A Case Study on the Uber Alumni Network
trailruncapital.substack.com
trailruncapital.substack.com
https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/05/fast-shuts-doors-after-slo...
The employees of Fast got screwed the most. Remember that. They were misled into believing the company was successful when it was famously almost completely devoid of revenue. The founders lied to them.
The data may stand on its own, but I’d be very suspicious of any narratives being pushed by these people. Fast was a disaster, and the money they raised on those lies is included in those graphs.
I don't think it's necessarily a bad pitch, but clearly it was a business that was only ever going to either be wildly-successful or a complete disaster, and nothing in the middle.
Also they were probably way-too-late and stripe were much better positioned.
(And I'm not suggesting that those two scenarios are equally likely - it had probably a 5% payoff chance!).
>Uber succeeded by hiring Really Smart People all over the world who were not afraid to tackle big challenges and who wanted to win.
Does not instill confidence in the author’s take. Uber succeeded by willfully ignoring laws, massively subsidizing actual costs with VC money, and frequently doing morally questionable things. Yes, they scaled well and worked hard, too, but so do many startups that fail.
I don’t want to diminish the work of the technologists, I’m sure operating at this scale is very complex.
There were a ton of technical challenges in scaling.
Uber was also one of the earliest corporate deployers of Node back in 2010 and ended up having one of the largest in the world arguably (have no idea to what extent they've replaced in the last few years).
Uber's open source projects have led to spinout companies that have raised a lot of money successfully like Chronosphere and Tecton.ai .
Halloween and then New Year's were huge traffic challenges and the Uber app (both driver and rider) really pushed the bounds of what was possible in the 2010s with respect to a two-side real-time marketplace for ridesharing and food delivery.
(I worked at Uber 2014-2019 in engineering.)
Uber only had the opportunity to prove its engineering prowess because nobody else had pockets that deep, and that much disdain for the law.
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/07/10/uber-investigation-...
In places like, IDK, Phoenix all you needed to be a taxi was a certified meter, rates posted on the side of your car, a sticker which they gave you when you fulfilled all these requirements and, here’s the big one which allowed Uber/Lyft to undercut everyone, commercial insurance.
If your drivers don’t have to pay for expensive insurance and you can sell your product for under the actual cost it’s no big surprise you can gain a large foothold against the “taxi monopoly”.
Whenever I get back to Phoenix and take a Lyft I always talk to the drivers to see how things are working out for them after the “monopoly” was broken and, from what I can gather, they’re getting paid fewer peanuts than I did driving a cab and have to maintain their vehicles at their own expense. Sure, tell me how “the warranty covers all that”, they aren’t killing their resale value by putting in a million miles and the $0.50 fuel surcharge for a 23 mile trip helps out when gas prices are over $4/gal.
Only on HN…
I drove cabs for nine years but fully admit I’m no expert so lay down your wisdom.
Yeah I thought so.
You’re the one who claims to know what they’re talking about yet make zero effort to support your claims.
Honestly, I’ve never heard anyone claim taxi drivers were getting rich but can tell you they weren’t universally getting exploited like the pro-rideshare propaganda was telling you. Back before Uber/Lyft I could work less than half the time, have a roof over my head and food in my belly plus got to spend time doing things I enjoyed like shaving yaks. After, not so much, all the “excess income” got siphoned off and went nowhere because VC money was subsidizing the push to bankrupt the competition.
Only job in my life where I had my income cut (to keep the insurance contracts which were the only thing making us money) and I’m not exactly a young pup.
Walmart (supposedly, no real evidence) does the same thing and everyone complains but some Silicon Valley companies do it and we’re supposed to cheer them on?
Yada, yada, predatory pricing, horay!!!
We read the same articles dude. Don’t act smarter than you are because you have Twitter.
It literally was…
Maybe not on the scale of “I’m gonna make a wrapper on top of this chatGPT API and be a billionaire” but you could survive with very little effort if that’s your jam.
AirBnB is illegally operating in tons of areas. Knowingly. Systemically.
And yet where is all the negative press?
Don't believe press narratives and try to put everything into context.
You really could make any company look bad or good if you wanted. There are a lot of actors, and a lot of different ways to slice it.
I think Uber and AirBnB were both aggressive, I suggest there should have been more regulatory pushback everywhere, but only for public good as a lot of mayors were just interested in backing this group or that, not really thinking about the true benefits of constituents.
Finally we have to consider the net benefit, and even while I think both companies have overplayed their hands, I do think there's a general benefit. It seems that regulations around Taxis and Hotels were far too onerous, and the surpluses lost to those de facto oligarchic situations were quite a lot. I'm grateful that both those companies shook things up, even at the cost of a bit of shenanigans.
Mind you, rat bites can be pretti nästi...
I know it’s against the rules but… have you been living under a rock?
It would be harder to find good press methinks.
Lots of early people left since the Travis days. Since then, fixing the reputation damage has been a big focus in the company. Safety center, electric fleet commitments, DEI, Ukraine initiatives, etc, are all newer initiatives in that vein.
"Do the right thing" is now a company core value plastered all over the offices.
Even the "off the shelf stuff doesn't meet our needs" culture alluded in the article has given way to adopting 3rd party solutions more (e.g. Slack replacing uChat, Oracle partnership, etc). Lots of things have changed over the years.
Two of these things are not like the other two.
That is great, I love slogans on posters. But if they were serious Uber would invite Spike Lee to their HQ to ward off the evil spirits.
uChat was based on Mattermost as I recall which was open source, and saved Uber several million dollars plus over its lifetime course.
I was not directly involved in its development but I (started and) ran the engineering blog, and also Uber's open source program for a time where this partnership occurred.
It is funny how some of these examples are floating around about build vs buy, but uChat actually was a good deal while it lasted.
Ultimately Uber decided they didn't need everyone talking to each other all at once and so bit the bullet and paid more for Slack.
Mind you, he was a journalist working off of leaks, presumably from disgruntled employees (of which there were many in the high attrition era), and he obviously had a journalitically oriented profit motive of his own.
So take it with a grain of salt, I guess.
Have we forgotten how Uber's casual abuse of "god view" was revealed when the then head of Uber New York met the reported he was scheduled to talk to by causally admitting, "I was tracking you." And then it came out that Uber employees were using it track exgirlfriends, journalists and celebrities?
How Uber instituted a vast program to specifically track government law enforcement agents to aid in their wholesale blatantly illegal operations.
How Uber's HR actively protected textbook sexual harassment. Specifically, a manager explicitly and in writing soliciting sex from a direct report?
How Uber's ATG was founded on the theft of Google's (now Waymo's) LIDAR technology.
How Uber execs famously complained that they weren't "killing enough people" with their self-driving tests.
How Uber routinely ignored and denied documented safety concerns in many markets, particularly in India?
But yeah. Anyone that exposes these actions trash, and not the demigods that oversaw and encouraged them.
What I "love" is people talking as if they are subject matter experts on shit they only read about in the news and have no first hand experience with. Gell-mann amnesia and all that.
That’s the unpaid damage control.
And now the very guy that said “take [the documented and admitted gross misconduct] with a grain of salt” is shocked — “shocked”, I say — to be called out on his very actions, ignoring the very words written here visible to everyone?
Amazing!
Nobody is implying any of the scandals were fake, but there was one other comment in the thread wondering about whether superpumped is sensationalized, and these are my two cents wrt where the source material for that book / TV series comes from.
Nobody is implying anyone was lying either. Plenty of people were disgruntled because yeah hearing there's multiple cases of sexual harassment going on in your company sucks. Doesn't mean people are gonna go around lying about stuff, in fact a number of people built up the guts to come forward w/ their own horror stories after Fowler. But you are only going to hear those stories, not the ones about the board member that got kicked out for sexist remarks or the people that got fired after HR investigations, because those aren't outrage-bait. That's what I mean by taking it w/ grain of salt when consuming media.
Also, whatever damage there may be was already done years ago, so there's nothing to "damage control" at this point anymore. As GP implied, people tend to hold on to weak opinions strongly for stuff that frankly they don't even have any reason to be emotionally invested in, and I sure as hell am not interested in trying to "convince" you of anything.
It’s no different than saying that regular health screenings for preventable diseases are encouraged by doctors, but doctors have a profit motive, so maybe you shouldn’t, but definitely don’t talk to any doctors, because they might be lying to you for money. Or that the idea that smoke detectors should be placed outside of every bedroom is a plot by Big Smoke Detector to sell more smoke detectors.
If you want to insist on thinking that I'm trying to gaslight you or whatever, you're ignoring the forum guidelines ("assume good faith") to the detriment of your HN experience and that's your problem, not mine. I'm going to go touch some grass now, I hope you do too. Cheers.
Yes, there were problems with incentives where some bad actors would do whatever it took to get into Zone 1 and get a 10X multiplier for a bonus, but the sad fact is that happens in every company. And yes, things that happened to Susan Fowler were horrible and the idea that it actually happened when everyone was trying to create a very progressive environment was extremely demoralizing. But her experience at Uber was definitely uncommon, all the women I worked with felt strongly that Uber was a principled and progressive company.
The people working for the company might have the best intentions, but when the ultimate goal is to extract as much value from the users of the platform as possible and monetize it, by way of technology which upends long establish social and economic mechanisms, you are playing with fire and anyone with a little but of judgement can see that the end result is going to be disaster for everyone but the investors.
Seriously, I don't care if you think you are a good person -- you helped destroy an established industry by subsidizing with loss-leading fares and payouts and created a culture of contract work which has workers grinding all the time with absolutely no network of support to rely on. On top of this the business model of 'not our fault, you are dealing with a 3rd party' platformization which washes its hands of any fault or support is currently wreaking havoc right now.
On the rider side, many people of color, especially Black, were not able to get taxi rides because they drove right by them. Look this up if you don't believe me -- there are innumerable examples of documentations of this, and this basically was altogether eliminated with Uber rides.
Uber was a game changer and a great equalizer for a great many people in society who didn't own their own cars (i.e. visitors, but also people who lived in major cities.)
In fact many taxi drivers became Uber drivers and have made a much better living this way.
Of course, there are also many more Uber drivers than at the start... and so it is kind of a race to the bottom with respect to an equilibrium achieved where it's now just an OK job instead of the $30+/hr like in the early days for uberX drivers...
The latest news on this is literally the opposite (Uber integrating w/ various taxi companies as their lead generation and dispatch provider)
FWIW, I've talked with a number of drivers over the years, and there's people using Uber as a flex source of income while some other pursuit hasn't gotten off the ground yet, people using it to supplement FTE income from elsewhere, people that made bank post pandemic, people doing it to be active in retirement, people who complain about platform issues, people that give it praise, and everything in between. I think if one is going to be outraged on behalf of drivers, it behooves them to try to understand how diverse the driver population is in the first place.
On a similar note, I think people often get hung up on some pet notion but fail to realize there's a lot of stuff going on that makes it hard to keep tally in an ethical bean counter. For example, there's efforts to support Ukraine[0], there's one about increasing women's workforce participation via government-subsided commutes in the middle east, there's the electric vehicle incentives, etc.
Do these offset some ideological notion of how the transportation industry ought to work? I don't know, but I think only looking at the ideology side isn't going to tell the whole story of what's happening on the ground.
I think latching on to the talking points from 8 years ago is not doing enough justice to how much Uber changed since then.
I am specifically talking a person about their experience working there at that time. This conversation is not about if Uber has changed or how bad the taxi industry was, this conversation is about 'can you be a good person while working for a corporation which is recklessly disregarding important social structures in order to maximize profit without concern for consequences'.
EDIT: I realize now I should have more clear with my tenses.
Shouldn't it be though? Even without getting into the weeds of Machiavellian ethics, I think if one can argue "you helped a high momentum company do X bad thing", then it's fair game to argue "you helped a high momentum company reach Y good outcome" as well. I don't mean to shit on the taxi industry when I bring them up, I mean that there are positive things Uber does today that are only feasible due to the sheer scale it achieved through the means it took to get there, and because even through its darkest periods, there were many insiders that sincerely wanted to do the right thing (and who eventually prevailed).
Is it "bad" if bad things happen from shaking things up and then good things materialize after that? As I said, I don't know to what extent the goods outweigh the bads or don't, but I'm trying to form strong opinions held weakly.
I get a bit drunk at a friend's house and my friend realizes I shouldn't drive home so he offers to let me sleep on in the guest room until I sober up. I refuse and get behind the wheel and make my way home. On the way I see a flipped car in a body of water near the road. I stop and jump in and save the trapped person.
Did the morally good act of saving a person negate the morally reprehensible act of driving drunk?
The end results don't make your actions in the original instance OK, even if the bad case (wrecking and killing someone) didn't happen but instead a good one did. I shouldn't have been driving since it objectively at the time was immoral and I had no way of knowing what would happen.
For one, the person you were replying to isn't the CEO. A more accurate analogy might be drawing ethical conclusions about the accountant in the company that built the road that led to the accident (or one at the beer company or a weapons company if we want to be spicier)
And the other thing is your drunk driver analogy has a big serendipity aspect to it. The change of tune at Uber was very deliberate in response to the reputational damage its earlier iteration inflicted on itself. A more useful thought experiment might be one about an ex-con gangster turned community service volunteer.
I agree reprehensible occasions remain reprehensible no matter what, what I don't agree with is the notion of immutable morality (X person is always as moral as they were previously), ascribing morality of amorphous groups to individuals, and various other cognitive biases I see people committing in threads like this.
Being able to walk around guilt free is nice, but I won't respect you for saying 'but I was intending to do good' if you willfully ignored the reality around you.
Then after getting knocked around regarding the peripheries of my message and whether or not taxis are good or Uber actually was bad, I ended up operating defensively and lost the tether on the thread with which I had started.
I accept that I approached this poorly but I maintain that my message shouldn't be discard solely due to my incompetence at delivering it.
Thanks for following through with this and I do hope we converse again.
First off, your opinions are completely meaningless to me.
> you helped destroy an established industry
LOL my other comment rings so true about how HN loves to bend over backwards to defend the taxi monopoly.
1) Taxi drivers were not employees they were independent contractors. 2) Taxi drivers had to pay for gas, rent the taxi, and clean the taxi at the end of their shift 3) Every shift they had to pay for the use of the car/medallion and they started the shift OWNING money. Once they earned enough to pay for the fees, they earned everything after that. If they had to end their shift early due to illness or family emergency, they LOST money for the day.
This is the "established industry" that you are protecting? I'm happy to be a part of dismantling this immoral monopoly that abused their workers. Uber drivers can turn on and off their apps whenever they want, they can work at Uber and Lyft at the same time, they can withdraw their earnings at the end of the shift, etc. They can stop working whenever they want and they can start working whenever they want. My time at Uber something I'm deeply proud of.
I would ask you to point out in my response where I am protecting anything. I am decrying the destruction of things by underhanded means (subsidizing to make costs artificially low and payments to workers high) which is irresponsible and completely indicative of a business model that has no concern for externalities or contingencies for failure. 'Oh the business didn't work' is a terrible line when in the process of failing you destroyed an entire working system, even if that system did suck in a lot of ways.
It is great that you are proud of your work, but I hope that in your current and future endeavors you may be able to use your talents for something a bit better.
Nah, I really don't. I enjoy having discussions where I educate people.
It wasn't underhanded, not in the least bit. Defending the status quo monopoly that exploits its workers is really strange. Destroying entrenched rent-seeking monopolies is doing the world a great service. Uber has been a public company since 2019. The fact that it's a viable business is beyond question at this point.
In that case, it sounds like you were a bunch of naive idealistic tech kids that bought the lie.
SV is very justifiably seen as a group of naive overconfident kids taking on the world and making a mess of it all, just as much as it is very justifiably seen as a group of ancap money men using computers to concentrate wealth and power.
If you want to “believe in a mission”, there are plenty of ethical jobs out there. It’s just a shame that so many smart people on this website are hooked on the high-TC go-go startup lifestyle.
The truth to me is a lot more nuanced. A lot of times engineers don't know how a product is actually being used. They have some key metrics they're responsible for but those are often abstracted away from the intended goal. Other engineers will see that something is headed in the wrong direction and try to influence it from the inside. Other engineers use their knowledge of the inside and share it widely. All of those depend on continued employment.
These kind of "causal relationship" judgements sound particularly adjacent to fire and brimstone rhetoric I've heard.
This means that morality consists of recognizing your responsibility to comprehending where you are in the causal DAG and what the probable outcomes of your actions might be, without shaming yourself about what you did before you understood.
It's not a perfect description because "getting paid not to understand X" is a real thing, but it's a start.
Most people working in a tech job in a company like Uber are extremely privileged and could work elsewhere.
“I’m morally absolved because I’m an employee” is a particular brand of modern American (esp. SV) thinking. It is not inherent and it’s just not as true as y’all make it out to be. If the collective realised that they actually had an iota of influence over the world around then, the US union movement wouldn’t be the dumpster fire that it is.
The IPOs matter and exits matter. Revenue matters if it's sustainable.
The list has two IPOs, which is great. But one is down 90% from it's IPO (aurora) and the other is down 98% from its IPO (bird scooters). Bird is only worth 75M today.
In the end I think real successes are those that deliver reasonable dividends.
But Bird scooter raised more than 900M, and today is worth 75M. Yes, it's an IPO and that's great, but it destroyed a lot of wealth. Not clear who ended up holding the bag (VCs or the public investors), but either way it's a bad outcome
My point was mostly about the details, not claiming that Bird was a success.
One could argue what the thesis or purpose of this piece might be, but the call to action seems to be this part:
“If you’re interested in supporting, joining, or investing in a company founded by Uber alumni or you’d just like to learn more, full details are below”
If you want to support, join or invest in someone on the basis of them being an Uber alumnus, you may want to know how much value was created by other alumni. The more sustainable (and, ideally, appreciating) that value is, the more likely you are to actually get to enjoy it.
Paying attention to what they are worth now seems more important than what they are worth relative to a random date.
"If they were raising money at 1% of their IPO value a month before, then IPO'd and then went down to 10% of their IPO value, it's a win."
"Bird raised at a 10MM valuation, IPOed at a 1 billion valuation and settled at a 100MM valuation" says the same thing in a clearer way and lets you know who got screwed (people who bought IPO shares).
And for employees, Bird stayed (close enough to) its IPO price for the 6 month lockups to expire and everyone to sell. In fact, it was at around 7 months in that the stock started tanking.
I highly recommend "Poverty, By America" if you'd like the background for my comment.
https://www.amazon.com/Poverty-America-Matthew-Desmond/dp/05...
Interested in learning more about this. Tagged the book for a future read, but in the meantime, can you enlighten us on the business model of Arrived?
Rents increase bc a return has to be made, and there is no escape. The poor stay poor. The rich get richer.
Disgusting is a matter of opinion but it does seem a zero sun game with a lot of losers.
As long as the wealthy can keep housing out of reach they can influence the distort the entire market and charge as much as they like. This is why housing is such a ‘good investment’. It’s reverse Robin Hood.
Not undermining the success of entrepreneurs but curious about tech’s obsession with mafia.
Aside, retargeting works!
[1]https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/05/venture-capital-using-data...
From the linked article linked about 'Fast':
Earlier this year, NPR reported on how CEO Holland had his share of controversy in Australia prior to starting Fast. Holland’s former startup, Tow.com.au, which aimed to be “the Uber of towing,” failed in what at least one person described as a “disaster.” NPR’s article noted that Holland’s previous venture was embroiled “in a multimillion-dollar billing dispute with the Australian state government over towing and impounding fees that led to the startup’s liquidation in 2018.”
A couple of months before the self driving car killed a pedestrian in Arizona, a drunk engineer from that team told me 'everybody is lying on their human intervention reports to the state, that's just how the sausage is made'
Late Uber produces seriously impressive technology and mature, reliable services. Early Uber was so errr.. problematic... that I'd be hesitant to wear that as a badge.
In other words, Uber killed Uber.
The whole way things unfolded subsequently (due to several other pile-ons in following weeks, and eventually TK's ouster in mid 2017) still seems surreal to this day.
(I worked at Uber for ~5 yrs and remember this time period well.)
everybody was lying on their takeover reports. EXCEPT Uber.
Uber was banned from California because they refused to lie, and refused to be made to look stupid compared to the companies who WERE lying, and who have literally decapitated multiple people while their vehicle was in control.
my time with Uber was rocky, and I had many qualms. I left partially because I didn't want to be part of the culture that produced Herzberg's death. but this specific thing is not one they should be criticized for.
the cultural issues were real. that's fair to say.
Do you have more on this?
Now Tesla has decapitated people. Particularly after Elon demanded that they stop using the radar to detect potential collisions. (He said it was too conservative, so they should only apply the brakes when both the camera and the radar detected an object.) The Model S drove under a tractor trailer, sheering off the everything from the bottom of the windshield up, and then continued to drive for quite a distance, until it drove into a ditch.
https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-tesla-florida-acciden...
So you ended up having insanity, like the necessity for even a black car service to "return to their base" after a ride, for time periods up to 1.5 hrs. Basically trying to nix the notion of efficiency in ridesharing.
We all know that nowadays most of those rules were battled back.
But the taxi industry and regulators had some very crooked ways which were really to the detriment of broader society trying to get places without having their own car.
There has to be a middle ground.