[youngButEager]

$50 million burn rate per month? Time to go public!

That president broke a cardinal rule of VC-backed startups -- never reveal your numbers. Although some do, admittedly.

But at that rate of burn, it's pretty surprising he got approval to disclose that. If I'm an LP -- looking at the #2 in the space -- and they're treading water against #1 while losing $50M a month -- I'd rather check out the #1 in the space.

Although Uber's burn rate is also quite high -- losing $1 billion dollars in China alone: http://money.cnn.com/2016/02/19/technology/uber-losing-1-bil...

[tedmiston]

Their burn rate is probably even higher than $50MM: presumably they are making some money.

Also, remember they've raised $2B [0].

If that is the burn rate, it's 40 months ~= 3.3 years of runway with everything else constant (admittedly a bad assumption). That's a lot more runway than most startups have. I'd suspect they have multiple alternative burn rates paths to go down that are more/less conservative with burn rate, like a 5- or 10-year runway before being profitable.

[0]: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/lyft