I am long on Uber: taxis are dead, it will not go anywhere. The only problem is that the board made a strategic mistake that felt good short term. They tried to retain users by pushing the founder out, and hiring a diversity CEO. This failed long term as any populist board move does. But they still have a chance to have their NeXT moment and bring Travis back.
At the current share price, no, it's probably not. It's the weak version of WeWork. The company is wildly overvalued based on growth expectations it can't possibly meet after a history of investor-driven mania. But the business model is solid. Pervasive gig-sourced drivers across the world with a universal interface is absolutely what the market wants.
Uber the company may be in trouble, but Uber the brand will be driving people around for decades to come.
They don't need Travis. They need an adult in charge who will shed about 80% of their payroll. Managing a cloud-based mobile logistics service for taxis shouldn't require 22,000 people.
For many purposes they seem to have automated/script-based customer service that requires little manpower.
I reported a bug in their app in a review I left on the Play Store. Uber responded saying to report it on their website instead. I did so, they told me it wasn't valid because I didn't include screenshots. (Even though there was a clear description of repro and expected/observed behaviour). After a few days I got around to sending them screenshots, and received an auto-reply that the issue had been closed and my reply rejected.
I'm not oppossed to frat bro culture tout court. As long as employees aren't being harmed and productivity is high, then the choice to work at a place with just such a culture is like the decision to choose to work anywhere. Pretty standard stuff.
However, people can mistake a frat bro culture with actually high productivity (leaving aside questions of whether employees are harmed by the culture). Zenefits pre-Parkers-leave might be an example. Employees can't be getting drunk and having sex in stairwells during office hours and retain a high level of productivity.
That's a rather strong claim. What's the causal relationship here? All frat bro cultures necessarily create lawbreaking and unethical behavior?
From my perspective, that would be prima facie wrong. I've witnessed frat bro cultures that led to that and ones that haven't. Just like every other type of culture.
The tech "bro culture" values being extremely aggressive, competitive, and ignoring norms of behavior. That sort of mindset leads directly to lawbreaking and unethical behavior.
Yeah, I think we might be talking about different things.
What I have in mind is a culture where personal boundaries are a bit relaxed, people are abnormally loud when communicating, etc. There is a sort of shallow resemblance to general sports culture.
I'll ignore whether or not it's morally sound to bring him back, since in the US putting reprehensible men in positions of leadership is par for the course these days. What moves would Travis make to attain profitability?
Remember that Steve Jobs helped Apple by killing a lot of products and simplifying their offerings. In the latest numbers release, rides were "profitable"; Uber Eats wasn't. I would agree that if Uber focused on the core product, and eliminated all the side projects, in the long run it would work best.
Not where I live. Where I live, taxis are beating the pants off of Uber and Lyft. This certainly isn't true everywhere, but it does show that taxis absolutely can compete with Uber and Lyft if they have their acts together.
It's not a company. It's a university, for God sake. If no free speech there anymore, then where? In the kitchen, like in the USSR?
Now if he was a pedophile, he should be in jail. But he is not, he is exersizing free speech, no matter how disgusting it is, he is entitled to it. Should Nabokov have been made unemployable too for writing Lolita?
Google trends is probably not a good way to assess Pinterest.
Want to browse Pinterest? Open the app.
Want to get Pinterest? Go to the App Store.
Heard someone say 'pinterest' but don't know what it means? Search google.
Google Trends takes advantage of the Google knowledge graph for deeper understanding of entities and companies. This is showing "Pinterest the social network" not just "Pinterest the search term". You can toggle with the menu at the top.
Google also knows how many Android users search/download the app. I don't use pinterest, but if they use Google analytics or ads then Google also has a fair amount of data on usage.
Google is very much a panopticon, I doubt any other single entity has as much knowledge of the internet as a whole. Now whether this reflects in Google analytics I don't know, as I've never really used their analytics for anything serious.
And for "Facebook", Google Trends shows a 71% drop worldwide over the last 5 years. Their Q2 2019 earnings showed a 20% worldwide growth in monthly users over the last two years alone. "YouTube" shows a 45% drop over 5 years. "Google" itself shows a 60% drop over 5 years.
Google Trends can't reliably tell you anything useful about a site's growth or activity. I'm not denying it correlates with your specific app, but that doesn't mean it will work for everything, and it clearly works very poorly for popular services.
Remember when everyone was sharing youtube videos. Or when you would sit and endless watch. I feel like that faded about 45%.
Google dropping makes sense. I visit less sites and the search results are not that great for discovery. Most sites I visit by typing a letter in the browser and auto completing.
Facebooks earnings raising 20% makes sense as more people are advertising on it. I notice 71% less people less original activity.. photos/status updates more groups/ads filling the gap. I spent 71% less time on and reduced my daily visits.
We're always chasing yesterday's tail. I bet twitter's numbers are down.
And how do you know this is all wrong? At least I get to look at our app internal analytics and compare. Do you have access to their internal analytics? Also contrast this to https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&ge... . Instagram is 9 years old
Their finance doesn't look bad. Revenue trended up. Flush with cash. Making money. The 5 year chart look bad, but they've stabilized in the past couple years and it looks like they've found way to actually remain profitable.
That actually looks catastrophic. Stock price doesn't reflect it yet. Shadenfreude isnt my thing but this looks bad and insiders must already be aware.
To be clear, I dont trade stocks and couldn't care less which way this moves. Just seems like the Google trends data is a bit of information asymmetry that the market hasn't caught on to, yet.
"Disclosure: I am/we are long PINS. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha)"
The lockup period does not expire till mid-october.
I read their 10-Q and found this gem about "user re-authentication":
"Users
MAUs at quarter-end were 300 million, representing growth of 30% year-over-year. This represents an acceleration in user growth, in part due to one-time changes to SEO algorithms and user re-authentication that impacted Q218. International growth drove the majority of global MAU expansion."
I can only interpret that they are talking about logged in users with accounts. The users were logged out during the pre-IPO and that resulted in some double counting in their second post IPO 10-Q.
I was researching this because I asked myself a general question: "Why is the stock price of non dividend paying companies correlated to the performance at all?"
Yes and no. I work for a bulge bracket bank and we're moving a significant number of applications to the cloud, including AWS, GCP, and our internal cloud offering.
But we have literally thousands of internally developed applications. We can move thousands of apps the cloud and still have a need to keep thousands on virtual/physical machines. My own apps are stuck on commodity physical hardware for at least the next few years.
The type of applications that can historically been run on mainframes is not really moving to AWS/cloud. Most of what's going to the cloud is what I would consider to be "supporting" applications, not core applications.
