Belphegor posted:

The HQs are lavish but as for the number of employees it seems necessity for some reason. When I was an Uber courier I often visited a similar HQ. The constant turnover of new people going through the paperwork + existing employees trying to get money when they inevitably get screwed out of it seemed to require a large staff. Even then,there were often long wait times

The office employees definitely had a careerist tech-bro vibe, on the other hand

thanks for the info. large churn through drivers and endless problems means that massive admin is also necessary, makes sense. i still sorta feel like there'd have to be a better way though. and all these companies trying to give the feel of an Apple Store raise suspicion in me. it's like they're projecting a success that just isnt there. maybe thats just the state of interior decorating.

Edited by Chthonic_Goat_666 (Dec. 2, 2017 04:29:24)

Chthonic_Goat_666 posted:

btw i would love if you shared more about your experience with uber belphegor, if ya wanna.

especially stuff like any problems with the app, any extra incentives they tried to give you (i know they game-ify), experiences with their admin etc.

Yeah sure, I'll put down the interesting stuff I can remember.

First let me add the disclaimer that I was an 'UberEATS' bicycle food courier, and I don't have any experience with the car service part.

First the incentives were all over the place. The way I got into the gig was through a third-party full time recruiter, believe it or not. UberEATS was just starting up in the city so they were offering 150$ CAD to any new courier who completed at least 10 trips (which would average around 7-8 dollars a trip, 30% of which uber takes as a cut), and 150$ to the person who referred them. In exchange for guiding me through the set-up process, the guy who referred me got 150$. He didn't earn it, that's for sure, but I couldn't get MY 150 without having someone's referral code.

A lot of people burn out quickly (biking in the city is tiring and stressful), so I can't imagine how much cash uber burned through and continues to burn through to keep the streets full of couriers, in particular now that winter is here.

The second big incentives are rush bonuses. During peak hours, I saw them try two things. The first was guaranteeing a minimum daily revenue on the condition that you were 'online' for at least 6-8 hours and that you did not turn down too many fares. They have to do this because the orders come in in waves, so the couriers don't necessarily want to be on the streets waiting for the deadzone between lunch and dinner to pass. The second thing was the familiar surge pricing, where customers actually end up paying the extra money.

Even with the incentives, it was a real grind to even make as much as a full-time minimum wage job. If you worked in the spaces and times that were easier to bike in (day, downtown core), there was always a surplus of couriers. Uber keeps customer wait times down by increasing courier downtimes. I tried to reach out to the other couriers on the streets sometimes, but if you both hang out in the same place then you are decreasing your odds of getting the next order, since uber reaches out to the closest courier to the restaurant first, waits 30-60 seconds for them to accept, and then tries the next closest. Competing against all your coworkers was very alienating, and also 'civilian' cyclists and motorists hate you because you are always going fast and breaking traffic laws to try to make more money ( a Toronto bike courier was killed by a judge in a road rage incident a few years back. Google Darcy Allan Sheppard). I stopped working after I got a concussion from a crash and decided it wasn't worth it. Uber pays no sick days or anything for medical, of course. I have public health insurance, but it didn't cover the ambulance, so my crash wiped out all the money I had made so far that day.

As for gamification, the uber app had more than a few design parallels with pokemon GO lol.

As for administration, they tried to do as much through the app as possible, which was awkward. IF you called them, the wait times would be long, and they would often tell me to go through the app and call again. I wish I had saved the texts the sent me.They mirror the type of copy that UBER writes in its ads: very upbeat, motivational poster type stuff, in a conversational tone, as if it's your old pal' uber letting you in on some sweet earning potential!

Once I was delivering some Thai food and the bottom of the bag fell away the moment I handed it to the customer. They were real mad, and I had no idea how to handle it. The app did not have a category for this occurrence (they had stuff like 'can't find address' and 'customer no-show'. Also absent was a 'I crashed and I'm in the hospital now, tell that guy his burrito is not coming' option. After about half an hour playing telephone tag uber refunded the customer their money and I got to keep my fare. Uber ate 50$ on that one. I imagine if it happened too often they would start deducting money from me, but idk.
I know that this is a wall of text but it is nice to be able to share some of this stuff with other commies for once, thanks for asking c-goat

Edited by Belphegor (Dec. 2, 2017 23:56:56)

Belphegor posted:

I also worked briefly as a foot rickshaw guy for tourists. My rickshaw coworkers mere more lumpen but they had a better understanding of class than many of the 'grinding my side-gig' uber workers.

*the rhizome creaks as it strains to reach the Sakai thread through the sub-forum layer*

I did this briefly when I was in college.

I think the last 'ride' I did was with a few other rickshaw runners to have a race while carrying a gang of yobbish tourists.... I slipped on the ice and the 2 drunk pricks I was pulling fell face first into the concrete

One source describes the deal as in the nine figures; another puts it at around £300 million ($401 million). We are still asking around. Notably, though, the numbers we’ve heard are lower than the $1.02 billion (according to PitchBook) post-money valuation the company had in its last funding round, in 2015.

Didi Kuaidi says it controls 80 per cent of China’s ride-hailing market. Meanwhile, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick recently said Uber has increased its market share in China from one per cent to “30 to 35 per cent market share.” Market share inherently can’t exceed 100 per cent, so at least one company is being overly optimistic with its estimates.

https://www.businessinsider.com.au/ubers-main-competitor-in-china-is-losing-buckets-of-money-2015-9?r=US&IR=T

This was also because economic growth in the pre-1999 period fell more sharply than had been anticipated. Employment had slowed down, in part because monetary policy was committed to such an outcome. But late in the year, the economy decelerated even more sharply. This sharper slowdown reflected, partly, the contribution of several additional shocks that reinforced the effect of monetary policy tightening. The result was increesed interest rates for low-rated borrowers and tighter underwriting standards at banks. The decline in equity valuations for high-tech firms, the virtual closing of opportunities for initial public offereings, and the higher quality spreads for low-rated borrowers naturally hit start-up and new technology firms especially hard. Equity prices fell sharply, particularly technology stocks, with the NASDAQ declining nearly 60% and internet stocks about 70% from their peaks.

This was, according to the Govenor, a prefect example of an unwinding of a pre-existing imbalance in the unsustainable rise in equity values in the technology sector caused by the initial rise in profits of the New Economy. The correction of equity prices presumably reflected, at least in part, a re-evaluation of the profit-ability of owning and producing high-tech capital and software, a deterioration in the expected earnings of telecommunications firms, and a reappraisal of the earnings prospects of dot-com firms, These re-assessments of the value of these firms had in fact much to do with earlier developments in the decline in industry and little to do with monetary policy or a slowdown in growth. The frenzy of investments arising from advances in technology resulted in some investments that were successful nad some that were not. This was a second example, and one that was perhaps less noticed earlier, of the unwinding of an unsustainable trend in the new sector. At any rate, a shake-up in the high-technology area and retrenchment of investment spending followed because of weakend demand, and the accumulation of inventories led to firms moving to cutdown production to not jut a level supported by the slowdown in demand, but one even lower to shed off the excess inventories. These were adjustments that were made to move away from the "old" industrial model, as well as the new one.

The chapter then goes on to say how this resulted in drastic cuts to interest rates (sound familiar?) which in turn primed the sub-prime morgage crisis - because the decadent imperialist rentier capital bourgioisie far preferes speculating in easy returns from usury than investing in production capacity. As for uber and clones i think its important to remember that its a labour intensive buisiness i.e. a very high organic composition of capital, and so theoretically represents a lot of actual surplus value, rather than super-profits derived from technological advantage or global labour arbitrage, to be extracted; that is if those pesky wage regulations didnt keep getting in the way

Chthonic_Goat_666 posted:

good post, reminded me of that earlier post where a group of people found a way to make money using uber, by getting together making an uber taxi company where they shaired cars. I remember talking to a regualr taxi driver about uber and he mentioned the same things about servicing and car maintinece and safety being ignored by uber/uber drivers.

swampman posted:

did u see this one https://qz.com/1149381/uber-softbank-shares-debt/
accredited investors onoly, are allowed to maybe cash out, as long as they are accredited investors

cheers, as with everything uber it seems like a big clusterfukk. december 28 looks like the important date:

The deal is on the table until Dec. 28, and could fall through if there aren’t enough shares on offer for SoftBank and a small consortium of other investors to purchase at least a 14% stake in the company.

this basically seems like a race to IPO now, something which Hubert Horan didn't really mention much in his most article but should probably be a focal point going forward.

Gurley, whom Quattrone recruited to the West Coast in the 1990s, is rigorous with financials and company fundamentals. He commonly criticizes overvalued tech start-ups for having indefensible business models and chastises venture capitalists for herd investing. In Silicon Valley, he says, there are too many VCs chasing too few deals with too much money at too high prices.

:ironicat:

At the June LP meeting, one investor said, it was as if Gurley "knew a storm was going to take place" and the rest of the world had no idea what was coming.

To a large degree, he was right. Soon after the meeting, the Holder report was released. It contained a scathing rebuke of Uber's culture and made 47 recommendations to the company. They included creating a board oversight committee, rewriting Uber's cultural values, reducing alcohol use at work events and prohibiting intimate relationships between employees and their bosses.

yes im sure he was very stressed about uber company culture and not his theoretical 8 billion dollars vanishing in an instant. lets see if benchmark hand the problem off to softbank...

Edited by Chthonic_Goat_666 (Dec. 15, 2017 11:30:40)