Hail a ride now! Uber, Ola to resume services in key cities from today

With further relaxation of lockdown regulations and more powers given to states, Ola will be restarting services in over 60 cities across the country from Tuesday.

Customers in Delhi, Bengaluru and other key cities have a reason to smile as cab aggregators – Uber and Ola – will resume their car and three-wheeler operations from Tuesday.

With further relaxation of lockdown regulations and more powers given to states, Ola will be restarting services in over 60 cities across the country from Tuesday.

These also include Hyderabad, Chandigarh, Mysuru, Mangaluru and Hubli-Dharwad among others. The areas it will cover include Karnataka, Haryana, Chandigarh, Punjab, Tamil Nadu (except Chennai), Andhra Pradesh, Kerala and Assam. With this, Ola will now be available in over 160 cities across the country.

ALSO READ: Uber to lay off 3,000 workers in second cut for May, trip requests drop 80%

In a statement, after resumption of services in more cities, Ola said, “This will bring relief to millions of driver partners whose livelihoods depend on serving citizens on a daily basis.” Ola also added it is taking all enhanced safety protocols, which include compulsory mask usage, social distancing and complete sanitisation of cars after trips, among other steps.

Uber, on the other hand, will restart services in 13 more cities from Tuesday, increasing coverage to over 35 cities. The new cities that it will enter include Mysuru, Amritsar, Mohali, Faridabad, Jalandhar, Patiala apart from Delhi and Bengaluru.

Both the car aggregators had restarted operations a few weeks ago when they were permitted under the rules to operate from orange and green zones across the country.

WeWork: The last unicorn or a black sheep?

WeWork's valuation, $47 billion in a private funding round last January, could be set as low as $12 billion.

Business Standard : The WeWork’s roadshow is set to begin this week, perhaps as soon as today. Such corporate processionals through the ranks of blue-blooded Wall Street institutions are usually a triumph for buoyant, young companies. WeWork’s roadshow, on the other hand, will likely more closely resemble Cersei Lannister’s humiliating march to the Red Keep in Game of Thrones.

Shame! WeWork’s valuation, $47 billion in a private funding round last January, could be set as low as $12 billion.

Shame! Shame! Investors will no doubt be distrustful of any evidence of apparent self-dealing by the chief executive officer, Adam Neumann, such as buying properties and leasing them to the company. (WeWork took additional steps on Friday to change some of the unorthodox aspects of its governance structure and seek an independent

board member.)

As the nine-year-old office-sharing startup continues its stumble to the public markets, some prognosticators see this moment as something more significant: that a WeWork belly-flop portends the end of the unicorn era in Silicon Valley.

The argument goes like this: SoftBank, the Japanese conglomerate and its $100 billion Vision Fund, has become an engine pushing the technology market to its limit. If it’s forced to retreat on its $10 billion commitment to WeWork, SoftBank will reconsider the nearly blind sanguinity that has perverted incentives for founders and distorted valuations in the industry over the last few years.

In this seductive vision of a calamitous—and cleansing—WeWork initial public offering, modesty will once again return to Silicon Valley; humbled venture capitalists will stop bidding the valuations of unprofitable startups into the stratosphere; and the unicorns—those magical startups worth a $1 billion or more—will be put out to pasture, their legendary horns clipped like the tusks of poached African elephants.

But that’s probably wishful thinking.

The current cycle in tech started more than a decade ago, fueled by excitement over the iPhone, Facebook Inc. and the infusions of cash from a new generation of VCs like Andreessen Horowitz and Y Combinator. Business cycles tend to last seven to 10 years in Silicon Valley, and the resulting boom should have ended by now. But that was before the longest bull market in American history and a seemingly never-ending supply of venture capital from an array of new sources, including wealthy Chinese investors and Saudi Arabian oil money.