I didn’t know things were already this bad for Uber. Looking like a big short on the stock would pay off nicely soon. I’ll leave that to the big guys.
“But you said you would never betray our customers! —Yes, because the customer is the shareholder.” – You know it’s bad when the series Silicon Valley mocks one’s business model for a joke.
> The math on WeWork etc. finding profitability never made sense.
“Don’t worry, we lose on every unit but we make it up on the quantity.”
Yes, we were in a bubble. More seriously though, Kondratief cycles are very long cycles, 50+ years, and the phase II is land grab. Economics didn’t make sense because investors are betting that they can extort customers later on.
Example: If WeWork succeeded to make building management code as difficult as construction code, they could have evicted all companies who try to maintain their own workspace (“Too bad, he didn’t know every 4th extinguisher has to be blue to be seen in case of red light event”) and WeWork would have rented companies their own workspaces. For that, you need to both dominate and modify the legal framework to prevent small actors from giving birth.
Cab companies might own hundreds if not thousands of medallions.
For example, a single private equity firm owns about 4,000 New York medallions [0].
Most medallions are owned in pools by private firms.
[0] https://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2021/04/01/private...
And if Uber operated exclusively in New York, we could accept they had a profitable-sounding business model: bypassing that system.
But given that Uber has expanded into many other cities and countries, 99% of which don't have medallions, it's pretty clear that merely bypassing the medallion system isn't their business model.
I keep getting all these photos of Michael Cohen