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Lyft’s IPO planned for tomorrow March 29, 2019, will offer 30.77M shares priced between $62 and $68 each putting its valuation between $21B and $23B. CNBC reported an updated filing to price each share between $70 and $72 and I will not be surprised if the IPO ends up at about $80 per share. These developments have forced me to review the IPO chapter in my upcoming book “Uberings and Uberchats: Engineering Behaviors in Contemporary American Society” because as late as last November 2018, some analysts valued Lyft at about $15 billion and Uber somewhere between $76-$120 billion. These early estimates were made before Lyft openly filed for its IPO and since that filing and further revelations of its financial bleeds, the company’s public value has jumped by a third from $15 to $21 billion.

Over the years, many analysts have wondered about the true values of these companies without any real knowledge of how they price their services and now there are questions being asked of whether their business model is sustainable given the cuts to driver earnings despite the fact that these companies depend exclusively upon these drivers executing the front-end process of transporting persons or goods from Point A to Point B.

Uber may have played it safe, delayed or simply been outmaneuvered by the Lyft team who by going first in an avalanche of Silicon Valley tech startups that plan to go public this year, including Airbnb, Slack, Robinhood, Pinterest, Postmates, Palantir Technologies, and WeWork, may stand to benefit the most before investor hype start questioning the red ink associated especially with Uber and Lyft that are reminiscent of the dotcom boom from the 90s. Lyft’s IPO is already oversubscribed despite the decelerated growth of both Uber and Lyft from their previous reported quarters. SNAP opened its IPO in 2017 and traded as low as 72% below it within two years of its debut. Even if Lyft snaps, it may be a slow and painful one for all stakeholders, including drivers and investors given its business model allows for growth opportunities in terms of ridership, number of rides and an increase in fares to help alleviate the ~$1.50 lost on each of its 619.4 million reported rides in 2018. A 33% Snap in Lyft’s value within two years will simply bring it back to where analyst had initially valued the company but given growth opportunities for expansion beyond North America, Lyft could be a good bet for long-term investors if it can rain down its insurance and operating costs.

Despite Uber’s delays, it will still be one of the mega IPOs of all time and given its huge worldwide presence and following a hype created by Lyft and the massive media attention, Uber stands to at worst generate a success that matches its fair market value of $76-$100 billion, or at best beat the $120 billion bullish proponents are already advocating. If Uber falls short, Lyft’s tactics during this race will be a lesson for future rivalries.

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One question riders commonly ask Uber drivers is: “what is your craziest Uber story?”
I know your trip was one of more than 10 billion Uber trips or one of the more than 1 billion Lyft rides and whether you were the driver or passenger, here is a community platform to share some of that experience.

In this inaugural post, I’m excited about the major players in the ride-sharing (‘Uber’) economy going public with impending IPOs (Initial Public Offering) this year with Lyft’s target as high as $20 billion and Uber rumored to be valued upward of $120 billion and the opportunities abound with an eightfold projected growth of the industry to $285 billion by 2030. Uber is the global dominant player but Lyft has been gaining grounds in the North American (USA and Canada) market. These companies have witnessed unprecedented exponential growths in the decade of their existence yet are bleeding cash so badly, $1.8 billion and $911 million losses respectively for Uber and Lyft, that some of their challenges will only become apparent with public scrutiny by shareholders and regulatory authorities. However, they have also created amazing technologies that have facilitated connectivity and made mobility seamless and convenient given generational challenges taxis could not innovate to overcome. These companies founded and championed by ambitious and creative entrepreneurs like Travis Kalanick of Uber, Logan Green and John Zimmer of Lyft, despite some human and managerial flaws have created a great opportunity for many Americans to work with convenience and flexibility with the ability to make money whenever they want to. The business model of these companies and their relationships with their drivers referred to as ‘partners’ for all kinds of reasons that we will discuss on this forum, has been challenging and continues to evolve to truly reflect and acknowledge the partner’s contribution in effectively undertaking the required process of physically moving a person or thing from point A to point B.

The transformative technologies powering the ride sharing experience include AI (Artificial Intelligence) which is arguably the big thing that will transform and power the next phase of human civilization according to major stakeholders like Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg. But on the dark side of this invention whose impact is projected will be bigger than that of electricity and all previous great inventions, there is the covert and even overt power to control and manipulate humans with or without their will or wish, often to the benefit of these very powerful enterprises, but also more fearfully for the interest of a regime or system of government as being tested in China today with their ‘social credit system’. With or without our knowledge and often implicit but sometimes explicit consent, all the major tech companies from Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Uber, Lyft, and you can name your pick; are engaged in exploiting AI and machine learning technologies that collect, save, track and mine data sets of information from our daily activities like shopping, travel, entertainment, political expressions and affiliations, healthcare and pretty much all aspects of our daily living experience. Some of you might be waiting for the Mueller Report on Russian use of AI on the American political psyche as greatly investigated on this NPR journalistic jewel titled: “Pizzagate: A slice of fake news“. But to the frustration of many, AI might eventually become a nightmarish tool for human manipulation the more regular Americans learn how to use it to fight for their interests, long neglected and often alienated by big and powerful coastal-based traditional media giants. If you drive for Uber, Lyft, Amazon Flex, or any other major ride-share player then you are under the influence of AI and automation from when they recruit and link you with your rider or product through navigation of routes to the delivery or final destination and all associated payment and processing services. AI exploitation of human impulses and compulsion are pivotal to the surge or dynamic pricing system that these companies use to help generate massive revenues and a veteran of this strategy, Uber’s CEO Dara Khosrowshahi, is spearheading reforms and transforming the company into a better organized corporate entity.

11 billion rides between Uber and Lyft means more than 11 billion unique human interactions in the setting of a car that vary in character given the diversity in race, ethnicity, culture, language, locality, career, education, and economic and social class. In a culture where 77% of Americans own smartphones and 36% use ride-hailing services, there is the growing prospect that more Americans are finding the carpooling experience to be a unique though brief socializing experience in an increasingly sedentary society where people drive the same car every day, live or work with the same people and travel or visit the same places all their lives. Though 83% of Americans like using ride-sharing for its convenience, not price, ride-share fares are still 60% cheaper that taxi fares when they are not surging. Uber controls more than two-thirds of the US ride-hailing market but Lyft has increased its market share and is fast approaching a third of the market share. Both provide much better services compared to their taxi counterparts and control more than two-thirds of the ground transportation market for travel and entertainment, with increasing opportunities for all stakeholders in the ‘Uber economy’. This will only get better for drivers where in many countries in Europe they are already classified as employees for these ride-sharing companies and it is only a matter of time before we follow suit on this side of the Atlantic where certain authorities are already ruling on the debate in favor of ride-share drivers as employees, not contractors, which means certain guaranteed benefits for these hardworking fellow Americans from all stripes of life.

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