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Comment by nemo44x | Hacker News Reader

Just throwing a hypothetical out there. What if this sticks and the drivers decide to organize with a union and collectively bargain a living wage, benefits, etc?

What would be the value of Uber (and related businesses)? Would it stay in business even? How many VC's would lose fortunes over Uber going nearly to 0? Would this be the popping of what some suspect is a private equity bubble as the effects of this ripple throughout?

Regardless, it would be a very different business with a very different valuation.

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My thought on this is that the current Uber valuation is related very strongly to the idea of their future worth, which is currently quite optimistic due to their self-driving car research. Uber without having to pay drivers at all is still the end-goal for them, so it may just mean that they need more capital investment in the short-term and investors may be happy to do so.

I don't believe self driving cars will be practical in the next 10 years. Not at the level Uber would benefit.

I don't understand why self driving cars are good for Uber. Uber is successful right now due to he network effect of their drivers. Once self driving cars are a reality you will see numerous offers for this service with all of them racing to the bottom.

Bigger fish like Apple and Google would be able to siege them and starve them out as pricing races to the bottom. Uber is valuable because of their drivers, not despite their drivers. In the age of self driving cars - Uber won't be able to compete.

The data Uber is collecting from their app will be very valuable once they start using self driving cars. Google may have a lot more data coming in from Maps, but it is noisy and unfiltered. Uber has a geospatial history of every ride along with the metadata needed to make it truly useful.

> Google may have a lot more data coming in from Maps, but it is noisy and unfiltered.

Because if there's one thing we know about Google it's that they're terrible at slicing and dicing large volumes of data.

If Uber can't survive when having to comply with the law, it shows that their company wasn't viable to begin with.

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