almost trippled from last year
What a joke. Those fkers called me during their start up phase looking for someone to rep the ChiTown market. They won’t accept the fact they are a glorified cab company with an Mobile App.
i never used it. how does it work, do they just contract car service companies?
anyone use this before?
Never used it, but I have a black car driver, so I don’t have to.
When I interviewed there I found out the following. Black cars are contracted out as independent consultants and drive customers of Uber. Someone will contact Uber who will arrange a driver. The driver then gets paid by Uber a % of the total paid by the customer. One big leak here is many black car drivers are crooked and will claim a customer didn’t show in exchange for a discoutned cash paid ride negotiated directly with the customer. My boy in the black car does this all the time for the agency he represents. He also takes folks like me inbetween scheduled drives for cash that goes in his pocket that the agency never sees.
In the days of cabs, black cars, this new thing call Lyft, Uber is really nothing special. They have an app that they call their competative advantage catalyst when I’m sure many of their competitors rep the same thing.
I pity the fool who pays for their acquisition. Where’s my man Bro to short the sht out of this f word of a company?
Uber is one of the few tech stories that I can actually see some value in. Maybe not $10B, but I get it. Where I live the taxi supply is artificially limited, so there generally is none available and the cost is high. This makes sense here. A lot more sense then the value of Candy Crush.
Boss
Uber solves a real problem – that taxis in most cities are terrible. I love it and Lyft. I think the model will endure and it is a valuable asset but I would have to see some serious math to get to $10B.
Isn’t that the case in virtually any major city?
It’s not the transportation, it’s the app. Went take long for better apps to surface for competing companies rendering their one catalyst moot.
I think the app is pretty good. Being able to see drivers around you and track where they are is useful. I got out early from my Uber once and tracked the driver taking my buddy who was still in the car to a different location, on my dime.
I agree with your point aboutthe drivers doing shady stuff to get as much money as possible. It’s in their best interest to cut out the middleman. Everytime I get in one, the guy hands me a business card.
I can see the value in Uber, but $10bn? Maybe if their plan for world domination works, but atm with all the legal challenges they face, it’s working out too expensive.
You racist son of a bitch. What difference does it make what color your car driver is?
It’s a black thing. I don’t trust brown folks, mexicans don’t speak english, and white folks have yet to be seen driving a car/cab.
Well, smell, for one.
I don’t care who drives my cab. That said, a black cab driver here is wildly uncommon. All either brown guys or Asian. And I don’t travel to the US often, maybe a couple times a year and mostly self-drive if on personal business. So lets just say I haven’t seen it much (in Toronto I generally take transit as I know the city and it’s more efficient anyway, but I understand there are lots of black drivers there).
Anyway, back to the story. So I fly into Boston-Logan, hail a cab to get into town. This Jamaican dude is driving and I honestly didn’t know whether or not to even get in. Was this a legit cab? I just hadn’t seen it before. Completely threw me off. Was my first time in Boston so expected either a sterotypical brown driver or one of the guys from New Yankee Workshop to pick me up. Instead I get “Yooooooo man… where we gooooooooing.”
Awesome.
http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-drivers-face-having-their-cars-seized-in-brussels-2015-5 Glad to see governments are getting serious about this criminal enterprise.
I lived in some major European cities such as London and Paris for a while, Uber is a must for sure! 10B is not impossible based on their customer growth rate, but there’s much more story than that
short term there is value and growth, it is destroying the taxi industry. prolly 15 years of growth. long term excess of 30 years, its a dead business. we will prolly have driverless cars that are run by renewables. lets get this going musk.
Uber has expressed interest in having automated driving Ubers. It could be another catalyst for massive growth as people stop buying cars and relying on uber like services
Uber has some regulatory issues they need to overcome to meet some of these wild growth projections I’ve seen.
They just got kicked out of Kansas. They were nearly kicked out of KC, MO too but the mayor stepped in and actually did something about it. At any rate, if the government doesn’t completely screw Uber over with so many regulations it drives the price of a ride up to what a cab would cost, then I think it’s a great company with a lot of upside. But, I don’t have much faith in the government getting out of its own way.
^ they kicked them out of San Antonio recently, so during Fiesta they operated and just didn’t charge people for rides. People already loved Uber but that bought them an incredible about of goodwill and publicity.