Ya, reading this article makes me think this person has never actually used a taxi (at least not one outside of Manhattan, which has probably the best cab system in the world). This guy certainly hasn’t tried catching a cab at midnight in San Francisco where they’ll reject you if you’re not going the right direction, insist their credit card machine is broken, and otherwise be insanely difficult to use. Every comment in this thread has started “I don’t like Uber, but…” and it’s absolutely true, Uber has problems but the service and the app have been a game changer. And his taking exception with the drunk driving study is a bit infuriating, he insinuated the data is compromised, but doesn’t offer any evidence. I can only speak anecdotally, but within my social circle Uber has absolutely decreased the likelihood of someone driving drunk, and if it even contributed to 1% less driving fatalities, that’s and enormous achievement.
The terminology around seed vs a vs b is so skewed right now, but a 50 person series a startup, just estimating, is a 5 mil per year burn. Hard to say exactly the raise, but personally I’d be uncomfortable with less than 3 years runway, so let’s call it a 12mil raise. 12 mil raise for 25% of the company (again, totally back of the napkin here) puts us at basically 50mil valuation. 50 mil valuation on 1mil ARR seems way high to me, basically this all seems sort of shifted left on the headcount side (series b should be 50 people) and right on the revenue side.
Hacker News doesn't have the churn that means other news sites are always different when you visit them...perhaps you could call that a downside, but I actually really like that aspect.