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Either Uber or Lyft go bankrupt.
A lot of unicorns that aren't currently profitable also go bankrupt as their funding dries up and there is no more available loans.
It's really bizarre how so many business can exist while not turning a profit just because there's a profit potential because they rose in popularity really fast, Uber will be 15 years old this year.
A lot of people believed that companies could use monopoly pressure and building a market as a way to get a billion dollar company.
It turns out a lot of ride hail and food delivery services have very price sensitive demand.
Car culture means that anyone who does gain a monopoly will still have a ton of small competitors. Delivery services have existed for centuries before Uber. All it did was offer a single interface for a wider area so it can take a cut. Ultimately, I don't think local deliveries or taxis are profitable enough for there to be a cut for some middleman unless the market is artificially restricted (which it was for taxis, hence Uber being very welcome when they first started up until people realized they were looking to take over what the taxi racket was doing, not give the public more choices).
Classifying drivers as employees for such apps might prevent the non-profit iteration that just charges drivers an infrastructure fee but otherwise allows them to set their own prices. IMO the approach should have been to open up how they charge fees and pay drivers, change it to be commission-based with the drivers getting most of the money. But that might be getting too close to challenging how most of the rich make their money (it's not from their own hard work).
Uber has posted profits for the last two quarters. Lyft hasn't yet been profitable, but they have been reducing their losses quite a bit.
I don't think either of them will fail this year. Some AI gold rushing unicorns out there certainly will. It's hard to know which though; they're still private companies.
I'm hopeful that government austerity measures ease up before that happens too much. There have already been so many layoffs.
Layoffs may continue.
Profitable tech companies have to maintain their existing businesses, but development of new businesses is likely to stay low and unprofitable businesses are still scrambling to hit profitability before bankruptcy.
It does depend on interest rates to some extent. For the past decade, the prevailing wisdom of the software industry has been to pour money into unprofitable ventures with the hope of getting profitable later. In the past year, austerity measures like heightened interest rates have made it so VCs are more interested in money now instead of money later.
Pulling back from investments is definitely related to the increased interest rate, but there really isn't any government austerity in the federal government at the moment.
I suppose that depends on which country you're in... I'm in Canada and we're going into an election year. Everything is getting slashed or frozen
Rates are coming down, and everyone is bullish as fuck about the economy, so idk that the loans are gonna be drying up.
Even the anticipated cut of 2.25% is still higher than why the Silicon Valley boom was based on. You are also seeing the cuts happening due to an anticipated recession.