Uber's Original Blog and First Posts | Hacker News Reader

Uber's Original Blog and First Posts

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216 pointsUberEstimate75 comments

check out the comments on their Techcrunch article - It would discourage any young founder. http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/15/ubercab-closes-uber-angel-r...

As they say, never read the comments.

I like the lady who immediately connected Uber and self driving cars.

Saw the same thing. Someone give her a million dollars and 3 years...

She's a Wall Street Journal tech columnist.

Not at all to diminish her insight, but for perspective Rainbows End was published in 2006: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End

Would be curious about earlier visions of self-driving car services.

You know, TechCrunch comments are typically not any better than what I see on YouTube nowadays. But what's scary is many of the commenters are here in the Valley and claim to work in tech.

Ok, maybe not too scary and unexpected if you spend enough time talking to people on CoFoundersLab. But still...

Interesting to see that Ryan Graves replied to one of the comments.

He actually replied a lot in the early techcrunch articles about Uber.

Uber and Airbnb taught me to pay attention to what people do, not what they say. By November 2010 I was taking Uber(Cab) once a day around SOMA and absolutey loving it, referring all my friends to it, etc...and yet I still remember letting the pessimism of the online nay sayer crowd infect my brain and convince me it wasn't an awesome service. Live and learn. Airbnb was a little different in that they had a soft pivot from renting out a spare bed/room to mostly full home rentals (it was just a much easier site to use than the other options available at the time), but not too different than Uber in terms of traction once it really hit.

I thought you were going to go in the opposite direction with that comment, in that Uber says that they're all sweetness and light and awesome for the drivers, yet the actual reports of treatment by the drivers suggest more that they're being screwed.

The comments on the internet suggest this. The number of people signing up to be drivers suggests otherwise.

Or the number of people signing up suggests a very high turnover…

That's marketing for you. There's been enough scandals in the past two years for it to be clear this is an evil company, but not many people know about this. For most, Uber is this cool new disruptive startup with awesome app and cheaper service, an underdog fighting the Evil Taxi Lords.

Lets unpack this myth of pure evil argument you've got going.

Uber is an evil company because they do some evil things?

Are they then not a good company because they do some good things?

Or are you saying ALL their actions are evil, and done intentionally, because they enjoy being evil?

The car requirement was a bit evil? 2008 foor door at one point, until they decided to lure Lyft drivers? 'Don't have the right car(on a ever changing list); 'we'll get you a good deal on a new Prius!' ( I know a guy who ruined his credit, and lost a huge down payment because he couldn't make what Uber said he would make with that new Prius. Yes--he was busy on Friday nights driving drunks from bar to bar, but their was not enough work to keep that Prius.)

... Wait, Uber is evil, because a guy you know bought a car he couldn't afford and Uber didn't pay him enough to pay it off?

So if I bought a ferrari, and I can't really afford to pay it off... the company I work for is evil. Got it!

If you have a bucket of honey and a bucket of poop, and you combine one with the other, you have two buckets of poop.

Given capitalism gives us the profit motive.

The profit motive inevitably leads to a company prioritising dollars over people (whether that is a consumer/supplier/employee/etc). Lets also agree that prioritisation is generally considered "Evil".

Are all for profit companies buckets of poop?

Is capitalism evil?

The number of people signing up to drive tells us a lot about the number of unemployed / underemployed individuals who have a car.

A job that's slightly better than starving to death is not a good job.

The best job opportunity for them is the best job opportunity for them. I wouldn't blame Uber for the fact that their driver jobs might not be some idealized version of the best possible job. For many of the drivers, it presumably is the best possible job they can get. I'd blame every other company who couldn't do better, not the one company who seems to be giving the best opportunity.

I think it's funny that you responded to a comment that boils down to "don't listen to random haters on the Internet" by essentially being one.

Only if you boil the original comment down so far that you evaporate the bit that says 'look at the actions, not the talk'...

Exactly this. That's what I learned from Uber (and in some ways, AirBnB too) - from my initial excitement to the eventual realization that this is just investors and management making money on breaking laws and damaging the structure society. Disruption, they say.

You do realise the law making process is basically corrupted? It's called regulatory capture.

Most of the taxi laws are there to create scarcity, not protect the consumer.

Even with these laws, there are tons and tons abuses by legal taxi companies, but you don't hear about them.

The only real way to protect the consumers, is to allow the consumer to choose to use a service or not. If they want your custom, they better behave and sort there stuff out. It's the ultimate regulation. Government regulation forces you to use a particular service because you don't have much choice.

Creating laws just ends up with complicated rules, loopholes, and twisting the rules to a companies advantage.

You don't think French taxi drivers are burning cars, and rioting over safety of the consumer do you? There doing it because its breaking there self-interested monopoly.

What you described, though debatable on its own, has nothing to do with regulatory capture.

> Regulatory capture is a form of political corruption that occurs when a regulatory agency, created to act in the public interest, instead advances the commercial or special concerns of interest groups that dominate the industry or sector it is charged with regulating. Regulatory capture is a form of government failure; it creates an opening for firms to behave in ways injurious to the public (e.g., producing negative externalities). The agencies are called "captured agencies".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

Errm "instead advances the commercial or special concerns of interest groups that dominate the industry or sector it is charged with regulating"

Incumbent Taxi companies have been lobbying regulation bodies for laws to stop competition for a long time. That's exactly what i'm talking about. They use excuses like "reducing congestion" etc when more taxi's actually reduces congestion.

Taxi companies all over the world are currently lobbying and forcing their local regulation agencies to stop uber(I.e Competition). I.E http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-33281896

They spend a lot of money on PR to manipulate media to create scare stories as well.

This sounds exactly like regulatory capture. The taxi and limo commissions are doing exactly this.

Uber is taking advantage of a market that has been completely stifled by regulatory capture, allowing the incumbents to catastrophically under invest in personnel, systems and vehicles. These companies pillaged the industry with terrible services. Competition is going to bring them back to the table with far better service and pricing.

Probably with new owners post bankruptcy.

But on the other hand, someone driving whole day, every day for Uber is an Uber employee, straight and simple. Yet uber refuses to treat them as employees, because it insists they are contractors. As the recent California ruling shows - they are not.

And yet a lot of people prefer working as contractors, as it confers tax advantages, control over hours and a higher salary(If your good).

Most Uber taxi drivers I talk to, like working for uber.

Uber's big advantage is that they aren't taxis. They don't pick people up off the side of the road who are holding their hands up, or go in taxi queues at the airport.

There are good reasons for those services to be regulated the way they are; the consumer has much less choice and power.

Uber is in the car service model, where you call someone to come get you. (Taxis have been very big players in this market, so it's confusing, but their displacement here is very real and also very fair.)

Uber has gotten good enough that people very rarely need that first protected-and-regulated market any more.

What about legitimate regulations that Uber skirts by drawing semantic distinctions? When an Uber driver refuses to make accommodations for riders with disabilities (as required by law in the US), Uber says, "sorry, not our driver -- we only serve as an intermediary." When Uber argues their drivers who meet the criteria of full time employees are just contractors to avoid all the complexities that entails, they are breaking the law (regardless of what the law "should be").

Uber riders (myself among them) are enjoying low fares paid for in an investor-fueled land-grab to capture some market share. The only question is whether their heavy-handed tactics will result in adequate market share to maintain the business profitably without incurring regulatory or consumer blowback. I would say so far that the answer is "yes".

I think there is a sustainable business model for Uber, but I don't think that Uber-in-5-years is going to be playing the same games that they're playing today.

Have you talked to an Uber driver who told you this? Jason Fried once commented about how he talked to his Uber drivers about the service, so I started doing it too. I have heard complaints, but I have never heard an Uber driver say that Uber was worse than the cab or car dispatch companies the driver worked at before. Not once.

I don't ever take UberX cars, though. Is that where the screwing is happening?

Yes - and most people user UberX

I always take UberX, I usually talk to the driver, and I almost never hear complaints. (The sole exception: when they lowered prices here in Boston). It's usually lots of praise.

I also often meet new drivers who are in love with the idea that they can work whenever they feel like it after their shift at the restaurant, or are retired, or somesuch. I don't know whether it's just a continuous stream of new drivers, but it seems like there's room for a world where all drivers are part-timers. It screws with the career drivers, but who are we to say that the part timers don't deserve that revenue?

I wonder if they would feel free to gripe.

Uber ... Airbnb ... now excuse me for asking, but are there any other hugely successful VC-funded startup stories that did not get involved in some nasty legal scandal or other by their own actions or neglect, as they grew?

Especially when spreading out internationally, Uber and Airbnb just thrashed over local laws as if it was perfectly fine to act like they shouldn't have to apply to them as long as they did not get caught.

Is this considered normal?

Should you consider it normal?

What if European startups came to the US with an air of "... yeah, we'll just do whatever we feel like until you catch us and tell us not to"?

What happened to Garrett Camp?

http://expa.com

I was expecting really bad comments. I would say they were actually mostly positive, or constructive criticism.

Indeed the second-highest voted comment is this :

"Freelance taxi's? There must be taxi laws that requires special transportation permits to allow such activity. Taxi companies will not like this and will try to stop drop dime drivers from popping up everywhere. Bandwagon Boy VC investments are the first signs of a sketchy product. "

Quite prophetic words. Uber has been called out several times over the years for its questionable ethics. France banning of UberPop today after severe protests from licensed cabbies, is also rather timely.

> How lame can it get? There are already iPhone apps that hail cabs for you! I've lost all respect for Super Angels. They are just plain stupid!!

Ah, the importance of being the last rather than the first.

I particularly like the one who suggested that if Arrington gave him the money instead, he would have a billion dollar company in three years.

How long did it take Uber to become a billion dollar company?

When I first heard about Uber, it was as a luxury car service through mobile app, that caught my fancy. There were a few mobile based cab booking services before, but none of them ever sends a limo.

That comment seems quite prescient!

People made fun of dropbox too.

I was lucky enough to meet Curtis last year at Uber HQ. Awesome dude, incredibly smart. His Node talk from 2011 was a big contributing factor to me learning node.js. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jups7FveC1E

Edit: And yes, God Mode was for developers. The media should chill and learn to nerd out every once in a while...

God mode existing wasn't the problem. Access to it in production was... Why did managers have access?

I don't understand how you would optimize routing/matching algorithms if you didn't have a visualization of all the trips/cars in the city. As a entry-level engineer.

Maybe it shouldn't have been tied to PII, but on the other hand there are some wins that you miss out on if you don't. (IIRC someone said that pairing women with women whenever possible increases overall rider engagement?)

My assumption is that Uber became too big too fast.

> pairing women with women whenever possible increases overall rider engagement

I'd fear for the driver's safety if this is true and this arrangement became public. Whoever thinks this is a good idea?

FWIW, here's a related data point:

> One in every 10 Lyft ride matches passengers with friends in common, according to Lyft.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/lyft-launches-profi...

This talk is great -- I'm re-watching now!

Anyone have other similar videos? It's always cool to hear the about others' systems and how they evolve

You know, we still write lots of stuff in Node (and Python and Go). A bunch of the stuff we are working on can be found on our GH page https://github.com/uber

There is absolutely no need to have god mode for developers. Develop your privacy sensitive product on a need to know princinple.

Followup: did you had god mode within WhatsApp too for devs?

No, just NSA Mode

Bit of a plug, I recently put together a collection of changes to homepages from startups in the ride sharing space (including Uber) over time. You can check it out here: http://www.startuptimelines.org/collections/uber_lyft_taxi_s...

Uber.... well that escalated quickly.

Who knew back then that they'd be burning cars in the streets of Paris over this company.

Well, in France they burn cars once in a while over any reason really :-)

Any reason? Youth poverty and loss of trust in the government, really.

Other reasons too. In the protests in the north of France over British beef (amongst other things) in the 90s(?) there was much burning of lorries.

I doubt it is a french thing either: how many riots end up involving fire (London the other year for instance). At a certain critical mass of angry uncontrolled people, a fire will be started somewhere within or near by.

Also this: http://ubercab.tumblr.com/post/485301492/entrepreneurial-roc...

If the dates of the posts are correct, they were moving really really fast.

You don't get to a valuation of $40B in 6 years moving slowly ;)

I had the opposite impression - the dates on the blog post start in Sept 2010, but the TechCrunch article says that Garrett had the initial idea for the company in 2008. That's almost 2 years between idea and angel funding.

They tried it multiple times, battery life and phone hardware couldn't handle the requirements needed. Even with the phone plugged in, until 2010 when it became possible.

Tone immediately changes post funding, brash excitement early customer phase -> pr.

Wait, I'm confused...

So taxi services had no phone dispatch over there? Like, you couldn't ring the taxi booking, and they would route a taxi to you?

This has been a thing in Sydney for as long as I've been alive --- it probably started up in the 70s. It wasn't great, and sometimes the taxi wouldn't show. But it existed.

Was this not available in SF? Elsewhere in the US...?

Of course it was, but it was extremely unreliable. That's what led to the founding of Uber in the first place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uber_%28company%29#Founding

From the Wikipedia writeup, it could very well be that they just didn't know the rules, but the experience in SF is the same: you can call a cab, but it's hit-or-miss.

It existed in SF, but (at least at the time) the cab would only show up maybe 10% of the time.

To echo SilasX, there was (and in most places) no way to ensure that your taxi will acctually arrive if dispatched.

Sometimes while en route to you, they'd pick up another passenger or the wrong cab would pick you up which would frustrate many of the drivers.

Car services have always existed (with a much smaller regulatory burden than taxis), and taxis have always been significant players in the car service industry

Uber just brought it all together and brought enough players into the fold to make "car service" almost strictly superior to "taxi."

Here is a post of the first tweets from popular app companies - https://tapfame.com/launching-an-app/

I didn't know how corrupt YC was until now. How much is your soul worth?

I'll bite. What?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com