[blakewatters]

Uber's valuation is entirely driven off the idea that they will reap monopoly profits in a market that is exploding. Like PayPal, Google and Facebook before them the wager is that they are going to be dominant and collect all the profits while all competitors are scraping up nickels and dimes.

I think that there is good reason to doubt that premise. Driving people around has a very different cost structure from a SaaS business that can throw off 85% margin if you get to product / market fit. Uber is a commodity and is trying to create margin by sucking all the air out of the room for competitors. A key strategy has been weaponized fund-raising. But even if you snuff out Lyft the barrier to entry for any player with a platform and scale is very low.

Then let's think about the tech. There's an implicit assumption that Uber is going to be a force in the self driving car market. Even if you set aside the Otto mess, why does anybody think that a 6 year old company that drew a car on Google Maps and did a payment integration is going to dominate the driverless car game? GM, Tesla, Volkswagen, Google have been thinking about this shit for decades. Why is Uber going to win? They can't run HR yet -- how are they going to own what happens next?

It's a monster business and they should be super happy with where they are. But I just don't see how they win in the shift that is coming. Car ownership is dying. It's becoming about transit experience

[Systemic33]

Uber has essentially become too-big-to-fail startup for all the involved investors, so at this point it's game of how you can get it into a stable state where the involved investors can withdraw without making the whole cardhouse fall down.