Lyft says its revenue is growing nearly 3x faster than Uber’s(techcrunch.com) |
Lyft says its revenue is growing nearly 3x faster than Uber’s(techcrunch.com) |
A stretch: is Lyft going to use these metrics to go public before Uber to hype itself up?
It seems like it Lyft has everything to gain and little to lose by building a growth story and rushing out to IPO. They get to set the price, they could be used as an Uber proxy which would increase demand for their stock, and more.
It really is possible for a company to piss off enough people.
Where's the data for this?
> with a particularly strong Q4 during which its revenue outpaced Uber’s by 2.75x
How much revenue did Lyft pull in? Or Uber? This article isn't very good.
How confident were you in the accuracy of the internal numbers being shared? ;-)
Devil's advocate question for sure, but I've been at companies where real numbers of all kinds were casually inflated internally during communications for morale (or just to flatter management's ego)..
It's much nicer and easier to get an Uber at most airports and know you're not getting screwed, communicate your destination easily when you don't speak the same language and know that they take payment by card -- rather than arriving at the destination, having already asked if they take card payment, they said yes, then suddenly they don't.
Looking at it another way, given a huge funding pool (say $10B) a modestly competent company could outpace both Uber and Lyft in revenue growth by the end of the year simply by subsidizing rides even more. The initial skepticism towards ride sharing services is gone and there's little keeping customers and drivers loyal to either Uber or Lyft.
But it will reach a point where the dispute will not be with the old business models related to mobility. And at this point, it will make sense to compare these companies. But at the moment it makes no sense to compare revenue.
It is a expression with no clearly defined meaning, and really shouldn't be used.
(No doubt that some companies take it much too far, but profits are not critical in this stage of any online/mobile ride-hailing company.)
Factually accurate, but none the less closer to bias / propaganda than truth. Unnecessary and inappropriate.
Techcrunch (and all others who choose to deny their journalistic responsibilities) should be embarrassed for being so willing to publish such click bait-y headlines.
Perhaps greed isn't so good after all?
Perhaps Uber should first try to get profitable.
My extended family in the southeast and northeast US is familiar with Uber (without using it), but they haven't heard of Lyft. When I lived in Chicago, most of my peers had Lyft, but Uber was the always the first choice.
Does anyone else see the same trend? The bay area certainly seems to be Lyft-dominant, but I haven't seen that anywhere else.
HN is not only a regional but also an ideological bubble, and it seems to hate companies that are doing well for themselves (except Apple and Musk-affiliated gigs).
They've never heard of Lyft and don't know anything about any Uber controversy other than the fact that 'taxi drivers hate it!"
Contrast e.g. Equifax, Comcast, SAP, etc, who've pissed of plenty of people with little consequences.
Apple didn't sell the first smartphone or tablet...
Facebook wasn't the first social media site...
Amazon wasn't the first to sell shit online...
And Lyft wasn't the first ride-sharing app.
Maybe being first to market is overrated?
Sometimes being first to market yields an unshakable dominance in that market for a long time to come... Mostly not though :)
What you're pointing out is often called 'second movers advantage'. Apples iPhone is a pretty decent example: by not being the first phone provider Apple got to enter a maturing market with a mature offering, use their own core competencies, and dominate. That's hard to do if you're bogged down with backwards compatibility and fighting to make the tech possible.
Can you name 3?
Your last sentence reminded me of that.
I do see the appeal with using Uber internationally that others mentioned in this thread, though.
The other stuff such as Uber's sexual harrassment, i get, but the above boggles my mind
This has absolutely been my experience in a city where both have operated for awhile. Things may be different in cities where one service is newer.
Drivers may express a preference for one or the other, but ultimately they drive for whichever one earns them more income at a given time of day.
They might stick with one for a bit to get certain bonuses but there’s no long term loyalty for any of them.
It seems there's even a market catering to these people now: https://www.amazon.com/Driver-Light-Removable-Suction-Ridesh...
In fairness, it’s a great benefit.
But for years they were basically just one among many sites, and not even terribly notable in the overall retail space. There were lots of other companies selling lots of other stuff at the time. Buy.com, for example, and ebay of course. Of all the ways to buy things online amazon was pretty far down the list until the mid 2000s.
What Amazon brought to the table was a unique combination of good web dev / services skills and top notch fulfillment logistics. And highly competitive pricing. Buying things on amazon was just a better overall experience compared to other sites. For example, when you put something in your shopping cart on amazon it stays there, it doesn't magically disappear for some artificial reason. And the overall experience of search/browse, read reviews, add to cart, then checkout, which today is commonplace throughout online retail was really particularly well honed by amazon. They didn't invent the form but they shaved off all the hard edges. This meant that amazon had much better customer retention than other sites and as amazon added new product lines existing amazon customers often decided to just use amazon for those things too. It took years and years for that momentum to snowball into the online retail juggernaut that Amazon is today.
A lot of other companies at the time had more revenue and invested more money into their stores than Amazon did, but they didn't win because ultimately they didn't execute as well. Amazon was helped by being online early, it gave them the experience necessary to build into what they became, but it's a stretch to claim they had first mover advantage.
That's just not true. Yes, they focused largely on books and music originally, but they were still a first mover in ecommerce and a huge presence. Heck, their 1 click patent was published in 99.
Lyft isn't a leap up from Uber. But I do stick with Lyft because Uber's been so cold.
The competition in ride-hailing industry is pretty intense right now actually. You have several big players:
- Ola (India)
- Didi (China + Brazil & perhaps Japan soon)
- Grab (Southeast Asia)
- Go-Jek (Indonesia, a very populous country with 250 million by the way)
- Uber (global but has retreated from certain markets already, see Uber/Didi deal in China)
- Lyft (US/Canada)
- bunch of startups in Europe but not sure if any of them are big enough to mentionIn other words: when I travel somewhere, be that a different city or country, I'll by default have Uber already running on my phone; I don't have whatever regional equivalent there is there. This also works the other way around: because I have Uber setup for whenever I travel, I end up using it over any local apps because it's already there and another taxi app offers me nothing that Uber doesn't. I'd love for Lyft or anything similar to get off their asses and expand internationally but I suspect I'll be an old man by the time that happens in any serious capacity.
edit: for example you said you work for Grab. Ok, granted that people from other countries are likely just a tiny market not worth chasing so you don't particularly care whether I use Uber whenever I visit SG, that's fine. But users in SG surely care about only needing one application whenever they travel abroad, which drives adoption towards Uber in Grab's detriment; that's a big reason why Uber is so valuable. From reading the Grab website it looks like that's exactly what Grab is chasing too: expansion into other markets (and props for already supporting multiple countries, along with the app being totally fine with my unsupported country phone number).
I imagine you would install it if Uber is not very common in that market; waiting for an Uber to come might take much longer than for you to install that regional equivalent.
There. It's not only in Greece, it's pretty much all over the world except a few places.
I know, the taxi drivers work hard, but the standards before Uber were really abysmal. Why? Because monopoly.
For the young ones and those with poor memory, the overcharging, taking 5 times the normal length "shortcuts", geographically challenged, downright scammy taxi drivers were a norm. In the States, they also expect a tip of 20% for deigning to do their job; one thing I never understood in Boston is how it is physically possible to accumulate so many fumes in a modern car. In places where the taxis are in demand, they wouldn't bother picking you up.
Today the horrible ones still exist, of course, but their number is dwindling.
Well, that—and, maybe, a pinch of Company-wide culture of sexual harassment.
If a large org has junior employees harassing other employees, that's bad.
If the CEO and executive level is actively participating in and covering for same, that's organizational policy.
Source required (specifically about company-wide culture, x != entire company fwiw where x is the number you are claiming).
Doing this is way more exhausting than cheering them on (see SpaceX, people have fun in those posts). "Oh this company is doing well and I'm jealous"? Seriously don't know how that's enough.
There's a slightly less nefarious interpretation which is that people have different values, and disagreement happens.
So many people are extremely happy to see other people's success here, for example Lyft here. But what you might think is unimportant virtue signalling is something other people actually care about, sometimes deeply
People by default will be excited about stuff that's "good news". But the community is pretty big, so there will usually be a set of people that see an issue, and comment on it.
So in the end many things coming through will be negative or cynical. The fact that people tend not to just comment "neat" but will write the paragraphs of research saying how X is wrong doesn't help in the impressions. But for things like research papers, most people tend to just comment on the contents.
I think the reason so few companies on HN have this reputation is because many of these companies are problematic. Google is the symbol of ad networks. Facebook does a bunch of privacy-busting stuff. Amazon exploits many workers on the lower end and it's not certain that their monopoly will be benificial in the future.
If anything I think it's an indictment on the kind of company that succeeds in SV (and, well, capitalism). I think we all remember old "do no evil" Google financing a bunch of awesome stuff. And when they turned out to be like every other company.... well that sucks.
Inversely loads of smaller businesses tend to get a lot of good press on this website, because people can see the passion and the "not about quarterly revenue" attitude.
Everyone, regardless of field, can relate to rockets and cars.
Far fewer people would relate to, say, optimizing insurance benefit payments.
In my European bubble people are generally aware that Uber is a morally questionable company (without necessary knowing about the details, just a reputation) and some have heard of Lyft, even though it's not available.
Actually in Greece 4 drivers have been criminally charged for violating the law by driving for Uber and falsifying documents (as per company instructions).
In the countries of South Europe (Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal) in which I have personal experience, although there are some Uber drivers operating illegally or in gray zones, penetration is minimal. You can only get rides in capitals and major cities, and they're not much cheaper.
The main reasons are 2: people hate Uber because they know they're exploiting workers, and taxi drivers have strong unions. Uber IMHO is the only entity that managed to become more hated than taxi drivers.
The reason Uber is banned everywhere can be summed up by the European Court of Justice: Uber needs to stop pretending to be just an app. It's a transport company, and it's using the app as an excuse to operate illegally, bypassing regulations, responsibility and avoiding tax.
Imagine that - they are able to do that without the "Uber" model of ignoring regulation and doing the fuck they want regardless.
https://metropolitan.fi/entry/uber-returns-to-finland-in-jul...
Wow. Can you back that up?
SpaceX is cool because there's a really good chance they'll be more successful at missions to the moon and Mars than NASA has been recently. They're both forward-thinking companies.
Not saying they aren't doing good things. But they get more credit than the good things they're doing would merit. And probably more than even effective PR can explain.
The apps involved weren't bad either. You entered your location (or had it located via GPS), told the destination and it would give you the exact price that you could either pay directly at the taxi (before you drive) or via Paypal/CC/etc.
It was quite pleasant though apparently not very popular since a lot of people simply prefer public transport or their own car here.