
Lyft’s IPO disclosure shows it’s not close to profitability - howard941
https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-lyft-ipo-disclosure-20190307-story.html
======
ChuckMcM
Yeah. And while this says a lot about Lyft, for me it really really says a lot
about Uber too.

It has never been impossible to run a company by injecting money into it to
cover the difference between how much customers 'value' the product versus
what it costs to provide the product. But the dot com days showed that without
a point in the business model where the value exceeds the cost by enough
margin to keep the business going, such businesses don't survive.

What neither Lyft, nor Uber, has yet provided is a credible 'size' at which
they would be a going concern (covering all their costs), nor a really good
idea of how being larger scales revenues more than costs in sufficient measure
to become profitable.

I would love to see a document that describes the 'per driver' costs that
these companies incur on a location basis (so costs per driver in Los Angeles
CA, and per driver in Minot ND) vs revenue expectations per driver vs total
available livery miles (how many people would have to want to go somewhere to
support those numbers). Then you could at least see if there were any islands
of profitability in that solution space.

So far, I've yet to see anything where the answer is net positive. Worse, any
positive solution will be very fragile by definition because the barrier to
entry is zero and so a third party can unilaterally drain profits out of a
ride share company by starting up an unprofitable competitor and funding it
out of pocket until it has done the required amount of damage.

~~~
bane
What's really interesting, and I think what's unclear is this: what's costs
these services so much that they can't turn a profit?

Their costs, other than taking a haircut on the ride, doesn't seem entirely
clear, or obviously large.

A 2017 number says Lyft completes about 360 million rides per year. For fun,
let's say they make $1 per ride, are they really not able to run their front-
end operations with around 1,000 employees? (assuming an employee costs about
$250k-300k/yr)?

That seems crazy to me, but I don't know what hidden costs there are. From an
outside PoV it appears they need to run a more or less static website, about 4
smartphone apps with some back-end routefinding and accounting systems.

What am I missing?

~~~
nabaraz
Last I looked at Uber's financials, 90-95% of their expenses was driver
earnings. And then you have operating expenses that includes employees,
promotions, r&d, regulatory fees, marketing, support, new investments etc.

Uber's margin is probably under 5% which simply isn't enough.

~~~
remote_phone
You were looking at the wrong numbers, or you didn’t understand if those were
the conclusions you came to.

------
chollida1
Sadly for Lyft I think the best comparison will be Snap. And just one look at
the SNAP chart will tell you why you should avoid the Lyft IPO.

It will go public at an inflated price and hold that valuation for a quarter
or two and then people will start asking where either the profits or growth
are and Lyft will need to start growing or erasing their huge operating losses
right at the same time Uber is trying to grab as much ride share as possible
gearing up to their own IPO.

So at a time when the market will be starting to really pressure them to cut
losses, probably by cutting the driver's portion of revenue and raising
prices, Uber will be trying their best to inflate their own ride share metrics
by giving drivers more and cutting ride costs.

What is the story you can tell that paints Lyft as a good investment over the
next 2 year period?

Then there is Lyft's dual share structure will get it kicked out of many
ETF's. This locked in money is a godsend to most companies as they help buoy
the stock price by having locked in holders of teh stock during turbulent
times. I think MSCI will put Lyft into some of its indexes given that it just
put in 8-10 Chinese companies with dual listing share structures

One thing I do like in Lyft's favour is that they could be a counter cyclical
stock, ie they do well when the rest of the market isn't, due to people using
Lyft to replace a second car or a lease that they've given up.

We just haven't had a recession while ride sharing was a main stream thing.

> Zimmer, Lyft's cofounder, went on to assert that private car ownership would
> “all but end in major U.S. cities” by 2025.

Given that people are currently signing leases and payment plans for cars that
won't expire by then I'd say this is a bit of a stretch:)

~~~
temporalparts
An investment thesis for Lyft is if you expect Lyft to get acquired. If
profitability is nowhere in sight, then the end-game is acquisition. Companies
that might want to get into ridesharing is long, and Lyft is the fastest (and
probably cheapest if the stock tanks) path towards competing against Uber in
the US market.

Any company that is working on self-driving cars will want to acquire Lyft:
Google, Apple, Tesla, GM, etc

Any company that is in logistics space will want to acquire Lyft: Amazon,
DoorDash, Grubhub, etc.

Any ridesharing company will want to acquire Lyft: Uber (defensively), Didi,
Ola, probably not Grab, etc.

There will likely be a bidding war for Lyft because that's the only reasonable
path towards competing against Uber unless you think self-driving car is < 5
years away.

~~~
jonathankoren
This is all predicated on someone thinking that the rideshare buisness is
profitable. It hasn’t shown that it is. Uber is also losing money on every
ride, isn’t profitable, and still has multiple rideshare options, and side
hustles of food delivery and freight. Same is true with every other similar
company the world over. Nowhere is there the indication that the industry will
be profitable anytime soon. People have assumed that if you could just stop
paying drivers, the profits will come. They might, but fully autonomous cars
don’t exist, and also, they seem much further off than they did just two years
ago. Even Andrew Ng publically suggested that pedestrians should just change
their behavior, because the AI doesn’t work, and won’t work for a very long
time.[0] So betting on magic cars to save the industry is a bit iffy.

It’s certainly plausible that at some point, the companies simply burn through
all their cash, and investors give up on expecting a return. That would kind
of suck, but why keep throwing good money after bad?

[0] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-16/to-get-
re...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-16/to-get-ready-for-
robot-driving-some-want-to-reprogram-pedestrians)

~~~
linuxftw
People are convinced that autonomous vehicles are a 'data problem' and if we
just log enough miles and 'train' our 'ai' enough, they'll be perfectly safe.

I'm of the opinion it's literal fantasy. Maybe in 50 years, heck, maybe in 30.
5-10? I can't see it.

~~~
repsilat
That is a very strong statement -- what odds would you put on a "literal
fantasy"? One in a thousand? One in a billion?

I'd back "self-driving, in-traffic, no-safety-driver taxi service available to
the public in 5 cities in 10 years" at even money any day of the week (so long
as it doesn't mean losing half of any money in escrow to inflation...)

~~~
rayiner
If we define "city" to include real cities like New York, Philadelphia,
Boston, and DC, I'd take the other side of that bet. Two things will make
closing the "last 10%" gap extremely difficult if not impossible.

1) Navigation. The D.C. street grid literally changes daily due to closures,
detours, and construction. Google Maps does not keep up with these changes in
real time. If self-driving tech can't understand when a construction worker is
hand signaling drivers through a single lane for both directions of traffic,
it won't work at scale.

2) Weather. Apparently, self-driving tech relies on following lane markings,
which routinely are invisible during/after snow.

I don't think it's a strong statement. I'm taking the other side of the
"everyone will be flying in supersonic airliners in 10 years" bet in 1960.
There is a huge difference between tech that kinda works, and tech that works
reliably enough to serve as a basis for transportation infrastructure.

------
jeffdavis
This article seems excessively negative about a company:

* Which provided $8B worth of rides in a single year

* Didn't hurt anyone

For crimes which amount to:

* May cost some IPO underwriters money

* May not make all of the employees rich

* May cost VCs money

The worst thing to really say about such a company is "I enjoy their
convenient rides but I won't buy their stock".

Instead, the article attacks the founders for their age (too young), ridicules
their visions of the future, and compares them to other young founders.
Bewilderingly, the author compares the founders to Zuckerburg, which doesn't
fit the point of the article at all. Not content with all of that, the author
takes a shot at Musk for selling fantasies, when he has done more than many
people thought possible.

~~~
themagician
Didn't directly hurt anyone in an easily quantifiable way.

It's not clear that Uber or Lyft are net positives to society. They are
disruptive, but not necessarily in a good way.

Yes, they provided $8B worth of rides. But before that people still got
around. What the world might have been like without Lyft is impossible to
know, but the way it's changed the job landscape isn't exactly a huge net
positive. It's put a lot of cars on the road and it's set to new "floor" for
jobs in general. Uber, Lyft, Taskrabbit, DoorDash have created a new kind of
serfdom.

I'm not saying it's a bad thing, necessarily, but I wouldn't say that they
didn't hurt anyone. They definitely hurt social progress.

~~~
googlemike
They (Uber and Lyft) radically reduce drunk driving in every city they enter.
They also radically simplify access to transportation for people of color,
women, etc.

~~~
amanaplanacanal
> They (Uber and Lyft) radically reduce drunk driving in every city they enter

This is cool if true. Does it show up in accident statistics?

------
annon
Giving the founders 20-to-1 voting rights over regular investors while losing
as much money as they are is insane. This really looks like a lemon, and the
VC's want to cash out and leave public investors holding the bag.

I don't see how self driving cars are going to help them. Waymo and Tesla are
both the farthest along, and they're going to run their own networks -
competing against Lyft and Uber.

~~~
nfriedly
I don't really disagree with you, but I think (or, at least, hope) that there
will be room for more than 2-3 players in the "self driving taxi" market.

~~~
erikpukinskis
The thing that would cause that is if there is some requirement for massive
amounts of difficult to obtain data that is required to build a competitive
system.

I do think data is a competitive advantage right now. But I find it really
hard to believe that 10 years from now it will be harder to build a self
driving system than today. That's just not how tech is. Building YouTube was a
herculean endeavor 15 years ago, but today you can hack a YouTube clone
together in hours.

Not just will we have more off the shelf software and hardware, but maybe you
can license the data too.

In the end, I don't see the moat around a self driving cab company. If someone
has a good app and a single car that operates in my area, why not switch to
them?

Sure there are wait times and availability in odd places. But that doesn't
inhibit a startup getting early adopters. You could literally just do the same
commutes every day and have a profitable business.

Lastly, I expect the variety in vehicles and "mobile spaces" will provide a
huge landscape of opportunity that a single company will not be able to fill.
Just like there is not one "housing" company, there won't be one mobile
housing company either. Too much variation in taste and preference.

~~~
askafriend
> Building YouTube was a herculean endeavor 15 years ago, but today you can
> hack a YouTube clone together in hours.

Ha, good one.

Would your clone have large scale spam, fraud, and abuse systems in place?
Would it work on all browsers, mobile devices, TVs, set-top boxes, etc? Is
your streaming tech cost-efficient and can it deliver reliability across all
regions? Will you be able to respond to DMCAA takedown requests and comply
with IP laws across states and countries?

I can go on and on.

Simply put, serving a video over the internet isn't rocket science. Building
YouTube...is much more like rocket science.

~~~
erikpukinskis
You don't need those things until after you hit scale, so I wouldn't include
them in an initial quote.

------
Animats
_" The dual class structure of our common stock has the effect of
concentrating voting power with our Co-Founders, which will limit your ability
to influence the outcome of important transactions, including a change in
control. Our Class B common stock has 20 votes per share, and our Class A
common stock, which is the stock we are offering by means of this prospectus,
has one vote per share."_

No-voting-power stock for a company that's losing money? No. Companies that
have done that before, such as Google and Facebook, were profitable _before_
the IPO. That's when you want to keep the management team. With Lyft's
numbers, firing the current management might not be a bad idea. They've had
their growth phase; now they need to move to profitability.

If you haven't read an S-1 before, you skip all the happy talk and go directly
to "Consolidated Statements of Operations".

~~~
djsumdog
To be fair, I doubt any management could make ride-sharing companies
profitable. The sooner they go under, the sooner drivers start making livable
incomes again.

~~~
dnautics
> The sooner they go under, the sooner drivers start making livable incomes
> again.

Have you actually been a driver? I can assure you that having been one, in the
Bay area, even, the income was quite livable.

~~~
i_am_nomad
There’s the common impression - misconception? - that driving for rideshare
companies is a losing game, and that drivers end up making very little money
after fuel, repairs, and depreciation. For a while, it seemed like every day
there was another article breaking this down and “exposing” Uber and Lyft.

Having never driven for them, I can’t verify whether this is true, but just a
quick back-of-the-envelope guess seems like drivers in the Bay Area could
average $40 - $50 an hour. That doesn’t seem like minimum wage level to me.

~~~
opportune
The weird thing is I almost never get a driver with more than 1-2k trips. If
the job actually paid well, you would think there would be a lot of people
doing it full-time for more than one year. Maybe the skew is due to the rapid
growth of rideshare in general but I suspect the main reason there don't seem
to be seasoned super-drivers is that the job simply isn't as good as it seems

~~~
i_am_nomad
It's been said is some of the articles I mentioned that Uber's business plan
is to profit of drivers who are financially illiterate, until those people
either wise up or break. That seems like hyperbole, but if there is a kernel
of truth to it, that would explain your observation.

------
justfor1comment
For me the saddest thing is that even if Lyft stock tanks after the IPO the
founders Zimmer and Green will have very little impact to their personal
finances. The founders along with the investors will be able to move most of
their stock through the markets making them billionaires. It's mostly the Lyft
employees stuck in the post IPO lock up period who will be hurt by the dip in
stock value. Another reason why the rich keep getting richer.

~~~
puranjay
Isn't the founders' holding severely diluted? They've gone through, iirc, over
a dozen rounds of funding and own very little in the company

~~~
Sohcahtoa82
Even owning 1% of a $15B company still makes you worth $150 million.

Dumping even 2% of that $150M would give you enough to retire.

~~~
ztratar
3M is not even close to enough for retirement in Silicon Valley. Also... 1.6M
after taxes.

~~~
Kye
I thought the usual track was _Move to SV - > Get rich -> Retire somewhere
cheaper_. ~1 million is plenty almost anywhere on the planet. Especially if
they go the FIRE route.

~~~
puranjay
$1M isn't plenty for everywhere. Even in India, $400-500k is what you would
need to buy a new 3-4 bedroom apart in a good area of, say, New Delhi. In
Mumbai, $1M is the bare minimum

------
throwaway-1283
Basically what will happen is that in some month X after IPO the company will
be forced to pull back on new driver incentives (the thing that is really
making these companies bleed cash), which will slow driver supply growth,
which will increase rider wait times and/or make prices spike, which will
lower demand, and thus slow growth, and kill the stock price.

I wouldn't touch this at all. Or short it if you're brave :)

~~~
linkregister
If/when Lyft decides it can't grow any more, it will dump the unprofitable
cities and focus on the cash cows: LA and New York, etc. The large cities are
quite profitable and will be enough.

That said, it's better for society if the unprofitable cities are served by
competing ride sharing services. It's kind of like how the US Postal Service
makes money in the cities and loses it in rural areas.

------
willart4food
Well same for Uber and we all knew that. It's just the business model (for
now).

So, in a world where we are all used to Uber/Lyft and there's no turning back,
the only way forward is for fares to go up, close to - if not the same - to
conventional cab fares. Which will decrease usage, which will decrease the
size of Uber/Lyft and therefore their market cap. Sounds like 1999

~~~
ghaff
I honestly, albeit naively, expected that when Uber put in a new CEO, they’d
take that opportunity to raise prices to break even levels which presumably
end up around where taxis are. Take the volume hit; customers who are only
interested in VC-subsided rides aren’t customers you want. But I guess
everyone decided to continue to pretend that the current business is
sustainable.

~~~
djsumdog
They're probably still holding on to the dream of the self driving vehicle ...
which is practically at least 15 years out at this point .. probably more like
20~25.

~~~
ghaff
Note that holding onto a dream and making public statements to sucker
investors are not necessarily the same thing.

I agree with your basic point, especially in the areas dense enough to make
taxi-like services work well.

------
mattnewton
I’m bullish on ridesharing as a segment but bearish on uber and Lyft, simply
because I think both have been run like landgrabs - large VC backed pushes to
jumpstart demand and find drivers. In this case though I think the land won’t
stay “grabbed”.

Every driver I have seen is driving for both services and would add a third if
someone told them about it and it payed equitably, so I think all the work
uber and Lyft have done to make a market can be leveraged by third party
competitors if they start dialing up prices to become more profitable. And I
think they will need to do that to meet their valuations.

This isn’t like Facebook where a larger network acts like a moat keeping
competitors out. Instead, I think it actively makes a market for competitors-
the friction for drivers is pretty small, and I don’t know the friction
involved for getting users to download another app but I imagine it’s pretty
low. Because the drivers are the same it’s a commodity, and switching between
apps costs me nothing.

Disclaimer: I probably don’t know what I am talking about.

~~~
linkregister
I agree that neither riders nor drivers have any affinity toward the ride
sharing platforms beyond cost and availability. That said, the incumbent in an
area typically wins due to the chicken and egg problem of riders and drivers.
Didi vs. Uber, Grab vs. Uber, Uber vs. Juno, etc.

Lyft's market share is as high as it is because they invented the ride sharing
category. Uber's market share is higher because the Uber Black service was
present in more cities, so it could use its existing operations staff and
rider network (and lobbying presence).

~~~
mattnewton
But the chicken and egg problem is partially solved by having lots of chickens
already around laying eggs for other services. So I only have to convince
people already driving to download my third-driver-app, and then riders have
chickens. There is some evidence of this happening in places like Austin.

------
lukewrites
I think both Lyft and Uber are pursuing IPOs because the private market has
soured on them. The VCs want to get their payout and are starting to fear a
down round…so the companies will go public, the investors will get their
payouts, and whoever buys will eventually regret it.

------
pochamago
What are the big expenses that cost Uber and Lyft so much? The driver takes
the cost of owning and maintaining the vehicle, and they're only paid a
fraction of whatever rides they get. Aren't the companies just running an app?

~~~
shereadsthenews
Because of churn and driver recruitment incentives Lyft pays the driver more
than it charges the rider. For example a new driver gets 80% of the fare plus
$8 per trip in the first month. If you can pick up 155 people per week, Lyft
also eats the entire cost of your vehicle. Also, Lyft is paying 100s of
millions of dollars to Amazon and Google to run their app.

~~~
notyourwork
I'd be really interested to know what resources they are using in cloud and
why it is so expensive. I don't disagree they need resources but 100s of
millions seems a bit on the wasteful side.

~~~
djsumdog
It's running in hundreds cities in tons of countries with huge pools of
drivers. The server costs alone are going to be big. Plus you have to hire and
pay for really good reliability engineers. Any outages are going to cost you a
lot of confidence, and a lot of money. This is a really big amount of data,
more than most people realize.

~~~
kingnothing
Lyft only operates in the US and a few cities in Canada.

------
duderific
I would gladly pay more than a cab to continue to have the convenience of
being able to get a ride when and where I need it.

I remember back in the pre-rideshare days, trying to call a cab ahead of time,
and having them simply not show up, with no warning or notification.

------
djsumdog
Lately my phone will die at 30% charge. I've ordered a new battery but last
week it went out while I was looking for a Lyft. I normally don't use taxis
but it was cold and I was tired.

Luckily I was near a train station and it was still early enough the buses
were running, so I knew which transfers to make and which bus to get on
without needing a map.

Still I thought about how only a decade ago, I could be on this same street
and hold up my hand and flag down a Taxi. Today if I really wanted a taxi,
they're pretty much only in the city. I'd have to hunt around for a payphone
and would need change too.

If I didn't know my public transport routes back home or if it was late enough
the trains stopped running, I'd be kinda SOL. I realize Taxis not just driving
around saves on fuel consumption, but have we lost something by simply not
being able to hail a cab without a charged phone or laptop with a Wi-Fi point?

I wonder if Uber or Lyft will start putting out kiosks people can use to flag
down rides when their phones or out.

~~~
RomanPushkin
Yes, we've lost it. However, it can be fixed. I created app so everyone can be
a taxi driver. It's PoC, but actually works. There are tons of problems, no
critical mass, security. But anyway, I was once able to find a ride back home
from San Francisco.

This app is for everyone at [https://libretaxi.org](https://libretaxi.org)
(non-profit, open source)

Disclaimer: I'm founder

~~~
jon-wood
As much as I love to see Open source solutions to problems having looked at
the website this seems like a disaster waiting to happen without any sort of
driver vetting. You’ve effectively made an app where people can broadcast to
random strangers that they’re waiting around in the street, carrying cash, and
far enough from home to need a lift. Sadly we don’t live in a world where
something like that isn’t going to be flooded by people with ideas other than
making a few bucks driving people home.

------
aiisjustanif
All of this talk sound surprising similar to airlines.

\- LCCs (Low Cost Carriers can come in and disrupt your fragile net profit, if
you get close to it in a quarter)

\- Always pretty much operating in the negative.

\- Consumers find a lot value in the company even though the operating cost
are insane.

\- The only way to solve the issue of airlines being in debt for years was
time to slowly cut operation cost and scale, massive scale (albeit, there are
a couple exceptions today now).

\- Local market competition in cities are hell to forecast and balance out
operating cost to how profitable you can be vs competitors. Which create
cities you grow dominant and via reputation and government policies.

\- They piss off investors because they have to trade off and invest in the
operating cost (fleet or employees) some years, which can effect the companies
earning for years.

I get they the rideshare industry is vastly different than the airline
industry in many ways (for example, oil price influencing one more than the
other), but I think they are similar in important ways.

Uber and Lyft will have to start taking out pages from LCCs in Europe to get
ideas on how to become profitable (and probably piss off customers by nickel
and diming them) and any ideas they haven't from the taxi industry that they
may have over looked. Hell maybe even adapt into the rental space. I don't
know the answers, but just sounds like an industry I've seen before that will
have to move mountains to been profitable.

Sidenote: I will not be surprised just like American, Delta, and United that
Lyft and Uber will soon see government sponsored competition (China, Russia,
Middle East countries) in future and be pissed because of how unfair they are
because they can operate in the negative without consequences of failing.

------
ProAm
The problem with both Lyft and Uber is they have MASSIVE VC investments they
need to pay back, and while the business model is good its not nearly good
enough to payback VC within the 10 year window. Uber will be in the exact same
boat next year.

~~~
throwaway-1283
What do you mean "pay back"? If you're talking about liquidation preferences
those all go away in an IPO.

~~~
ProAm
All the investors that 'purchased' a percentage of the private company with
their investment during funding rounds will want to see ROI when the company
goes public (or if the company is insanely profitable while private). Most of
these VC's expect to start seeing ROI around the 10yr mark. The company isnt
remotely profitable still privately held, so lets go public and get other
suckers to buy in so the early investors can cash out and hopefully make a
buck or two or at least breakeven.

------
thisisit
I have been reading Lyft S-1, especially their risk factor assessment. While
it is full of normal warnings like limited operating history, competitors etc.
One of the warnings stood out for me.

 _Our results of operations vary and are unpredictable from period-to-period,
which could cause the trading price of our Class A common stock to decline._

If this is the case, I wonder how do they can they even predict their future
growth? How much credence can be given to the data they present or expect
about their growth?

------
popz41
In the past two weeks I've been receiving offers for discounted rides from
Lyft. First was 30% off for a week, then yesterday I received a code for 50%
off this week. It seems they're trying to inflate their ride numbers quickly.
I have not received any promotions prior to this, and I've been a member for
over a year.

~~~
scottnyc
No question. It's pretty evident they are aggressively spending on acquisition
to boost their top line numbers. Timing wise, this effect will probably show
up after they IPO and for their first publicly reported earnings announcement.
Which will hopefully keep the stock price high long enough for the employee
lock-up to expire.

------
angel_j
I'm trying to think of some way a large equity firm could make money on shares
that are almost certain to go from high to low...

------
throwaway082729
Once Waymo has fully autonomous vehicles on the road, they'll look to acquire
Lyft for a decent price. Lyft has the brand value and the infrastructure for
ride calling (intentionally not using ride sharing) except that drivers will
no longer be needed. Profits will be through the roof when that happens.

~~~
leesec
There are 1.4 million Lyft drivers in US and Toronto.

Waymo is going to buy and retrofit and provide 1.4 million cars?

~~~
i_cant_speel
Those 1.4 millions drivers aren't all driving at the same time. They would
only need a fraction of that many cars and they could be built over an
extended period of time.

~~~
leesec
OK so Waymo is going to buy and retrofit and provide 500k cars?

~~~
throwaway082729
Self-driving cars will be feasible only if LIDAR/camera costs go down to
$10k/car or lower. No one is going to pay $250k for a self-driving car. At
$10k/car, it's $5B for 500k cars, something that Google can easily afford.

~~~
leesec
Google would have to own the cars that this point tho right? They can't just
plop a LiDAR on a car and call it self driving. So 10k+ the cost of car. Maybe
50k.

~~~
throwaway082729
Not really. They could sell their technology to a car company and all cars
sold by that company could be self-driving enabled. Maybe we'll get true ride
sharing then. I'm at home and not planning to use my car for the day. It could
be used to give someone rides without me having to go drive. Waymo/Lyft could
still own some cars but not all.

------
robot
I get a lot of promotions from lyft that make me think they're desperate.

~~~
Invictus0
They're not really promotions. All those 20% off emails only give you 20% off
Lyft's fee, not the whole fare. It saves you a total of maybe $2 on an average
ride.

~~~
popz41
I disagree, my email yesterday said "50% off your next 10 rides. You have 10
rides remaining. Max savings of $6 per ride. Discount applies to the fare,
Prime Time charges, Service fee, tolls, and taxes only."

------
fargo
Would it be wise for someone to go work for lift given this information?
Asking for a friend...

------
badinsie
they are the literal definition of a parasite how are they not profitable?

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pastor_elm
Three words: Ads, ads, and ads.

Ads is how you make money. All lyft needs to do is incorporate ads into its
platform and it will start printing money.

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tgeo
At this point I'm convinced this is a troll account

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samstave
What level of equity are Uber and Lyft drivers given in the company? Any?

Are they "earning shares per mile" or anything like that?

If not - then screw both companies, and I hope they do poorly in the IPO --
even though ridesharing is such a wonderful service - I really hope they do
right by the literal foundation of their existence, which is the drivers.

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EpicEng
That seems completely unreasonable. Lyft contracts with more than 700k
drivers. How in the world could they give each driver a meaningful share of
options while also maintaining a controlling interest in the company? Let's
also be real here; the supply of drivers is endless. It's about as far from a
skill position as one could imagine. Would you be ok with their pay being
decreased as well?

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Marsymars
> How in the world could they give each driver a meaningful share of options
> while also maintaining a controlling interest in the company?

Not commenting on the practicality, but when choosing between traditionally
cab companies, I preferentially go with ones that are driver/employee owned.

