Uber could be buying the company not for the founder's experience, but for that of the team that said founder assembled. In real estate parlance this is called "land assemblage": a developer spends years buying up enough adjacent plots of land to build something useful, then he sells it at a substantial premium to someone with enough local political connections and/or capital to make that happen. There should be a subcategory of tech exits that's called "talent assemblage" where the CEO hires the right people to develop a product and sells it to someone with sufficient resources to see it through. While this isn't remotely as valuable as actually seeing the project through, it does still have considerable value.

EDIT: this would be a subcategory of the acquihire