What VC Needs to Learn from Uber and WeWork

So the pendulum is swinging back the other way.

It used to be standard practice to replace the founder CEO with someone more mature / experience. Then they saw Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and it rebuilt confidence - actually your founder has the strongest vision.

Now with Uber and WeWork, well...not always.

I think the lesson here isn’t “replace your visionary when company gets to a certain point”. I think it should “look at the fucking business fundamentals of today”.

Those companies above were profitable or (amazon) not profitable due to investment, but the investment made sense.

Uber never made sense to me - the story was once they achieved “scale”, they would be able to raise prices. No, I’m sorry. People will just revert to whatever transit they were using before. But hey I’ve been thrilled with 7 years of subsidized rides (think I started using them in 2012 or so).

WeWork I’m not so familiar with but given the immense backlash with IPO, clearly their board and lead investors shit the bed and believed the hype / potential vs what is real now.