Ellen Huet

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“Almost Half Of Its Drivers Stop Driving After A Year”

June 8, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Uber is good for consumer experience and the environment, but CEO Travis Kalanick is determined to convince the public the rideshare company is also beneficial to workers, and that’s a lie. When half your employees quit in the first year, you haven’t created good jobs. When your business model kills many more-stable positions, you’re not good for employment. When you publicly lust for that day you can be rid of all your employees, you aren’t a friend of Labor. Maybe all these things are necessarily collateral damage in the march of progress, but let’s be honest about it.

From Ellen Huet’s Forbes report about the company’s fifth-anniversary ceremony:

Uber is adding “hundreds of thousands” of drivers globally every month, Kalanick said, and has 26,000 active drivers in New York, 15,000 in London, 10,000 in  Paris and 22,000 in San Francisco, the company said. It has 20,000 active drivers (and 42,000 who have ever signed up) in Chengdu, China, a region where Uber’s two major rivals recently merged and control almost 99% of the market. Uber often signs up many more drivers than remain current active drivers: In a recent study of U.S. drivers, Uber found that that almost half of its drivers stop driving after a year.

Because Uber tends to experiment and explore many different verticals — courier service and food delivery, for example — it was surprising that Kalanick barely mentioned the company’s potential outside of its core ride-hailing service. He only made one allusion — “just imagine all the goods and services you could get delivered quickly and safely with just the touch of a button” — to Uber’s other services. He also made no mention of Uber’s advances in developing autonomous cars, which have involved poaching numerous engineers and researchers from Carnegie Mellon to staff up its own research center.

Instead, the address focused on Uber’s effects on cities, urban transportation and its driver workforce. An Uber driver who is also a military wife gave the introduction for Kalanick and spoke briefly, occasionally tearing up, about how Uber’s flexible schedule allowed her to volunteer at her son’s school.•

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“The Wright Brothers Didn’t Make Money Off Of Aviation”

November 11, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

In defending modern-day billionaire technologists and the technology that enables their wealth and likely contributes to the wage stagnation of those with punier portfolios, Peter Thiel makes an argument to Ellen Huet in Forbes that doesn’t seem fair. He uses the Wright brothers as examples of inventors who didn’t profit from their innovation. Well, they didn’t become the 1903 equivalent of billionaires, that’s true, but there are reasons. While the brothers were (likely) the first to take air in a plane, they weren’t miles ahead of their competitors, so they weren’t able to grow one of Thiel’s beloved monopolies. They also weren’t very good businesspeople; Wilbur who was somewhat better at commerce passed away less then a decade after the historic flight. Orville wasn’t exactly left destitute, selling their company for enough money to build a giant estate and never need work again. They didn’t become billionaires despite being at the vanguard of aviation the way Gary Kildall didn’t become one even though he was at the forefront of computer software. It happens sometimes, but it’s an anecdote that doesn’t really speak to the macro. From Forbes:

“‘When you think about the history of innovation more broadly, the past 200 to 250 years, it’s a sobering fact how many inventors and creators of new things, how little they capture over time,’ Thiel said. ‘You have to create x dollars of value for the world and you have to capture y% of x. And in most cases y equals 0.’

The Wright brothers didn’t make money off of aviation, he pointed out, and even after the advent of the first factories and the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, much of the wealth was still held by the aristocratic classes in Europe. In Silicon Valley, a similar split can be seen between software and cleantech, Thiel said.”

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