Behind Tech Layoffs Lay Systemic Cash Flow Negative Companies (medium.com) 115
An anonymous reader shares an analysis: Since the pandemic started, there's been approximately 61,260 tech layoffs. Close to 30% of the layoffs came from public tech companies, 85% of those companies are unprofitable. No deep insights here, just the simple fact that the once growth hyper focused startups grew to be publicly traded companies without ever sorting their unit economics, and now their mediocracy has real consequences on real people. This includes household names such as Uber, Lyft, Casper, and Eventbrite which we've all used, and raises the question: why did we allow so many unprofitable companies IPO? When did losing money become acceptable and the new normal for publicly traded companies? Chamath Palihapitiya's "VC Ponzi Scheme" monologue comes to mind.
There is an old saying (Score:1, Troll)
From Reagan I think.
"Privatize profits, socialize losses."
'bout sums it up. CEOs walk away will millions, the workers who made all that money for the CEO gets zip.
And we as a society let it happen.
Greed is good, right?
Re:There is an old saying (Score:4, Insightful)
Also presumably the workers were paid for their services and the time they spent working their. I suppose they could have accepted compensation in the form of stock options as some portion of their wages, but unless they're working for free they got paid. The only people that got soaked were the people who invested their money in the company in the first place. The losses were privatized.
If you're going to make inane arguments against capitalism at least try to pick an example that doesn't completely contradict the point you're trying to make.
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He's saying somebody walks away with money in their pocket; it's not necessarily "profit" for the company; it could be be an expense.
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Generally speaking, when there's an IPO involved, especially a unicorn IPO, the original investors make a huge profit, and the suckers who buy during the IPO pay for it.
Under even slightly different circumstances, it'd be considered a ponzi scam.
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Re:There is an old saying (Score:5, Informative)
No, money the company makes *in excess of expenses* is profit. Plain old money made is revenue.
And there are lots of ways to take money out of a company besides salary.
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When I use them, yes. When others, I make no such assumption.
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for fuck's sake, "making money" means profit. If you ask your friend at a startup if they're making money, you're asking if his company has making any profits. not whether they had one customer in the last year who paid $10 for a trial subscription. why the fuck would "making money" mean "revenue"?
Turn over, Revenue, Profit are not the same.
Revenue = income from sales
Revenue is the most useless way to value a company though these days though is the most often given figure
Turnover is more complicated involves the amount in inventory, sales, expenses etc.
Net Profit is revenue - Expenses.
an old rule of thumb was a company was valued at 8 x Net or 2 x Turnover then add in something for Goodwill and assets but this requires more than 5 minutes of accounting analysis
Re: There is an old saying (Score:2)
The distinction between the public and the retail investment masses is very thin. The profits went to the pre-IPO investors and founders. The losses are socialized to the post-IPO retail investment masses who don't qualify to make early, risky, profitable investments like VCs do. While, technically, this is private loss, the numbers of losers are so great, it's effectively a public loss.
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It's really mostly retail investors being really stupid. And I mean really really stupid. Once I saw the S&P500 hit the high 2900's a few weeks ago, I sold all of my equities in my 401k and basically I'm sitting on cash, because the stock market does NOT reflect the current economic reality, now probably worse than ever. The shares are only worth what people will pay for them, and people who are willing to pay higher dollar amounts for them are just being dumb. Take Uber in particular: It's not at all a
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Well, for the companies that apply to 'socialize the losses', it makes sense.
If you are the head of a company in that role that is profitable, you take a lot of money home because it's profitable. It is stereotypical that these people will also complain about high taxes and what not because that profit is *their money*. You may go so far as making your business 'foreign' for more favorable tax status (e.g. a lot of the cruise line operators).
If your company is losing money but is deemed critical, here comes
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Uber. Lyft. Facepalm.
Execs walk away with millions or billions. Are you *really* so deluded as to thing most of the employees, or contractors, get paid that much?
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Re:There is an old saying (Score:5, Informative)
Re: There is an old saying (Score:3, Interesting)
These days I see leftist commentators pointing to him as a good president. Please help me, I am confused by this.
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I don't like either of the two main political parties for various reasons, but not being particularly attached to either does make it easier to notice that thei
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Did you seriously just try whataboutism?
George W. Bush was called Hitler. And now people are pining for Hitler because the new president is Hitler. It's Godwin's Law all the way down.
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Did you seriously just try whataboutism?
George W. Bush was called Hitler. And now people are pining for Hitler because the new president is Hitler. It's Godwin's Law all the way down.
Aside from the fact that your entire post is whataboutism, what president hasn't been called Hitler in the last 30 years? That doesn't mean anything. A lot of shit repeated on slashdot about him in particular was just made up, like the "goddamn piece of paper" incident, which never actually happened, but people keep repeating it as if it's the truth.
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That's nothing, I've seen them pining for George W. Bush. That's right, the warmongering neocon bully, the one people unironically called Hitler, Chimpy McBu$hitler himself. Wow, it's almost as if they have emotional breakdowns whenever they don't get their way.
The interesting thing about that war was that it was bipartisan until the democrats made it a campaign talking point to be against it in 04. Remember that Hillary herself was on the intelligence committee, in other words she was one of those giving bad information to the president, and then her and the rest of the democratic party turned it against him. Given what happened with Benghazi, she was probably the last person that should have had anything to do with the intelligence community, let alone play a le
Re: There is an old saying (Score:2, Informative)
The reality of the modern neo-con platform caught up to the rhetoric of the 80s. Now Reagan just seems like a quaint out-of-touch Hollywood Republican. The real neo-cons (Gingrich and any Republican who gave up the platform when Trump was elected) are much worse.
I mean his biggest scandal was selling weapons to Iran. It's hard to look back and see Obama trying to normalize Iranian relations and also look at Reagan as some great failure for trying to help Iran. Maybe it was too soon, but with proper hindsigh
Re: There is an old saying (Score:4, Informative)
I mean his biggest scandal was selling weapons to Iran . . Maybe it was too soon, but with proper hindsight, if that's the biggest scandal, it's a yawn.
Iran had taken over the US Embassy in the very recent past and was very actively promoting terrorism against the US and our allies. The CIA sold arms to this regime in order to get money to fund the rightist Contra paramilitary insurgency in Nicaragua--because Congress stopped allowing the CIA to find this sort of things.
So not only was the Executive selling arms to our enemies, but they were doing to to violate the separation of powers and funding a pretty nasty group of guys. Then they lied about it under oath before Congress, and Regan lied on TV.
Your take on neo liberalism and neoconservativism is also ahistoric and seems to be based on them sharing thieir first three letters.
Re: There is an old saying (Score:2)
Neo-cons: the success of our corporations is more important than our people.
Neo-libs: the success of our corporations is more important than your people.
Same ideologies. They both essentially twist the idea of classic liberalism until it only applies to LLCs.
Re: There is an old saying (Score:2)
Seeing crypto-fascists everywhere is code for "I stopped paying attention to civics in the third grade".
Re: There is an old saying (Score:1)
From the individual that thinks every neo movement is the same because of the first three letters. Hilarious.
Re: There is an old saying (Score:2)
Your failure to see the similarities between neo-cons and neo-libs does not mean I can't tell the difference.
But you would need the reasoning skills of someone much more intelligent than yourself to understand that.
Re: There is an old saying (Score:1)
Or someone pushing an agenda...
Re: There is an old saying (Score:2)
He's the very definition of a troll (check his comment history). You're wasting your time.
Re: There is an old saying (Score:1)
Aww my stalker is back.
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These days I see leftist commentators pointing to him as a good president. Please help me, I am confused by this.
I can understand your confusion. At the time, Regan was considered a "hard-Right Republican." These days, the "Democratic" wing of the Party is closer to his social and economic policies, while the "Republican" wing has gone even further toward Facism and tyranny.
Essentially, both sides of the Party are on the Right side of the political spectrum.
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Seriously? Here is the 1984 GOP platform [ucsb.edu], and here is the 2016 Democrat platform [democrats.org]. They could not BE more different.
The reality is we went from Democrats like Tip O'Neill who wanted to work with the President to make the US stronger and better, to Nancy Pelosi tearing up speeches and doing her damnedest (including using henchmen like Adam Schiff to lie continually about Russian collusion) to block everything and get him removed from office.
The GOP has slid slightly to the left; the Democrats have moved s
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I haven't really seen it, but let's suppose it's happening.That would be indicative of how far the bar for the Presidency has been lowered.
Whether you like it or not, Reagan had a vision for the nation and took cohesive, effective steps to implement it. Even if he wasn't the most educated, he didn't have a compulsive disregard for anyone more knowledgeable than him. He didn't have a chronic inability to fill top-level positions for more than a few weeks - or ever. He was well-spoken and didn't change his mi
Re: There is an old saying (Score:1)
The "leftists" you see are your imagination.
He wasn't mentally fit. Much like your current joke.
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Reagan actually held the line in 1981-1983, and pulled the US out of recession a lot faster that most people thought
The thing is, Reagan's recession was entirely artificial. It was caused by the Fed raising rates from 8% in January 1980 to 20% in December 1980. Fed then gradually lowered the rates and the economy immediately picked up.
The rate hike was somewhat justified, the US needed to break the inflationary spiral. There were other options, but Fed hike was the easiest one.
Side note, 20% Fed rates look like science fiction today (with effectively negative rates).
Extract the wealth now and worry about consequence (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Extract the wealth now and worry about conseque (Score:4, Insightful)
This is pretty much the entire US economy - extraction. Stripmine all assets, concentrate wealth.
Those easy resources having been played out, we are in the fracking phase.
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That just demonstrates how disconnected you are from reality.
Most businesses focus on growth. Sure, there are some who pursue the strip mining mentality, but those are usually circling the drain already. Those are the bought out companies who have their entire management teams replaced. Everyone knows what's going to happen, so their job is to squeeze blood from a turnip, then keep squeezing.
By their very nature, those companies are exceedingly rare.
Re: Extract the wealth now and worry about consequ (Score:2)
If that were really the case, the bag holders would be banks who issued credit. You really think that's what's going on?
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Banks aren't allowed to fail... so they'll be bailed out by the Fed.
You're not wrong about that: bailing out banks (well, technically bond holders) takes the "loss" out of "profit and loss". There still are investors who put up actual capital. They can and do get wiped out, their investment value going to zero.
If we protect bond holders, it becomes more attractive to loan money than invest it. That's what gives companies incentive to borrow rather than hustle for investors. One of my favorite economists, Russ Roberts, talks about this sort of thing all the time. Markets set
Tech companies are scalable (Score:2)
This probably wouldn't work if we weren't doing things like this [thehill.com] then those risks might not be as desirable, but as it stands it's basically zero risk.
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I've seen this at the company I work for as its grown. I mean, we're only 50-odd people now, but we sure have layered on a lot of non-revenue employees.
The worst is several are justified by "taxes" -- basically hours they get to bill all projects, regardless of how many real hours they put into them. I think all projects are now burdened by at least 4 hours of bullshit time, which is ton when many projects have less than 30 hours of project time associated with them. And of course project profitability c
We've all used??? (Score:3)
I haven't use any of those.
See Amazon as an example (Score:1)
Re: See Amazon as an example (Score:2)
We lose $x per sale, but we'll make it up in volume.
Re:See Amazon as an example (Score:5, Insightful)
Amazon is a great example. The business model of these companies is to outspend their competition until they've built up barriers around their business model, then hopefully become profitable.
So case 1 you've had a giant bonfire and burned a bunch of money. Case 2, you've destroyed all the competition and turned a market into a monopoly.
It's distinctly anti-capitalist if you're being generous. A the-first-hit-is-free drug dealer business model if you're not.
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I suppose I should have said "free-market capitalism" which is what just about everyone means when they use "capitalism" without any qualifiers. As opposed to "state capitalism" which is probably a more accurate description of the economic systems of the Soviet Union and Maoist China than the colloquial "communism." I guess Amazon would be most compatible with laissez-faire capitalism, provided you assume they don't exercise any significant influence on governments.
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I'm not necessarily aiming for the most precise language, just introducing another interesting perspective to the discussion. :-) Braudel wasn't so much talking about a static description of a static system as about two forces that are intertwined in our economy and that change in relative influence over time.
For example, in a free market everybody can see all the products and everybody knows all the prices. In a market fully controlled by capitalists, it's only the capitalists who know all the prices a
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The point about private deals, not knowing what ot
Re:See Amazon as an example (Score:4, Interesting)
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Part of the problem is that interest rates have been so low for so long that, well, what else are you going to do with all that almost-free money?
I can think of a few things that would be more inspiring than hipster mattresses and expensive versions of sitting in a corner of the local pub with your laptop, but society wants what society wants.
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Of course as unpalatable as the strategy is, it works... for capital intensive endeavors.
See also, petroleum companies. If you get squeezed out, you aren't going to go through the capital spend again.
Now for a lot of these companies particularly social media or other 'app' companies, there isn't a whole lot keeping entrants discouraged, so you basically get to spend gobs of money to try to outlast everyone else. When you finally are the last one standing you slightly increase your revenue to actually be pro
It's the way to make money in the VC world (Score:1)
Re: It's the way to make money in the VC world (Score:1, Troll)
They toss money at a lot of random crap, most go under, a few hit 10x or 100x or more which keeps them in the money and their investors happy. Unless you fuck up big time like SoftBank with We(dont)Work.
Re: It's the way to make money in the VC world (Score:1)
Sheesh. The dumb assery around here runs thick.
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You were modded down because you were wrong.
A venture capital firm raises money from other people, and uses that money to try to "hit it big" for those who supplied the money. The venture capital firm partners and employees get a cut of the funds and interest - no matter what happens to the actual bets they place. Place wrong - and you won't get much (if any) money next time. Bet wrong most of the the time, and hit it really big once? More money thrown at you (from which you can skim your cut) in the
Re: It's the way to make money in the VC world (Score:1)
Look what happened to SoftBank when they announced a huge loss a few months ago, mostly from WeWork. Their stock got CRUSHED and you think their new investor pool grew or shrank?
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Exit stage left (Score:2)
Going public is a popular "exit strategy".
why did we allow so many unprofitable IPO? (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, the fundamental answer is that in many sectors it takes massive investments to become profitable.
Imagine you have a great idea for a new smartphone and you want to build a company around that.
You are going to need an army of engineers to build the product because you need to catch up with state of the art.
You are going to get sued to oblivion for patent infringement even if you infringe on no ones patent. So you are going to need an army of lawyers to defend you against that.
It will take years until you have a product out the door, all these years you will be cash flow negative.
Tesla was founded in 2003. I think their first sale was in 2013.
Companies like Uber have a similar problem. They can't become profitable until they have a significant share of the market. That means running a deficit for years.
Re: why did we allow so many unprofitable IPO? (Score:1)
"Imagine you have a great idea for a new smartphone"
Now, imagine a polka-dotted unicorn in every home...
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Well, the fundamental answer is that in many sectors it takes massive investments to become profitable.
No. What all these companies have in common is that they realised it takes massive investments to undercut your competitors and drive them out of business. Uber might have made it, Netflix was never going to until the pandemic came along and even so, once this is over they'll still be facing Amazon, Disney and Apple, all of whom can do their streaming services for free if they want to.
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Agreed. They traded out profits for market-share because they could; investors seemed happy with that strategy. It has little to do with needing actual investment capital like a 1970's factory did. During a slump investors may be less willing to play along, but we'll see. The rich can wait out recessions.
This is amusing (Score:3)
Why are unprofitable companies allowed to IPO? Because many companies need operating capital to last long enough to become profitable and one way to do it is to offer stock which means an IPO. Essentially companies like "Uber, Lyft, Casper, and Eventbrite" are overblown penny stocks that should be trading on the pinksheets.
Re:This is amusing (Score:4, Informative)
The modern stock market is entirely based on pure speculation. Stock price no longer follows any sort of rational though process, it's all herd behavior augmented by automated transactions. Buy a share of pretty much any company today and you'll never earn enough dividends for it to pay for itself, its only value is the sale price.
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Buy a share of pretty much any company today and you'll never earn enough dividends for it to pay for itself, its only value is the sale price.
I bought when the market was down, not at the bottom but down, and am now in positive territory. I have shares in a REIT that pays a dividend yield equivalent to 6%APR, better. Over all, my stock investments currently pull in about 3.5-4% APR in dividends while my high interest saving account is less than 2%. And, that ignores the increase in value over time. When I sell after the market recovers, I will have made about $10,000 in profit by investing wisely.
This is a case of diminishing returns. (Score:4, Insightful)
Internet based commerce started from nothing a little over twenty years ago.
Amazon spent years losing money pursuing, if not the very lowest hanging fruit, the single biggest *piece* of it: retailing. It now has a market capitalization of over a trillion dollars.
Companies following in Amazon's footsteps are not taking aim at Amazon; they're looking for vulnerable traditional companies that haven't figured out how to compete on the Internet yet. That means they're going after the biggest *remaining* low-hanging fruit.
People who bought into Amazon's IPO in 1997 had to wait for years to see the company make any profit; but it was worth it to own a piece of a company that ended up becoming 50% of all online commerce. But as time goes on, the jackpots get smaller and smaller.
We've All Used Them? (Score:5, Interesting)
People chose to work for those companies - regardless of the corporate governance pracices. People chose to invest in those companies regardless of the corporate governance practices.
I see only willing victims and suckers. Many hoping to be the next one to 'strike it rich' through stock shares, or to make a quick buck.
I see almost the entirety of the gig economy as a giant money pit for suckers.
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Some of those companies I simply won't use, because I see their parasitic nature.
Ya know, I don't agree with your choices and I'm grateful you're free to make and explain them. Knock yer socks off. Vote with your dollars. it's one of the most powerful ways you have of expressing your preferences, much more powerful than most elections.
Duh? (Score:2)
Because...profit isn't the goal in the early years of a company? It's growth you want, failing to earn a profit is normal. In fact, some times you don't even want a profit, for tax reasons. Do...do people not know this? Is economic illiteracy really that widespread? Do we not remember Amazon who famously lost money for its first decade?
Wow. This sort of knowledge used to be widespread. It was so well-known that during the dotcom boom it became a widely parodied joke. It's frightening that people are so out
Retail investing (Score:2)
Retail investing is exploding with apps like Robin Hood, etc.
Why wouldn't VCs fund unprofitable ventures if there's $trillions in capital waiting for their IPO?
Now, why do people invest in bad companies in general? Primarily some form of rational or irrational momentum investing. Retail investors are not sensitive to systemic shocks. They're looking for get-rich-quick schemes. They are the greater fools who hold the bag.
Stock prices have been propped up by large growth in retail investment. Some are worth i
"We" who? (Score:1)
No one makes the little people but those shares. It's a high risk investment which may or may not work out. I wouldn't do it but others have gotten very wealthy that way.
There is no "we" who is "allowing" anything.
And remember some IPOs are so horrible they fail to go out. WeWork being the most recent w
Re:"We" who? (Score:4)
No one makes the little people but those shares
How much say do you have in the funds your 401k or pension is invested in? Unless you're a billionaire you have essentially none. If the clown running the fund buys into the next Enron you're fucked and had no choice in whether to take the anal reaming or not. Just ask anyone who watched in horror as the Texas Teachers Pension Fund bought all the Enron shares it could acquire up to the day trading was stopped. And the guy who made the decision? He walked away with his paycheck paid in full.
Re: "We" who? (Score:1)
Stock goes IPO at randomly chosen number, say $20 per share. ALL of the available stock is going to 401k and other big funds. The actual price available to John Q Public is after the "pop". It might be, say, $27. As a little person you can't get in lower. Period. So my 401k then flips and sells a bunch for an instant $7 per share profit.
As a 401k holder I'm ok with that. And no one forced anyone to buy at $27. All these numbers are out in the open and
All-in strategies come with risks. (Score:4, Insightful)
Just like Amazon, when your company grows you have two choices : stop the expansion and cash the money or continue to invest in even more expansion to get even more money in the future (but grow an even bigger debt in the middle).
You can see those companies as unprofitable, or just as making a ton of money while investing even more money for even bigger gains in the future. Obviously it's not trivial to see which companies will eventually be making huge amounts of money, but that's why we allow them. Once they reach the peak, suddenly all the R&D investment will stabilize and the profit will skyrocket.
Now that also means you're taking all the risks to maximize your future gain, and this is a fragile situation. So the current situation is very bad for them, although one could argue it could have been the best strategy without the virus outbreak no one could predict.
Kind of reminds me when I play civilization with 100% science and almost no defense on my cities. In the long term, that strategy will make me reach the end of the technology tree faster, at which point I'll stop that strategy, put everything on producing tanks and battleships, and rule the world thanks to my technological superiority. But if at any time in the way someone attacks me, I'll be in big trouble.
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You can see those companies as unprofitable, or just as making a ton of money while investing even more money for even bigger gains in the future.
That is a misunderstanding on how cash flows are used. Cash flows are used for operations, investment, and for financing activities. Much of the cash flow is for day to day operations: paying bills, salaries, and marketing. I see a lot of these startups blast through tons of money for advertising alone. And other companies bleed cash just from operations AND continue to invest - and they have a tendency to go insolvent. Iridium is a prime example.
Now, there are unscrupulous entrepreneurs who paint the
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Well, taking Uber as the main company this article is talking about, salaries are in a big part R&D and increasing the technological competitive advantage, and the rest of the money is subsidizing which, as advertising, is supposed to increase their market dominance even more, as they see adoption rising. They could increase the price and get the money but that would slow down their expansion significantly.
So no I'm not talking about the majority of start-ups, but the big ones that lose tons of money f
Facebook Model (Score:2)
Blame the Fed (Score:3, Interesting)
Thanks to zero interest rate policies from the Fed during the Obama and Bush era and floods of money printing from Powell during the Trump era, now we have all of these zombie "tech" companies funded by free money from the Fed that end up selling a dollar for 80 cents in the name of disruption. The zero interest rate money supposedly had nowhere else to go in the eyes of Wall Street, so Wall Street chased and backed up tech companies in the aftermath of the 2008 recession, leading to one of the biggest periods of inequality the U.S. has ever seen after a recovery from a recession (something like only 22 counties in the U.S. recovered and all in tech or government centered counties), and Bernake cutting rates to zero, Yellen maintaining them, and Powell brring the money printers are all squarely to blame. It is the most ridiculous example of socialism for the rich the U.S. has ever seen.
Now all these loss subsidized zombies have basically destroyed previously legitimate companies that hitherto had a good business plan. All the previously legitimate companies were forced to take on unsustainable amounts of debt to compete with loss subsidized zombie companies because they simply would not die when they were supposed to, and now every company is overlevered with shrinking cash flows entering into a recession that really wants to turn into Great Depression 2.0.
Currently, the entire U.S. economy is being held up by money printing from Powell, but now we have reached a point in which he has to make a horrible choice; either destroy the US Dollar and send everything into hyperinflation to save US stocks and the loss subsidized zombies, or allow the zombies and the stock market to finally burn. However, just like delaying healthy forest fires from occurring, because the Fed has not allowed the zombie companies to die during mild recessions over the past 12 years, the entire U.S. economy will now go up in flames and we will enter into Great Depression 2.0 as all businesses die.
Congrats to the Fed for doing what no other external force could do: destroy America.
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Everyone is trying to find the next amazon (Score:2)
For years amazon didn't turn a profit and everyone joked about it... no one is joking now!! Investors are all looking for the next amazon .. where at some point all that money plowed into the company will take off.. Everyone is also looking for the next apple, the next google ... Those companies come around infrequently. So good luck .... until then alot of folks will lose money looking the next _ _ _ _ _ _ _ .... fill in the blanks.
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For years amazon didn't turn a profit and everyone joked about it
Amazon didn't declare a profit; they certainly turned one. They were simply allowed to hide it from the taxman - you know, just like you or I are. The law is made by the rich for the rich.
Oh, come off it (Score:3)
This includes household names such as Uber, Lyft, Casper, and Eventbrite which we've all used
This is exactly the sort of wrongheaded mentality that got these companies and their shareholders into trouble. Despite presumably being in the target demographic of these companies—a Millennial, above-average earner in the tech industry—I've never used any of those products, and I'd even wager that across the US, more people haven't used any of those than have.
For instance, I actually did purchase a mattress online last year, but not from Casper. With all of their marketing in podcasts I listen to, they were one of the first brands I thought to check out, and by all accounts they make good mattresses. In just a few minutes of searching around, however, it became pretty clear that you're paying a markup for all of that marketing, since you can find comparable mattresses for much less, or else can find much better mattresses at those same prices.
As for ride shares, they might make sense for some, but not for us. For day-to-day use, we own our 2004 and 2011 vehicles outright and keep them in good condition, which has been true since before ride sharing was available in our area, so we've had no reason to reconsider car ownership. When it comes to one-way trips, such as to the airport, Uber's site is currently telling me that it'd cost $140 to reach the nearest, major airport, which is ludicrous. Assuming it costs the same to get back, paying $280 round-trip makes no sense at all when I can simply drive myself and park for $7/day. And when it comes to getting around while traveling, we nearly always have a friend/family member, reliable public transportation, or a rental car to get us around, and in each of the three cases in the last decade where we didn't, a taxi was either the only option or the more convenient option.
As for Eventbrite, I don't even know what it is. I've heard of it, and I assume it's something like Ticketmaster, but my brain can't stop playing the '90s Lite Brite commercial [youtube.com] every time I hear their name, so I've never really been interested in giving them much consideration.
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+1 for "This includes household names such as Uber, Lyft, Casper, and Eventbrite which we've all used" being pretentious fluff.
There's no Uber or Lyft in the area I live in and I don't even know what Casper, and Eventbrite are supposed to be.
Boom n' Bust (Score:2)
Allow? (Score:2)
Waddaya mean, "allow"? Thank God I don't have to ask for approval to start some cockamamie idea company. As long as I'm not breaking any laws, no one needs to give me permission to do anything. And that's a good thing because for every one company which works out, there were 10-100 which absolutely cratered. Problem is, no one knows which one is which until after the fact.
Amazon? (Score:2)
As I recall, when Amazon went public they were losing 25¢ for every dollar of goods they sold, so since then I figure.
Re: Amazon? (Score:2)
Amazon lost 25 cents for every dollar they took in.
Forgot comment style would destroy cents symbol...
Not just tech, most companies these days (Score:2)
The MBAs have been taught for decades that having assets and savings wasn't a good idea. I think the idea is that any profits should immediately go into acquisitions or paid out to executives/shareholders. This is where the "outsource everything" movement came from, as well as the "externalize your costs" like Uber and the other gig economy places do.
The problem with this is that when cash flow dries up, the company can't continue. Everything's outsourced so all your service providers have their hands out a
Negative interest rates (Score:2)
Money rarely goes away. In the wake of the financial crash, a lot of people became very very rich. But there's no point in sticking it in the bank, and with inflation being kept artificially high in order to burn down national debts, the net return on a lot of investments is negative.
In that sort of investment landscape, there's an attraction for the hyper-rich to put down some long-odds bets. Especially if the central banks' QE policies will step in and keep a lot of zombie companies afloat (especially ban
Wait, what? (Score:2)
"This includes household names such as Uber, Lyft, Casper, and Eventbrite which we've all used"
I have never used these companies, and I only recognize the first two, but don't use them, as I own my own vehicle. Maybe these companies aren't nearly as important or necessary as some people believe?
WeWork and its upcoming bankruptcy (Score:2)
In July/Aug, I have a feeling they're going to declare bankruptcy
They were completely unprofitable in January of this year; this, and with all their tenants leaving in droves or defaulting on their rent payments in March, spells certain doom for them. They will not be able to last more than a couple months