
Lyft warns it may never make any money - Reedx
https://oversharing.substack.com/p/lyft-warns-it-may-never-make-any/
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rayvy
This type of disclosure is quite literally standard in almost every type of
public company financial disclosure. Surprised this made it to the HN front
page

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fouc
>Meanwhile in risk factors, Lyft warned it has never made any money and can’t
promise it ever will, a disclaimer popularized by companies like Twitter,
Square, Etsy, Box, Dropbox, Snap, Blue Apron, Shopify, Twilio, Spotify, and of
course the patron saint of all profitless companies, Amazon.

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Yhippa
Not an expert but do any companies ever make a guarantee that they will make
money in the future? This seems like the requisite legalese and a non-story
unless companies do make guarantees.

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thundergolfer
You're right, the title is click-baity. Besides the title, the rest seems
generally informative.

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pbreit
The author provides a snarky pre-response to those who point out that
virtually every IPOing company is unprofitable (IPOs are fundraising events,
after all) and that such a "risk factor" is S-1 boilerplate going back
decades.

And proceeds to gloat over not understanding Business 101 ("invest money to
make money").

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derekp7
One question, is how is "profit" defined? For example, if a company has
surplus cash based on a given base of assets and current operating expenses,
then that surplus is typically profit. However, if that surplus is used to buy
new assets or pay down debt principle, I would consider that to be similar to
profit because it tells me that the company would be profitable if it wasn't
expanding (or, that it will be profitable once the debt is paid off, assuming
all else remains the same).

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gamblor956
Profit means income exceeds expenses for a given period of time. There are
different types of profit, i.e., gross profit, is just the profit on the
primary business activity (sales or services income), while net profit is the
profit after all expenses are taken into consideration. There's also cash-flow
profit, which is gross profitability adjusted for some but not all non-
operating expenses.

And just to make things even more confusing, there's unicorn accounting
profit, in which gross bookings as treated as revenue even though they are
never earned by the startup (think Groupon, GrubHub, etc.).

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sjburt
These are terrible charts. With the comparison to Uber and the lack of
horizontal grid lines or trend lines, you can't see how Lyft is performing at
all. And the comparison to Uber is only somewhat relevant in valuing Lyft.

