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Comment by kraig911 | Hacker News Reader

Uber kind of seemed over valued to me compared to the likes of SpaceX, DropBox etc. Is it really worth that much?

    One of the most commonly invoked takedowns of the ever-increasing and
    mind-blowing valuation levels the company has achieved — $40 billion at
    last count — is this:
    
    "Investors are valuing Uber as if it's bigger than the whole taxi market!"
    
    The implication?
    
    Investors are nuts.
    
    Well, investors are indeed valuing Uber as if it's bigger than the whole
    taxi market.
    
    But it turns out that that's not nuts.
    
    In its most mature market, San Francisco, the four-year old Uber is already
    bigger than the local taxi market. Much bigger, in fact.
    
    According to Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, who spoke at the DLD Conference in
    Munich on Sunday, the taxi market in San Francisco is about $140 million
    per year.
    
    Uber's revenues in San Francisco, meanwhile, are running at $500 million
    per year.
    
    That's more than three times the size of the taxi market.
    
    And Uber's revenues in San Francisco are still growing at about 200% per year.

http://www.businessinsider.com/uber-revenue-san-francisco-20...

Uber is not over valued. They are about to re-define, the transportation and logistics of the whole world. Of course they are lot of rough edges and they are facing bureaucratic walls and demonstrated some old Microsoft style Evil Empire style tactics, the company reeks of Domination mentality and they have enough traction. Where Lyft et al. try cultural things to attract, Uber is an efficiency monster. Their coverage is bigger and better in terms of both Areas of the Cities (esp. DFW) and platforms (including Windows Phone). There is lot of potential increasing the taxi market share as well as expanding into other markets/services like delivery etc and/or making fleet arrangements with Cities or Companies. of course the futuristic self-driving cars and de-coupling transportation from car ownership is a vision Uber rightly fits into.

If I can buy Stock, I will bet my House on Uber.

Uber will be in a great spot if they are thinking about integrating the technology with self-driving cars. That's how the landscape will most likely look in 5-10 years. Uber + Car Sharing + Driverless cars.

I think your time line for driverless cars is unrealistically short. It will be a very long time before we trust the technology enough to allow a car where there's no driver to take over in an unanticipated event.

And even longer still before it's economically more rational to do so, versus paying one of the many low skilled workers handling the job now.

There was a study that used Google's self driving car costs, and claimed that cost per mile is much cheaper than taxi's.

If we had cheap self driving cars, it would be immediately economical. Those cheap low skilled workers are still taking 80% of the revenue.

The Uber drivers are paying for the cost of the car, gas, maintenance, parking/garage, most of the insurance, etc. plus supplying the labor, while Uber takes probably around 80% of the profit. Getting rid of the driver means that Uber would have to spend ~$50B to put a million self driving cars on the road, which would immediately start depreciating. Plus it will need thousands of well situated facilities necessary to garage, maintain, and dispatch them.

Yes and if we had an immovable object it would be immovable.

It's going to be a while before these cars will be able to handle snow or ice

Yeah, I agree with you. 10 years does not seem long enough!

> They are about to re-define, the transportation and logistics of the whole world.

Uber seem to be having hard time gaining traction in Europe. And their value so far is an app and ignoring regulation and medallion scarcity in US.

They are one case away of complete disaster if a court declares their partners as employees ...

The market for taxis is a lot larger than the market for space rockets, a situation that will continue for some time yet. I'd also wager that it's a larger market than cloud storage, but that at least has a chance of getting bigger in the short term.

Its a large market, obviously, but it's also messy. Heavily regulated, not very high margins, tons of competition.

Two of those three are applicable to cloud storage and space rockets as well, though.

SpaceX is still (though I expect their success will create new markets) relatively niche. It's a very high-priced product (though lower than predecessors), but it's not like you and I are sending things into space just yet.

I'm curious why you think the market for Dropbox is larger than the market for Uber?

With reusable rockets and just general privatization of space travel, the whole idea is to make the product more accessible. No one knows how big the market could be.

It costs governments incredibly large sums of money to do anything in space, so if they can make it cheaper they stand to make a killing. Space technology has a huge indirect impact on ordinary folks -- from telecommunications to medical research to environmental science, and on, and on...

(Number of drivers) * (avg driver weekly earnings) * (20% uber's cut) * (P/E ratio on Wall Street for high growth companies)

With the numbers I would put in those parenthesis, I'd say that uber is probably undervalued...at least relative to how Wall Street would value the company if it were public.

The market for putting things into space is pretty small compared to consumer services.

I agree, but mostly because I think that Uber is going to get nailed by regulation eventually in the same way that the taxi companies already are. What if a state or a major metro area demanded that they have signs on top of their cars, medallions, and other such things that aren't quite required yet.

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