Carl Icahn Takes $100M Stake in Lyft | Hacker News Reader

Carl Icahn Takes $100M Stake in Lyft

wsj.com

64 pointsfoobarqux59 comments

I love how greenmail was rebranded to "activist investing". For those of you who don't know, greenmail is basically going to a company and saying: "Hey, I can convince your investors you suck and should be replaced, or you can pay me to go away." That's also activist investing (but activists are good right?)

Yet to be fair, if some random guy can convince shareholders that the board needs to be replaced, the board may be screwing up. Maybe those are the ones most likely to pay someone to settle down.

It's actually a shame, because the term "activist investor" already had a meaning.

It's what you would call nuns in the 80s who used proxy votes from pension funds to push pro-people corporate policy. Or Harvard students in the 60s who used proxies from their university endowment to agitate against corporations profiting off the Vietnam War.

These days, that doesn't really exist anymore, but if you have to refer to it its usually called "shareholder activism." Even then, most people who read that assume that you're referring to greenmailing.

His most recent foray was in eBay and Paypal. He was demonized at the time but it would appear he was right. There are literally thousands of choices for him. He only shows up on your doorstep if he thinks you're vulnerable then puts all his own money at stake. He may not always be right but I think he (and others like him) can have a very positive role in the overall ecosystem. A lot of these management teams and boards are just too dang cozy and it can be nearly impossible to shake them up.

To be fair, he doesn't need to convince that many people.

Is it possible to change the link to the Google one, so people don't find themselves firewalled

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&c...

You could also pay for WSJ journalism. I'm surprised HN doesn't ever seem to care about this issue.

Not paying for WSJ content is a mitzvah.

The two are not mutually exclusive, and I'm not even sure about the net effect of linking to the non firewalled article. If I couldn't read any article from the WSJ, I don't know how likely would it be that I'd sign up.

fair point. Though if you never hit the firewall, you'd also probably never sign up.

Someone posted this bookmarklet the other day and it works pretty good.

javascript:location.href='https://www.google.com/webhp?#q=' + encodeURIComponent(location.href) + '&btnI=I'

That doesn't always work - you have to actually access it from the Google search page. Clicking on that link you posted, I still get a paywall.

Inserting a fake google refer seems to do the trick.

I wonder how things will go with Icahn and Andreessen on the same board?

http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-03-04/the-icahn-vs...

wait Ebay did spin-off paypal, Andreessen is still at EBay's board?

Icahn for sure just invested so he could be higher in a liq pref stack than A16Z, so when things go south he can take away anything that A16Z could have potentially recouped

There is a theory that Icahn is so rich and old that the money doesn't really matter to him much anymore. Instead he gets the most value from investing his money in ways that entertain him and sometimes that's by poking people he doesn't like in the eye (Ackman, Andreessen).

Carl Icahn's shenanigans were part of what drove Marvel Comics to bankruptcy in the mid-90s. I hope the same thing doesn't happen to Lyft.

He ruined TWA airlines before that. Argue as you want about his success as a businessman, he is bad bad news for employees, board members, and usually (other) stockholders.

Motorola didn't end up so great because of him either.

Well remember he's only getting involved in risky projects because that's where he can maximize upside. If your company is doing well to begin with he's not there.

Not quite. Netflix was doing fine, and yet he kept trying to do his shit to them so that he could chop the company up and sell it off, piece by piece. I'm glad the Netflix board was successful in telling him to go fuck himself.

You're forgetting when he showed up at Netflix. It was after their disastrous splitting of the DVD and streaming biz when they lost 1 million subscribers and their stock price crashed.

Apple seems to be weathering the storm though.

Probably because when things are great and the company is growing in value, it'd be very hard to convince the shareholders that things need to change. If they start missing targets quarter after quarter, that's when he'd have leverage.

As a Houston resident, we don't have any competition from Lyft anyway: they exited the market last year.

What's interesting is whether Icahn is for or against autonomous cars supplying the service. Obviously Uber/Google have one opinion, but Carl may disagree since lyft has no autonomous car technology.

> but Carl may disagree since lyft has no autonomous car technology.

Which they could buy from Tesla or Delphi.

>Lyft raised $530 million in a funding round earlier this year led by Japanese e-commerce firm Rakuten. Mr. Icahn’s investment is the largest portion of a $150 million extension to that round at the same valuation, the company said

>The money is an extension of a round of funding Lyft announced in March that values the three-year-old company at $2.5 billion.

Doing back of the envelope math, Lyft is valued at $1.97B premoney. This $680MM round gives the new investors 25.6% of the company. Uber raises even bigger rounds while giving away much smaller fractions of the company each time. Fascinating to see how market position dictates these terms in such dramatic ways.

Carl Icahn is a contrarian. There's no question Uber is ahead, but Lyft has material market share. I don't see this as an activist investor issue. In Silicon Valley, people fight, and they get over it and move on. I'd be surprised if Marc and Carl can't, and don't, do the same.

Icahn is a raider. He has no plan to grow Lyft. He wants to sell it to someone and make money.

I wonder how much of the company the Lyft founders still own. They have raised over $1B at relatively (compared to Uber) low valuations.

What a great PR move for Uber!

sigh... and tomorrow lyft will adopt worse printing tactics than uber. that guy makes uber founders look like madre Teresa

I find the Icahn hate very curious, and very similar to the outrage towards Donald Sterling.

Both people have done questionable (I'm trying to be charitable) things that have hit the public limelight, and have been ostracized and scapegoated by their peers so that the public has a visible enemy they can attack instead of realizing the problems are endemic to larger systems and groups of people.

Honestly, if you think Sterling/Icahn are even in the bottom 25% of their equally immoral peers you're being duped. Continuing to vilify the symptoms of larger diseases will only allow the disease to spread, and will solve nothing. Maybe we should take a better look at the environments that create such people?

It all rather reminds me of this Scarface scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzfX0T4LDD8

Dangerous move in what could end up being a 'winner take all' market.

Seems he already lost interest in eBay.

That's cause he won.

Bye bye, Lyft

this is Lyft committing suicide and donating its zombified corpse to Carl Icahn.

Why anyone would accept a single red cent from Carl Icahn boggles my mind.

He's no different than anyone else playing the money game (just take a look at his accusations towards Mr. Andreesen, who, I think, is a nice guy). He's just better at it.

He's an ass who has a long track record of basically destroying businesses, chopping them up, and selling them off. Fucking over anyone who isn't himself in the process.

There are others who do this, too. He's just the worst at it.

To HackerNews, Please don't include stories in your feed that go to paid site.

Why not?

N=1 but all of my friends use uber and none use Lyft. Not sure how long they'll last.

I use Lyft exclusively. I've never touched Uber for probably the same reason as others - the brand/culture just feels... icky. I want a ride, not a chauffeur.

To be fair though, almost every Lyft driver I've had says they also drive for Uber, it just depends on demand. And consensus seems to be that out-of-towners use Uber while locals use Lyft.

I use Lyft exclusively and it's not based on any features or advantages they have/don't have. It's just conscious decision not be be anywhere near Uber. Too much d-bagness in a company image (I know that many will praise successful douches though, sadly)

I personally don't use Uber - Uber almost screwed me in my one attempt to use it, not sending anyone for almost 2 hours before I pulled the plug and called a traditional cab. This was to catch a flight, where I ended up making it with 1 minute to spare for check in.

Lyft has been an infinitely better experience for me, and I have the option to tip.

Anecdotal, but I use Lyft as much as I do Uber. I like being able to tip in-app with Lyft, and I want to see them both survive so we can options.

I don't use either. Is there a way to know roughly how much you're going to pay before you get-in?

With Lyft Line the price is fixed ahead of the pickup, I don't see an estimate for the standard Lyft.

With Uber the price is either fixed also (SF), or there is a fare estimate button after you set your pickup location.

Pretty sure they all have a way to get a fare estimate if you enter the destination before requesting.

N=~10, my friends are about 70/30 Uber/Lyft usage. Sometimes one will have lower surge pricing. Some have Lyft for Work and that drives a lot of usage. UberPool for longer rides with no time urgency that would otherwise be much more expensive than $7.

Most people just use whatever is the cheapest / most effective for their purpose. It's a commodity service. I know friends who use sidecar, because it often can sidestep surge pricing due to it's relative lack of popularity.

I have to use Uber as a Houstonian (Lyft pulled out), but anytime I travel, I use Lyft whenever possible.

Doesn't Uber need Lyft to be around so they won't get called a monopoly?

It's not illegal to have a monopoly. The real issue is if the company employs illegally anticompetitive business practices.

http://www.girardgibbs.com/antitrust-monopoly/

Especially because Uber pretty much created the market for ride sharing

You'd have to define their industry pretty narrowly to say they had a monopoly, as most would include taxis in their industry.

Yeah, Mastercard and Visa

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