The issue is whether any of that will matter if self-driving cars come into the picture sooner rather than later. Uber's key advantage is that there's a huge network effect that's hard to overcome with humans. Drivers want to use the app that riders are using. Riders want to use the app that drivers are using.
If a company could go out and finance a few hundred self-driving vehicles, it would be easy to build up market share for competing services with lower margins. Where I am, Uber has far better coverage than competing services. But if it were easy for alternatives to cover equally and with lower margins, riders would easily check the cheaper services.
While Uber is certainly employing robotics engineers, so are the auto manufacturers, Google, and possibly others. I think people use Uber for the same reason that people use Facebook - it's hard to get all the other humans to use other services when the value of those other services is how many people are using it. But when self-driving cars allow anyone with enough money to finance enough vehicles that they're offering comparable wait times, Uber's network effect disappears. Sure, it will still have brand recognition and some amount of loyalty. But it won't have the kind of barrier to entry that it has today.
Uber is winning, but it's also subject to a huge disruption by self-driving cars. If one can purchase and operate a self-driving car for $500/mo., you only need to do $17 worth of rides per day for that to pay you back. If Uber tries to keep its margins up, there's no reason someone isn't going to come into the market with some VC and drive those margins down quite a bit. Lyft, Sidecar, Split, and others all face a huge challenge of getting drivers to work for their service before they have riders and getting riders for their service before they have drivers. If they could just grab some VC to pay the finance charges on the vehicles until ridership picks up, that's a game changer.
Uber goes from Facebook with a wonderful network-effect moat to Amazon who has to make sure that margins stay razor thin to maintain a quarter of the market. I'm not saying that Amazon can't do good things, just that Amazon doesn't get high margins and if it tried to up its margins 10%, many people would shop elsewhere. With self-driving cars, someone is going to have near-zero margins and if Uber is 20% above that, people will switch. In fact, if Uber had margins of 60-70%, why wouldn't Amazon (who has a reasonable amount of robotics expertise with Kiva and their drone research) step into the market at significantly cheaper prices?
Heck, Amazon could have an automated delivery fleet of cars with drones handling the car-to-door problem and then Amazon could use their "excess capacity" much like they did with EC2 to drive people Uber-style. During the 10-4 day (when there's less demand for vehicles), they could deliver Amazon packages. From 7:30-9:30am and 5-7pm they could do rush-hour and 7pm-4am do restaurant and bar patrons. That's probably a lot more use out of those vehicles than one could get simply from people wanting an Uber and that would lead to lower prices.
Sitting here in the cheap seats, I guess I wonder how Uber would fare against that business plan. Amazon accepts thin margins and has a giant use case for their vehicles for the hours that self-driving Ubers sit idle. I'm not saying that Uber isn't filled with smart people. The issue is simply that Uber's current success is probably mostly due to the network effect. They might still have future success, but it's going to be tempered by the fact that competition will be a lot easier.
HubSpot is a great place to work with a great culture of getting things done and delighting our customers. HubSpot loves investing in Engineering as a way to build a world-class product.
On the front-end, we use technologies like CoffeeScript and React to create a wonderful experience for our users interacting with the system.
On the back-end, we use technologies like HBase, Kafka, MySQL, Elasticsearch, ZooKeeper, and Dropwizard. If you haven't looked at Dropwizard, it's actually a really nice way to develop web services in Java: you can annotate paths like you would do in Python and Flask and just return a Java object that will be serialised into JSON for you by Jackson.
Engineering is organised into small teams (usually around 3 people) where you can have a big impact on the product. We deploy hundreds of times per day and use GitHub Enterprise for SCM, Jenkins to build, and an internally developed open-source system built on top of Mesos called Singularity to deploy app instance containers. Your changes won't be languishing in git waiting for a major release. Because deploys are so painless, we're able to deploy small changes.
If Google's catch-phrase is "Don't be evil" ours is "use good judgement". Check out our Culture Code for more information: http://www.culturecode.com. Also take a look at our 2014 Year in Review if you're interested: http://hubs.ly/y0zbyd0.
Work schedules are flexible, though most engineers get in around 10am. You get to make a meaningful difference in a product with loads of paying customers and a ton of traffic. Best of all, you get to work with loads of smart and fun people. That's the best thing about HubSpot: the people are great people that you can rely on, learn from, and have a great time getting things done with.
HubSpot is a great place to work. In fact, it was ranked the #2 place to work in Massachusetts and we're the fastest growing non-public software company in the US (and 33rd fastest growing non-public company). We focus on helping businesses with their online marketing - specifically helping them to avoid interrupting and annoying their customers with bad marketing.
In Engineering, we're organized into small teams where you get to have a big impact on the product. We have a great environment to move quickly in and deploy hundreds of times a day. We use GitHub Enterprise for SCM, Jenkins to build, an internal deployer system for zero-downtime deploys, and we even have a Heroku-style system coming (for those that would ask "why not just use Docker?", there's still the provisioning and routing issue).
On the backend, we use Java and Python (though more Java these days). It's really modern Java. We use Dropwizard which is really wonderful if you haven't checked it out (annotate paths similarly to how you'd use Flash in Python and just have the method return an object and Jackson will serialize it into JSON and return it - Java can be really nice). For data, HBase, Hadoop, MySQL, ZoopKeeper, Redis, and Memcached all have their place. Again, we deploy hundreds of times a day so don't expect your code to languish in the repository. We like pushing small changes fast.
On the front end, we use Backbone.js, CoffeeScript, and jQuery. We also have our iPhone and Android applications.
Engineers get a lot of responsibility from the start and you'll usually push changes your first day. You'll also get a Retina MacBook Pro and Thunderbolt display.
Work schedules are flexible. Most engineers keep a 10-6 schedule. You get to make a meaningful difference in a product with loads of paying customers and a ton of traffic. Best of all, you get to work with loads of smart and fun people. That's the best thing about HubSpot: the people are great people that you can rely on, learn from, and have a great time getting things done with.
We create software that helps businesses with their online marketing. The company is several hundred employees and nearing a hundred in engineering. Things are organized in small teams and you get to have a big impact. We were also named the #2 place in Massachusetts to work.
On the backend, we use Java (modern Java with DropWizard, Guice, and the like) and Python (Django). We love using JSON to get things done. For storage, there's HBase, Hadoop (for MapReduce jobs), MySQL, ZooKeeper, Redis, and Memcached. We do great monitoring and deploy hundreds of times a day. We use CI and have automated deployment. Don't expect your code to languish in git (we have GitHub Enterprise) for long.
On the front end, we use Backbone.js, CoffeeScript, and jQuery.
We're also looking for iOS and Android engineers.
Work schedule seems flexible (most engineers work 10-6), you get great equipment (like a Retina MacBook Pro and Thunderbolt display), and you get to make a meaningful difference in the product. There's free drinks (including beer), snacks, etc.
It's a great place to be and hope you come join us! We have lots of positions open.
If a company could go out and finance a few hundred self-driving vehicles, it would be easy to build up market share for competing services with lower margins. Where I am, Uber has far better coverage than competing services. But if it were easy for alternatives to cover equally and with lower margins, riders would easily check the cheaper services.
While Uber is certainly employing robotics engineers, so are the auto manufacturers, Google, and possibly others. I think people use Uber for the same reason that people use Facebook - it's hard to get all the other humans to use other services when the value of those other services is how many people are using it. But when self-driving cars allow anyone with enough money to finance enough vehicles that they're offering comparable wait times, Uber's network effect disappears. Sure, it will still have brand recognition and some amount of loyalty. But it won't have the kind of barrier to entry that it has today.
Uber is winning, but it's also subject to a huge disruption by self-driving cars. If one can purchase and operate a self-driving car for $500/mo., you only need to do $17 worth of rides per day for that to pay you back. If Uber tries to keep its margins up, there's no reason someone isn't going to come into the market with some VC and drive those margins down quite a bit. Lyft, Sidecar, Split, and others all face a huge challenge of getting drivers to work for their service before they have riders and getting riders for their service before they have drivers. If they could just grab some VC to pay the finance charges on the vehicles until ridership picks up, that's a game changer.
Uber goes from Facebook with a wonderful network-effect moat to Amazon who has to make sure that margins stay razor thin to maintain a quarter of the market. I'm not saying that Amazon can't do good things, just that Amazon doesn't get high margins and if it tried to up its margins 10%, many people would shop elsewhere. With self-driving cars, someone is going to have near-zero margins and if Uber is 20% above that, people will switch. In fact, if Uber had margins of 60-70%, why wouldn't Amazon (who has a reasonable amount of robotics expertise with Kiva and their drone research) step into the market at significantly cheaper prices?
Heck, Amazon could have an automated delivery fleet of cars with drones handling the car-to-door problem and then Amazon could use their "excess capacity" much like they did with EC2 to drive people Uber-style. During the 10-4 day (when there's less demand for vehicles), they could deliver Amazon packages. From 7:30-9:30am and 5-7pm they could do rush-hour and 7pm-4am do restaurant and bar patrons. That's probably a lot more use out of those vehicles than one could get simply from people wanting an Uber and that would lead to lower prices.
Sitting here in the cheap seats, I guess I wonder how Uber would fare against that business plan. Amazon accepts thin margins and has a giant use case for their vehicles for the hours that self-driving Ubers sit idle. I'm not saying that Uber isn't filled with smart people. The issue is simply that Uber's current success is probably mostly due to the network effect. They might still have future success, but it's going to be tempered by the fact that competition will be a lot easier.