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If Katie was a man do you think people would be going through git histories and their published papers trying to determine if she is being over-credited for her achievements?
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Edit: I just checked Twitter, apparently there are thousands of idiots who believe this "850,000/900,000 lines written by Andrew, therefore he wrote the algorithm" narrative. It's amazing how willing people are to eat up a low-hanging narrative as long as it confirms their world-view. All it takes is a very crude understanding of how software development works to see through this narrative.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/unpopularopinion/comments/bbykvf/ka...
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/bbuvff/this_is_andrew...
You might as well credit the Linux operating system to only a single man, whose effort is certainly largely responsible, but for who also does not in any way represent the whole of effort.
It's the ship of Theseus all over again.
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1. Uber is unprofitable and the only way it can become profitable is to get SDC's
2. Uber is significantly (years) behind Waymo in the SDC space.
3. Waymo will launch SDC taxi services first meaning:
- When it puts in an order for SDC components no one else is going to be buying in bulk and thus it can have effectively 100% of capacity of these specialized equipment makers
- It is going to be competing with other taxi/ride share services with all the cost advantages of SDC vehicles while its competitors are paying human drivers (and have basically no fat to cut from their current pricing)
- It will be able to improve its services so when someone else does launch their service will be inferior.
4. Uber expects that its users will stick to it over the course of years in the face of significantly cheaper competition.
5. Uber expects that it is going to be able to continue to use human drivers even while it competes against those same people with its SDC's (i.e. when your employer hires your replacement but expects you to train them).
I simply can't imagine how Uber is worth anything at the moment.
While Uber looks healthier especially given it's size, Lyft's reception after the IPO was quite negative, with the stock falling 30% immediately in the days that followed.
Even with better economics and larger scale the larger question looms, which is how do these businesses turn profitable.
Are they subsidizing a market and creating it by charging less, or will they reach a certain scale and be able to cut back on certain expenses which will give them profitability.
I don't think Amazon is a fair comparison here, because they were investing in infrastructure, building out global logistics, which is different from Uber and Lyft. They should be much more profitable because they don't have to invest in that. They don't know warehouses and logistics, and everything else that e-commerce required.
Also in the case of Amazon the supposed profits would be reinvested in the business with large CapEx spend, here it seems that the negative margins are being spent on sales and marketing, which isn't the same as what Amazon was doing when it was treading in the negative for a decade.
With self driving cars much further away than previously thought, this is the real danger for a company like Uber, who is bleeding money through their standard taxi-like services, quarter after quarter.