> look at the brain drain claim instead. I could maybe buy that argument if they were facing technical/scaling challenges, but that’s not the case

Eh, yes and no. There's that famous thread about how they rewrote the iOS app and managed to pull it off by what can only be described as a sheer miracle. That was a legit technical/scaling issue. But also, the first round of layoffs under Dara came largely because there were too many teams spending time on projects of dubious ROI (there was even an internal joke about how people would build things first and only then write the RFC for it...) and eng spending was kinda out of control.

Layoffs were extremely demoralizing to be sure, but honestly, employees are over it now and the internal atmosphere is back to business as usual.

Recall that pre-pandemic Uber had projections to reach profitability by EOY 2020. Personally I think it's a bit weird to single out Uber as having difficulty retaining drivers when I see reports of labor shortages across just about every service industry. On the rider side, people complain about prices going up, but again, this is happening across the board due to the inflation spike (and doubly so for Uber due to its supply/demand bound elastic pricing structure). Sooner or later, I think the economy is bound to return to business-as-usual with their bosses shortchanging minimum wage employees and people scrambling to pay for bills flocking to Uber for extra cash.

</two-cents>

>What happened is that during the pandemic when fares were at the bottom

I don't know where you tried using Uber during the pandemic, but from many of my attempts to use it in Seattle, Cincinatti, and ATL during the pandemic, I had the opposite experience. Prices were simply off the charts.

Prices seem to have been returning more to normal recently (while still being at least 50% higher than pre-pandemic). But during the last year, it was total hell. A ride that would typically take $12 was closer to $30+ (both Lyft and Uber btw). A ride from Seattle to Redmond, which normally would cost around $27-31, was in the range of $55+.

Maybe I am misunderstanding your comment about fares being at the bottom, but from what I saw myself, the fares during the pandemic in 2020 were at their sky high.

My understanding of the argument is that the way Uber's elastic pricing works means that once supply reaches some critical upper limit, there's so much competition among drivers that the payoff for any individual driver gets too low and they are forced to go elsewhere.

Personally, I don't think the pandemic timelines align well enough to support the idea that this is specific to the pandemic (though I do agree with it being a thing outside of the scope of the pandemic). IMHO, there was a period of time when prices tanked because rider demand cratered but drivers were still relying on Uber as their safety net, but as the pandemic went on, drivers - especially the full-time ones - were forced to find work elsewhere because there was simply no income to be made from Uber rides. This conversely meant that when riders started coming back, the driver supply was simply not there to match the resurgence in demand.

The thing about Uber is that it's roughly equivalent to fast food worker type of work: for most people, it's not meant to be a long term career, but rather just a crutch to try to get onto the next rung in the ladder. If you are indeed going to do this sort of work full time forever even despite a market saturated with drivers, employers like McDonalds have much better propositions, e.g. in terms of job stability.

Ah yeah I meant “fares” as in number of riders. Rates were sky high but total trips were down so much the drivers weren’t making reliable money even at those rates. A lot of people sold their cars because they couldn’t afford the payment without Uber or did some training to get a better career. Nobody wants to drive a car for a living the rest of their life.

Ah, makes much more sense, fully agreed then. The number of drivers was definitely on the low end, which resulted in waiting forever for a ride + increased fare prices.

This sounds like a cool story and a nice idealistic narrative, but do you have any evidence for it? It’s honestly the first I’ve heard of this even being a claim/trend.

Just anecdotal; but the people I know who used to drive for Uber have desk jobs they do from home now. It’s a better quality of life; why would they go back to driving a car?

You seem to be under the impression that companies hire engineers to improve the product. My pet theory is that FANGUL/et al. really just poach as many engineers from the talent pool as possible - it’s cheaper to keep the smartest guys on payroll then inevitably buying a competitor for billions of dollars.

I'm not sure about other places, but at Uber specifically, it was a combination of explosive early growth (and subsequently teams finding themselves having to justify their continued employment) combined with the notion that "Uber scale" was really really big and required custom solutions (never mind that AWS scale actually is orders of magnitude bigger)

Because that's literally how you get promoted. Reimplement something in a new sexier language and add that to your promo packet

The whole issue with them not being remotely profitable no doubt doesn't help things either...

I couldn't agree more. Company culture should be one of the top primary metrics used to value an investment. Forget all the business school lingo, all the numbers, and all the bullet points. CEO's buyback stocks, and accountants cook the books all the time. There's always room for fudging with numbers and metrics and how you present them, so all that "math" is really just misdirection. What is presented really doesn't matter, because at the end of the day the goal is always to present the company in good light. No ones gonna say "we had a bad quarter, we don't have a plan, and lost our lead in the marketplace, so please give us more funding".

What can't be faked is the experience their employees - the team so to speak - have working there. And if the team at large doesn't get along, doesn't believe in what they are working for, well, lets just say they aren't gonna win any championships.

> Let’s ignore the elephant in the room about canceling the founder CEO

I'm not sure I follow this one. How would the mere presence of the founder allow them to ignore economic reality? Like, this is fundamentally a business model problem. If anything, it might have provided an opportunity to dump some of the money-burning efforts (self-driving etc)

I was acknowledging that a mob cancelling a founder CEO and kicking him out of his own company could surely have deleterious downstream effects on workforce morale. It’s an arguable point and opinions probably range from “the CEO is a mostly pointless figurehead” to “everything flows from the CEO.”

You really can’t discuss what might have caused Uber to lose its market advantage, without first addressing this topic. But it’s contentious and so my comment was meant as “let’s assume the firing of the CEO has no impact, so we can move on to considering other variables.”

In very rare cases the CEO may be critically important (maybe Jobs at certain points in Apple's history), or critically deleterious (I think there's an argument that late-stage Ballmer was this), but generally, a CEO is just a CEO; there's very little reason to think ejecting Kalanick harmed Uber significantly (keeping him might have harmed them slightly, but probably not significantly).

But how did they lose uber eats business?

I don't get that at all. You have the restaurants, the drivers, the math gets better the more of all this you have (shorter drives, more stops per trip etc). Something happened there. Covid should have freed up drivers initially for more eats stuff.

Did they change leadership somehow around Eats? Because 2017 ish it felt like eats was the main player. Then a few years later a ghost.

There has to be some behind the scenes story! Crappy quality in terms of service? What happened?

Or did doordash just outspend them somewhere in the mix? Taking a quick look at DASH financials DASH is burning cash on something.

Hard to believe Uber didn't have the capital to fight the fight.

Not this is bay area annecdata - maybe eats is big in Boston or somewhere, but around here it's def not feeling #1 anymore.

It’s a great question, but due to the geographical clustering, very difficult to answer with personal observations and anecdata.

I wonder how much of this question you could answer with semi-public data. Are there any sources you could scrape that would serve as a good proxy for delivery market penetration by the various participants?

You're forgetting the most important thing about Uber: they disabled the automated braking system in their 'self driven' cars and killed a person.

That was tragic and all, but it's just a blip as far as stock prices go. Aurora acquired Uber's self driving unit in December, so SDV isn't even part of Uber's strategy anymore.

In a sane world the management of the company would be in prison for that.

There were multiple failures. Two automated braking systems were disabled, and they moved from a 2 person testing standard to a 1 person standard. I think there might be others, but those are the big ones I remember. It took a number of circumstances for that collision to occur.

The operator watching TV shows on their phone instead of doing their job was kind of a big part of it as well.

Yes! I mentally sort of rolled it into "going from 2 to 1 operators", because fucking around like on becomes easy and less attractive when you aren't alone, but it absolutely should be stated. Thank you. And I guess, plus the person going across the highway at night. Just, a whole lot of things had to go wrong in this case.