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A comment on Uber opens at $42 per share. Parent comment

Re:Uber opens at $42 per share by fullshark on Friday May 10, 2019 @01:35PM (#19880186)
Online retailers wasn't far-fetched at all. It wasn't obvious they were going to become the everything store and dominate the market, but it wasn't like people were perplexed by a business plan of selling books online and sending them to consumers.

If people are perplexed by uber today it's because the unit economics look horrible, and it doesn't seem like they will improve without a major technological advance.

Edit: TBF, I was curious so I checked out AMZN's first year of trading: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AMZN/history?period1=8528832...

They dropped 20% on day one. I don't think that reflects investor skepticism re: shopping online, but skepticism re: the myriad risks they faced as one of many money losing online retailers.

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Re:Uber opens at $42 per share by SeanAppleby on Friday May 10, 2019 @02:45PM (#19880917)
Even with a major technical advance it's not obvious that they'll have a moat to defend their margins. All of the ride sharing platforms might just end up competing to the death on price without anything else to differentiate on, and in that future I'd imagine the person with the cheapest supply chain will win, and I don't see why that would be Uber.
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