[HN Gopher] The Drivers Cooperative
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The Drivers Cooperative
Author : pasquinelli
Score : 745 points
Date : 2021-03-26 03:57 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.drivers.coop)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.drivers.coop)
| tomdell wrote:
| It's encouraging that initiatives like this seem to be popping up
| more often - co-operatives of workers looking to cut out
| corporate middlemen. It will be an uphill climb, but I hope this
| is the future. The technical moats of a lot of recently minted
| tech companies don't seem to be so great that they can't be
| overcome with time and open source work. The inertia and
| efficiency that comes with scale will be harder to compete with.
| CameronNemo wrote:
| Is Uber still operating at a loss? Hard to compete with that,
| even accounting for the 20% tax.
| dbuder wrote:
| Only from spending big on marketing and lobbying.
| mannerheim wrote:
| Uber invested a lot of money into self-driving cars.
| Presumably a coop isn't spending money on automating away
| their workers.
| discodave wrote:
| They spent a lot of money subsidizing rides. It would be
| nice if they were making losses to plough money into R&D,
| but that is/was not the case.
| CameronNemo wrote:
| That is actually an interesting point. Why would I, as a
| driver, fund research and development aimed at making my
| skills worthless?
| hkt wrote:
| Drivers don't have an incentive, but car manufacturers
| do. The dream for Uber was a robofleet of driverless
| cars, which can still happen; it'll be General Motors
| getting into the taxi trade if such a thing ever became
| feasible.
| throwinreturn wrote:
| That would probably be competition. A monopolist
| corporation has no incentive to improve its capital if it
| gets its profit anyway (c.f. the dismal state of DSL and
| cable). But if it's not a monopolist, it might be forced
| to anyway.
|
| It's the same thing at a worker cooperative, or for that
| matter at a heavily unionized workplace: the workers have
| no incentive to automate themselves out of a job, but may
| collectively understand that if they don't, the business
| will go under and they'll all be left without jobs.
| hobofan wrote:
| Because you own part of the co-op, and it's value would
| go up if that research succeeds?
|
| I think co-ops can actually be a good way of handling
| technology replacing manual labor. The profits made from
| the technological advancements can be put in a dedicated
| trust of the co-op that is focused on retraining the
| workers for new positions. With that you could handle
| inevitable technological progress.
| yellowapple wrote:
| > Because you own part of the co-op, and it's value would
| go up if that research succeeds?
|
| That ownership is contingent on you working for the co-
| op, which doesn't seem very likely if a robot took your
| job.
|
| That said, there are a couple ways to work around this:
|
| 1. Flip the ownership model to a customer cooperative (or
| a customer/worker hybrid cooperative), thus moving the
| decisionmaking - and the incentives as a result - from
| workers to customers (which can and often do overlap).
| Customer cooperatives are a proven model here in the US
| (credit unions are probably the most widely known
| example).
|
| 2. Use automation to multiply labor rather than replace
| it. Replacing a drivers with cars at a 1:1 ratio
| obviously doesn't leave much room for drivers, but
| replacing them at a 1:10 ratio (or somesuch) can mean
| converting drivers into owner-operators of "squads" of
| cars. This depends on there being enough of a customer
| base to warrant this multiplication; for this to work,
| it's best paired with a massive expansion of that
| customer base (adding a bunch more cities, for example,
| or extending service areas, or slashing fares).
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Skills is a stretch. Having a driver's license in the US
| is a pretty low bar for entry for being a rideshare
| driver.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| competition and because if you own a share of a future
| technology you're still standing to gain financially.
| It's not like tech companies not routinely also innovate
| away their own tech.
|
| Software developers also work on tools that make software
| development easier.
| nickik wrote:
| > It's encouraging that initiatives like this seem to be
| popping up more often
|
| Any evidence for that? Seems to me this has been 'pet idea' of
| the labor movement for 200+ years.
|
| Maybe that are more that are visible to the avg person because
| of the web and social media, but if there are actually more
| seems highly questionable.
| fossuser wrote:
| Do others have better experiences with co-ops than I do?
|
| I know people love REI, but whenever I go in there to buy
| anything that requires someone (ski boots, skis, work on skis)
| - it sucks. There's never anyone available, it often takes up
| to an hour or more to get helped or waiting in line. Sometimes
| I have to leave and come back later. Last time I gave up and
| ordered everything online.
|
| It's not like it's crazy packed in there either, it's pretty
| empty - there's just nobody working there.
|
| Co-ops are supposed to be better about aligning incentives, but
| at least for me I've often had worse experiences as a customer.
|
| Uber and Lyft work pretty well (for the most part, except for
| when drivers cancel on you) - I'd be surprised if a co-op could
| pull off a similarly good experience for riders.
| afarrell wrote:
| Was that true pre-pandemic?
| playpause wrote:
| If co-ops have a problem with human customer service (which I
| can totally imagine, although I've never heard of REI), then
| wouldn't that mean that the gig econonmy is exactly where co-
| ops could potentially compete anyway? Rideshare and food
| delivery apps do almost zero human customer service, it's
| nearly all automated (and in the rare cases it's not, it
| takes hours or days to get a refund).
| vore wrote:
| REI is a consumers' cooperative, not a workers' cooperative.
| The people who work at REI don't own the business, and they
| would basically have the same role in any other company
| (which is one of the criticisms of why they're not actually
| good for labor).
|
| In fact, in a consumers' cooperative would probably be better
| in this case since you would have more direct control over
| the business than with a regular corporation.
| fossuser wrote:
| This is a good point - and makes my REI example irrelevant,
| thanks.
| TaylorAlexander wrote:
| I've not had any trouble finding help at REI, but it sounds
| like perhaps you go more often than I do.
|
| The point of the co-op is that it is much better for the
| worker. There's no inherent reason why a co-op would need to
| have any different level of customer service than a
| corporation. My personal worst customer service experience is
| at Home Depot for example. I had to wait 45 minutes to get a
| 4 foot length of hose cut, something that would have been
| under 5 minutes at my local hardware store (and so I go to
| the local shop now).
|
| Ideally many stores would be co-ops and they could compete on
| price, quality, customer service etc like any other business.
|
| Perhaps you're satisfied with the customer experience at
| Uber, but the situation for drivers seems pretty
| exploitative. If I can get similar service and the workers
| get a fair deal, I'd be much happier choosing that.
| [deleted]
| praveen9920 wrote:
| While it is great to see drivers disrupting the space, one
| particular aspect is might be missing. Uber/Lyft or any ride
| hailing company kind of acts as an mediator between driver and
| rider. If there is any issue between driver and rider, ride
| hailing apps provide certain "guarantees" for both in terms of
| experience and financials which might be more biased towards
| drivers in this initiative.
| elcortez wrote:
| I really admire these kind of experiments, and hopefully it'll
| work out for them.
|
| However it seems that people vastly underestimate how hard it is
| to run a business like Uber. You have to take care of handling a
| complex demand/supply ratio, geolocation, fraud management, a
| seamless payment system, tax rates, etc. etc.
|
| Hopefully these initiatives will produce meaningful value locally
| all around the world, contributing to a more decentralized
| Internet.
| tootie wrote:
| I had a handful of go-to car services in NYC prior to
| Uber/Lyft. Just put their numbers in speed dial, talk to a
| dispatcher and the car is there in 10 minutes or less. And they
| were doing this with a handful of people who barely speak
| English out of a garage in central Brooklyn. Running a global
| business is hard, but providing services to 1000 local
| businesses isn't.
| st_t wrote:
| I read recently an article that claims the Driver's Co-op is
| "fighting Uber's model" --but, having talked with most TDC's key
| players, I believe what's good for Uber is good for them too.
|
| Fighting Uber's model means three things: 1) replacing its app
| and network of contractors, 2) abolishing its third parties
| selling services to drivers like selling shovels to gold miners,
| and 3) strengthening state and federal labor laws giving workers
| wage protections and right to a union.
|
| The Driver's Coop may do 1, but they have resisted 2 and 3.
|
| At most, I believe they are friendly competition to Uber, not yet
| the fighter that the labor and cooperative movements need.
| But/and I think the Driver's Co-op to do better.
| yawnxyz wrote:
| i'm surprised Blablacar (in Europe) hasn't made it over to the US
| yet -- the most "disruptive" part about it is that people can set
| their own prices. Also, it's for "long haul" drives, like from
| the airport into the city, or between cities
| runeks wrote:
| I never understood why Uber doesn't allow drivers to set their
| own price.
| pluc wrote:
| Great photo where nobody wears their mask properly
| sonicrocketman wrote:
| This is a very cool idea. I love to see more worker-owned takes
| on big-tech ideas.
| christiansakai wrote:
| Wow, I wonder how do they manage to cover the expenses of running
| a tech startup? We know that software business is capital and
| intellectual property heavy. How do these people do it?
| Ekaros wrote:
| Taxi apps really aren't very complex and expensive pieces of
| work. The unicorn start-up scaling up model is just what makes
| them so. There are already plenty of examples of pretty okay
| taxi-apps. And the industry itself is much more capital-to-
| revenue intensive and tech...
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| I would argue that it's Uber's marketing costs that make
| their business much less profitable than it could be.
| bertjk wrote:
| Some things should be cheaper, due to the work already done by
| existing competitors. They don't need to spend marketing
| dollars on educating people on ride-hailing in general, do not
| need to buy lobbyists to make amenable laws, their initial app
| can be merely a clone of the competitors'.
|
| Now that driver and rider expectations around the service have
| solidified somewhat the backend systems can be simpler too.
|
| There are many benefits to being a fast follower.
| [deleted]
| cycomanic wrote:
| This is such an odd comment. What industries/businesses are you
| comparing with? Software is one of the least capital intensive
| industry I can think of. Similar for intellectual property, I
| mean what important IP is in building a website or a mobile
| app? That's why the industry is so focused on growing as quick
| as possible IMO, because everyone could essentially build your
| service, it's all about building so much momentum/user base
| that it becomes difficult for anyone to compete.
| gher-shyu3i wrote:
| > Software is one of the least capital intensive industry I
| can think of
|
| Software runs on hardware, and it's not cheap.
| foepys wrote:
| Everytime I hear this, I have to laugh. Setting up a car
| workshop, carpenter workshop, a bakery, a hair salon etc.
| will set you back a few ten if not hundred thousand dollars
| for equipment and/or inventory alone. Meanwhile you can
| rent servers for low double digits dollars a month and a
| decent laptop costs $2,000.
|
| The only thing expensive about software development is
| labor cost. Hardware is ridiculously cheap compared to any
| other profession.
| gher-shyu3i wrote:
| We're talking about infrastructure costs to run a
| platform like Uber or Lyft. Do you think that's cheap?
| foepys wrote:
| Yes. Compare it to having to buy/lease all cars first
| like a traditional taxi service.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| It's a hell of a lot cheaper than serving the same number
| of customers with physical products.
| Miner49er wrote:
| For programming one can do fine with much cheaper then a
| $2k laptop.
| Draiken wrote:
| Compared to what?
|
| Cheap is not an absolute term. I agree with another comment
| here, it's absurdly cheap compared to almost anything else.
| gher-shyu3i wrote:
| If the goal is to run infrastructure like Uber or Lyft
| (or any other big company), it's going to be in the tens
| or even hundreds of thousands USD per month at least.
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| Hundreds of thousands to run infrastructure like Uber?
| That's absurdly cheap.
|
| That's probably less than the cost of setting up one
| restaurant.
| gher-shyu3i wrote:
| A restaurant runs up to the order or $100k/month?
| cwyers wrote:
| It seems like this only works in New York, which is probably a
| much smaller scale than Uber has to serve.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Which is fine, they could probably franchise the tech out to
| other cities.
|
| In fact, this is how Hailo (an Uber like service
| headquartered in the UK) used to work, until they were driven
| out of business by VC backed competitors.
| chobeat wrote:
| it's also how CoopCycle works throughout Europe
| chendii wrote:
| Coops FTW
| pjs_ wrote:
| Good on em - I hope they get a ton of support from this community
| and elsewhere.
| vijaypatil wrote:
| Hi all, I have been toying this very idea for consulting. Several
| people with niche experience can come together and from a global
| consulting co-op. I wonder what you think.
| m_ke wrote:
| Here's a recent interview with them https://youtu.be/VykTBPKwYnA
|
| I've been considering starting a software coop to build open
| source versions of these middleman gig work services for a while.
| Would anyone on here be interested in joining one?
|
| With so many well paid engineers I'm also surprised that there's
| not more coop based tech startups in the states.
| jessxdesign wrote:
| Give us a shout over at Start.coop if you decide to go this
| direction. We have lots of resources and supports available to
| help you get off the ground.
| maxmamis wrote:
| > I've been considering starting a software coop to build open
| source versions of these middleman gig work services for a
| while. Would anyone on here be interested in joining one?
|
| i've been idly considering the same thing for a while now. i'd
| be down to chat about it, [my username]@gmail.com
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Developers are well paid in the US because of VC and monopoly
| backed business models. To go coop is to abandon those options,
| one explicitly and one implicitly.
| m_ke wrote:
| What I meant by well paid was that most engineers who spent a
| few years at FAANGs have 6 figures in savings and can use
| some of that capital to kickstart a cooperative without
| needing venture funding.
|
| A coop could absolutely become a monopoly in a market. The
| reason developers in the US make so much is because they live
| in a large wealthy English speaking country that's the
| launching point for most ventures before global expansion.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| perhaps California developers talk a big game but don't put
| their money where their mouth is? I would expect the same
| bootstrapping of cooperatives but it doesn't really happen.
|
| I think cooperatives would struggle to gain a monopoly
| holding because they're not as ruthless as investor-driven
| companies. They tend to treat their workers fairly and
| focus on quality of life, over relentlessly pursuing high
| quarterly growth targets. That's a very good thing for the
| employees and probably the customers too, but makes the
| company less competitive.
|
| > The reason developers in the US make so much is because
| they live in a large wealthy country that's the launching
| point for most ventures before global expansion.
|
| If that were the case then developers all over the US would
| make bank. They don't; only in startup-focused areas like
| the Bay Area and NYC. It's the same here in the UK, you can
| make a ton of money if you work in London for hyper-
| capitalist companies, but outside of London most developers
| are making 40-60k max. Which is still good for the UK, but
| not the 6 figure incomes that even shit-tier developers can
| make in California.
| m_ke wrote:
| > perhaps California developers talk a big game but don't
| put their money where their mouth is? I would expect the
| same bootstrapping of cooperatives but it doesn't really
| happen.
|
| I suspect a big factor in that is a lack of a safety net
| in the US. FAANG engineers with enough mileage to have
| some savings have families and mortgages that make it
| hard to give up their employee provided healthcare and
| risk their own savings on a new venture.
|
| I was foolish enough to go into startups as a new grad
| with huge student loans and though I have enjoyed it, it
| has not been good for my physical nor financial health.
|
| > I think cooperatives would struggle to gain a monopoly
| holding because they're not as ruthless as investor-
| driven companies. They tend to treat their workers fairly
| and focus on quality of life, over relentlessly pursuing
| high quarterly growth targets. That's a very good thing
| for the employees and probably the customers too, but
| makes the company less competitive.
|
| Biggest obstacle is not being able to burn billions of
| dollars on growth and expansion with no clear path to
| profitability like the Ubers and WeWorks of the world.
|
| A coop could probably get to monopoly scale through
| mergers with other coops in adjacent industries. In the
| case of gig work, there's no reason why a NYC based
| drivers coop couldn't slowly expand to food delivery,
| logistics, car rentals and etc, then jump to other major
| cities in through mergers with smaller coops in those
| markets. There would be a lot of benefits to having a
| single middleman platform with some sort of a social
| credit system (reviews) baked in and a large user base to
| launch new offerings to.
|
| > If that were the case then developers all over the US
| would make bank. They don't; only in startup-focused
| areas like the Bay Area and NYC. It's the same here in
| the UK, you can make a ton of money if you work in London
| for hyper-capitalist companies, but outside of London
| most developers are making 40-60k max. Which is still
| good for the UK, but not the 6 figure incomes that even
| shit-tier developers can make in California.
|
| I'm an immigrant who grew up in NYC and up until this
| year I would have never considered moving to a small town
| in middle america due to a lack of jobs and a shitty
| walmart and car centric lifestyle. In New York I can quit
| my job on Monday and have a choice of 4-5 job offers by
| Friday. Now that companies have been forced to be more
| open to remote work I can imagine people in the middle of
| nowhere having the same options and I anticipate that it
| will lead to a major repeat of the white flight, sending
| a ton of white collar workers out of the cities and into
| suburbia.
|
| Starting a tech company used to be a very expensive
| venture that required knocking on doors of VCs and
| racking servers. Now that we're starting to have the
| infrastructure in place to work remotely and can spin up
| machines on the fly for under $100/month things will
| probably change. The pandemic will accelerate this trend.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| Yeah, a lot of the constraints around software services are
| a function of market size and legal changes. It's
| _intensely_ profitable to have a large market with the same
| regulation, and one would imagine that software
| professionals would be paid a lot in such a place.
|
| And interestingly enough, in both China and the US,
| software professionals make a lot of money.
| m_ke wrote:
| Yeah.
|
| US also benefitted from being isolated from any threats
| by huge bodies of water, having a ton of cheap land,
| speaking english and being welcoming to immigrants.
| Thanks to this the whole global economy is tied to the
| dollar and runs through wall street.
| nhoughto wrote:
| It's a nice idea, can't imagine they can match the UX polish lyft
| and Uber deliver, which is what users expect now. What other
| examples are there of do-it-for-the-cause tech plays working out?
|
| Interestingly i imagine a not insignificant amount of effort from
| Uber etc goes into combating drivers "bad" behaviors, the co-op
| model might align incentives to reduce this cost.
| [deleted]
| beefield wrote:
| One of the most amazing things to me is that a couple of large
| hotel chains can't come up with a hotel reservation coop that
| would compete/throw out with bookin.com et al. If you worry about
| competition, just found two or three competing coops and be
| member of them all. SEO? If most hotels are nowhere but in the
| coop platforms, how can google not display them at top?
| bberenberg wrote:
| Antitrust?
| ugh123 wrote:
| Yeah that sounds like price fixing.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| They used to have roomkey.com and it would show you all the
| hotel chains' options. Was actually a very nice site, and you
| could quickly compare all the lowest rewards member pricing
| (lower than expedia or priceline offerings, since there was no
| commission to be paid).
|
| They didn't advertise it for years and then and killed it for
| some reason.
|
| It's also possible that certain markets (especially with
| expiring goods like hotels and airlines) earn sufficiently more
| money via price segmentation that it makes sense to pay
| middlemen. For example, if you have 100 rooms in a hotel, and
| you can sell 20 of the rooms for $x, the next 20 for 1.1 _$x,
| the next 20 for 1.3_ $x, the next 20 for 1.5 _$x, and the last
| 20 for 2_ $x, then the ability to price discriminate might be
| worth it.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| Mariott Bonvoy chain has member rates for a reason, and they
| are great, although they could be more predictable so that I
| could search on booking.com and know the member pricing.
| SergeAx wrote:
| I never saw any "great" member rates via Bonvoy, they are
| typically just 5% lower than the street price. And in
| exchange I should surround my ability to choose from all
| other competitors. Also, they will not allow mw to reclaim
| any points/benefits for stays booked via agents. It's
| understandable, but looks extremely cheap.
| xiphias2 wrote:
| Sure, I understand it, I also first look at the hotels to
| go, but I go to a lot of reserves, and the best ones are
| quite often Ritz Carlton or Four Seaons. Four Seasons don't
| have member rates though.
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| Can you tell us a bit more about your experience with them?
| And costs?
| xiphias2 wrote:
| My favourite hotel with them with value/price with member
| rate was this Ritz Carlton in Portugal (less than 200
| USD/night for standard room):
|
| https://www.ritzcarlton.com/es/hotels/europe/penha-
| longa#HOT...
|
| If you use their site, they give you some money that you
| can use to eat at their pricey, but amazing restaurants
| (also 2 of the hotel's restaurants has Michelin star, but I
| haven't tried those yet).
|
| Their swimming pool / jacuzzi is bad, but the nature, the
| castle and the room is great.
| btown wrote:
| This is a really good question with a frustratingly simple
| answer: OTAs like Booking.com have "rate parity" contracts
| guaranteeing them equal rates to the hotels' direct booking
| sites and any other channels they use:
| https://businessblog.trivago.com/rate-parity-hotel-industry-...
| - and these have de facto been upheld in the US court system.
|
| So if you're a hotel deciding whether to invest resources into
| your own branding and marketing, vs. investing it into a brand
| new coop that itself can't undercut the household-name OTAs
| that are spending vast amounts of marketing dollars and years
| of SEO work to make household names, you'll invest in yourself.
| beefield wrote:
| Well, in my opinion rate parity agreements should be illegal
| in the first place, as they foster rent seeking behaviour as
| opposed to fair competition.
|
| And if a few large chains drop out of these household names
| and welcome all small hotels to their coop with fair terms, I
| fail to see how that would be NPV negative move even if it
| took a couple of months to readjust for SEO. Price fixing?
| Just found a couple of competing coops with different seed
| chains.
| pydry wrote:
| This mirrors the clauses VISA/MasterCard have that say that
| shops can't charge different prices for credit cards and
| cash which _also_ solidifies rent seeking behavior.
|
| I wonder if you could create a similar law for both.
| beefield wrote:
| Funniest is that nowadays card payments are likely
| cheaper to process for merchants than cash - if you
| account properly for all costs. So credit card companies
| should start lobbying to allow different pricing based on
| payment methods.
| lorenzhs wrote:
| If you're a large retailer and have been able to
| negotiate good rates with a payment processor and are in
| a country where interchange fees are capped (e.g., EU
| countries), then I can see it. But I doubt that it's the
| case in the US where those fees have to fund 2% cashback
| programmes etc.
| beefield wrote:
| Even for a small retailer, (i)zettle costs 1.75%[1] per
| transaction. No monthly fees. I honestly can't see how
| cash can compete with that. You need to spend time
| managing your change. You need to have some kind of
| register. You need to take your cash to the bank (which
| is far from free, and takes time). You need to manage
| your operations so that nobody steals or loses your
| money. Only "benefit" in cash is that tax avoidance may
| be easier, if you are into such things.
|
| If I'd start a small business, I would flat out refuse to
| take cash. (in Europe)
|
| [1]
| https://www.zettle.com/gb/help/articles/1084775-pricing
| moduspol wrote:
| I think it's totally doable if you can avoid cash
| completely, but for most of the costs of handling it,
| they hit when you take your first dollar. If you're
| already buying a cash register, counting, making change,
| stocking cash/change, making a trip to the bank, etc.,
| the incremental costs of additional cash transactions are
| minimal. Even with steps up for things like time-locked
| safes or pickups by armored cars.
|
| I agree with the sentiment, though. I guess realistically
| if it were my business, I'd need some significant
| evidence that I wouldn't be losing money by not accepting
| cash. That's the extraordinary claim, after all, with the
| vast majority of businesses doing it.
|
| I think I've seen a few food trucks in my area that don't
| take cash.
| bluecalm wrote:
| This one is very frustrating. If anything it should be
| obligatory to make payment processor fee to be a separate
| item. This way we would have fair competition with
| consumers choosing the cheapest/most convenient option.
| oarsinsync wrote:
| Airlines such as Ryanair in Europe do this.
|
| One of the regulations that airlines in europe are
| required to adhere to is that they're not allowed to
| advertise up-front prices that come with additional non-
| optional fees. So the ticket price advertised up front
| has to include all mandatory fees and taxes. Optional
| fees (hand luggage now being the latest, priority
| boarding, checked luggage) can be extra.
|
| Payment processor fees cannot be extra. At least one
| needs to be free. So in reality, it's not necessarily the
| cheapest processor that's free, but it's the least
| popular one that's free. That way, for all the common
| ones, you can now charge a fee and tick the regulatory
| box, while still screwing your customers out of more
| money.
|
| E.g. Visa Electron is free, Visa Debit/Credit, Mastercard
| debit/credit and Amex all come with fees to use.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| Having worked for a company with a similar model, the
| problem with not having rate parity is that companies will
| then use your site for lead generation but encourage people
| to book directly. Also, the industry I was in had more
| transparent pricing than is typical in hotels so the client
| would often realise they had been made to pay extra for
| using the intermediary and leave bad reviews about the
| price discrepancy.
|
| So long as there is sufficient competition in the industry
| then I don't think it's in the consumer interest to ban
| rate parity.
| beefield wrote:
| > companies will then use your site for lead generation
| but encourage people to book directly
|
| Of course. That would be the whole point. In that case
| the OTAs would need to start figuring out how to actually
| produce value to both end customers and hotels instead of
| just rent seeking.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| I for one consider that being able to compare prices and
| availability across a large segment of the market to be
| consumer friendly behaviour. Additional fees for the
| privilege, not so much.
|
| Hotels are of course free to decline a business
| relationship with the various OTAs and traditional travel
| agencies for that matter. So long as no one OTA has a
| monopoly I don't think there is a problem.
| beefield wrote:
| > Additional fees for the privilege, not so much.
|
| But you understand that as the end customer, you end up
| paying the fees anyway, even if they are not visible in
| the bill? If your customers were unhappy about the extra
| cost, maybe you were not open enough about them or maybe
| the customer did not think your service worth the extra
| fee? After all, if the end customer is the one paying the
| fee, hotel has no incentive to try to get the customer
| past the OTA. They get the same money anyway.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| You could say that for any marketing activity. You don't
| expect a hotel to add an additional fee for the fact that
| you seen an advert in a glossy magazine, or for providing
| their own website for that matter.
|
| I'm sure you are aware that the entire travel industry,
| predating the advent of OTA, works on a commission basis.
| [deleted]
| darig wrote:
| Charge a $1/month membership billed annually to the coop
| site, and offer a $25 rebate to any coop members when they
| book a room.
|
| Make it very easy to become a member while booking the
| room... $100/night + $12 coop fee, and after you check-in you
| get a $25 rebate. The OTAs would still get the $100 price,
| but hotel would effectively charging $87.
| anticristi wrote:
| I always wondered why airlines are not pilot-owned.
| lukifer wrote:
| United went through a period in the 90's where it was
| majority-owned by its employees, which ended when it
| restructured under bankruptcy in the mid-2000's:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UAL_Corporation#History
|
| In general, airline employees enjoy very strong unions, not
| only for pilots but also flight attendants.
| missedthecue wrote:
| Airlines are literally among the most capital intensive
| industry out there. Where are some pilots getting their first
| billion for aircraft, flight scheduling, landing slots, fuel,
| maintenance contracts, etc...
|
| Notice how most employee co-ops such as law firms have
| essentially zero capex requirements. They don't need startup
| capital that necessitates shareholders.
| kbos87 wrote:
| It's always surprised me that we haven't seem more attempts at
| co-op like models in spaces like this, and I'm happy to see it.
|
| Uber/Lyft strike me as thin businesses in the value that they
| actually provide both to riders and drivers. Yes, they were
| responsible for some initial innovation, but now the cat is out
| of the bag, and the concept could absolutely be applied in a
| business structure that is more profitable and friendly to the
| people actually delivering the services.
|
| Getting initial traction with riders, and adequately investing in
| trust & safety strike me as the two hardest parts up front. On
| the flip-side, they should benefit from less regulatory scrutiny,
| and less pressure from investors vs. the heavily funded players
| like Uber & Lyft.
|
| I'm rooting for them and hope to see this go somewhere.
| agentdrtran wrote:
| It requires a lot of start up capital to make co-ops involving
| network effects work, and it's hard for co-ops to get startup
| capital.
| bob1029 wrote:
| I've been considering unconventional business models for
| software development teams, and something like this has crossed
| my mind a few times.
|
| What I ultimately dream of doing is assembling something like
| what seal team 6 is to the US armed forces. How do you build an
| organization around that model? It takes many layers to filter
| the talent appropriately and protect the most capable players
| throughout. How do you achieve a similar effect on a small
| scale? Coding interviews are clearly not the most fantastic way
| to judge the capabilities of a software developer. I would have
| to find some new thing that is virtually failsafe, or I would
| have to find outside investors which ruins the whole thing. If
| I bootstrap with my own money, no one can stop me from doing
| what I want and then bestowing that same freedom upon other
| team members over time.
|
| Maybe I could write a "game" and release it to the steam store.
| It could be a thinly-veiled programming challenge spanning many
| hundreds of hours of "gameplay", which tests for the exact
| qualities I would be looking for. This game would be the
| equivalent of enrolling in BUD/S training. The first 10 people
| to complete it with a perfect ending get a number directly to
| my cellphone with monetary offer & NDA presented on-screen.
| philsnow wrote:
| > Getting initial traction with riders
|
| I haven't really used lyft in a couple years but back then it
| seemed like most drivers were using both apps and preferred
| taking rides from lyft. Adding a third might not be hard.
|
| Drivers can suggest riders download the co-op app (keep a QR
| code taped to the back of your headrests) and try to use it
| first, falling back to uber/lyft if there are no drivers
| nearby.
| njoubert wrote:
| The single benefit of Uber having a global presence likely
| already outweighs the value of these local coops.
|
| You can get off an airplane just about anywhere in the world
| and get an Uber. That's huge value.
| yt-sdb wrote:
| I live in NYC. I'd be happy to use an app like this the vast
| majority of the time and then switch to Uber/Lyft when
| traveling.
| mromanuk wrote:
| that's one use case. I'm sure lot of people, translate 90% of
| the time locally, in their city. Having and trusting a local
| App has huge value too.
| gnopgnip wrote:
| But can the drivers move to another country?
| [deleted]
| gvb wrote:
| > The single benefit of Uber having a global presence likely
| already outweighs the value of these local coops.
|
| That and a willingness to subsidize rides to the tune of
| _billions_ of dollars per year. A coop is going to struggle
| to provide rides at a "competitive" rate when the
| competition is paying people to use their services.
|
| "For all of 2020, Uber's net losses amounted to $6.77
| billion..." Ref: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/10/uber-
| earnings-q4-2020-.html
| xyzzyz wrote:
| If you look at Uber financial reports, you'll see that they
| earn profit on rides, and their losses are due to their
| attempts at expansion in other segments.
|
| Uber used to subsidize rides a lot, and it still does in
| some foreign markets where it is trying to get a foothold,
| but this is not really happening in US anymore.
| jfengel wrote:
| What is causing Uber's losses? The customers are paying
| money, the drivers are getting only a fraction of it.
|
| Are the drivers actually getting more money than the
| customers are paying? Are Uber's data center and
| transaction costs really high? Or is it the armies of
| lawyers and business development people?
|
| The basic value proposition of ride share seems viable. If
| Uber's losses are overhead, maybe somebody can compete.
| kingnothing wrote:
| Uber's core rideshare business is net positive. They
| invest significant money in to other lines of business.
| rsj_hn wrote:
| Yes, the the customers pay more money than the drivers
| get, but from that difference Uber must pay the salaries
| of all their software developers, they must pay for
| infrastructure, they must pay for app development,
| product managers, hr, etc.
| kspacewalk2 wrote:
| They'll focus on the local customers. I don't know what
| percentage that is in a touristy city like NY, but surely
| it's more than half.
|
| In my (non-touristy) city, this isn't important. The
| overwhelming majority of Uber users are locals. Ignoring out
| of towners will work just fine.
| jellicle wrote:
| The thing you describe as valuable... isn't. The idea of
| someone who spends Monday in Madrid, Tuesday in NYC,
| Wednesday in Moscow and can't be bothered with too many apps
| is just an idea. That person doesn't actually exist. There is
| zero value to you for Uber serving other random cities around
| the world that you will never visit.
|
| Serving NYC is easily a large enough market to be successful.
| Serving a borough would be.
| staticautomatic wrote:
| Does it? What proportion of rideshare users regularly travel
| internationally?
| subpixel wrote:
| The vast, vast majority of Uber riders never leave their own
| country.
| killerstorm wrote:
| It's possible to make an app which works globally and
| connects you to local coops.
|
| For example, it can be done using ... blockchain.
| playpause wrote:
| A single global brand can be an advantage, but I wouldn't be
| so sure that's the case with a rideshare app, in a city with
| a strong identity like NYC. In terms of brand positivity, I
| can see New Yorkers proudly switching to this. (And if Uber
| retains the "just got off the plane at JFK for the first
| time" market, so what.) The real question is whether they can
| compete on price and UX.
| toast0 wrote:
| > You can get off an airplane just about anywhere in the
| world and get an Uber. That's huge value.
|
| You can get off an airplane just about anywhere and get a
| taxi at the taxi stand, but that never enabled a global
| company.
|
| Airports with local unlicensed taxi services generally have
| advertising in the airport for arrivals. Installing a new app
| in each city, and putting in payment information is more
| hassle (especially if payment options aren't geared towards
| international visitors), but you do it once per trip, just
| like the in flight entertainment app.
| killerstorm wrote:
| With a local taxi stand, you don't know if that would be
| over-priced, if they accept your card, etc.
|
| I've been in a situation where card should accepted in
| theory, but driver insists on cash, and I'm a kind of a
| person who doesn't like arguing.
|
| Using a global brand which handles shit smoothly is
| valuable to consumers.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| >You can get off an airplane just about anywhere and get a
| taxi at the taxi stand, but that never enabled a global
| company.
|
| Because it didn't streamline the process as much as
| Uber/Lyft (and the use of internet). It's a big difference
| when you don't even need to talk to anyone.
|
| >but you do it once per trip, just like the in flight
| entertainment app.
|
| And that is enough friction to make Uber/Lyft worth it. The
| in flight entertainment app has a monopoly. If there was
| sufficient broadband access on the plane, no one would get
| the in flight entertainment app either.
|
| However, I might download a new local app if I found out
| the local app's fare were sufficiently cheaper, since the
| friction of downloading a new app is relatively low.
| bayindirh wrote:
| A local coop doesn't have to go worldwide to be meaningful.
|
| Not all businesses shall grow indefinitely. If they can get a
| core customer base and hold it steady, it'd be much more
| valuable and impressive over time.
|
| They try to make a living, not to dominate the world for
| money.
| fractionalhare wrote:
| If you're competing in a winner-take-all market, it is very
| difficult to compete without shooting for domination. I
| don't know if digital ride hailing is a winner-take-all
| market, but there's pretty compelling evidence it could be.
|
| But I also don't think that commenter is disagreeing with
| you - when they say huge value, they're probably gesturing
| towards the fact that consumers will generally use whatever
| the most convenient and recognizable brand is. It will be
| hard for the coop to achieve a core customer base which
| allows them to survive if everyone gets off the plane and
| uses Uber instead of looking for the local coop.
| m_ke wrote:
| There's no reason why we can't have a coop based version of a
| WeChat like super app with all of these services on a single
| shared platform.
|
| Most people don't get on planes that often so the value of
| global scale is not something that would prevent them from
| getting disrupted in a place like NYC. I'd be willing to pay
| a large premium for gig work if I knew that 95% of it went to
| the worker and they weren't being exploited by a bunch of
| clowns in SV.
| basch wrote:
| I'd argue that standardization at the protocol level
| benefits almost everyone more than the current paradigms.
| Any app works with any taxi network.
|
| I want to use Lyft as my client, great. I land in a city,
| and I can ping drivers working for any pool, co-op, or
| team.
|
| WeChat just replaced the AppStore/OS. If each service is
| its own entity inside WeChat, youve just nested the problem
| one level down. The client browser should be completely
| divorced from the rest of the network. There should be an
| IMAP/HTTP level hailing protocol. You want gmail but I want
| outlook, great we can still talk to each other.
| tootie wrote:
| That's a plus for sure, but I'm betting 99% of rides are
| local.
| dv_dt wrote:
| But then Uber also has to setup the meta-structure
| operationally to actually legally and financially operate in
| all those jurisdictions and that incurs a higher cost
| overhead than a local coop.
| frereubu wrote:
| Uber is not used exclusively by international jetsetters.
| clarkevans wrote:
| Cooperatives can expand by cooperating with other
| cooperatives -- a bunch of local cooperatives might nest to
| form a regional one, etc. Those regional ones could form a
| federation with a single identity for global operations.
|
| So, this problem can be addressed by cooperatives, it's just
| a different kind of structure that distributes power locally
| -- with centralized power deriving from the bottom up, by the
| membership of localized cooperatives. The organizational
| challenge for expansion is how to avoid administrative
| capture: how to keep centralized infrastructure controlled by
| localized entities.
|
| I don't think this "franchise" challenge has been worked out
| with platform cooperatives. However, if this NY based
| cooperative becomes profitable, it could expand to other
| cities not by getting bigger, but by forking off the
| operational aspects into a cooperative-of-cooperatives, then,
| a Chicago driver's cooperative could be a member of this
| shared operational entity.
| dwater wrote:
| I've noticed credit unions in the US are like this. They
| are generally locally operated, but they have formed
| networks so that you can e.g. go into a branch in Maryland
| and perform transactions on your account held in Georgia.
| They have also banded together to develop credit union
| apps, since banking apps are essentially universal in
| function. Reaching critical mass for these ride hailing
| apps would be a challenge, but it is possible.
| novok wrote:
| We don't really see coop payment networks in wide use
| although, and Uber is more like a Visa or Ebay than they
| are a bank.
| Retric wrote:
| Fraud from either side of the transaction is the primary
| issue payment networks deal with and that makes them a
| poor fit for coops. Ride sharing apps are very different
| beasts.
| sangnoir wrote:
| The "big 4" accounting firms are structured similarly: a
| single global identity, but each country's org is
| independent, with local partners in charge and having
| partial ownership.
| Kalium wrote:
| One of the key advantages a large corporate model has over
| a small, local cooperative is the ability to effectively
| harness resources for shared infrastructure.
|
| In the case of Uber and Lyft, that's all the technological
| infrastructure that goes into making the platforms work.
| This isn't a trivial amount of work that can be easily
| replicated by taxi companies or scrappy driver-owned coops,
| as attempts to do so have shown. As we're all familiar
| with, maintaining this infrastructure is also far from free
| or trivial.
|
| Credit unions are an instructive example. Many offer
| membership in interoperative networks, but few are able to
| effectively compete with the customer-friendly offerings of
| big banks with centralized power structures. The ability to
| satisfy customers isn't some side-effect, it's a key goal.
| A localized organization that can't compete is worth
| nothing except as a cautionary tale.
|
| With that in mind, I would say the organizational challenge
| of coops is thus: how to keep centralized infrastructure
| controlled by localized entities while being competitive
| with non-local entities.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| A huge value for a relatively small amount of people and uber
| customers.
|
| It's also not really very true. Its been a year since I
| traveled outside of the USA but on my last two international
| trips Uber was not available in those countries.
| beckingz wrote:
| An aggregator model would be great here if the major and
| local platforms provided fair access.
|
| SmallTownUberCoOp would provide their offerings via
| standardized API, which aggregator apps could use and display
| to anyone.
|
| Getting the balance between aggregator and local drivers coop
| would be hard, because aggregators love to squeeze.
| sanj wrote:
| Why not both?
|
| When I shop for groceries at home I can use the hippy dippy
| organic bodega.
|
| When I'm in an unfamiliar city, I can go to Kroger's or Aldi.
|
| Space on my phone is free!
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> You can get off an airplane just about anywhere in the
| world and get an Uber. That's huge value.
|
| I wonder what percentage of people driving on roads are
| actually the old "jet set", people who travel internationally
| more than once a year. I'd bet that is actually less than 1%
| of western populations. I think the real market is locals,
| people who need rides home when drunk, rather than 1%ers
| going to and from airports.
|
| (I love the irony of people who use uber because "owning a
| car is evil" and then hop on 1st class airline seats to fly
| to remote islands. I wonder how often people take ubers to
| get them to their private jets;)
| chrisseaton wrote:
| The vast majority of people travelling aren't jet-set or 1%
| flying in first - they're just normal hard-working people
| flying in economy who happen to have a job that requires
| them to travel and don't have any choice in that matter if
| they want to put food on their tables and feed buying their
| children new shoes.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| The vast majority of people travelling for work aren't
| doing so by plane. From the perspective of overland
| transport, people going to/from airports are the 1%. The
| 99% are all the people who's jobs don't involve them
| flying anywhere.
| samcheng wrote:
| Maybe COVID will render many of these "must travel for
| work" use cases obsolete! One can hope...
| yumraj wrote:
| Sure, but I'll bet that that is only a small part of the
| business.
|
| Most of riders, I'll say 90-95% in large cities are
| residents, (just a guess not based in real data) which fits
| very well with coop model.
| aphextron wrote:
| Agreed. Their technological moat is practically nonexistent. I
| honestly think things like this are the future of ridehailing,
| and uber and lyft will be left in the dustbin after this
| economic cycle of free debt ends.
| tootie wrote:
| Their moat thus far has been in their enormous runway to burn
| VC cash and sell rides at a loss while they waste energy on
| useless side projects paid for by their drivers who are given
| absolutely no cushion.
| AbrahamParangi wrote:
| The reason we tend not to see this is that aggregating demand
| is much more critical to success than aggregating supply.
| jefb wrote:
| Juno[1] tried something like this in NYC back in the
| mid-2010's. They ended up getting acquired by Gett and
| discontinued their equity share ethos.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juno_(company)
|
| Edit: Typo
| kaczordon wrote:
| So the workers all voted to be acquired?
| SirSourdough wrote:
| From the wiki article:
|
| "Juno initially had an equity structure that planned to
| give drivers fifty percent of the founder's equity by 2026,
| but this program was discontinued in 2017 when Juno was
| acquired by Gett."
|
| So I doubt much equity was in the hands of drivers at the
| time of the sale. Certainly doesn't sound like it was first
| and foremost a co-op model.
| tootie wrote:
| I hope food delivery is next.
| throwaway2a02 wrote:
| > While Uber and Lyft make their money for Wall Street and
| Silicon Valley investors, we will be a co-operative. So any
| profits will go back to the drivers.
|
| Can't they set it up as a non-profit? What almost always happens
| in these cases is that most of shares are owned by the first few
| workers, and ultimately a small group will control the whole
| business (at which point they will obviously won't drive for the
| app anymore). So it will inevitably turn into another Uber/Lyft
| this way.
| throwinreturn wrote:
| Some cooperatives mandate one worker one vote, rather than one
| share one vote. The most well-known example is Mondragon.
| Mauricebranagh wrote:
| Each worker has the same share in a coop its one of the key
| definitions so OMOV.
| clarkevans wrote:
| > What almost always happens in these cases is that most of
| shares are owned by the first few worker
|
| I've not seen this to be the common case. It depends upon the
| organizational structure. At one extreme, a cooperative can be
| seen as a limited partnership; but at the other, membership is
| open to those who meet reasonable criteria.
|
| In cooperatives, there is often a difference between investor
| shares (if any) and voting shares. Early owners might have some
| investor shares (notes to cover capital investment) but, their
| voting shares are often on-par with new members.
|
| In some states, cooperatives are kinds of non-profits; others,
| such as Colorado, have their own statutory basis that permit
| investor shares (rather than only allowing notes at a fixed,
| say, 5% interest rate). The new Illinois worker-cooperative
| statute permits up-to 50% investor shares, for example -- just
| short of controlling interest.
|
| Also, it's a bit of semantics here: I'd call this a platform
| cooperative rather than a worker cooperative.
| bloudermilk wrote:
| I've read several books on cooperatives including case studies
| on how fail and I've never heard this. Do you have some
| examples of where this was an issue?
|
| One common issue I have heard about is early members acquiring
| disproportionate social capital, but that's a different problem
| with different solutions.
| Arkenklo wrote:
| Tangent: I've tried to research cooperatives but haven't
| found many good resources. Do you want to share a couple of
| the books you've read?
| [deleted]
| zouhair wrote:
| Aren't COOP supposed to grow to accommodate newcomers? You have
| to pay to get in so you end up with same shares as others. At
| least that's how I thought it works. Am I wrong?
| legulere wrote:
| Cooperatives (at least here in Germany) often have a maximum
| amount of shares that you can own and are open for people to
| get new shares.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| You don't issue permanent shares, working for the company gives
| you shares. I don't think registering as a nonprofit is
| necessary to stop that problem, though I wouldn't be surprised
| if they did end up registering as a nonprofit.
| otar wrote:
| Good model. Hopefully this will take off and expand to moped
| drivers as well.
| carlio wrote:
| There is a coop for delivery cyclists, started in France I
| believe - https://coopcycle.org/en/
| aenario wrote:
| The interesting thing about coopcycle is that it's actually a
| coop of coops :
|
| Several local delivery coops (say one per city) collaborate
| to fund development and hosting of the software solution.
| crowf wrote:
| > So any profits will go back to the drivers.
|
| Thanks to Hollywood accounting, does this have any meaning?
| AndrewDucker wrote:
| They're also owned by the drivers, so one would hope that would
| help with transparency
| hobofan wrote:
| I don't know about the US, but in Germany coops have pretty
| strict auditing guidelines. Since Hollywood accounting would
| divert money to the coop, which is also owned by the drivers,
| you would by diverting money from the drivers to the drivers,
| which obviously doesn't make any sense.
|
| Of course there are also concerns that the coop administration
| might be too fat and lining their own pockets, but through the
| auditing combined with the fact that the board is normally
| elected by the members, the members have quite some control
| measures to keep the administration honest.
| msoad wrote:
| I tried downloading and signing up for the driver app on iOS. The
| quality of the apps are very very low. There are some grammar
| mistakes in the labels that makes me think the app is made by non
| English speakers. The phone number placeholder was specially
| weird. It was using a phone number from Iran in the placeholder!
|
| I hope this works out but as all of us in the software industry
| know, making good software is time consuming and expensive. I'm
| not sure with low ride volume and not VC money they can afford
| building a good iPhone app.
| dfgdghdf wrote:
| Good luck to them!
|
| How does it work in terms of ownership? Can anyone buy a stake?
| Do you need to drive to earn shares? Can someone drive for a bit,
| then generate passive income from the shares? Will drivers get
| bought out by financial interests over time?
| fblp wrote:
| I would probably pay 20% more and wait twice as long to
| contribute to a worker owned coop with each ride. Come to sf
| asap!
| ryan29 wrote:
| The thing is that it shouldn't have to cost more unless Uber is
| massively subsidizing rides. Once the platform is built the
| incremental cost of adding a driver or customer should be very
| low and, by cutting out an unnecessary rent seeking middle man,
| you have better margins.
| changoplatanero wrote:
| Why not skip the wait, take an Uber, and donate 20% to the
| coop?
| chobeat wrote:
| because this would keep uber afloat a little longer and do a
| little more damage
| ajmadesc wrote:
| I want to disagree but this actually makes perfect sense...
| tuyiown wrote:
| The economics of charity won't solve those drivers
| problems.
| yholio wrote:
| What keeps Uber competitive is access to a relatively cheap
| reservoir of labor force. They mediate this process where drivers
| compete against each other and extract a good rent in the
| process. The focus should be getting rid of the rent, not the
| competition.
|
| While I wish these guys all the best and think it's a good
| paradigm shift, I don't think they will be successful for the
| same reasons most cooperatives aren't successful: the owner-
| workers see the business as a means to insulate themselves from
| market pressures. They stop growing and innovating and simply
| redistribute the larger than market compensations among each
| other. If many another drivers are willing to accept a lower pay
| for the same work, they will simply not accept them in the co-op.
| pydry wrote:
| Also gargantuan amounts of capital subsidizing cheap rides.
|
| They can engage in a game of chicken with the cooperatives
| where they see who is willing to lose money the longest.
|
| This was how the UK "bus wars" we're fought that consolidated
| control of the market under a few players.
| sm4rk0 wrote:
| > What keeps Uber competitive is access to a relatively cheap
| reservoir of labor force.
|
| Cheap labor force means someone is underpaid. If the coop cuts
| the middlemen out and transfer the extra to drivers then it's a
| win-win: drivers get more and customers pay the same for a
| better service because well-paid driver => good service.
| yholio wrote:
| Underpaid compared to what? If people are willing to do the
| work to a high professional standard for a certain wage, than
| that is the right compensation for that job. When you setup
| arbitrary _fair wages_ above market, you must also somehow
| protect them from intruders from other fields willing to
| change jobs and benefit from the higher wages in your field.
| This is exactly what a co-op ends up doing most of the time -
| if they don 't succumb to a traditional model where the
| initial members become the owners and the later employees
| have regular employment contracts.
| ryanmarsh wrote:
| Is it just me or does this sound like purely a marketing strategy
| hiding the actions of a few opportunists who will receive
| outsized rewards? At least Uber and Lyft are honest about being
| greedy capitalists.
| scotttrinh wrote:
| A lot of the comments here seem to think this has to become the
| next Uber, but it really doesn't. It just needs to sustain the
| cooperative workers and provide a service at whatever scale makes
| sense for them and our community (speaking as a NYC resident) and
| that will be success. Heck, it doesn't even need to be the only
| cooperative like this! They could federate this and it still is
| more ethical and equitable then the current system. Bravo. Let's
| do food delivery next!
| eeZah7Ux wrote:
| Hopefully women can vote as well...
|
| And why all the downvotes now?
| fblp wrote:
| Some background on their crowd funding is here. Looks lkke they
| raised 20k last year. Scrappy! https://ioby.org/project/help-nyc-
| drivers-launch-platform-co...
| zxexz wrote:
| I hope this takes off. Ride-hailing apps always seemed like a
| model that was extremely conducive to a cooperative, worker-owned
| model. I would gladly (and will try to next time I'm in NYC) use
| this service over Uber or Lyft. Power to the drivers!
| jasode wrote:
| _> Ride-hailing apps always seemed like a model that was
| extremely conducive to a cooperative, worker-owned model._
|
| It's only the surface-level of an ride-hailing app that seems
| easy for worker-owned cooperatives to create. In reality, the
| extra expensive programming dollars required to tame the hidden
| complexity so that the app can _present a seamless experience
| to the customers /passengers_ is a huge factor that works
| against co-ops.
|
| E.g. see the famous Uber comment on the complexity of the app:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25376346
|
| Real-life customers don't want to enter their credit-card
| details into City_X_driver_coop and then re-enter their
| financial details multiple times again into City_Y_driver_coop.
| Even if you imagine a hypothetical _national_ co-op to
| consolidate multiple cities, customers would still then have
| inconvenience of Country_X_coop and Country-Y_coop.
|
| It takes a lot of _capital_ to pay programmer salaries for
| desirable features that customers want and since co-ops are
| capital-constrained (by definition because they can 't take
| millions in investors money), the app will always have less
| features compared to Uber/Lyft.
|
| That's the financial constraint that causes co-ops to more
| easily organize in _lower complexity_ businesses such as local
| grocery co-op or a farming coop. But a high-tech complexity
| business that 's expensive to build is inherently too costly
| for a pool of drivers' savings to fund.
|
| Whenever you see the phrase _" worker-owned"_, mentally
| substitute _" capital-constrained"_ -- and it starts to make
| sense why many businesses domains don't have any coops rising
| up to compete with VC-fueled startups.
|
| EDIT to reply: _> Driver co-ops or smaller operators simply
| don't need to worry about half the nonsense in the comment you
| linked_
|
| Sure, the driver co-ops can _choose_ to not spend capital on
| "useless" features but this leaves out the fact that _customers
| can also choose not to use the co-ops because of the lower
| quality app experience_. Keep in mind the _behavior of
| customers_ who prioritize _conveniences_.
|
| E.g. the non-profit RideAustin app fails customers even after
| Uber/Lyft left Austin:
| https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/12/austin-is-fine-without-ube...
|
| It takes _capital_ to build tech solutions that deal with peak
| load. And RideAustin later shuts down in 2020:
| https://www.google.com/search?q=rideaustin+shuts+down
|
| Well, one might say RideAustin was hampered by coronavirus
| lockdowns. That's true, but it also takes _capital_ to get past
| an economic downturn of low revenue. Uber /Lyft got hurt by
| COVID as well but they had more capital reserves to deal with
| it.
| ssb1 wrote:
| Riders will just use pay-by-qr-code.
| brbrodude wrote:
| If the app was open source/free in some way, and coops forked
| some of the money into development, maintenance,
| infrastructure, etc, then maybe it could really undercut the
| big guys, have quality, innovate fast and etc and also
| distribute capital fairly. So instead of having a big guy
| owning everything and dealing all the cards, the development
| people would get paid for the service provided to the coops,
| who in turn provide service for consumers. I've actually had
| conversations with a friend on doing this exact kind of
| thing.
| tzs wrote:
| The overwhelming vast majority of reasons I've heard people
| give for preferring Uber/Lyft over regular taxis are (1)
| regular taxis could not be summoned via an app or web page,
| instead requiring a phone call or curbside hailing, and (2)
| their credit card terminals were often broken so that you had
| to pay cash.
|
| Both of those specific problem are solvable for most rides
| without going anywhere near the level of complexity described
| in that post you linked to that details why the Uber app is
| so complicated.
|
| Most of the Uber app complexity that post gives is because
| they want one app that works nearly everywhere and does a lot
| more than just let you summon a ride from A to B and pay via
| credit card.
|
| For most US cities you could cover the payment needs of most
| riders with something from Square installed in the car. That
| gets rid of a huge amount of complexity (or rather, pushes it
| to someone else).
|
| That should be good enough to make them a viable alternative
| to Uber/Lyft for probably 95% or more of the rides in a US
| city.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| There was one more reason: Uber debuted in NYC. NYC has a
| limited number of taxi medallions and therefore a limited
| number of taxis which is a problem because demand outpaced
| supply. Uber provided additional drivers/vehicles. Also
| initially it paid better while taxi medallions were no
| longer owned by the drivers but rather by what amounted to
| wage-slave owners. As a result some people felt it was
| better to support this nee gig economy as it put more money
| into the pockets of drivers. Oh and did I mention it was
| slightly cheaper than equivalent yellow cab rides because
| it was VC subsidized? Turns out when you sell dollar bills
| for 90 cents you can get loads of customers.
| shalmanese wrote:
| Uber debuted in SF.
| jasode wrote:
| _> For most US cities you could cover the payment needs of
| most riders with something from Square installed in the
| car._
|
| That's a good example of driver-centric thinking instead of
| holistic thinking that considers the _paying passengers_.
| Consider: what if the _customers /passengers_ actually
| prefer the _convenience_ of not having to mess with an
| extra payment transaction step before exiting the car?!?
| With service like Uber, passengers can just get out of the
| car _immediately_ when they arrive at their destination. No
| whipping out the credit-card to swipe. No exchanging of QR
| codes.
|
| Always think of game theory and _consumer behavior
| preferences_.
|
| Adding "Square payments" as a driver-platform "solution to
| avoid complexity for the programmers" is adding another
| reason for _customers to avoid using it_ because you _added
| complexity to the customers_ -- and therefore you have less
| revenue. There are always tradeoffs.
|
| Whenever anyone thinks _" Problem <X> is trivial, and the
| solution is just to do <Y>,"_ ... you have to think a few
| chess moves ahead as to what the _actual paying customers
| will do_ that may negate your "solution".
| tzs wrote:
| I think you are overestimating the inconvenience of
| paying at or near the destination. Most passengers will
| have smart phones with them, most of which support NFC
| payments. Double tap the side button on your iPhone (or
| whatever is equivalent on non-Apple phones), hold it near
| the reader for two seconds, and you are done.
|
| Heck, a large fraction of the passengers won't even have
| to reach into their pocket to get their phone because
| they'll have been doing stuff on it during the ride.
|
| Even for those who have to use an actual physical credit
| card I don't think it would be enough of a barrier to
| make a noticeable difference because they are also using
| that card for nearly everything else. It's so routine
| that they don't think about it or notice it. I don't
| think I've ever heard anyone complain about the
| complexity of paying by credit card at a non-waited
| restaurant, a grocery store, a hardware store, or any
| other retail place.
|
| Also, note that with this approach the co-op would not
| have to make riders create accounts and associate payment
| information with them. That removes some complexity for
| the user, and is one less thing to deal with when the
| user gets a new credit card.
| jasode wrote:
| _> I think you are overestimating the inconvenience of
| paying at or near the destination. Most passengers will
| have smart phones with them, most of which support NFC
| payments._
|
| And I think you're falling into the same trap of
| _believing other economic actors will happily agree_ to
| your proposed "solutions".
|
| Disadvantages of NFC payments:
|
| 1) economic friction which _lowers supply of drivers_ :
| drivers have to buy $50 NFC terminal from Square. $50 is
| not a lot of but it's extra financial friction which
| deters potential drivers
|
| 2) trust issues which _lowers supply of paying customers_
| : NFC payments puts the payment amount in _control of the
| driver_ which makes potential customers fear getting
| scammed. In the Uber /Lyft model, this doesn't happen
| which is a significant psychological advantage because
| drivers are notorious for playing games with payment
| (especially with foreigners and travelers). By letting
| the "service in the cloud" pay the drivers on behalf of
| the passengers, it adds _accountability_.
|
| I'm not claiming it's impossible to create a car-on-
| demand service that uses NFC and/or credit-card swipes.
| I'm saying it would be a _disadvantage_ to other
| platforms that work more conveniently. This means less
| paying customers which leads to less capital to
| continuously improve the software -- which could then
| lead to more customers abandoning the co-op rideshare app
| for the more polished Uber /Lyft apps.
|
| Again, see the failed non-profit RideAustin losing riders
| as somewhat analogous case study. And see the other
| comment about the apparent low quality of this thread's
| app (Drivers.coop):
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26592354
|
| The co-op needs capital to _improve the app software_ and
| you need a virtuous cycle of paying customers that don 't
| avoid (or abandon) the platform to provide that ongoing
| capital.
|
| _> co-op would not have to make riders create accounts
| and associate payment information with them. That removes
| some complexity for the user,_
|
| This wouldn't be an advantage for commuters that use
| Uber/Lyft daily.
| maxerickson wrote:
| I mean, I take your point, but I'd choose a higher
| friction payment every single time I thought it favored
| the driver vs Uber or Lyft or whatever. It's the driver
| providing the valuable part of the the service, not the
| wholistic user experience in the app.
| Kalium wrote:
| > (1) regular taxis could not be summoned via an app or web
| page, instead requiring a phone call or curbside hailing
|
| This is partially true. It wasn't just that taxis couldn't
| be summoned through an app. It was that when you tried to
| summon one, there was at best even odds of one showing up
| within 30 minutes. Drivers could and did take curbside
| hails as they saw fit, and a dispatch often seemed to
| amount to no more than a polite request.
|
| I've used taxis apps in the years since Uber's debut.
| Replacing a phonecall that gets ignored with an app's
| request that gets ignored is not an improvement.
|
| > (2) their credit card terminals were often broken so that
| you had to pay cash.
|
| They essentially never were. Cabbies just prefer cash. The
| real issue here is that cabbies had no compunction about
| lying through their teeth and there were no consequences
| for this. The whole system was set up so that there was in-
| theory accountability but no in-reality accountability.
| Uber took this away entirely by forcing payment to be
| handled entirely via the app.
|
| > That should be good enough to make them a viable
| alternative to Uber/Lyft for probably 95% or more of the
| rides in a US city.
|
| With the above points in mind, things take on a slightly
| different character. Using Square accomplishes nothing
| except giving cabbies a slightly different thing to lie
| about. Without the assurance that your driver won't make
| random other stops or otherwise not show in a reasonable
| timeframe, the request app isn't that useful.
| tnzm wrote:
| >present a seamless experience to the customers/passengers
|
| There does exist a segment of users who are willing to
| navigate a less-than-seamless experience if that lets them
| avoid dealing with a less-than-ethical business. (And
| probably there's at least some PR effort involved in making
| their voices not count.)
|
| Besides, the Uber/Lyft experience is far from "seamless", and
| developing a ride-sharing app that does _not_ aim to work on
| a global scale has different challenges from those outlined
| in that post.
|
| >But a high-tech complexity business that's expensive to
| build is inherently too costly for a pool of drivers' savings
| to fund.
|
| >Whenever you see "worker-owned", mentally substitute
| "capital-constrained" -- and it starts to make sense why many
| businesses domains don't have any coops rising up to compete
| with VC-fueled startups.
|
| My favorite conspiracy theory is that VC is poured into
| software not to produce meaningful innovation, but chiefly to
| hypercomplicate the field in a sort of Cambrian explosion, so
| that the "capital-constrained" can't get anything done with
| the baroque frameworks and out-of-touch developers that the
| ecosystem produces.
|
| Thankfully, people who understand how a computer works (and
| what it's good for) do exist outside of SV. Sometimes (shhh!)
| they're even motivated by other things besides short-term
| capital accumulation!
|
| And better ethics can mean better efficiency - fewer
| politically driven kludges in software, less staff turnover,
| even the fact that people can and do accept to get paid a
| more average salary in exchange for working at a place that
| isn't screwing people over at industrial fucking scale.
|
| That's how a cooperative can compete with a megacorpo,
| although realistically a more reasonable first goal would be
| to coexist in the same markets, or operate in markets that
| have demand but are deemed insufficiently profitable for the
| corp.
| sokoloff wrote:
| > less-than-seamless experience if that lets them avoid
| dealing with a less-than-ethical business.
|
| True; this is why I started using Uber: to avoid the "oh
| the credit card machine is broken, you need to pay cash"
| only to find out it did work AND I'd paid cash.
| tnzm wrote:
| Yeah, it works both ways. Otherwise we wouldn't have
| competing alternatives to discuss (Uber, cooperatives,
| taxi companies, solo cabbies... I hear that in Russia
| it's customary to hail any car on the street and pay for
| a ride, with obvious safety drawbacks of course)
|
| What you're describing can happen anywhere there is a PoS
| terminal. I guess a sketchy cabbie has the benefit of
| being able to drive away before you realize what happened
| (and it could be harder to see the card machine when
| sitting in a car as opposed to e.g. paying at a desk in a
| shop?)
|
| Nevertheless, "we let users order and pay for rides with
| an app" is a part of the business model which is totally
| distinct from "we'll make sure users never get screwed by
| fucking with the workers". Which does have an obvious
| advantage in terms of customer retention though -
| especially if your customers are petty bourgeois
| knowledge workers who want to benefit from an "on-demand"
| lifestyle and to distance themselves from the people
| doing the actual gig.
|
| Not to mention, Uber probably has more data on your ass
| than what a single fraudulent transaction entails (for
| which you can at least issue request chargeback). It's up
| to them to handle it responsibly, and they have failed to
| do so at least once (the 2017 hack). Just like every SV
| company that keeps screwing up but people still love them
| because all those beautiful apps make their expensive
| smartphones a little less pointless.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > That's how a cooperative can compete with a megacorpo
|
| Hum... I guess you forgot about the main competitive force
| of cooperatives. On service based industries, they let the
| service providers capture most of the value, what should
| attract better service. (But some times it doesn't, those
| things are complex.)
|
| It's not about the IT people at all.
| tnzm wrote:
| Parent post explicitly referenced "a high-tech complexity
| business". Agreed that "high-tech complexity" is not
| essential to providing a service, indeed it's often
| antithetical to that goal. Does help with market capture
| though.
| psoots wrote:
| You're making some assumptions. Why can't programmers be
| workers in the coop and be part of the equation? Why can't
| forms of capital available to other startups be available to
| coops?
| tacostakohashi wrote:
| > Why can't forms of capital available to other startups be
| available to coops?
|
| ... because then it wouldn't be a co-op. The whole point of
| a co-op is that it is owned by the
| workers/producers/consumers instead of equity investors.
| Mauricebranagh wrote:
| As long as the members co-operators own 50%+1 you can
| take external funding - doesn't always workout as Poptel
| found
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Hmm, they probably could be. But it may be difficult to
| recruit and retain good ones. Coops tend to have a
| compressed salary spectrum, which is good for lower wage
| workers like taco drivers, and bad for higher wage workers
| like programmers.
| Kaze404 wrote:
| I would personally give up half of my income to work at a
| cooperative. Weirdly enough, I don't see many
| cooperatives hiring software engineers specifically.
| jessxdesign wrote:
| You're in luck! Driver's Seat Co-op is currently hiring
| for a software engineer and UX/UI designer. The founders
| are smart and committed and also just really thoughtful
| and kind guys. https://www.driversseat.co/careers
| jessxdesign wrote:
| Actually, there are a lot of high wage workers like
| programmers who opt to work in co-ops because the
| ownership model aligns with their values and they find
| the work both financially and also intellectually and
| emotionally fulfilling. You need look no further than
| Ampled.com, which has a robust team of "contributors" who
| are all working to build and improve the platform on a
| volunteer basis. Ampled has built a system to track
| everyone's contributions which will be honored down the
| road once the co-op has more $ in the bank. And these are
| top notch folks who have come from Kickstarter and other
| related platforms (and who also clearly have a lot of
| economic privilege to be able to work in this arrangement
| for the time-being).
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Agreed, people who believe it ideologically will be
| attracted. It just seems like that would still make it
| hard to recruit if the money is much worse, though --
| there are only so many people willing to take a huge pay
| cut.
| Mauricebranagh wrote:
| Does depend on coop - a fully flat worker coop is very
| rare
| TulliusCicero wrote:
| Not fully flat, no; just compressed.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Why would a VC invest in a co-op? What would be the exit
| strategy that would allow them to be paid off at the
| multiple needed to compensate for the risk? In a worker-
| owned co-op, there is none, so they won't have access to
| venture capital as Uber could raise.
|
| They can get _different_ types of financing perhaps.
| jessxdesign wrote:
| Unless they use revenue-based financing, a VC wouldn't
| invest in co-ops. As you point out, their need for an
| exit strategy that revolves around an increase in the
| price of equity doesn't align well with co-ops striving
| for building longer-term wealth for their community.
| That's why we see co-ops funded through loan funds, angel
| investment, and a new breed of equity funds trying to
| fill the gap, like The Equitable Economy Fund
| (https://www.equitablefund.net/)
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| These are real challenges, nice outline of the capital issue.
|
| Coops generally have to get money by borrowing rather than
| equity investment.
|
| I'm for increasing federal programs for offering and
| subsidiziing loans to worker-owned coops -- like we do
| student loans -- not that that's a model, I realize, student
| loans don't work well, but just a demonstration that the
| federal government can subsidize loans in the public interest
| if it chooses to.
|
| There are also hybrid models possible where workers own some
| % of the company -- over 50% if you want to consider it
| worker-controlled -- but investors also own a portion.
| Investors invest in companies where the founders have a
| controlling stake, it's not unheard of. there could be
| federal tax or other subsidy incentives too.
| gruez wrote:
| >There are also hybrid models possible where workers own
| some % of the company -- over 50% if you want to consider
| it worker-controlled -- but investors also own a portion.
|
| but why would investors invest in a company that gives them
| half as much stake (because the other half goes to the
| workers)?
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Why do investors invest in a founder-controlled company,
| where the founders have more than 50% stake? To make
| money, I would assume, is why they do it?
|
| I'm sure it's a barrier, but it apparently isn't one that
| rules out all investment, since investors do it with
| founder-controlled companies, right? There is even
| entirely non-voting stock, which people invest in.
|
| If it were decided through political processes that
| worker-owned cooperatives were a public good to be
| encouraged, there could be additional incentive/subsidy
| through the tax code or other means for investing in
| minority stakes in them. (As the government
| subsidizes/incentivizes homeownership or higher ed
| tuition. Or for that matter, ESOP's for another route to
| minority employee ownership).
| gruez wrote:
| >To make money, I would assume, is why they do it?
|
| If the only option were a drivers cooperative, then yes
| they might go for it (although they're still going to be
| competing against other forms of investment, eg. other
| stocks). However that's rarely the case, because there's
| going to be non-cooperatives which don't have workers
| taking up 50% of the stake.
|
| >since investors do it with founder-controlled companies,
| right? There is even entirely non-voting stock, which
| people invest in.
|
| They only do that because they think the founders are
| valuable. I don't see how the same dynamic exists with
| mostly replaceable drivers.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| They can still believe in the leadership of the project.
| After all, many investors invest without _themselves_
| having a majority stake. If you own 3% of a company, the
| other 97% might be other investors, or might be some
| other investors and some worker-owners, you still only
| own 3%. Not everyone thinks worker-owners are any less
| capable of making good decisions towards the success of
| the endeavor than investors, although I gather you do.
|
| Sometimes worker-owned businesses do well in fact because
| the worker-owners are willing to put in more energy and
| sacrifice for their business than typical employees,
| worker-ownership can be a plus. (Obviously plenty fail
| too, not saying it's some kind of magic invulnerability).
|
| But also investors sometimes invest in worker coops
| because they want to support a worker-owned business in
| addition to make money, some kind of values-based
| investing: https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/worker-
| cooperatives-are-fin...
|
| Look, all I can say is this is an actual thing that
| happens, there are hybrid ownership worker coops taht
| also have investors, it literally exists in reality.
|
| Here's more info, including targetted at potential
| investors: https://project-equity.org/about-
| us/publications/coop-invest...
|
| As I keep saying, I agree there are reasons some
| investors rae reluctant to invest, and the government
| could provide subsidy or incentives to change that
| calculus somewhat, the same way the government does for
| all sorts of economic activity that is considered
| socially desirable. It's true that worker coops have
| barriers to raising capital, but this really is one way
| some have done it, despite the challenges, it literally
| happens in reality, so if you're trying to argue that it
| doesn't, that's a weird argument.
| gruez wrote:
| >After all, many investors invest without themselves
| having a majority stake. If you own 3% of a company, the
| other 97% might be other investors, or might be some
| other investors and some worker-owners, you still only
| own 3%.
|
| That's not exactly the same. If you invest in a regular
| company, the other 97% of investors contributed capital,
| making the company worth more. On the other hand, in a
| owner coop the 50% (or whatever % share allocated to the
| workers) is essentially dead weight. There might be
| _some_ value that the workers add (increased loyalty?),
| but I doubt whether that has actual value in the context
| of a ridesharing platform where turnover is high and the
| workers are more-or-less replaceable.
|
| >But also investors sometimes invest in worker coops
| because they want to support a worker-owned business in
| addition to make money, some kind of values-based
| investing: https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/worker-
| cooperatives-are-fin...
|
| >Look, all I can say is this is an actual thing that
| happens, there are hybrid ownership worker coops taht
| also have investors, it literally exists in reality.
|
| It's hard to infer motivations here, because what they're
| doing is blending rational investing (eg. maximizing risk
| adjusted returns) with philanthropy. While it's
| technically true that worker coops can find "investors",
| having to rely on the generosity of others isn't exactly
| a sound business strategy.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| Buddy, I don't know what you are trying to argue for.
|
| Worker-owned coops exist, thousands of them. Some of them
| have investors. Some of them fail, some of them have been
| in business for decades. Yes, raising capital can be
| challenging for worker-owned coops, my first post on the
| topic literally said that. But there are ways it can be
| done, that have actually been done.
|
| I gather you think worker-owned coops are a terrible
| idea, that's fine you're entitled to your opinion.
| Mauricebranagh wrote:
| No that model is a worker coop - its how Poptel in the UK
| was structured.
| Alex3917 wrote:
| Arcade City (the other driver co-op from Austin) is still
| going strong though. They're actively working on v5 of their
| app. https://arcade.city/
|
| They are more of a free tool to allow drivers in each city to
| create co-ops though, rather than one specific co-op.
| clarkevans wrote:
| > That's the financial constraint that causes co-ops to more
| easily organize in lower complexity businesses such as local
| grocery co-op or a farming coop. But a high-tech complexity
| business that's expensive to build is inherently too costly
| for a pool of drivers' savings to fund.
|
| Farming cooperatives can be very capital intensive.
|
| In contrast, technology platforms are relatively inexpensive
| to build these days. The value of a platform is proportional
| to the number of users (drivers) it has: hence, this is a
| particularly good application of a cooperative structure.
|
| > It takes a lot of capital to pay programmer salaries for
| desirable features that customers want and since co-ops are
| capital-constrained (by definition because they can't take
| millions in investors money), the app will always have less
| features compared to Uber/Lyft.
|
| There's nothing saying the cooperative cannot have revenue
| bonds, notes payable as a percentage of revenue. Savvy.coop
| received funds from https://indie.vc under these terms.
| Moreover, technologists could contribute well below their
| market rates in exchange for revenue bonds.
| https://start.coop is working on these sorts of legal
| details.
| jasode wrote:
| _> Farming cooperatives can be very capital intensive._
|
| The _farms_ are capital intensive but the _separate entity
| that forms the cooperative_ is less capital intensive. E.g.
| building the local co-op grain storage bin that farmers
| contribute to will cost less than the millions it takes to
| build a polished app like Uber /Lyft.
|
| Or did you have something else in mind when you meant farm
| co-ops are capital intensive?
|
| _> There's nothing saying the cooperative cannot have
| revenue bonds, notes payable as a percentage of revenue. _
|
| True but bonds don't exist in a vacuum and must _compete
| with other alternative investments_ including other bonds
| by other businesses /governments.
|
| Certain financial aspects of the co-op bond (regional
| business is lower revenue than national Uber, higher risk
| premium than Apple/Microsoft bonds, lower Moody's credit
| rating, etc) ... are less appealing to bond buyers which
| then lowers the amount of capital to the co-op. Just
| because a company has a "bond offering" doesn't
| automatically mean investors will line up to buy them.
|
| E.g. and using the failed RideAustin example above... if
| they hypothetically offered bonds in 2017, your coupon
| payment would be $0 right now.
|
| Whatever financial "solution" one comes up with for co-ops,
| one still has to account for behaviors of all the other
| economic actors in the system.
| clarkevans wrote:
| > Or did you have something else in mind when you meant
| farm co-ops are capital intensive?
|
| I disagree with your characterization: it's the potential
| sharing of capital expenditures (for storage, processing,
| distribution and advertising) that drives cooperation. In
| many cases these costs are far more than software-based
| services. Cooperatives of this nature often have
| significant capital contributions required for
| membership.
|
| > True but bonds don't exist in a vacuum and must compete
| with other alternative investments including other bonds
| by other businesses/governments.
|
| Agreed. I would note our current legal environment makes
| it challenging for cooperatives to raise capital since
| most of their potential contributors, who see the
| community "main street" value, are effectively prevented
| from becoming investors, even if they are willing to do
| so. Retail investors have their arms twisted (401k) to
| put their savings into the stock market... rather than
| into main street. Moreover, since they are not often SEC
| qualified investors, they are prevented from investing
| even if they wish to do so. There are some limited
| exceptions for local organizations, but these rules are
| hard to navigate. These barriers to capital should be
| addressed.
| leto_ii wrote:
| > Real-life customers don't want to enter their credit-card
| details into City_X_driver_coop and then re-enter their
| financial details multiple times again into
| City_Y_driver_coop. Even if you imagine a hypothetical
| national co-op to consolidate multiple cities, customers
| would still then have inconvenience of Country_X_coop and
| Country-Y_coop.
|
| I strongly suspect city level coops would consolidate easily
| and naturally once they would develop a strong base in their
| respective cities. Besides, consolidation isn't the only way
| this might go: a lot of the software work can easily be
| ported from one city to another - if for example the current
| NY coop catches on, I think it would be quite easy to spin
| off a Boston coop for example.
|
| Regarding international travel you should ask how often does
| that need actually occur. Quite few people travel
| internationally so much that having a couple of different
| apps on their phone is a real inconvenience.
| ethanbond wrote:
| That Uber eng comment reads like list of features and
| approaches that are necessitated _by_ an overstaffed
| engineering department than stuff that necessitates it.
|
| Yeah if you have 40-50 (!!) "product teams" fiddling with the
| Rider app, it'll get complex and sure it's impressive it
| works. But uh... why are there 40-50 product teams working on
| the Rider app?
| fractionalhare wrote:
| Did we read the same comment? They all look like useful
| features which deal with the complexity of things external
| to Uber (like regional payment regulations).
| andrepd wrote:
| Your comment is a perfect illustration of problems with the
| capitalist model of private ownership of capital. Notice what
| you're saying: one person starting a for-profit enterprise
| can get access to the capital they need to start their
| business, but a group of thousands of people starting a co-
| operative enterprise are unable to get a similar credit even
| in a collective name! This highlights the deep injustices
| people face in access to capital which hamper their ability,
| among other things, to start competing businesses.
| mojuba wrote:
| I'd say it's not the capitalist model per se but particular
| preferences of the investors. The same way as investors
| preferred young white male founders (maybe until recently)
| to all the other combinations of the three parameters.
| Similarly they prefer entrepreneur-owned companies to
| collectively owned ones for whatever reasons they have in
| mind.
|
| In fact it's perfectly possible to raise money for a coop,
| or a steward company [1], i.e. not owned by anyone, or
| owned by the employees but via non-economical shares. You
| issue special class of shares for the investors - could be
| redeemable for example - and make a commitment as an
| elected executive of the company.
|
| [1] https://medium.com/bettersharing/steward-ownership-is-
| capita...
| 88 wrote:
| Let's not pretend back-end taxi/private hire vehicle dispatch
| is either a complex problem, or one that Uber solved
| themselves.
|
| They added a glossy mobile app to the equation. Many others
| have since done the same.
|
| Driver co-ops or smaller operators simply don't need to worry
| about half the nonsense in the comment you linked (support
| for dozens of languages and payment methods, integration with
| other first or third party services, etc.)
| fractionalhare wrote:
| The commenter is not saying literal taxi dispatch is
| complicated. But that's an extremely reductive view of what
| Uber is.
|
| Their actual point is 1) that it's a complex problem to
| make it a programmatic market which functions nationally
| (even internationally) and 2) that such a product will
| naturally have a feature and convenience advantage over
| regional-specific, capital-constrained alternatives.
| intev wrote:
| _> It's only the surface-level of an ride-hailing app that
| seems easy for worker-owned cooperatives to create. In
| reality, the extra expensive programming dollars required to
| tame the hidden complexity so that the app can present a
| seamless experience to the customers/passengers is a huge
| factor that works against co-ops._
|
| This "seamless" experience is actually not required by most
| people. While it's amazing that I can land it a random major
| city around the world, pull out my Uber and hitch a ride,
| it's not a requirement for most people. Most people travel a
| few times a year, and those who travel for work are used to
| the context switch anyway. Very rarely do they land in a
| brand new city every time. Usually its a rotation of the same
| set of cities, for which they can use the corollary set of
| apps. The friction is only in the beginning. Besides, in the
| post covid world, I'd imagine business travel is going to
| take a huge hit, so this is less of a concern. Also, Uber has
| retreated from a lot of countries over the past few years, so
| this benefit is not true anymore.
|
| _> Real-life customers don 't want to enter their credit-
| card details into City_X_driver_coop and then re-enter their
| financial details multiple times again into
| City_Y_driver_coop. Even if you imagine a hypothetical
| national co-op to consolidate multiple cities, customers
| would still then have inconvenience of Country_X_coop and
| Country-Y_coop._
|
| This such a minor inconvenience. It's like saying, "I wish
| Amazon was dominant all over the world. It's so annoying that
| when I go to America I need to use Amazon but in Brazil I
| need to use Mercado!" If there is a trusted an app in a
| country that everyone uses, I don't mind entering in my
| details. Signing up takes 2 mins.
|
| _> That 's the financial constraint that causes co-ops to
| more easily organize in lower complexity businesses such as
| local grocery co-op or a farming coop. But a high-tech
| complexity business that's expensive to build is inherently
| too costly for a pool of drivers' savings to fund_
|
| Ride hailing is _not_ technically complex. There are many
| open source repos that do it. What makes it very complex in
| Uber 's case is because they need to handle every single
| scenario. If they had only one country, or even one state,
| the tech because so much more straight forward and even
| scaling becomes much easier. The complexity is entirely self
| inflicted because of their single app model. Amazon for
| example has it's own India app. I can't imagine the headache
| and complexity they'd have if they tried to do an India + US
| app.
|
| _> Sure, the driver co-ops can choose to not spend capital
| on "useless" features but this leaves out the fact that
| customers can also choose not to use the co-ops because of
| the lower quality app experience. Keep in mind the behavior
| of customers who prioritize conveniences._
|
| I agree poor user experience could be the downfall of such
| apps. I think it's only a matter of time before someone
| creates the model of a rider cooperative. Technically it's
| possible and contrary to what you say doesn't require as much
| capital. It does require amazing execution which is where I
| think most of these upstarts are failing. As a customer I am
| happy to support the local upstarts even if it means a minor
| app switch.
| gerardnll wrote:
| I love seeing this in USA. Cooperatives are great, power to the
| workers.
| TeeWEE wrote:
| People are paying for a service to go from A to B, whether that's
| a driver bringing them or a robocar, it doesn't really matter. As
| long as the service is good.
|
| Money being made on the service should go back in making the
| service better. These cooperatives often miss that point. They
| are not product centric.
| ThePhysicist wrote:
| In Germany we have some really large organizations that are
| organized as cooperatives (Genossenschaften), e.g. banks
| (Volksbanken/Raiffeisenbanken) but also tech companies like DATEV
| eG that build software for their members (tax accountants in that
| case) and make close to 1 BNEUR in revenue. So it can work.
| luckylion wrote:
| DATEV feels like a government apparatus straight from the 80ies
| though, I don't think that's a good example. It's slow and
| expensive, feels very bureaucratic.
|
| A good example are housing coops though. They work rather
| efficiently, have not turned into bureaucratic monsters, and
| provide housing to their members at sub-market rates (at least
| in the larger cities), while still being profitable and usually
| paying ~4% as a dividend.
| ThePhysicist wrote:
| Yeah but to be fair they're basically implementing German tax
| law as a software product, it's a miracle it even works in
| the first place :D
| DocTomoe wrote:
| We have a ride hailing app for traditional cabs in Germany. The
| reason why I still preferred Uber is that once you travel around
| (remember when we still did that?), you don't want an app per
| location and memorize which app is valid for which geographic
| region - Uber is virtually global.
| alberth wrote:
| This makes a lot of sense and there's past precedent to indicate
| they can be successful.
|
| Ocean Spray (juice company) is exactly this, a coop. Farmers
| about a 100 years ago came together to form their own juice
| company to share in the profits.
|
| Coops make a ton of sense if you're providing a commodity good or
| service. Eg cranberries are essentially the same and are not
| differentiated by definition. You could argue being a driver is
| similar.
|
| https://www.oceanspray.com/Our-Story
| tacostakohashi wrote:
| This website is very scant on details like their bylaws and
| financial statements.
|
| What often happens with these kinds of things is that there's a
| co-operative or charity that is worker/member owned / tax exempt
| and stuff, and they have an agreement with a "management company"
| or license some white label product from a separate, privately
| owned, for-profit company.
|
| There's not necessarily anything wrong with that, but depending
| on the relative size and negotiating power of the co-op vs the
| vendor(s), at some point the co-op ends up being a front for some
| for-profit entity.
| VWWHFSfQ wrote:
| I'm going to give this a real try. I live in Brooklyn Heights,
| NYC. My GF is having a birthday party/gala in Harlem at 140th and
| Broadway. I'm going to try this for traveling to Kerri's birthday
| party.
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| Yo, why are you broadcasting these details, how many strangers
| do you want to show up at her party?
| rPlayer6554 wrote:
| Should I bring drinks? Or should I bring my C manual signed
| by Dennis Richie for some fun party discussion?...never mind
| I'll bring both. I can't wait for an engaging discussion on
| the pros and cons of ANSI C!!!!
| yellowapple wrote:
| Well now I'm obligated to make a cross-country flight just
| to crash the party and point out how C is objectively
| inferior to PL/1 and how the world would be a utopia if
| Multics caught on.
| itake wrote:
| I am curious how they tackle safety issues within the coop. Uber,
| Lyft, and other big players have teams of engineers improving the
| safety of the platform (e.g. banning duplicate accounts of bad
| actors, banning people from re-creating accounts, identifying and
| removing fraud).
|
| I'm skeptical that the team behind the drivers.coop could deliver
| a fair and scalable safe service for both the riders and drivers.
|
| For example:
|
| 1. Uber verifies drivers have face masks before starting shifts
| with ML.
|
| 2. Some/all companies have ML route deviation algorithms to warn
| the passenger if the driver is not following the correct route.
|
| 3. Toxic language detection. Rideshare companies want to flag
| drivers and passengers that are not communicating nicely.
|
| 4. Crash detection. If the phone detects a crash, the ride share
| company can automatically connect them with emergency operates to
| ensure everyone is ok.
| snicker7 wrote:
| A coop is just another corporation, just with a different
| ownership model. This means they will likely have to hire
| engineers, customer service, business analysts, lobbyists, an
| executive team, &c. None of your examples is unachievable with
| a coop. The main blocker is initial capital acquisition.
| itake wrote:
| All of these things are expensive to build, but achievable
| when you operate in many cities or countries.
|
| I am not seeing how a handful of drivers in NYC could fund
| the infrastructure and talent required to deliver these types
| of features that passengers have grown accustomed to.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| Part of the problem is that developing and maintaining these
| applications is _expensive_. Not just the technical part, but
| also all the operations (all the customer care and lawyers and
| mapping and...)
|
| Uber and Lyft are still losing money, VCs are pumping capital
| there daily. How can driver coop survive? Where do they take the
| money for all that?
|
| Sure they don't need to go all Uber and scale into 500
| microservices, but still it's not easy...
|
| I wish them good luck, but I also don't think they will succeed
| against Masa Son deep pockets.
| om2 wrote:
| Accomplishments on their page include: * Purchased ridehailing
| app code and completed customizations for NYC launch
|
| I wonder who sold them the code and who did the customizations.
| Do they have software engineers on staff? Do they own and operate
| their own servers? Or is there someone out there selling/renting
| a white-label rideshare app/service?
| nerdponx wrote:
| > Or is there someone out there selling/renting a white-label
| rideshare app/service
|
| Via I believe was involved in something like this.
| hkt wrote:
| There are a number of companies selling white labelled uber-ish
| apps. My local taxi company uses this one:
| https://riide.co/fleetsignup/
|
| It makes sense that there's a big market for this stuff and as
| much sense that a cooperative would form eventually. Uber
| didn't invent the taxi, after all.
| jwr wrote:
| This is doubly ironic and amusing if you think about how
| Uber/Lyft were "disrupting" the existing markets. Well, market
| forces are at work: if Uber/Lyft provide no additional value over
| drivers' work (and treat drivers as disposable assets), they
| themselves will get "disrupted" and the drivers will get rid of
| them :-)
|
| Happy to see this happening, and I wonder how this will develop.
| tomjen3 wrote:
| Uber provides discoverbility, ratings and a feeling of safety.
| bwilli123 wrote:
| A 'feeling' doesn't guarantee any more than that.
| leto_ii wrote:
| From my experience in many places drivers actually use
| multiple apps at the same time. This means that there's less
| and less of a distinction between the safety, ratings etc. of
| each individual app.
| agloeregrets wrote:
| Ratings is an easy to use and game feature (fun fact often
| harmful to drivers of color) that costs almost nothing to
| build. The feeling of safety was flatter Uber had a bunch of
| rapes that forced them to pretend that they cared, spend is
| very small on it.
| andrepd wrote:
| Unfortunately there are two things being a barrier.
|
| One is advertising: for many people Uber is either the only app
| they know or the one they see as the "standard". " To uber" has
| even become a verb in many languages. Uber can spend hundreds
| of millions of dollars per year on ads.
|
| The other thing is operating at a loss. A co-operative, almost
| by definition, will produce a service at fair prices for both
| customers and employees (market forces dictate the price to
| customers as with any company, and the co-operative structure
| means that profits go to labour -- you know, the people
| actually doing stuff and creating value). A private company
| with never-ending billions of cash can simply operate at a loss
| to out-price their competitors until they close and they have
| achieved an even more hegemonic monopoly in their space. At
| some point Uber was burning 300,000,000$ per month to subsidise
| artificially low prices. Of course, as non-profit seeking
| enterprises, co-ops are plenty restricted from accessing
| capital in the current economic system.
|
| Now the really interesting thing to me is how neither of these
| factors of advantage for private capitalistic enterprises is
| _actually anything useful_. Spending billions to drill your
| brand names into the brains of people is a net loss for
| society, distorting the market is favour of those with the
| biggest advertising budget, not those with the best product. In
| fact nearly all advertising is universally imoral in my
| opinion, but that 's a different story. And burning venture
| money to artificially lower prices and further skew things is
| also obviously a negative.
| nabla9 wrote:
| App provides value, global brand has some value.
|
| There is absolutely no reason for ride hailing app to get
| 10-20% markup per ride.
|
| I suspect that after the competition really kicks in, Uber/Lyft
| must settle for 1-3% per ride or less.
| drrotmos wrote:
| Global brand definitely provides value. Whenever I'm
| traveling (or rather, back when travel was possible) I always
| use Uber because I know that I can pay buy credit card
| (rather than cash) and if the driver takes a huge detour or
| some other common taxi scam, I can just contact Uber's
| customer service, and they'll refund me.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| I have often found local alternatives to Uber/Lyft, whether
| it be in Austin or Ireland, and their main value
| proposition remains: get me a car, quickly, and take my
| payment digitally. If I have a problem there's always
| credit card charge backs.
|
| I think competition is the other thing that makes them
| work. The local options know if they fuck customers over
| that they'll just jump ship to Uber/Lyft. And same is
| probably true for Uber/Lyft!
| nabla9 wrote:
| That's true, but most rides are local by wide margin. And
| 10-20% per ride is too much. Maybe $20 per month/car or so.
|
| It's only question of time until the margins from riding
| app start to go down. Someone builds competing app with
| similar bells and whistles and sells it to locals as a
| service without branding for example.
| mnd999 wrote:
| I think this is what was (pre-pandemic) happening in London.
| Bolt came in, cheaper than Uber and paying the drivers
| (slightly) more. Uber burned a lot of cash creating the
| market, and to some degree on all the self-driving cab
| nonsense.
| pjmorris wrote:
| I've read that grocery stores operate on a ~2% profit margin.
|
| Is a high-margin business a sign of market inefficiency that
| will eventually be stamped out?
| EliRivers wrote:
| Or they've got a moat. Warren Buffet likes moats.
|
| If your potential competition is stymied by huge costs of
| startup or catchup, or you've got the government (be it
| national or local) on side to help you maintain a monopoly
| or cartel (I'm looking your way, numerous US internet
| service providers...), then your high margin can exist for
| a very long time. I don't know if I'd like to say
| "indefinitely" but with the right moats, yeah, maybe
| indefinitely.
| gmadsen wrote:
| Not necessarily. An extremely low profit margin is a sign
| of a commodities market, where there isn't really a space
| for innovation. For example a grocery store, so you are
| competing on very fine details and logistics.
|
| High margin, COULD be inefficiency, but it could just be a
| technological or innovation advantage.
|
| It seems ride hailing is transitioning into a commodity
| since innovation has dried up. The one obvious disruption
| would be self driving cars
| pjmorris wrote:
| Well, at one time, cash registers, packaged food, and
| stores were all technological innovations. I'm asking
| whether 'technological or innovation advantage' can be
| interpreted as a sign of temporary inefficiency that will
| eventually get ironed out of the system (unless
| maintained by force, as another commenter mentions.)
| aaxa wrote:
| You could say the same with Just-Eat. In Denmark, I know they
| have a markup up to 15%, even though they have a lot of
| competition. So honestly, I am a bit sceptical if we will see
| a much lower markup. One might hope though.
| input_sh wrote:
| Huh, where I'm from delivery companies charge by the
| distance, approximately 0,8 euros per kilometer. But that's
| definitely due to competition, there's like 6-7 competitors
| in a city with about 400k people.
| nabla9 wrote:
| The dot-com bubble 1995-2000 included multiple delivery
| service companies.
|
| kozmo.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kozmo.com
|
| Webvan was once valued $4.8 billion.
| ozim wrote:
| So you expect that whole food delivery business will
| collapse?
|
| I don't see that coming because it is 2020 and we have:
| smartphones in every pocket, easy payments from those
| smartphones, it is super convenient to order via such
| platform, in the end lock downs basically mandate food
| delivery.
| vmateixeira wrote:
| In the UK, JustEat takes 30% of the order, same as
| UberEats, with 0 liability - if something goes wrong with
| the order, including problems with delivery time, driver
| taking a nibble, the restaurant just doesn't get paid.
| Deliveroo is a bit greedier and takes 35%.
|
| It's definitely not the lack of competition... it's just
| that the competition doesn't behave much better compared to
| them.
| [deleted]
| yunohn wrote:
| Interesting to hear that Just-Eat acts this way; Takeaway
| (Thuisbezorgd) has similar practices in NL.
|
| They take no liability on anything (delivery delays, food
| problems, missing items, etc). They have no customer care
| number, and take days to respond to emails. If anything
| goes wrong, they make you call the restaurant, and of
| course they redirect you back to Tkwy. In the end, you
| will receive no refund, none of the missing food, and
| have waited 1-3hrs for an order that should've taken
| <1hr.
|
| It's a horrible experience, but they get away with it
| because they have a near-monopoly. Uber Eats & Deliveroo
| have <25% of the restaurants on Tkwy.
| agloeregrets wrote:
| This. I never got how Uber was still unprofitable for so
| long. Sure you have a bunch of Silicon Valley salaries to pay
| but realistically speaking, one could build an Uber/Lyft for
| under $1M and basically can operate with two or so devs
| fixing issues. Yet, they are blowing hundreds of millions of
| dollars yearly all over the place while shorting drivers who
| can't make a living wage and are basically trading vehicle
| expenses down the road for payment today.
| killbot5000 wrote:
| The Uber business model is:
|
| Undercut competition. Use borrowed money to sell rides
| under cost. Wait for all competitors to die. Jack up
| prices.
|
| AFAIK they're still living on borrowed money.
|
| It reminds me of the airline deregulation of the 90s. New
| airlines would use borrowed money to sell seats at below
| cost to attract customers, driving established carriers out
| of business.
|
| The funny thing is that this smells a lot like "the tragedy
| of the commons". Everyone wants to use this amazing
| infrastructure for flying, but no one wants to pay for it.
| New firms undermine the stability of the system by charging
| less than cost in order to starve established competitors
| whose business model is focused on being profitable.
| missedthecue wrote:
| That's not their business model. Uber knows very well how
| low the barrier to entry is in ride hailing.
|
| It's not like they're building railroads here. It's an
| app.
| tmoertel wrote:
| > The Uber business model is: Undercut competition. Use
| borrowed money to sell rides under cost. Wait for all
| competitors to die. Jack up prices.
|
| The interesting thing is that there is more than one
| startup using this model. The competition isn't the other
| startup; it's the other startup's investors.
|
| I wonder how long those investors will keep on pumping
| money into the scheme, hoping their guy will be the last
| standing. Or will they ride the sunk cost fallacy all the
| way down?
| objclxt wrote:
| > one could build an Uber/Lyft for under $1M and basically
| can operate with two or so devs fixing issues
|
| This is fundamentally untrue, although you hear it a lot
| here. I have to wonder whether the people who think this
| have actually worked on a system at the scale Uber operates
| at.
|
| Uber is an _incredibly complicated_ system. The trick is it
| 's presented to the user as a very simplistic one, so
| people overlook what's actually going on behind the scenes.
|
| Sure, like many well-funded tech companies with a large
| engineering staff there's a fair amount of fat you could
| probably cut away (and indeed, Uber have - they've done
| engineering layoffs in the past). But just to sustain the
| app in all the territories they currently operate in you're
| talking hundreds of engineers, not "two or so devs fixing
| issues". That's how large the problem surface area is.
| ozim wrote:
| I think they are blowing hundreds of millions of dollars
| yearly on marketing/sales people not on developers.
| ta988 wrote:
| I'm not sure you realize that a product at that scale can't
| run with two people. You need lawyers, service support,
| testers, advertisers... People that hacl the other company
| to sabotage their launch (if you are not aware, uber did
| that).
| agloeregrets wrote:
| I was referring to Silicon valley salaries, obviously you
| would need ~ 50-100 people or such. At current scale of
| Uber, if they charged just a penny (instead of the 20-30%
| they currently do) They would make 16 million dollars
| which could pay 100 people an average of 100K per year,
| they could spend $4M on infrastructure and still make $2M
| in profit despite being not much more than a payment
| processor and app provider (like square or shopify) They
| bill more than 200X that on average.
| n4r9 wrote:
| I subscribe to an email newsletter called BIG by Matt
| Stoller. It's all about US monopolies and he's very
| interested in exactly what you describe. His response is
| that both ride-hailing and delivery apps are taking a
| gamble on establishing a monopoly in several years time, at
| which point the profits will pay off the current losses.
| andrepd wrote:
| This is evident. We're at such a crazy level of
| capitalism/neoliberalism that it's a regular occurrence
| to see large businesses operating at a loss for 5 or 10
| years.
| twelvechairs wrote:
| Being able to run at a major loss for 5-10 years is great
| for 'hard tech'. For a simple phone app though its a
| different story.
| mindvirus wrote:
| Which of those two devs will be responsible for ensuring
| taxes are properly charged and keeping up to date with the
| tax code?
|
| Which will maintain parking and map zones?
|
| Who will work on routing and matching?
|
| Who's working on fraud? On safety?
|
| Who is working on payments, both from riders and paying
| drivers?
|
| Who is generating required tax reports for drivers?
|
| Who's doing driver onboarding?
|
| Which will ensure that drivers have the proper paperwork to
| operate in their market (insurance etc)?
|
| And who is working on Android and iOS apps, both for
| drivers and riders?
|
| Who's working on the backend?
| agloeregrets wrote:
| My numbers were talking app expenses, obviously a company
| of Uber's scale would need 100+ employees. I broke down
| below that if they worked at their current scale and
| charged just a penny, they could pay their employees an
| average of $100K per year and still make millions in
| profit after spending millions on Infrastructure. Uber
| bills on average more than 100-200 times that and spends
| insane numbers on unprofitable projects like self driving
| cars. I've read the whole book, a set of co-ops could
| easily spend as little as a million dollars, retain devs
| for work on it, bill a tiny service fee of a penny per
| ride (plus card processing) and then have local co-ops
| operate the other half of everything above at a
| reasonable scale whereas drivers get paid the rest other
| than management costs. Uber is intentionally using
| automation to overswamp driver markets to keep prices low
| and driver pay low to boost ride numbers and eliminate
| competition.
| aerosmile wrote:
| Nope, your words were clear - you were flat out wrong,
| and are now trying to save face. I don't have a tendency
| to call people out, but blindly applying the "two devs in
| a garage" axiom is not only wrong when it comes to labor
| marketplaces, but it also unnecessarily spreads
| discontent to the point that we have to stop this
| silliness. I don't care one bit about your recalculated
| math from now on - for me, you're just another armchair
| quarterback who speaks before he thinks.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Yes, OP was wrong to specifically call out "two devs" and
| HN, as it always is, was technically correct and called
| him out on it. Congratulations HN! Bad OP!
|
| I agree with the overall sentiment though: "What are all
| these people doing?" is a valid question against _lots_
| of Silicon Valley companies who are currently growing for
| the sake of growing. Yes, you need a few lawyers. Do you
| need 100 lawyers, each with executive assistants, and
| lawyer managers of other lawyers? Why? What specifically
| are they all doing? Why can 't you do it with 90 lawyers?
| or 80?
|
| I've worked for companies ranging from 12 people up to
| 100,000+. I've seen companies that were legitimately
| understaffed, but also companies where I don't think
| anyone (including the employees themselves) could
| articulate why all these people were needed. Outwardly,
| it's always explained with some nebulous reason like "Oh,
| what we do is oh-so-complex! We need people to, um,
| manage the complexity, and uh, create synergies." Yea,
| and they need exec assistants and interns, and their own
| staff of sub-complexity-wranglers, who also need
| assistants, and soon it's complexity-wranglers all the
| way down, and nobody knows what any of them are actually
| doing, but they're all sending E-mails to each other!
|
| The unspoken side is that most companies simply measure
| your importance by how many people are under you, so
| everyone tries to hire as many people as they can get
| budget for, and build their empire. But it's an empire of
| paper, of TPS reports! These people aren't really doing
| anything, but they make this SVP's org bigger than the
| other SVP's org, and the CEO can tell everyone how huge
| (i.e. important) the company is getting, and that's
| what's important.
| bhupy wrote:
| > The unspoken side is that most companies simply measure
| your importance by how many people are under you, so
| everyone tries to hire as many people as they can get
| budget for, and build their empire.
|
| If we're throwing around conventional aphorisms, one
| could just as easily argue that most companies simply
| optimize for maximizing profits by minimizing labor
| costs, and therefore have an incentive to eliminate
| redundant labor. Heaven knows that Uber's primary goal
| for the next few years is profitability. Why, then,
| wouldn't Uber just get rid of all of these paper TPS
| report empires? Should be simple enough, right?
|
| The reality is that it's a lot more complicated. I think
| GP's comment about armchair quarterbacking is an
| important one, and I think this comment as a good example
| of that. A fun joke I've heard is that the mark of a
| senior engineer is how often they say "Well, It
| Depends(tm)". It mostly alludes to the general tendency
| to avoid simple explanations of complex systems the more
| senior one gets.I think the same applies in the context
| of organization building.
|
| There was a good comment a while ago from a former Uber
| engineer that broke down just why the Uber app is so big:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25376346
|
| If you take that, and try to imagine that it's not just
| engineers, it's also Product Managers, Designers that
| feed into the raw R&D; and the fact that Uber actually
| operates in multiple business lines (Eats, Rides,
| Freight, Bikeshare, Transit) and then the
| operationalization of all of those features, including
| customer support, biz ops, product marketing, etc. And
| then wrap all that up into the core organizational
| infrastructure necessary to support all that: FP&A, HR,
| etc. It all adds up! And that's _just_ the current
| businesses we see, you also have portions of all of that
| feeding into the numerous exploratory efforts they
| probably have underway into new business lines.
| ryandrake wrote:
| I think the Uber example is a great read, and kind of
| makes my point. All that complexity and they are still
| losing money! All those payment methods, hundreds of
| megabytes of application binary, hundreds of backend
| teams, all of them very busy "doing things" but the
| company is not making money. Maybe they need to hire 60
| more bizops ninjas.
|
| Even with this thread, I have to say I'm kind of a
| hypocrite, since I'm one of these "support role" guys in
| my own company. I make it a goal every day to try to draw
| a clear understandable line between my work and the
| company making money. Some days it's not easy after 8
| hours of TPS reports. I've been in roles where to this
| day I can't figure out how what I did made the company
| money. It was a lot simpler to explain when I was
| directly making the product.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| > Well, market forces are at work: if Uber/Lyft provide no
| additional value over drivers' work (and treat drivers as
| disposable assets), they themselves will get "disrupted" and
| the drivers will get rid of them
|
| We shall see if that ends up being the case. It's an open
| question to me. I could see this being as effective as Uber.
| But I could also see an industry association implementing some
| anti-consumer policies that make it less appealing than Uber.
|
| I'm also interested to see how the compensation model works
| out. It will be interesting to see if the cooperative pays out
| for idle/waiting for passenger time. It will also be
| interesting to see if they offer health coverage, PTO, etc. Or
| is the idea simply that they will give the drivers a larger
| slice of the earnings? A pure labor-price play?
|
| I have often wondered what you'd build in the ride-sharing
| space if you didn't have a profit incentive. One could imagine
| going full auction nerd and building an app where drivers and
| passengers are able to bid (automatically?) in an auction to
| see who gets whose time. Of course you'd lose price
| predictability. And that might cost you customers, and that
| might cost you volume, which you absolutely need to have a
| modicum of success in this space. An app that has only drivers
| or only passengers is not a useful app.
|
| How sick would it be if we had interoperability laws where the
| app could fall back to Uber if it couldn't find a better price
| in-app? I'm sure this would be against Uber's TOS today, but it
| would be a great pro-consumer feature.
| beckingz wrote:
| Just give it back to the taxi drivers to operate, but hold
| them to a higher standard of quality.
| asdfasgasdgasdg wrote:
| TBH Uber has led to dramatically better consumer outcomes.
| Without them operating in the market, and given the power
| the taxi lobby seems to have over local lawmakers, I am
| skeptical that any taxi-only scenario will be good for
| consumers.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| I applaud the effort, but the problem with a collective is that
| they are, legally speaking, a soft target. Uber can afford to
| break laws, run at a local loss, and generally throw its weight
| around a new market. Cooperatives don't have such deep pockets.
| They will leave town as soon as a some local interest resists.
| They aren't going to survive multi-year fights with cities or
| organizations like the London cabs.
| vivekmgeorge wrote:
| Only for so long. Their stock price will suffer at a certain
| point. Not to mention the bad PR that come with it. The more
| of these that we see globally the harder it would be for them
| to run at a loss. As a CO-OP they can take growth slowly.
| They don't have the same investor pressure
| chaos_emergent wrote:
| Part of the design of Coops is that they are the local
| interest. It's much less likely that they will encounter
| local resistance than a VC-backed Silicon Valley overlord.
| kube-system wrote:
| The 'local interest' is more than just drivers. It's
| competing groups, regulators, land owners, etc.
| [deleted]
| patentatt wrote:
| But can't they just ride the coattails of the big players?
| Once they've lobbied their way in, shouldn't it be pretty
| easy for the coop to just say they should be treated the
| same?
|
| For that matter, I always wonder why Airbnb still exists. Now
| that they've bulldozed all sorts of local regulations with
| their VC money, why wouldn't a coop model work better for the
| actual landlords? Something akin to the MLS for real estate,
| for local operators of short term rentals.
| xsmasher wrote:
| The little guy can ride the coattails as long as the
| behemoth allows it.
|
| The behemoth can get "safety" regulations passed that only
| the behemoth can satisfy- basically pull the ladder behind
| them.
| zbyte64 wrote:
| Ostensibly yes because landlords would get a larger share
| of the surplus, but as long as capital writes regulations,
| entities that extract more surplus will be better able to
| change the rules. Just look at how much was spent in
| California to keep gig workers as contractors.
| mromanuk wrote:
| wow, this is wonderful, SaaS for the people and not exploiting or
| selling their information! I'm in awe. It feels like open source,
| what other industries can be disrupted, in this with help from
| devs?
| t7s wrote:
| It would be interesting if this service could be provided 100%
| browser based. No app install needed.
| justinzollars wrote:
| > While Uber and Lyft make their money for Wall Street and
| Silicon Valley investors, we will be a co-operative. So any
| profits will go back to the drivers.
|
| I'm not sure this is true. Neither Uber or Lyft makes any money.
| They lose money for Wall Street.
| aerosmile wrote:
| I would rather be dead in a ditch than set foot in one of their
| cars. Because I expect it would be basically the same thing.
|
| Their website has thousands of words about how horrible Uber and
| Lyft are, but not one word about how they are going to approach
| trust and safety. I really hope there's an experienced labor
| marketplace executive in the room who knows anything about this
| business, rather than a bunch of drivers who decided to run one
| of the riskiest operations for personal safety that one can
| imagine (there's a reason why parents don't allow their kids to
| get into cars with strangers).
| mitchdoogle wrote:
| The world is not so dangerous as you imagine it to be. A
| stranger approaching a child and offering a ride is a dangerous
| situation. Adults hailing a car through an advertised driving
| service is not. You might as well be scared to walk out your
| front door as well.
| aerosmile wrote:
| I wish you were right. But if you spend a minute talking to
| people who work in trust and safety at those companies,
| you'll want to give them a hug.
| [deleted]
| sukruh wrote:
| Cool. One trap worker-owned companies often fall into is to
| neglect investing into risky/long-term projects and as a result
| fall behind the industry. When the choice is 2x salary for 3
| years or some R&D investment one does not fully grasp, many
| individual members choose the former.
| chrismorgan wrote:
| On the Google Play Store, they have app IDs com.driver.coop and
| com.rider.coop. I figure these should be coop.drivers.driver and
| coop.drivers.rider. This suggests to me that Google aren't
| verifying domain ownership in app IDs, which I find a tad
| surprising. I had just assumed they would, and thus that you
| could _trust_ that apps on the Google Play Store with IDs like
| com.example.foo or io.github.example.foo were actually from
| whoever ran example.com and example.github.io. That sounds like a
| mild phishing opportunity (only mild because I doubt most ever
| notice app IDs).
| yunohn wrote:
| Play Store IDs use the "domain" style naming scheme, purely as
| a relic of Android apps being written in Java. Neither Java nor
| Play Store have ever mandated domain checking, and the IDs are
| up to the developer.
| ryan29 wrote:
| I hope this is successful. For a couple of years I've been
| telling people how bad demand aggregation platforms are because
| of the way they commoditize supply for important things like
| labor providers and small businesses.
|
| A supply side coop is the only way to defeat demand aggregation
| IMO. Hopefully we see more of this because I think the economy is
| a lot healthier with a lost of fair value, mutually beneficial
| relationships instead of the current trend of exploiting everyone
| and everything within sight.
| domano wrote:
| I wonder how this would influence autonomous taxi services.
|
| Maybe there is a financial possibility to finance retraining of
| drivers while the industry shifts to autonomous rides in the
| future. This would ease adoption while not discarding drivers as
| disposable resources.
| specialist wrote:
| Neat. Responses, in no particular order.
|
| Yay for co-ops, WDSEs, not-for-profits. Is that what this is? I
| expect stuff like charter, bylaws, list of board members, budget,
| etc. (Vs post-capitalist agitprop.) Here's Richard Wolff's
| popular treatment of this trend: https://www.democracyatwork.info
| For more context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers%27_self-
| management
|
| Efforts like this validate the observations that ride hailing has
| no moat.
|
| Eventually, we'll have white labeled ride hailing hosting
| companies. So you're a specialty transport group in Cincinnati,
| eg for elderly and wheelchair bound customers. You get your own
| branded and slightly customized version for your niche. The
| hosting companies do all the tech.
| foxhop wrote:
| In this video the drivers coop and Chompsky makes an appearance
| at about minute 53
|
| https://www.facebook.com/aman.bardia/videos/1022529023954722...
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