I prefer Gett for long commute. It gives you a firm quote so if your Uber/Lyft/Juno driver messed up enroute or there's a traffic, you don't pay the extra. From a user's perspective, this saves me money. I would take Gett to Barclay Center knowing Uber and Lyft would charge me high premium after game. Or trip from Manhattan back to Queens. There's also an option to make extra stop which is nice! Gett cars are the regular black SUV cars so much more comfortable.
This acquisition is nothing but acquiring users (although Junos has fewer drivers so fewer active users) and talents, as Gett itself can already do what Juno and other rider-service apps can do. I wonder if they will continue to run Juno as a standalone app like Seamless and Grubhub but share the same user database. I still wonder why Seamless and Grubhub can't shut down one of them, this seems like a marketing tactic than anything else, creating a diversion that there are other players in the market. Who knows, maybe there's tax advantage.
The sense I got was that they haven't unified the brands yet because they're really afraid of messing up the NYC market. Grubhub merged with Seamless in 2013 because leadership wanted to get into NYC, and Seamless owned/owns NYC. It's a hugely profitable market for the company.
They've toyed with the idea of bringing the brands closer (particularly around the Grubhub rebrand last year), but nothing's happened so far.
I see. I can see the risk, although at this point both apps are virtually identical appearance wise and even function wise. For the G/S folks out there, not that I am picky, but seems like a good idea to consolidate. I was actually using Grubhub before downloading seamless then I wanted to try Seamless (I didn't know the merger until I downloaded both apps and realized they are the same).
Living in NYC also, I use Gett mostly and sometimes Juno (due to 30% off limited time promotion). I always ask drivers which service they like. Many do not like Uber or Lyft due to the % they take, compared to Gett/Juno.
Also, I found it interesting that nearly all drivers have multiple cell phones logged into separate services, sometimes Gett and Juno! I wonder what the percentage of drivers Gett will be picking up that were already Juno drivers.
Do you just not use Uber Pool/Lyft Line? Those provide fixed prices and seem many times cheaper than the rates on Gett/Juno. Currently Lyft line is $25 to get me to Brooklyn, while Gett is $60.
Juno pledged to give away 50% of the founding shares to drivers via RSUs over a 10 year period [0]. I wonder how units many were issued, if they had accelerated vesting upon an acquisition, and if so, what drivers actually got in the transaction.
[0]
https://gojuno.com/drive/meet/
Over a period of ten years, we intend to distribute to drivers a number of RSUs that would give drivers the same ownership interest as our founders upon an IPO or sale assuming all such RSUs vest.
The headlines I see in Hebrew (both Gett and Juno's founders are Israelis) are somewhat more low-key: the undisclosed price tag is estimated at "few tens of millions", to be paid in shares of privately held Gett.
Been using Gett in NYC with excellent results. Car availability is hard to beat, even during peak hours and the special flat $10 rate in manhattan is quite the deal. Never tried Juno but will check it out.
Heh. I used their free service on occasion for a few years during the period when it was no longer worth it for me to pay for monthly dial-up but broadband wasn't always available when traveling. (And pre-mobile data.)
Instead of burning cash by subsidizing travels, Uber could have just bought some competitors but still... The only chance Uber has is becoming a monopoly, and I don't see how they can achieve it.
Why do they need to be a monopoly to succeed? I personally dislike Uber based on all the latest PR but what if they actually achieve a self driving car? If so, this would change the business entirely because no more contractor's to pay.
Do you think if one company has self driving cars and the rest don't this is a competitive advantage? Perhaps they license the self driving car software to other companies which also presents revenue options.
The longer self driving cars take to completely replace cars, the harder it is for a self-driving only company to compete. You can't run a network with only self driving cars unless you they are all level 5 under all driving conditions (like poor weather) and you literally have hundreds of them in each market you want to compete in so you can guarantee availability.
Customers want reliable transportation. Imagine if your internet company could only provide service when the weather was good. You'd quickly switch to the service that is reliable because being without service becomes unimaginable. This is especially important if you want to compete with car ownership and not just livery services. These companies also need to be reliable on pickup times. If a service take 5 minutes sometimes and 25 minutes at other times, most people will give up on them and go for the 5 minutes all the time service.
It isn't irrelevant in the slightest if their plan is to replace all these contract drivers with automated cars. That would in fact be a long term business strategy. Considering waymo's lawsuit for alleged theft and their large monetary investment in self driving I disagree with being utterly irrelevant.
But if that replacement won't happen for 30 years which seems likely given the tech... One can disagree about timeframes but getting to the last 1000 feet in chaotic urban environments seems challenging.
Business models are based indirectly on available resources. I cannot have a business with a business model that says I want to fly to Jupiter if I don't realistically have the resources (cash/engineering) to do so. Therefore, whether it happens in 10 days or 100 years, the company is directly impacting its balance sheet and business model today by investing money and resources into automated cars.
What could Uber today with the resources being devoted to automated cars? Could the app be improved, could the route optimization algorithm be improved to create more ride shares? I and you won't know because those resources are going towards a different agenda today.
Something about this headline interests me, along with the title that appears here on HN:
Article: "Gett in advanced talks to buy Juno for $250M as Uber rivals consolidate"
HN: "Ubser rivals consolidating: Gett to buy Juno for $250M"
I wonder if the HN headline is as-submitted or mod-ified.
The latter title leans much more on the Uber link, while TC's headline puts it at the end.
If we didn't have all of Uber scandal stuff going on, I wonder which title would've been submitted to HN:
"Uber rivals scrambling as Gett buys Juno for $250M", maybe?
Here's a fun query to run: Pull HN submissions and go back to the linked articles. Pull those headlines, and then remove ones too long for HN's length limit.
Of the remaining headlines, normalize and see how many HN posts modified the title in some way.
I'm skeptical about the business model in general, not related to any recent scandal.
The leaked financials[1] seem to indicate it's a losing proposition until self driving cars are relatively ubiquitous.
So whenever it does become financially viable, there's a pretty long payback cycle. And no obvious iron clad moat that keeps competitors at bay...ones that aren't under pressure to pay back investors for years of subsidized prices.
Of course, the leaked data is incomplete, and using unusual accounting, so perhaps I'm wrong.
Revenues growing exponentially from 2012-2015. The revenues in 2015 were even higher than the predictions done 2 years earlier (that were actually planning for a steep exponential).
At this rate of growth. They should be making 1-2 billion in revenues per quarter now. Wish we had a recent leaked document.
That's a solid multi billion dollars business. Worse case scenario if they run out of subsidies: Stop distributing tons of incentive in unprofitable markets + fire half the staff (they have too many anyway) = back to positive.
Easily back to a profitable business that is already in a hole how big?
Anyone can drive big revenue by taking huge piles of investor cash and selling things below margin. That isn't magic. If that buys market share with a moat, it may make sense. If not, it's unwise.
What matters it the size of the shovel they are using (their expenses and subsidies) and the force of the wind that's refilling the hole with nearby dust (the customer revenues).
They can reduce their shovel without impacting the wind too much.
Amazon was fine throwing money into making a moat, and they have a tangible one.
I don't see what Uber's moat is once self driving cars are common. It seems they will be fighting off competition (car companies, Waymo, etc) that didn't have to spend money on lobbying, lawsuits, subsidies, and so forth.
Self driving cars are just hype that won't be any significant for another decade. You should forget about self driving cars.
What Uber has right now is real, a massive customer base and network of taxi, that is bringing billions of dollars. They could totally focus on that and have a strong and sustainable business.
Sans self driving cars, Uber loses cash. You seem to think shedding employees is enough to fix that. Closing a $2 to $3bn/yr loss with just layoffs seems hard. Eliminating subsidies puts competitors on a level playing field. I can sell dollar bills for 90 cents and be incredibly popular too. I just don't have the panache to sell that plan to Saudis.
They bring you business. Yes, it helps you that the taxi can have a phone with lyft in the same car. It gives the illusion of choice and it gives an alternative to the driver.
In the end, your business has 90% market share. It's not going away overnight. Market share is actually self sustaining and it's giving you a strong edge for the future.
Competitors don't have 1/10th of the cash. If they get try to compete on subsidies, they'll get a peak of traffic and run out.
I read your comment twice. You only mention Uber and not "Waymo and car companies" unless your referring to a different comment of yours than the one I replied to here.
This was the only spot where I said anything about specific competitors: It seems they will be fighting off competition (car companies, Waymo, etc) that didn't have to spend money on lobbying
The bigger thing, though, is that you keep implying that I said Lyft was somehow in a better spot. Now you're noting I never mentioned Lyft.
Nothing I'm saying is affected one way or other by Lyft. Pointing out that they have the same problem doesn't change the rationale.
Given Lyft's leaked financials versus Uber's leaked financial, it looks like Lyft (and others) are going to be the ones trying to pay back investors for years:
I don't understand how so many people on HN falsely believe that Uber is the only one subsidizing rides. My only explanations are ignorance and astroturfing.
That might make sense here if I'd thrown a rant about how Lyft was going to eat their lunch.
But I didn't.
I said, roughly, that the current model is unsustainable and loses money. If Uber is losing $2-3bn/year, and Lyft is losing $600/mn, that doesn't contradict that. People talk about Uber because they are the market leader, and because their hubris and antics add additional risk to the already shaky model (like the Waymo suit).
Define hubris and provide evidence of it. That seems like an odd accusation to levy if someone is trying to be dispassionate and objective in their argument against a business model instead of a particular company.
I think its a concern, but how is it hubris on Uber's part? It's an allegation not a proven fact based on weak circumstantial evidence. In America you can sue anyone for anything. The fact that they knew about these downloaded files since well before he left Google but only did something now when Uber has a negative PR firestorm makes me very skeptical about Google's motives. If you know an employee download files, you deal with the situation immediately and make sure your IP is returned. If you're being ethical, you don't wait almost 1-2 years until a convenient time to use that incident to attack a competitor that out-executed you fair and square.
If you're on the fence as to whether Uber demonstrates hubris, we're probably too far apart to have any meaningful debate.
On the "knew about these downloaded files", that's not the story Waymo presented[1]. They said an email from a supplier had attached files of a Uber lidar board that looked a lot like a Waymo proprietary board. That is what prompted a look into the logs.
If you don't think self-driving vehicles face an enormous uphill regulation battle, you are sorely, sorely mistaken! Politics haven't even entered the self-driving game yet. They will and every union associated with driving is going to freak the fuck out. It will be a bloody political mess.
Everyone is blinded by the large number like $3 billion. That's not the number that matterS. All the companies in this market are subsidizing rides (except maybe the traditional taxis). What matters is how much each ride is being subsidized.
A while back another user did this math using leaked financials from Uber and Lyft and Lyft deserves more criticism for subsidizing rides than Uber:
It does change it a bit. If one is more efficient than the others and is improving efficiency/utilization faster than others, then eventually that company will eventually be able to compete on price while others are forced to subsidize. At that point they can just wait out the other competitor until the investors in those competitors tire of throwing good money after bad.
Subsidies don't work at scale. The bigger the ridesharing market gets, the less a company can meaningfully provide a subsidy that changes consumer behavior. Whichever company can get to breakeven before R&D and capital investments are taken into account is going to clean up because at that point they can outlast their competitors indefinitely.
So, wait it out, and then raise prices? Assuming that won't affect demand I suppose. Give me a mountain of cash and I'll start a flat rate $25 airline and put everyone under. Then I'll raise prices when it's over. Guess what happens when the mountain of cash is gone and I have to charge something that makes margin? We're back to competing because my moat was artificial. Nobody has demonstrated a profitable quarter yet in this nuevo taxi game.
If they need self-driving cars to be profitable, they might as well hang it up, seriously its not happening for a long while. I don't think that is the case, however.
This acquisition is nothing but acquiring users (although Junos has fewer drivers so fewer active users) and talents, as Gett itself can already do what Juno and other rider-service apps can do. I wonder if they will continue to run Juno as a standalone app like Seamless and Grubhub but share the same user database. I still wonder why Seamless and Grubhub can't shut down one of them, this seems like a marketing tactic than anything else, creating a diversion that there are other players in the market. Who knows, maybe there's tax advantage.