Many startups do the same thing to established industries. They burn VC money to "disrupt" a field, then when it's time to make money, they hike prices. But by then, there's no competition left.
While I agree that startups can disrupt the big monopolies, past Uber, I now find them just as dangerous as big companies to the customers and the societies they live in. Perhaps more so, because big companies don't have to disrupt anything to extract their rents.
I feel startups are not like they used to be. Or maybe they always were what they were, and I became disillusioned only recently. Either way, today, this is a well-developed process of wealth transfer. In a sense, startups aren't something opposite to big companies - they're the means big companies use to frack an existing market and pump out all value. Startups are an integral part of the market ecosystem now, and from the POV of those at the top, it's arguably a symbiotic, not parasitic relationship.
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[0] - I used to call it "strip-mining a market for all its worth", pointing at fast extraction of value with no concerns about sustainability, but I think "fracking" is better, as it also evokes the image of first cracking the market by a sudden, focused infusion of seemingly infinite free money.
Could it be that the conglomeration of the startups controlled or at least heavily influenced by a few dominant VC firms essentially creates an oligopoly in the tech startup world? In other words, these startups, which behave like monopolies by razing certain markets with low prices while losing money, are small tentacles of the huge vc firms that are funded by large stockholders of the FAANG oligopolies.
I've had a similar epiphany over the last five years or so. Once you take money from the VCs, you are essentially just an R&D department of the VC collective with perhaps a bit more autonomy than you might have in a BigCo but you are still heavily constrained by the demands of your funders. This is nothing like the romantic two guys in a garage with a great idea taking on the world narrative that we've been fed for decades.
Not all markets are winner takes all or even close to it
The competition (or sometimes faux-competition) lasts until investors get bored, then the unsustainable startups slowly go away (often extracting more money from the public on their way out, by means of an IPO), leaving a broken market that needs to be rebuilt, if it's possible at all.
- the actual innovators are rewarded
- innovators have more skin in the game
- innovators live or die by their execution
Not so with the monopolies.
And so, the main innovation of the most successful startups in the last ~decade was in ways of breaking into and destroying (er, "disrupting") markets that before were just fine - not perfect, but at least sustainable.
AirBNB, by the same argument, put offline-only vacation rental services on check.
Neither of these is models is going to go away now. The companies may have to deal with debt, may need to increase unit costs, and may have to conduct layoffs, but they fundamentally changed their markets and will remain the dominant players.
Can't comment on Uber, because in my local market they lost against a community of taxi companies who have an excellent app.