It's fun to gloat over the (unsurprising-to-us) IPO fiascos. As "Uber Burn..." says so well above, they should have asked us. Since we're in the trenches, the machine guns will can now open up on us.
Importantly for us, this will make things even worse on the pay inequities scale than we've ever seen. With the seed investors out of the picture, the tooth fairy ain't writtin' no mo blank checks to Dara and Travis. These guys and the rest of their Huns are going to have to work for a living. They'll need to pull hard at the teats of their Ivy League educations to come up with workable ideas that might demonstrate a real path to profitability. Or maybe they'll get sold to one of the big car companies and become a small R&D division in Detroit or Tokyo.
Do they really think that they can sustain business as usual bleeding the drivers dry by further incentivizing the GQs and Wall Mart shoppers? Again, with our money? I know, they'll dip into all our tips that PAX insist they've left in the app. Think about it. There will be meetings on Monday in SFO with bagels, croissants and $5 Starbucks coffee where all will be pressed to save the company from going down the shytter.
Maybe U/L will reorganize into a not-for-profit, just to take our poorest underclasses to the laundromats. And we drivers can reserve our special places in heaven by donating our time and treasure to this worthy cause. I'm thinking that the face, look and feel of rideshare as it was originally conceived, will now be based on a totally unrecognizable business model.
The TNCs are spending more that they have in their check books and the widely anticipated, newly found richs from the public markets will dwindle to nothing. Where am I going wrong here? We all better go out and get real jobs. No more liven' high on the hog collecting 60 cents/mi and paying our own tolls on the way back. Wait, there's the food truck at EWR still serving lamb and rice.
