
As Uber Prepares to Go Public, Its Lead Lawyer Races to Clean It Up - SeanBoocock
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/03/technology/uber-ipo-legal-issues.html
======
jeswin
Uber has among the worst customer support policies I have seen - but alas they
are a monopoly and there's no end in sight. I think they should be regulated.

Recently, I raised an issue when I got billed twice for the same ride. In
India, they have no phone support, just email. Instead of checking
transactions on their end, they wrote back to me asking me to submit my bank
statement so that they can verify. I was quite surprised that customer support
could just ask for people's bank statements.

~~~
FriedPickles
In the US we have Lyft, so not quite a monopoly. Possibly an oligopoly though.
I'm building an app that pits them against each other on price to promote a
competitive transportation market. In some countries Uber does have a
monopoly, or has been kicked out in favor of a different monopoly...

~~~
jimmaswell
Google Maps already does that.

~~~
rchaud
Doesn't Uber pay Google for that privilege? I'm in Toronto and I've only ever
seen Uber fare estimates on Google Maps.

~~~
jimmaswell
I don't know, but I've seen it list both Uber and Lyft for me.

------
marcrosoft
The brand is already tarnished. I know many people that use lyft over Uber for
this reason alone.

~~~
asafira
This might be the silicon valley bubble here though.

~~~
biesnecker
Totally. I use Lyft wherever I can but I can virtually always use Uber whereas
Lyft is spotty.

~~~
lettergram
Where do you go that doesn't have Lyft, but has Uber?

I travel regularly and it is very rare not to have Lyft available. Virtually
any city with >250k has both from my experience, although that could just be
where I travel, I don't know.

~~~
Xeago
I've yet to find Lyft in Europe but there's a lot of cities there with Uber
available.

------
keyle
I have this pet theory that every company that becomes publicly traded on
financial markets becomes "evil" because the focus is taken away from
customers, and towards keeping shareholders happy. Let's hope I'm not proved
wrong, again.

~~~
mruts
How is that “evil”? Isn’t that the crystallization of the teleological purpose
of a company?

The ideal company works to maximize shareholder value. And not just short-term
value, but the amortized value of the company in perpuitity. This in turn
maximizes employee value and customer value.

Let’s take a company that has great products and gives away everything for
free. In the short-term, this might look like maximizing customer value, but
soon, the conpany will go out of business. You could construct a similar
example in which employee wages were maximized.

The ideal situation is that the company pays employees as little as possible
and charges customers as much as possible. In this way, the company is on the
efficient frontier. Companies then compete on employee wages and product cost.
This creates a Nash equilibrium in which no party can benefit from doing
anything differently.

This is the highest and most noble calling of the markets and creates the
abundent and efficient markets of today (unless of course, the government
steps in to fuck everything up).

PS: I know I am going to get downvoted, but I would appreciate a comment
instead of a downvote.

~~~
dontreact
There are many places where we know that a free market doesn’t properly
function. Specifically, there are certain types of goods that end up priced
wrong: those with externalities (positive or negative). So if all a company
cares about is maximizing shareholder value over time they are drawn away from
products with positive externalities (like a public park) towards those with
negative externalities (like cars that pollute)

Note: I use these two examples because they are classic cases of positive and
negative externalities but they are so well known that the government has
already stepped to make public parks and tax or regulate of the externalities
related to the pollution from cars.

~~~
darawk
> There are many places where we know that a free market doesn’t properly
> function. Specifically, there are certain types of goods that end up priced
> wrong: those with externalities (positive or negative). So if all a company
> cares about is maximizing shareholder value over time they are drawn away
> from products with positive externalities (like a public park) towards those
> with negative externalities (like cars that pollute)

Sure, but that simply suggests that those externalities should be priced.
Problem solved.

~~~
whatislovecraft
> Problem solved.

That would imply that there is no climate change happening, as we would have
priced in that externality and resolved the issue by now. Right?

As it turns out, that isn't right, because nobody who has incentive to price
the externality right is allowed to be part of the process, and the ones who
are part of the process are incentivized to cheat and not price externalities
at all, or to price them poorly.

So we have runaway climate change. And we have structures preventing that from
improving because the incentive structures are flipped to the opposite right
now. There is no indication that will change, in fact the incentives to
pollute and remove the externality of pollution from the cost of goods sold
and services provided, so that we are actually accelerating this path towards
higher pollution (see Trump's coal-and-oil-championing attitude).

~~~
darawk
> That would imply that there is no climate change happening, as we would have
> priced in that externality and resolved the issue by now. Right?

Erm, what? I didn't say that the system would price it...if it would...we
wouldn't need to price it. I said that we needed to price it. You seem to be
arguing against some sort of made up straw man here.

------
imustbeevil
Hey I just got a crazy Idea.

Give me 18 billion dollars, and I'll pay people to drive other people around.

"How will we make money?" What? This is Silicon Valley, nobody makes money, we
just burn capital ($18B) from people who invested in one good thing 20 years
ago until we can sell the remaining capital ($7B) to braindead retail
investors for 10x it's value.

The company only has a year and a half of runway left, so we have to move
quick.

~~~
xiphias2
Try it. I don't think you will be successful. I think you underestimate the
amount of money it took Uber to get the network effect in each city to have
enough drivers. At this point it's easy to keep it up.

~~~
imustbeevil
> At this point it's easy to keep it up.

Define "easy"; they lost $1.8 billion last year. My investors made more money
and my company doesn't exist.

------
jsonne
I'm seriously considering dumping Uber after they charged me for a ride pass
while my app was neither open nor was there even a ride pass available for
purchase in my area at the time. Most of my friends are moving back to lyft at
this point to be honest.

------
bamboozled
I mean, what else would they do? They want to maximize their returns so the
most important part of the mission will be to clean up public and financial
image.

I've been through this with other companies preparing for IPO.

------
rhizome
They still hire bad drivers.

~~~
escapecharacter
I do wonder in the new age of increasingly automated employer-contractor
relations, if “hire” is the right word.

~~~
SllX
I think from a tax and accounting perspective, “hire” is probably the
appropriate term.

