Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by jakelazaroff 2931 days ago
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.

1 comments

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?