[puranjay]

> Uber has to also pay for engineers, sales/marketing to get customers/restaurants onto the platform

I really wonder how much of this is a self-created problem. Would Uber really need that many engineers if it wasn't processing data at a massive scale to find the ideal surge price for every trip and maximize revenue? Maybe Uber would make less money without surge pricing (and the large scale data crunching it involves), but then maybe Uber also wouldn't need to pay for so many engineers.

Similarly, would Uber really need to pay for marketing if it attracted growth organically instead of trying to dominate the world within half a decade?

We live in rather strange time for business. It used to be that if you wanted to build a $100B company, you spent decades in the trenches, reinvesting profits and attracting growth organically.

Even a true "unicorn" (not that I care much for that term) like Microsoft was worth "only" $35B in 1995, 20 years after it was founded.

We've all somehow assumed that this order of things is natural when it is far from how the rest of the business world functions

[usrusr]

> I really wonder how much of this is a self-created problem

It's part of the overfunding game: you can't just take the money and go "yay, 300 years of runtime because we stay lean". Investment is meant to be spent. Burning it all purely on buying market would also be a little too transparent, investors want to believe that they are getting more than that and they need others to believe that as well should they ever desire for greater fools.

But once you add an army of well paid talent to the mix it gets much easier to claim that there's more to your growth than buying market. Even if all they do is cosplay unassailable technological lead.