> -18.67 billion $ in revenue

You’re confusing revenue and earnings/net income. Revenue is the sum of the sales. Net income, or earnings, is how much money is left after accounting for expenses. Uber alone has tens of billions of dollars in revenue.

You're not wrong about OP's confusion, but a quick note that uber recently reported quarterly revenue of ~3.1bn which means "tens of billions" annually is exaggerating a little.

Does uber count it's fees as revenue or does it count fees and the fares (which get passed back to the drivers) as revenue?

My opinionated take is that if uber wants to pretend that drivers are not employees and it's just a marketplace then they shouldn't be booking the fare as revenue, just their cut but I'm not an accountant and I don't make the rules.

> My opinionated take is that if uber wants to pretend that drivers are not employees and it's just a marketplace then they shouldn't be booking the fare as revenue, just their cut but I'm not an accountant and I don't make the rules.

Good point, but Uber literally takes the money through its app, so I don't suppose that would be possible.

Yea, classic case of low vs. high margin businesses. Travel is a great example. You would think sites like Expedia would make a healthy margin on airline tickets. Due to the way it's set up (booking systems, airlines, competition) the actual net per ticket is something like $5 for domestic flights. Last I checked Expedia specifically, most of their revenue was on hotels.

Contrast that with a high margin business like consulting services or a proprietary technology/product and there's a huge difference in net profit between the two at $10m annual revenue.

Revenue is King, margin is Queen.

Does PayPal count money paid through its app as revenue?

Good point. I believe it (and similarly Amazon marketplace sales) uses nominee accounts.

I don't use Uber so I don't know if the payments are always to the same 'Uber Ltd' or not, but you're right that would seem to be a good option.

No. Neither does a bank. That’s, for lack of a better term, escrow.

They only count their share, not the full fare (agent revenue recognition). I was referring to annual numbers.

You're missing Zoom, Pagerduty, and Cloudflare which are all doing phenomenally well.

A cynic might note that they're essentially selling pickaxes in the gold rush, so would be expected to do well in a tech bubble, even when their customers aren't :)

Thanks, didnt have earnings per share on cloudfare so skipped it

Pagerduty's stock is in the toilet. Almost anyone who has bought in the past 5 months has lost money.

Some of those (e.g. Slack) are growing phenomenally fast though, and could become profitable quite easily. Others (e.g. Uber and Lyft) have a questionable business model.

Edit: wow I didn't realize Slack had such a large market cap. That is a LOT of growth priced in, probably more than is justified.

While this is true, I seem to miss what makes Slack special. We use it at work, and it is decent at what it provides, but we could probably just as well switch to Discord, Microsoft Teams or ICQ.

Microsoft Teams especially seems like a deliberate attempt to dethrone Slack, and while it is slightly more annoying to use, it just makes sense for companies to bundle their services and subsciptions.

I do not really see a bright future for slack.

You could switch, sure. But would you ? You would be losing :

- Message history

- Files that have been shared

- Integrations / bots / ...

- Plus you would need to setup everyone again, create channels, ...

Slack goal is to be cheap enough that it does not represent a major cost for the company and integrated enough that moving would be a pain.

Would you, though? My company was a very early user of Slack, and imported our history from Skype group chat, IRC and HipChat over various periods in history. You can get the data out of Slack easily enough, so I don’t see that as a major aspect of lock-in if there is a competitive product.

The integration story is more interesting, but to _be_ a competitive product many of these must already exist.

The job of competing with Slack is harder than it once was (just look at MS Teams) but not impossible (just look at Slack...) - there’s lots of room for improvement.

My company switched from Slack to Mattermost, and then back to Slack. We either did all these things, twice, or lived without them. Switching is not something you'd do on a whim, but it's not really difficult either.

Why back?

The IT department moves in mysterious ways, its wonders to perform.

I think we moved from Slack to Mattermost because our infosec people weren't happy about Slack's handling of our data; there's a line in an email about "discussions with Slack over the past year regarding their data security and AI initiatives". But then Slack sorted that out to infosec's satisfaction, so we moved back, because running your own Mattermost installation is more of a hassle than paying Slack to do the equivalent.

As someone contemplating the move from Slack, I'm also very interested in this response

For the same reasons (good and bad) companies periodically switch other software platforms despite switching costs. History is exportable, and I suspect that for every company that's built clever and essential integrations and comprehensive channel structures there's another one where it's an under-used message board...

I don't think you can post syntax highlighted code snippets, or do automations with ICQ.

This is something they (ICQ team) are working on right now (actually they are launching ICQ-based Slack-alike collaboration solution, Myteam)

Well, probably rpa could help here.. If it makes sense is another story :)

> and could become profitable quite easily

That's easy to say and hard to do, especially when u have to justify a very public valuation

> are growing phenomenally fast though, and could become profitable quite easily.

Exactly. Cut their S&M budgets overnight and you'll see a ton of very profitable companies. Just look at their Gross Margins.

You're missing Eventbrite, which IPOed September 2018 and has lost around half its peak value.

https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/EB/

Maybe you need to flip that envelope around because I don't know how you get that much negative revenue.

Not to be flip, but pretty sure the gp is referring to losses, I.e. burning vc money and not earning enough revenue to break even.

added link above

Revenue and earnings are not the same thing.

>negative revenue

How is that even possible?

WeWork is such a mess that i wouldn't be surprised if their revenue was negative and their profit was a quaternion.

Obviously that happens when your product is so bad that you have to pay people to use it.

That’s called negative profits or earnings before taxes/depreciation/etc.

By definition revenue can’t be negative.

Sorry, my comment was tongue-in-cheek. If revenue is defined as income from operations, having to pay people to use your product could be considered negative income, aka negative revenue (even if that's not how that actually works). I guess it was a bad joke if I have to explain it.

"hating investors"

They don't hate investors, just the likes of you or I, and who can blame them? Softbank gives them money on a $47bn valuation, don't have to deal with reporting requirements, don't have short sellers (which SV types seem to be really annoyed by?!).

Twilio has been non-GAAP profitable for a year now with a positive EPS for the last four quarters (possibly five, but my brain is failing me and Yahoo Finance only lists the last four), but you list it as negative. So that leads me to wonder if many of the other figures you cite have similar issues.

(Disclosure: I work at Twilio.)

> non-GAAP profitable

Like how on my Tinder profile i'm a non-GAAP 10.

Has that been seasonally-adjusted?

it has been community-adjusted