. And the Uber management guys might actually have to go out and get a REAL job.
Is the ride over for Uber? Uber never ever had a real ride to start with.
As I said above, Uber relies on their drivers not having any 'business smarts'. If the drivers went through all the arithmetic involved in costs, wages, taxes, non-business hour loadings, return on investment figures, etc, etc, etc they would find they are subsidising the Uber management, rather than being paid properly.
I can see why it might seem to be an attractive business, food addiction is legal, socially accepted and the harmful side is slow enough that most people don’t notice.
But this is not a “service”, it does not add value for the customer, same category as cigarettes.
I don’t think that businesses riding on addictive behaviours should be regulated, but the public should be made more aware of the bad deals they get…
That’s not to say that DoorDash et al. aren’t enabling people with food addiction problems, just to point out that there are very many real good uses for the service.
This can be said about any addiction. The problem is addiction. If your not an addictive person that’s great, for you, but others are susceptible to addiction.
They were never necessarily professional drivers, and the drivers today are just as 'polite'.
The market for NYC 1% high end cars is very small compared to the value of unlocking the big marginal market inefficiency brought about by medallions.
All of that said - a bit of technology and flexibility by the world's cities and taxi fleets would have made them a lot more money and made Uber pointless.
I've found the drivers to be almost universally accommodating (almost like they're being paid more fairly!)
And you can even get an hourly Uber Black that will wait on you indefinitely.
We know from air travel that most people prefer to pay the lowest fare for the worst cattle class airfare.
I think the market of people willing to pay $40 for a $10 ride with first-class experience must be too small.
This is even though they have raised prices, $10.50 flagfall before leaving the curb Saturday night.
It seems all uber has done is handed out a few cheap rides for a while, sucked a heap of money out of the taxi industry, then going to leave us with the taxis, only paying higher prices.
Disruption indeed, but of no to the benefit of the customer, least not in any long term way.
Let me give you an example: I took a taxii from the airport to my home, the guy took the route I knew was very long and with only 20% of the trip I was being charged like $100 and asked him to immediately stop at the next parking lot he sees. Took my luggage out and called Uber that completed the rest of the trip for $50. Not my first time dealing with scammy taxi drivers either. It was a nightmare calling a taxi before uber, it will take them at leasr 45min to get a guy and good luck getting them to wait on you and coordinate your pickup.
My point is, it may be operated badly but it provides a ton of value and has the advantage od being first to market. I have always wanted to try Lyft for example but I never had to, never been in a situation where I needed them (except for scooter rentals in santa monica once -- didn't work at all). I avoided Uber eats on purpose but the rest were so crappy I switched, much more costly but I have a lot less problems now and they even added grocery delivery now. They are quite possibly one of the most valuable companies at he level of Walmart, whether or not they can realize that value globally and get the timing right I have no idea, but I am rooting for them.
$60M loss is small enough that Uber can almost certainly get to breakeven or a tiny profit -- but a tiny profit isn't enough to justify their current valuation. They have always needed a business that is solidly profitable on great revenue to justify the valuations they've had since the mid-teens, and they'd rather try to convince people that those profits are coming someday than to try to make it as an extremely low-margin company (which is the correct thing for them to do in service to their shareholders, who would presumably be very sad if Uber contracted to like a $10B valuation company).
(Where we really need a Sabre is for takeout ordering. If you go to any restaurant these days there are like 5 iPads at each of them, one for each delivery service. This is bonkers!)
After seeing that the content of this article doesn’t surprise me one bit.
As a driver with experience cleaning a car after someone threw up in it, I can sympathize with their plight, but I hate stinking like a urinal cake after spending $50-100 for a ride.
At heathrow a couple of weeks ago and tried 5 times to get a taxi to take me 30 minutes down the motorway, each time it was a minute wait showing nearby cars and eventually saying "not possible to find you a ride", had a similar experience in Newcastle a few weeks ago. If I can't rely on it then it's useless to me - may as well run the gauntlet of black cabs and "oh no I'm not going there this time of night mate"
The recent reviews in the app store are full of 1* reports with the same problems.
They have the brand recognition, the first mover advantage and a sizeable market. Since they're developing self-driving tech themselves that'll also help lock out other companies for several years giving them a massive competitive advantage.
Both companies are crashing down but one of them is closer to the floor.