This month 14, Uber sold the automation division he founded and was proud of, and he remained silent. We believe that he will not mention Uber.
When he left office, he probably signed some kind of "silence agreement". Kalanick owns 8.6% of Uber and remains the largest individual shareholder, but he is not a member of the board of directors.
Uber founder Kalanick
If Kalanick stands opposite the successor CEO Kosrosasi, it is simply the opposite mirror image.
The former has thick hair and likes to shave his face, while the latter is Iranian, bald and bearded. The former is an idealist and an entrepreneur, while the latter is a professional manager. The former is hot-tempered and sharp-tongued, while the latter is steady and eloquent.
Uber CEO
Dara Kosrosasi
What kind of leaders there are, what kind of companies there are. Under Koch's leadership, Uber no longer expands its territory around the world and makes enemies on all sides, but it has also become as boring as swallowing water. Doing nothing but financial reports all day.
Only the precious "high-tech" label is left, and it is still the person saved by Kalanick. And Koch turned around and sold it.
It's for sale, but it's actually worth 400 million cash. Win 26% shares and board seats of the buyer Aurora.
Japanese into the pit.
Before Uber IPO last year, Koch spun off the autonomous driving business with the support of the board of directors and named it "Advanced Technology Group" (Advanced? Technology? Group, ATG), suddenly blurred.
At that time, Koch explained that the move was purely a financial arrangement, because ATG burned tens of millions every month, and secondary market investors did not like listed companies to raise such expensive and unprofitable departments.
Last year, Koch also fooled a group of Japanese investors, including Toyota, Denso and Softbank Vision Fund.
20 19 was the declining year of son, and everything he paid forced the old gentleman to bow and apologize in tears at the shareholders' meeting, saying that if this continues, there will be no "foresight" in a few years. Some of Masayoshi Son's tears belong to ATG.
At that time, the valuation of ATG was 7.25 billion US dollars, and the latter three together earned 654.38 billion US dollars for Uber ATG. This money is only equivalent to Uber's expected IPO financing amount. You know, Uber's valuation before the IPO reached 654.38+00 billion. Why do the Japanese pay so much money?
Just because Uber has a large-scale self-driving road test fleet?
In the "Departure Report" of DMV20 18 in California, Waymo and Cruise invested by GM rank in the top two, and Waymo only needs manual intervention once every 1. 1.5 million miles.
Uber, who suffered a fatal accident, needs to intervene once every 1.2 miles on average, which is simply "letting go" to accompany the last seat.
By the 20 19 annual report, Uber had disappeared from the list because Uber "suspended" the test and no longer provided detachment data.
At this time, the signs are very obvious, even more obvious than letting all security officers be laid off. Uber doesn't want its future assets.
Uber's technical contribution
Although there was a fatal accident, Uber's road test was not as terrible as the report showed. The definition of "separation" has never been unified.
Uber can't be 10,000 times worse than Waymo, otherwise Waymo doesn't need to launch a series of legal actions against Uber.
So far, production cars are equipped with L2-class assisted driving, but there are no truly unmanned commercial projects. However, Uber's important contribution is to develop a set of development tools-automatic driving visualization system.
Breaking the tool suite used by companies in the past, the log files obtained by road test (or virtual test) have various formats, and the scene modules are not common to each other, forming a standard autopilot stack component.
In short, Uber has built a standardized environment for the development of autonomous driving software. Data and logs are standardized. With this toolkit, you can learn about the development process and test results of other companies.
Waymo, known as the pioneer of autonomous driving, has not carried out such basic work and has no open source code.
Instead, Kalanick took the initiative to acquire Otto, whose founder lewandowski was a Waymo technical executive. In addition, Waymo has evidence that Wan Le "copied" (or stole) technical documents.
After learning all this, Uber chose to settle with Google and compensate the latter for its shares worth $240 million. Levin was sentenced to 18 months in prison and fined tens of thousands of dollars.
More importantly, Waymo therefore established a patent wall for autonomous driving. Uber spent a lot of money and time to bypass the past, including clearing the technical assets brought by Levan.
stepson
After Koch came to power, his approach was completely different from Kalanick's.
Uber has achieved diversification on this basis. In addition to taxis and food delivery, micro-travel (soon abandoned), small logistics, parcel delivery, and businesses related to the concept of pan-transportation, Uber is trying to intervene in order to increase business income.
But no business or research is prospective.
All the future-oriented projects that burn money at present, such as unmanned bicycles, flying cars, AI laboratories and other product incubators, have been laid off, just like ATG.
In order to make the financial report look good, Uber now dresses itself up as a logistics+taxi company.
Of course, compared with the traditional logistics and taxi business, Uber has one more data platform, and that's all.
The direct cause is still the loss of ATG. This year1-September, the company's net loss increased by $330 million. The company invested $457 million in a package of projects such as ATG. During the Bikalanik period, the rate of burning money actually slowed down.
Google and Amazon are patient investors, but Uber under Koch must make a quick profit. In this year when cash flow is under pressure, turning off the money-burning department has become the best choice.
As for how to please investors without technical labels and make a simple pan-flow data platform, Koch can't manage that much.
Only responsible for quarterly financial reports, regardless of the flood after death, should professional managers be so short-sighted
Koch insists that this transaction will enable Uber to maintain its "channel" in the field of autonomous driving.
This is equivalent to adopting a son who can't afford his eldest son to others, but firmly believing that the child can support himself when he grows up. what can I say? Faith is spirit.
See you at Google.
Ulmson, the aurora entrepreneur who took over, was also from Google and was the actual pioneer of Google X Lab. The initial basic work of autonomous driving was completed under his leadership.
His partners are also from Tesla and Uber. But the roots can be traced back to Google and Carnegie Mellon University.
Today, all self-driving startups in the United States are also controlled by Google+ Michigan School. No matter the network or the technical route, a thousand words can be summed up in one sentence, and we will resolutely make bicycles intelligent.
It's not that they don't know the benefits of the cloud, but that the deployment of 5G in the United States is too poor. Once you leave the periphery of a big city, the 4G signal is unreliable. What if you don't do bicycle intelligence?
Like Levin in prison, Ulmson, after a period of exploration, also turned from passenger cars to automatic freight.
After all, the high-speed scene is simple and the product is easier to land. Customers can tolerate higher-cost stacking solutions, after all, hiring people is more expensive in the long run.
Aurora is testing more than 65,438+05 tons of self-driving heavy trucks in Dallas-Fort Worth. Ulmson promised to integrate Uber's ATG department within 60 days, but he did not say when the product could be delivered.
With customers, orders and new partners, everything is ready, and Dongfeng has to wait.
Before, the eldest son inherited the family business, and everything was available.
For Uber, although the autonomous driving business is not the earliest, it is not only the only heavy asset sector, the biggest investment direction, but also the hope of the future, and it is also the maintenance of investors' imagination.
Now, my own son belongs to others, just because I ate too much. Where is the future of Uber? We are curious about how Koch will answer this question.
At least this year, Uber's "excellent food" takeaway has expanded happily, partially equalizing the loss of the decline in carpool orders.
It's not that it's not good to make money by delivering takeout food. Yesterday was a sea of stars, and today is a meal. Save today's money and cut off tomorrow's road. This operation is really amazing.
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This article comes from car home, the author of the car manufacturer, and does not represent car home's position.