lenley's comments

lenley | 8 years ago | on: Tesla’s Elon Musk May Have Boldest Pay Plan in Corporate History

Absolutely. Also, Tesla doesn't really have the network effects that other industries have (like search). Companies with similar cultural cache are also catching-up like BMW...

lenley | 8 years ago | on: Mattermark (YC S12) to shut down after selling to FullContact

That aggressiveness gets noticed and picked up by lots of different outlets -- from tech aggregators to mainstream business publications looking for "punchy" topics. E.g. look at who appears on CNBC programs.

Unfortunately, people have made that into a marketing strategy -- I'm not sure it is something to really hold against Mattermark in particular.

lenley | 8 years ago | on: Candy Japan 2017 Year in Review

I think that's an excellent comment about instagram, i wonder if pinterest would also be useful -- since the images of the candies are so enticing.

lenley | 8 years ago | on: Seed funding has declined

The companies still have to be willing to sell, and there's greater and greater liquidity in the market. While the ICO fad will fade, there will be new financial innovations to take the place of ICOs.

lenley | 8 years ago | on: Seed funding has declined

Following your model, then 'innovation' at the big five will slow down and there will be greater incentive for people to create new start-ups... and the cycle will continue.

lenley | 8 years ago | on: Uber’s Losses Widen as SoftBank Launches Bid to Buy Shares

I would argue there isn't really a network effect for lyft or uber or any ride-sharing company for that matter. There might be brand and price effects for the companies to battle over amidst both riders and drivers.

I'd say there is a network effect for ride-sharing in aggregate, neither Lyft nor Ueber has been good at locking drivers and riders in with loyalty programs to try to keep people solely on their platform.

lenley | 8 years ago | on: FirstSearch – Tactical advice in tech

This is interesting, it's like First Round trying to create a curated social-news site to draw people in like YC's Hacker News.

lenley | 8 years ago | on: Impact of the Amazon-Whole Foods Deal on Instacart

Yes - In my view revenue (and probably most accountants would also say this) is the delivery fee only. If you think about it, most marketplaces have this same issue. This isn't unique to Instacart, Enron did the same thing...(our accounting prof used them as an example). It's just not useful for analysis of the company.

Edit: Most marketplaces can charge you the "full price" to keep the transaction on the platform; however, they are only paid a small portion of that transaction as revenue -- e.g. Fiverr/Upwork/etc. don't keep the full amount the service provider charges their client, only a (hopefully) small fee.

https://a16z.com/2015/08/21/16-metrics/ #6 Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) vs. Revenue "In marketplace businesses, these are frequently used interchangeably. But GMV does not equal revenue!" The rest of A16Z's explanation is worth reading.

lenley | 8 years ago | on: Impact of the Amazon-Whole Foods Deal on Instacart

It's GMV (Gross merchandise volume or GMV is a term used in online retailing to indicate a total sales dollar value for merchandise sold through a particular marketplace over a certain time frame. - wikipedia) not revenue (fulfilling the order through their service). Companies use it to inflate the topline (revenue) figures.

lenley | 8 years ago | on: The true cost of an Uber ride is higher than it seems

This. Airlines are not a favorable model. Airlines irrationally invest, deal with fuel costs they have to partially hedge, can't store capacity... the list goes on.

lenley | 8 years ago | on: The true cost of an Uber ride is higher than it seems

I think more people would agree that the economies of scale are not even close to software. And that's even in the best case with autonomous vehicles.

lenley | 8 years ago | on: Blue Apron Plans to Cut 24% of Staff Barely a Month After IPO

Transportation / Logistics (energy is shifting away from carbon-based, populations are shifting to cities -- especially in developing countries).

Food. Moving from traditional livestock to other more efficient sources of protein (plant and insect).

lenley | 8 years ago | on: Insiders say Google was interested in buying Snap for at least $30B last year

Jerry Yang made a magnificent bet... one of the best investments ever in Alibaba. I don't think he's received enough credit even as Yahoo has been wound down.

lenley | 8 years ago | on: Uber Backers Discuss Stock Sale to SoftBank, Others

It looks like Uber maybe pulling out of India as well: https://www.recode.net/2017/7/14/15964808/uber-global-domina...

lenley | 8 years ago | on: Invisible unicorns: Big companies that started with little or no money

These articles are great, but they really need to focus on useful ratios and free cash flow rather than talking about revenue.

lenley | 8 years ago | on: An ‘Uber for garbage’ picks up steam, and $11.7M in Series A funding

YC's own https://www.startyoshi.com/

lenley | 10 years ago | on: Income of an uber driver

Mine too, but I'd say it is more that Über is exploiting driver behavior.

If you assume there's the $9.50 wage someone calculated above. + maybe some premium for being able to schedule work hours yourself. + surge pricing, which doesn't seem accounted for.

Transportation companies are making money on the inability of drivers to calculate their expenses properly. People are likely "more satisfied" w/ Uber b/c they don't calculate what the actual money they make.

It's interesting, b/c it makes you wonder about other questions around Uber's model in the longer term as drivers have more information.

== This brings up an interesting issue -- will driverless cars actually _reduce_ profits (of transportation companies) and _increase_ competition?

lenley | 15 years ago | on: Mahalo 4.0: All about learning

They haven't scraped it at all, they've just evolved the product a bit. I think the new designation is more showmanship then "pivot"

lenley | 15 years ago | on: Crunchies Winners: Twitter Takes Best Startup Of 2010

of course ... it's called generating traffic.

lenley | 15 years ago | on: Why can't all "tech" journalism be like this?

Unfortunately, Internet journalism has become primarily about speed -- so the fastest to report or even speculate wins on aggregation services -- thus the lions share of the traffic.