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Comment by furioussloth | Hacker News Reader

As much as you and many on the HN like it. Ship is not sinking at least not any time soon. If all they wanted was a way out why tarnish their own image by filing this law suit and make benchmark look less founder-friendly and supposedly create leaks which make Uber look even worse. Making Uber look like a bad investment is possibly something they don't want to do if they want $$$ for their existing shares.

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I'd like to hear your reasoning that the ship isn't sinking. My reasoning is their burn rate, unit economics, the writedowns, and VC's taking some controversial hardball steps to protect downside risk. Since they're private, there's not much real data to be had, but that's a lot of smoke for no fire.

Anecdotally, I have seen up close what it looks like when suit-and-tie MBA types start looking for the emergency exit, and this smells right.

BUT

What I don't know would fill volumes-- whaddya got?

A paper titled "Squaring Venture Capital Valuations with Reality" [1] was recently published by students at Stanford GSB that put forth a new model for valuing privately held companies [2]. If you consider "Table 8: Detailed Unicorns Fair Values and Post-money Valuations", Uber objectively has one of the smallest deltas of all valuations listed at 12% (bested only by Snapchat and Lyft out of ~100 companies).

[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2955455

[2] https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/silicon-valleys-unicor...

I only skimmed these papers, but they seemed to be dealing with contract terms that caused later shares to have value not totally reflected in the per-share price, including but not limited to things like ratchets and liquidation preferences. Such that the valuation is that of a "unicorn" but that some conditions may apply if you want to realize that investment.

Nowhere did I find reference to the economics of Uber justifying their valuation. I should clarify my point: I don't think Uber is worth what they think they're worth based on the fundamentals. Certainly a bunch of tricky contracts could exacerbate that, but I think everybody bought into Uber at a valuation they were never going to sustain, and the ship is slowly crashing back to earth.

> If all they wanted was a way out why tarnish their own image by filing this law suit and make benchmark look less founder-friendly and supposedly create leaks which make Uber look even worse.

Because they're trying to shape the battlespace of public debate to create the best possible conditions for a resolution of this standoff in a way that gives them liquidity for their investment at a valuation approaching Uber's last round.

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