our service – which already provides over 150,000
    trips per week across Phoenix, Los Angeles, San
    Francisco, and Austin

I wonder how close they are to being profitable? As soon as they are getting close to being profitable, they will probably scale this up super fast.

I don't know how much Google invested into Waymo so far. Something like $10B?

If they at some point make $10 per ride, they would only need something like 50 million rides per year to justify that investment with a p/e ratio of 20.

To go from 8M rides to 50M in 5 years they would have to increase their capacity by 50% per year. Might be possible?

Well, thankfully it is not.

There's no need for one side or the other to "win," especially at this point. Instead, likely, debate will continue until a more-nuanced view is better understood and accurately disseminated.

(Not necessarily a view "in the middle." Sometimes one side is just Right, Full Stop. But a more-nuanced view when there's strong disagreement on both sides is usually helpful for more people to understand _why_ there's disagreement.)

The bigger the company the further away from the employees and customers the leadership gets, and therefore the less guilty they feel about squeezing every penny out of them.

There is a great book, small giants, about companies that choose to go against this trend and be great instead of large.

For Google search ads pretty good CTR would be about 8%, and a pretty good conversion rate would be about 5%. So it’s more like 1/250 buying if you’re doing pretty well. At average costs, that’ll be one conversion for something like $40 in ad spend. More average would be like 2% and 3% so more like 1/1700 and like $70 per conversion.

(Display ads are more like 0.3% and 0.6%. So more like 1/50,000. Costs are cheaper.)

Those prices are _average_. There’s no flat rate for these—they’re an auction. So generally your higher margin items, especially in industries with higher average click/conversion rates, are going to end up with higher bids and higher costs.

A bank will pay a lot more to convert someone to a mortgage customer than a restaurant will pay to convert them. You may end up paying $30 per click for someone searching for mortgage refinancing. Assuming the same “good” search conversion rates, you’re paying $600 for the conversion at a $30 CPC. (I suspect the conversion rate on something like mortgage refinancing is probably lower.)

It’s been a few years since I was forced to live in the advertising world but (1) no it’s not a money printing machine (except for the ad networks) and in fact (2) I’ve literally never seen a directly attributable positive ROI. Mostly the gap is explained away as "well, it's building _brand awareness_". Most of the positive results I’ve seen were… questionable. Usually “you didn’t acquire new customers, you took existing ones or existing leads and funneled them into your advertising pipeline and attributed them there”. Think advertising on your own company’s name—people searching for your company by name were almost definitely going to end up there anyway.