What if it IS a viable long term strategy? VC was always "moonshots", 9 out of 10 fail, 1 goes big. While Uber is having issues, I've been hearing the profitibility issue raised for years now. Other startups, while not doing necessarily unicorn-esque in the "real world", have still IPOd or sold off. I imagine the VC's aren't idiots, if they looked at their balance sheets and saw a trend of throwing money into a bonfire they would have stopped a long time back. Are we breaking even? (I honestly don't know.) If we are, then perhaps the consumer 'charities' are a new norm for userbase building, for one strata of company growth strategy. "want to grow faster, throw money at it" has always been a technique, and I see the charity as just a new way of spending that money to gain userbase. The relevant question is whether it's more or less effective than prior/future methods.