[wintom]

I know your not trying to troll, statements of disbelief are very common about companies that are about to own an entire market with no real competition in sight. No one sees it yet but these guys are about to own office space and how that is acquired in the future, whose going to stop them? They are creating a future you don’t yet see.

People couldn’t believe Uber was worth more than Delta airlines in one of their valuation rounds.. this is very common. They were about to own the taxi industry and take a cut out of every ride.

This is so much bigger than that.

[jakelazaroff]

This is an interesting comparison, because Uber is also hemorhaging money and to a lot of people it's still not clear they're worth anywhere near as much as their valuation.

It's easy (relatively speaking) to build a big business when you can take on billions of dollars in losses. Turning that around is the hard part.

[adventured]

Plausible $15+ billion in sales over the next four quarters, growing at 70%, with the burn rate rapidly declining, and six years of accessible capital to operate with assuming zero further decline in their burn rate.

Uber will be near or at break-even within 18-24 months. Their sales will be over $20 billion at that point.

Are they worth three time sales? Definitely. How about 5x or more the $20 billion in sales two years out? Probably. Twitter is fetching 13x sales currently, and has only finally started making money after more than a decade of vast losses (even worse, Twitter has almost no growth).

So how does a Twitter-like 10x sales multiple on $20 billion sound, two years out? $200 billion valuation. Does that sound crazy? I think it's very rich, the capital markets may think it makes sense.

Netflix has a zillion PE ratio (and has for a long time), and a 16x sales multiple. Their margins are horrendous and will never be very good. There's a small chance they can ever grow into their current valuation (it'd require 500+ million global customers), much less anything higher.

Uber's quarterly sales will catch Netflix in probably four or five quarters. How about a 16x multiple on Uber's sales four years out, with a conservative $25 billion in sales at that point. How does $400 billion sound?

[gamblor956]

Their competition is literally every office building on the market...

Meanwhile, Uber and Lyft have been shut out of Europe and Asia, and at best might become the major (but not sole) player in the car service market.

[icelancer]

>> Their competition is literally every office building on the market...

Definitely false. The majority of office buildings on the market aren't interested in leasing me spaces of varying sizes for terms from 1 month to 5 years.

[SeanBoocock]

Sure, but some are and coworking space competitors definitely are. I don't see the unique advantage, the moat if you will, to justify WeWork's valuation. I've seen comparisons to Uber in this thread but even if you presume for the argument that Uber's valuation is justified, the network effects don't seem nearly as strong for WeWork.