Uber to focus on FCF and hints of bumpy ride ahead for employees

Uber to focus on FCF and hints of bumpy ride ahead for employees(twitter.com)

32 points by Lapz 4 years ago | 9 comments

djbebs 4 years ago |

Uber is running out of runway I see. Who knew that losing money on every trip you sell was an unsustainable business model?

rightbyte 4 years ago | |

Their software engineering overhead is just insane. I found some numbers from 2018 which states that there are about 90 000 FTE Uber drivers to some 1000s engineers. It is really strange setup for a cab company.

They are using their scale for bloat rather than a scale advantage.

https://www.epi.org/publication/uber-and-the-labor-market-ub...

djbebs 4 years ago | | |

The whole business has bad economics, and it's been a perfect example of Venture Capitalist charity

kramerger 4 years ago | | |

What stops a much smaller company to create a more efficient solution and take over the market now?

axg11 4 years ago |

We were promised the roaring ‘20s. Instead the party’s over, every tech company is pulling back plans and preparing for a multi-year recession.

The tone of these emails is odd to me. Dara is not stupid, he must know that Uber is bloated and over-engineered. If there is a long recession affecting their business, they will inevitably have to trim some of this fat. Surely _that_ is what was discussed with investors.

lalos 4 years ago | |

Specially the part of “most of our employees are below 30”, sounds like that sound bite is still fresh on the mind from that conversation with investors.

strikelaserclaw 4 years ago | | |

Most big tech engineers who went to SV in 2010's have experienced unprecedented appreciation to their equity and that forms their baseline of expectations. For a lot of people, it is not "oh my 100k a year equity grew to 300k a year", its my income per year grew 300k a year and my expectations are for 500k a year from now on. This is especially bizarre at companies which fail to make money because their business model is flawed, no amount of engineering talent can make a shitty business model functional. What this all means is that we are in for a slow down in the next ten years.