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Comment by jsonne | Hacker News Reader

You don't get to the size they do and simply die. They'll be acquired and vertically integrated in a way that lets them be competitive on price. You can break even on the ride if you make it up in harvesting data, showing in car advertisements, having sample products placed in cars, and a million other "fremium" style revenue harvesting techniques.

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They need 1 billion per quarter in "fremium" revenue to get breakeven, though. Thats _plenty_ of in car ads.

That's if they want to continue with every cost they currently incur, which includes some expensive R&D.

Assuming 300-400mln out of 1B is R&D and we cut it completely, they need to make ~600mln per quarter -- which is, as comparison, in the same ballpark as the quarterly revenue of Twitter.

Not really. They lose money by sponsoring some markets, they can just stop doing that and become less aggressive.

They made a choice to lose money and grow rather than break even and slow down.

Yes, but then the "growth story" ends aburptly, and their 120B valuation they aim to get on IPO stop making sense. As the "value stock" their price is probably closer to 12B than 120B.

I honestly think they will eventually license and lease their platform and technology to others and just rake in money (every cab company would pay for this type of access to customers, Uber Eats is an indication other delivery services could likely license it too for a reasonable price). That is where their true value is at.

Being acquired is still a long ways off when they still have this insanely high imaginary valuation.

FlyWheel https://www.flywheel.com/about has been around for a bit but is far from massive.

Even if a taxi company would pay for lead gen, how many Uber customers would stick around when introduced to statutory taxi prices?

I would, if it saves me the bullshit excuses that the credit card machine is broken or I don't have change.

You can order taxis on uber too.

Really? I didnt know this. Personally I switched to Lyft years ago when I heard about how scummy the company was. (Lyft will have the same problems as Uber with yesterday's Waymo announcement)

> You can break even on the ride if you make it up in harvesting data, showing in car advertisements, having sample products placed in cars

From what I recall, Uber is profitable in New York and San Francisco. Uber failing would probably involve them being bought by a private equity firm and cut back to servicing those cities.

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