The worrying tale of how my business made $515m more than Snapchat last year
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At the end of the day, Uber is still a private company. There's very few data flying around, and key metrics are shared just with the original investor group. It's hard to judge if they made a correct capital allocation decision or not. And, ultimately, it's their money and their decision to make. Who are we to judge?
But there's a whole range of Valley businesses out there with the same basic model: attract lots of users (preferably by being "social"), and then monetize them... Somehow. Where that somehow is almost inevitably advertising.
How many of those really justify billion dollar valuations?
Could Uber or Lyft be profitable if they slashed incentive spending, cut R&D efforts (self driving cars, improved matched algorithms, etc), closed up shop in cities too small to be profitable, and fired everyone that wasn't critical to keeping the business running?
Maybe. But this guy certainly doesn't know enough to tell.
Vacuous ad hominems, however, add nothing to the discourse.
(Clearly, these tech-nerds have sold something to someone, or vast sums of money wouldn't have changed hands.)
Given that:
* sometimes people make large bets and don't expect immediate returns.
* sometimes people make large bets, and they are wrong.
* markets can get overheated
There's no premise to discourse here - just sour grapes.
Go figure.