The real news is this is precisely why TK was ousted. He was categorically opposed to taking Uber public, and that went against the wishes of big investors who want an IPO payday.
Employee & investor liquidity, who are the majority stockholders of these kinds of companies. And the value of a stock does far better when something is profitable vs not. Past history shows it's usually a bad idea to be a public company and be in the red for many quarters.
If you're profitable you can disburse dividends to all of the non public shareholders on a regular or irregular basis.
Going public is a really expensive way to do that with a profitable company (why spotify is trying to do it in an irregular way)
> Past history shows it's usually a bad idea to be a public company and be in the red for many quarters.
Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Marc Benioff would strongly disagree.
Under this reasoning if you're profitable, you may not want to go public. Now you have to worry about public perception and hostile outlets affecting a major asset.
Most shareholders don't like dividends because of the tax treatment compared to stock buybacks. It's still less liquid than a public market.
As far as those other examples, I don't know their full histories. From my memory amazon has had a break-even policy on purpose which investors are ok with. FB was profitable for about a year before IPO and its stock went to half of IPO for a year because people were worried about it's numbers until they got a lot of a money through mobile.
He wasn't opposed to taking Uber public, he wanted to delay IPO as long as possible because going public places restrictions on how the company is run. Dara said the same comment. But 18-36 months doesn't go against anything TK said.