In June 2014, Aswath Damodaran (the expert in valuation cited in the article) wrote an article about how Uber should be valued at $5.9B rather than the $17B they had just raised at: http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/uber-isnt-worth-17-billi... If Damodaran's current $28B valuation is "correct," that would imply ~26% annualized returns if you'd invested in Uber at the "unjustified" $17B mark. Not bad. So I'd say his 2014 number missed the mark, in retrospect.

"Expert in valuation" does not imply an ability to magically divine the "true value" of companies. Valuation is as much subjective as it is objective–multiple people creating DCFs for a company can come up with different values. There's also upside (or downside) that isn't purely captured by metrics to date.

This isn't to say that I think Uber is "truly" worth what it raised at. Just to say that valuation isn't an exact science.

As a side note, Damodaran does have some great lectures on how to value companies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=znmQ7oMiQrM