- If they do go public for $20B+ they that would be for more than Twitter and Facebook went public for. Would you really want to own Lyft over FB and TWTR the day they went public? That's a very large ask of the public markets.
EDIT To be clear I"m talking about their valuation multiple not the abs valuation.
- working with JPMorgan, Credit Suisse and Jefferies. So I guess we know 3 banks who won't be on the Uber IPO. Goldman probably has that locked up
- doing a traditional IPO
- banks pitching a valuation of $18 to $30 Billion, I believe their last round as at $15.1B
- Seems rushed to beat Uber to market, maybe there is only room for 1 hugely money losing, $10B+ ride sharing company?
- how do you loose $1B in a year on $2.2B in revenues and ave any concrete plan at all to become profitable?
> Lyft generated $563 million in revenue in the third quarter, up from $300 million in the same period a year earlier, a person familiar with the matter said in October. Losses increased to $254 million in the period from $195 million in 2017, the person said.
So losses increase as revenue increases, again, what's the profitability plan?
I actually have no idea how to value this company? What metrics should we be looking for? How do use future cash flows to evaluate a company when their future cash flows are all negative by even the most optimistic of estimations?
- Will be interesting to watch the first 6 months, if things don't go well, Uber could be in for a rough ride on the public markets. Uber has a much more diverse product line, maybe that will be their pitch.. Watch Uber's S1 to see if they promote food delivery, etc over ride sharing.
- Part of Uber's pitch may be their stake in Didi ala Yahoo and Alibaba, if that's true
- can't find any info yet on how long employee's and investors will be locked up
- Lyft has lots of room for international growth as they are only in North America
- shareholders with more than 5 percent of stock
- Rakuten Europe S.à r.l.with 13.05 percent
- General Motors Holdings LLC with 7.76 percent
- Fidelity associated entities with 7.71 percent
- Andreessen Horowitz associated entities with 6.25 percent
- Alphabet Inc. entities with 5.33 percent.
- Lyft's founders did negotiate for a special class of stock that gives them 20 votes for each of their shares. Will be interesting to see if they get locked out of indexes for this. Index/ETF flow can be a godsend to management as they tend to be passive and long term holders.
- from the S1 "We have incurred net losses each year since our inception and we may not be able to achieve or maintain profitability in the future. We incurred net losses of $682.8 million, $688.3 million and $911.3 million in 2016, 2017 and 2018, respectively."
- will list on Nasdaq under ticker LYFT, sweet ticker!!
This caught my eye in their exec compensation section:
> For Mr. Green, the 2018 amount reflects $935,105 in personal security services and $1,787 in ride credits for use on the Lyft platform.
Nearly a million dollars for the CEO's security services (presumably also including private air travel)? I can understand Facebook or even Twitter doing this for their high-profile CEOs, but most people would not recognize Logan Green if they seem him on the street.
> how do you loose $1B in a year on $2.2B in revenues and ave any concrete plan at all to become profitable?
These are not role models (or similar business models), however there are several well-known examples of companies that have survived comparably substantial red ink to revenue ratios:
Twitter was a red ink machine its entire existence until 2018.
Amazon had a net loss of $719m on sales of $1.6 billion in 1999, as they spent aggressively to build out the infrastructure that would facilitate their present advantages. Again in year 2000, they did $2.7b in sales with a $863m operating loss and a $1.4b net loss.
Box looks like it will survive based on its latest quarterly burn rate (in 2015 they had $300m in sales and a $200m operating loss; latest quarter was $163m in sales with a $21m operating loss).
Tesla has burned enormous amounts of red ink to scale its business. Their 2012 figures were $413m in sales with a $396m loss.
Splunk lost $278m on $668m in sales for 2015. Operating income finally turned positive in the latest quarter, after 15 years of losses.
Those companies all survived thanks to sales growth that continued to march forward. A bet against Lyft is a bet on their sales having a low upside from here. They have to get a lot larger to bring that $1b loss down to a reasonable level.
eh, I read a paper a while back that argued that ridesharing in a world with self-driving cars will be a hyper-competitive commodity market akin to the airlines, and it made a lot of sense. I don't think there's a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow here, as the services will likely have little moat to defend themselves outside of competing to the death on price.
People online say this but I'm pretty sure it's nonsense. The word right now is self driving cars won't be working for quite a while since they're nowhere near solving for rain and snow.
Not that I disagree with the larger point here, but it's fully possible that a system which can't (yet) handle rain and snow could still deliver a ton of value— for example, in Arizona, where neither of those things happen all that much.
A partial launch also gives you a bunch of opportunity to iron out other details, like establishing the protocols which allow a rider to call for assistance, or a remote safety driver to take over in a construction zone, weird driveway pull-in, whatever.
Lyft's business model is betting that automation will happen at the OEM level, and thus has a slower corporate burn rate. So less of their balance sheet goes direct towards automation efforts. Contrast this with Uber's significant losses in which the company's long term survival is contingent on the automation developed in-house to be leveraged as their own. I'm not entirely sure how Uber's technology would be integrate with OEMs where most (GM/Honda's Cruise, Ford, and others) are developing their own level-3+ autonomy, and how their sensor arrays/networks would be physically installed on cars.
I personally wanted to see the patent lawsuit Google had brought against Kalanick to completion- much of the lidar and sensor technology at stake needs to be either licensed using FRAND terms or have each company using its own disparate systems. V2V may be a desired open standard but I'm less than optimistic about its targeted implementation date being a few years away because of this competition.
Being first won't help much. The technology for full self driving in any area (not just a few cities with good streets) is still many years away. And when it does arrive it will quickly become a commodity, available to everyone.
They have zero experience in fleet management. Rental car companies or car dealers are probably set up better than Lyft or Uber for self driving car sharing.
If that were true (I have no info either way), wouldn't that mean most drivers have no clue the true cost of working for Lyft/Uber? All they see if free money, but aren't factoring in repairs.
> If they do go public for $20B+ they that would be for more than Twitter and Facebook went public for
Lyft is IPOing at a higher valuation than Twitter, but Facebook went public at a valuation of $100B and raised $16B. FB's IPO was 5x bigger than Lyft's.
It is going to be interesting to see how Uber/Lyft play out. I assume prices will just increase until profitable, but that will undoubtedly cause a decrease in paid rides as people will move to alternative transportation.
- If they do go public for $20B+ they that would be for more than Twitter and Facebook went public for. Would you really want to own Lyft over FB and TWTR the day they went public? That's a very large ask of the public markets.
EDIT To be clear I"m talking about their valuation multiple not the abs valuation.
- working with JPMorgan, Credit Suisse and Jefferies. So I guess we know 3 banks who won't be on the Uber IPO. Goldman probably has that locked up
- doing a traditional IPO
- banks pitching a valuation of $18 to $30 Billion, I believe their last round as at $15.1B
- Seems rushed to beat Uber to market, maybe there is only room for 1 hugely money losing, $10B+ ride sharing company?
- how do you loose $1B in a year on $2.2B in revenues and ave any concrete plan at all to become profitable?
> Lyft generated $563 million in revenue in the third quarter, up from $300 million in the same period a year earlier, a person familiar with the matter said in October. Losses increased to $254 million in the period from $195 million in 2017, the person said.
So losses increase as revenue increases, again, what's the profitability plan?
I actually have no idea how to value this company? What metrics should we be looking for? How do use future cash flows to evaluate a company when their future cash flows are all negative by even the most optimistic of estimations?
- Will be interesting to watch the first 6 months, if things don't go well, Uber could be in for a rough ride on the public markets. Uber has a much more diverse product line, maybe that will be their pitch.. Watch Uber's S1 to see if they promote food delivery, etc over ride sharing.
- Part of Uber's pitch may be their stake in Didi ala Yahoo and Alibaba, if that's true
- can't find any info yet on how long employee's and investors will be locked up
- Lyft has lots of room for international growth as they are only in North America
- shareholders with more than 5 percent of stock
- Lyft's founders did negotiate for a special class of stock that gives them 20 votes for each of their shares. Will be interesting to see if they get locked out of indexes for this. Index/ETF flow can be a godsend to management as they tend to be passive and long term holders.- from the S1 "We have incurred net losses each year since our inception and we may not be able to achieve or maintain profitability in the future. We incurred net losses of $682.8 million, $688.3 million and $911.3 million in 2016, 2017 and 2018, respectively."
- will list on Nasdaq under ticker LYFT, sweet ticker!!