The complexity is not the depth of the problem, but rather the scope. Matchmaking — while complicated — is a very small subset of the domain. Pricing, demand forecasting, routing, payments, etc. are all equally important on the pax side. Similarly, there are many teams needed to support the overall ecosystem for things like driver onboarding, compliance, and support.
Also comparing a 1% return to a 30% charge isn’t exactly fair. Fixed costs like background checks aside, chargebacks, fraud, insurance, support claims, incentives among others warrant the markup
I could be completely clueless here, but it looks to me like a lot of the Lyft/Uber/etc cut is going to:
1) Overpaid, wasteful software engineering (no offense to us). Like someone here said, there are a lot of cheap software solutions out there to handle this stuff
2) R&D into crazy moonshot ideas
3) Advertising
4) Making a completely opaque techno-dystopian game out of people's livelihoods in order to manipulate drivers into working harder for less money and riders into paying less up front and as much as possible in the long run
If I'm right, I'd ideally like to completely destroy this market for good. Fragment it into a separate crappy home-made app for each city that you find out about via a poster on the wall in the airport when you land. I'm hoping that with enough transparency and flexibility, riders and drivers would keep each other in check and come to a happy and sustainable middle ground without making any VCs rich
(Or maybe Uber/Lyft are operating on a level of efficiency that would make my half-baked idea look like a joke. Ain't nobody disrupting Amazon or Apple from their basement any time soon)
Self-driving cars is not such a moonshot at this point, and indeed may be the only way they reach profitability (still a while off, though, and Lidars need to come down in price)
Also comparing a 1% return to a 30% charge isn’t exactly fair. Fixed costs like background checks aside, chargebacks, fraud, insurance, support claims, incentives among others warrant the markup