
Ask HN: How come some group of hacker Uber drivers hasn’t disintermediated Uber? - abrax3141
The Uber (etc) drivers could be paying themselves instead of the owners investors if someone were just to write an open source gig manager and apply everywhere.
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BoorishBears
Because there's way more to Uber than an app.

There's so many facets I don't know where to start

\- Background Checks

\- Payment Infrastructure

\- Insurance, and not some off-the-shelf insurance, complicated messy layers
insurance

\- UX

\- Expensive marketing and subsidies (which is what creates trust in brand so
we all feel comfortable hopping into cars with strangers)

\- Local laws (even if they break a lot of them, they do still follow some)

There's an open source Uber-like platform:
[https://libretaxi.org/](https://libretaxi.org/)

But making an Uber app is easy, making an Uber platform is expensive.

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abrax3141
A union of drivers could easily do all that.

~~~
greenyoda
1\. If it's so easy, why hasn't anyone done it yet? I've seen this idea
mentioned on HN dozens of times already.

2\. Even if you could set this up, you'd still be competing against Uber,
which is a name everyone knows already and which can afford to burn billions
of dollars a year to grow their business. They could temporarily lower their
rates or driver's fees in the area that you operate in and quickly put you out
of business, since they can afford to lose money much longer than you can. The
same drivers who'd use this app will still be driving for Uber and Lyft
(they'll go wherever the money and customers are).

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troydavis
> could be paying themselves instead of the owners investors

Uber isn’t “paying the owners [sic] investors,” it’s (still) consuming huge
amounts of their capital. From [https://investor.uber.com/news-
events/news/press-release-det...](https://investor.uber.com/news-
events/news/press-release-details/2019/Uber-Announces-Results-for-Third-
Quarter-2019/default.aspx) :

“As such, we are improving our full year Adjusted EBITDA guidance by $250
million to a loss of $2.8-2.9 billion”

