Silicon Valley Adjusts to New Reality as $100B Evaporates (opens in new tab)

(wsj.com)

4 pointscarty76ers6y ago3 comments

3 comments

I think you mean "adjusts to reality". The only new thing is this phenomenon where as long as a company is growing by 50% a year it's perfectly fine if it's losing five billion dollars a year and has absolutely no idea how to ever make a profit.

larnmar6y ago

I’ve watched from the sidelines as a lot of rapid-growth but loss-making companies with “no idea how to make a profit” suddenly figure out how to make a profit. I said “pah, unprofitable!” And turned down opportunities to invest in Google, Facebook, Amazon etc at tiny fractions of their present valuations.

A company with a lot of growth is nothing to sneeze at, even if they haven’t yet properly monetised. Speaking of which I’ve been meaning to buy Uber shares...

nabla96y ago

Google, Facebook, Amazon all had idea how to make profit and especially how they build a moat against competition.

Uber still has not figured out how to be profitable once things settle. At the basic level it's just an app matching drivers and customers. They have little moat against other apps and conventional taxi companies adopting similar apps when price competition becomes brutal. Uber has externalized car maintenance etc to individual drivers. Taxi companies can manage their fleets more economically.

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