I'm just thinking about how many $500k to $1mm seeds could have helped founders get their ideas off the ground in lieu of these debacles.
17,700,000,000
17,700 at $1mm
35,400 at $500k
That's a lot of ideas getting fuel and a lot of people being put to work. Even if you filter through for high quality ideas and teams, this is still a better use of those funds.
WeWork was a bad idea from the start. Uber is a great idea without a functioning (profitable) business model.
As an entrepreneur, this kind of news drives me batty.
WeWork is absolutely not a bad idea. Talk to regus, they’re running a profitable business doing the exact same thing (pre-covid).
Also, Rides had already reached profitability at Uber (pre-covid).
They are both totally viable businesses, post-covid.
The mistake SoftBank made wasn’t investing in them, it was investing at a valuation that grossly overestimated the size of the opportunity, and how quickly they would see their return.
Uber & Wework aren’t going to be Apple/Google market cap any time soon, if ever. And that was true pre-covid.
I am not trying to bash Uber, but statements like:
>>Also, Rides had already reached profitability at Uber (pre-covid).
Need to be taken with a grain of salt. There are so many ways to game accounting in general, and even more ways to game the accounting of business unit. So when they say Rides is profitable, it may be true, or close enough to be true to be so. But you should doubt. If a company has $14b in revenue and $8b in losses (2019) and a profitable unit like Rides. That means some other part of the company is lost $8b+. I am sure they spend a lot on delivery, and self driving cars, but do they spend that much.
The reply to this will be "that involved a one time write down.." or some such. But when a company has never turned a profit, its hard to tell when the one time costs will stop.
That said, I believe there is a viable business in Uber. It has just been overvalued.
Others may be profitable, but I'm skeptical that Uber is.
If you talk to many drivers, you'll find a common theme that "bonuses" make up a substantial fraction of their overall income (bonuses are things like "Drive XX rides in a week and get $YYY").
To my understanding, most/all of these bonuses are placed under the accounting budget (under the premise that these bonuses are intended to bring new drivers onto the platform), not the rideshare budget.
So rideshare cost of operations doesn't properly reflect the true cost of operating the rideshare business, which means that unit economics are worse than they appear in Uber's reporting (possibly even negative).
There's a huge gap between "the economics of ridesharing are not obviously unprofitable" and "the economics of ridesharing justifies the valuation implied by the investments in uber lyft etc".
I agree it is a viable business, but they still may not be charging enough for it to be profitable. If they need to charge more, growth may slow or reverse.
> There are numerous profitable companies in Europe and Asia doing the same thing as Uber.
How can Uber be doing the same thing if Uber is losing money doing the thing and the other companies make money doing it?
Even if one or more sections of Uber are profitable, it's likely that those sections rely on functions performed by unprofitable sections of the company. Disentangling those elements isn't simple. It's possible that Uber as-it-exists-now can never transition to profitability but a company-like-Uber-in-some-ways could be profitable in the future.
>but a company-like-Uber-in-some-ways could be profitable in the future
In a sufficiently dense area, there is clearly a market for app-summoned taxis (for various values of who owns/maintains/pays for said cab). Prices may be higher than today's rideshare and volume lower. But there's a market for it. Just probably in fewer areas/at fewer times/with more expensive rates than today.
> In a sufficiently dense area, there is clearly a market for app-summoned taxis (for various values of who owns/maintains/pays for said cab)
Oh well. For sure, but it's a pretty vague statement, isn't it? We're not talking about some modest value that can keep some small company running; we're talking about $75 billion value. I'm sure that not one, but many small companies can thrive providing local services to taxi drivers collecting and dispatching hails. But that's a far cry from that to a single global company valued at almost a hundred billion dollars.
I'm sure some people would disagree with you. What you value isn't the same as what others necessarily value. That doesn't make it a terrible idea in itself.
The experience of a WeWork and Regus are very different. They can both co-exist because some people like a more community type environment, and some people just want a modular space that is affordable.
WeWork tried a bunch of things that you might not find at a typical coworking space but I personally would pay 2x for a WeWork space over the same Regus space because I will get more value out of the WeWork space which is meeting people. I have spent plenty of time in my career in WeWork and Regus spaces, and WeWork has been much more fruitful in terms of the network effect.
Tesla shares are expensive compared to other car manufacturers because investors are placing a bet on the future of the automobile being electric and Tesla having the first mover advantage and becoming almost synonymous with Electric Car. Same way we now tell each other "just Google it".
If it was just for having a yoga instructor as CEO and all you can drink Kombucha at it's charging stations then it is eye roll worthy.
Maybe not a bad idea but its ludicrous that WeWork was ever considered and valued like a Tech company, it's a real estate company with hipster interior designers nothing more.
> The mistake SoftBank made wasn’t investing in them...
The mistake Softbank made was investing in direct competitors without enough control to make those competitors play nicely.
Instead you get companies both buying marketshare using softbank's money that are forced to do so because the other has softbank's money. That's just lighting money on fire. The majority of the investment should have gone to R&D and developing durable assets that bring value in perpetuity. Buying marketshare through promotions is the opposite of that.
"The mistake SoftBank made wasn’t investing in them, it was investing at a valuation that grossly overestimated the size of the opportunity, and how quickly they would see their return."
That doesn't say much. When you're off by 20X for a close-to-IPO company that's a huge mistake and the diff in funds would've been better spent on spray and pray R&D. Many companies are good investments at 20X lower valuations than what they recently raised at.
Uber and WeWork is a capital driven business, not technology driven. The barrier of entry is very low. Anytime if there is a competitor come to the market, they have to compete with price. I'd like to see they transform into a data platform. Rather than providing the service through their apps, why don't they provide APIs for small cab companies.
As long as this companies keep investing in marketing over customer satisfaction and real value generation for shareholders the scenario is going to be the same regardless of covid etc. As you pointed out Refused is a good example: focus on business fundamentals, that's it.
It has to do with the scale of capital. If these are YC scale $150k investments you'd need more than 100k investments. Which means maybe you'd have to vet 10m companies at a 1% acceptance rate (which is less exclusive than YC.)
There aren't 10m seed stage companies, and the effort involved there would be insane.
I still think you're right that they should have gone for more smaller investments to the greatest extent that it was practical.
As you go for larger and larger investments there is less risk and less reward. Also a bigger chance of one mistake wiping out a huge chunk of the return.
Warren Buffett also has this problem and why his investment returns trend down over time as the amount of capital at play goes up.
Banks historically gave 10m loans, to businesses. And today we have really good knowledge management tools. So isn't it possible to build some process for that for seed investment ?
As someone who has been on funding committees there is a logic for making a few large grants. Monitoring costs and efforts are far smaller with a small number of grants, so sometimes it is less work to give a few large grants than a lot of small ones even if you know that there may be more wastage.
I don't understand how the Uber business model isn't profitable besides mismanagement. Taxi companies all over the world are profitable, and Uber doesn't even have to handle the regulation that they have
The reason Uber initially blew taxi companies out of the water is because taxis greatly limited their service to what was profitable and we're incredibly difficult to work with should you be outside one of their comfort zones. You could always count on Taxis near an airport or for an intra-downtown route but good luck getting a cab to pick you up at your house to take you to another suburban destination. It's not that they'd ignore your call because they sucked at customer service, it's that your call is only worth it to them if there's literally nothing else going on. Even then they might not show up if your request isn't going to end with them back in a profitable starting point for another ride.
I worked for 3 years as a part time taxi driver in first world mega city while doing my post grad at University. Taxis are heavily regulated. If I had refused a fare, I could be taken to court. Especially if the passenger belonged to a certain category like disabled or children needing a ride home after school.
This was pre GPS days so I had to pass 4 different computerised exams about the city and major roads. I had a through police check and had to display my taxi driver license on the dash.
There was proper commercial driver & vehicle insurance that was automatically taken out the day's earning. There was camera in the car including infrared mode. There was a panic button to start broadcasting location, video and audio.
Uber's advantage was completely ignoring any regulations. No insurance. No driver check. No driver safety infrastructure.
And their best move was the marketing bullshit. Even now people like you spout the same talking points.
I put in my card and boom! Done! I see the number on the screen - I pay that number, not that number plus customary tips.(99% of the time completely unearned, BTW)
In civilized places, it was the other way around. Taxis exchange privileged position for certain requirements city demands them to meet as a part of city transportation infrastructure - requirements which include having proper insurance, servicing unprofitable routes, or adapting their vehicles for passengers with disabilities. One of the ways Uber saved money was by completely ignoring these market segments.
But of course, the major way Uber "blew taxi companies out of the water" is through their ability to offer below-market-rate prices by losing money on each ride, thanks to unending supply of VC money.
Uber definitely increased the availability and coverage of end to end car hire in my region. As far as I’ve seen, the evidence suggests that Uber is more equitable for geographic and demographic access.
Yeah but from Uber's perspective they aren't paying drivers as salaried employees but contractors only for a completed fare. So Uber isn't incurring any overhead expense by having cars in less desirable pick up points, or having a car travel 10-15 minutes for a pick up before they can start a fare.
Also keep in mind that the majority of Uber's revenue is from metropolitan areas, not rural areas. And in the metro areas there was a lot of convenience to be gained from their app and matching supply and demand side of the equation and a lot of those areas were underserved by the TLC and specifically car services because taxis didn't even operate there. So they actually took the pent up demand and created a better system.
Now they are still grossly unprofitable, but not for the reason you cited here.
>And in the metro areas there was a lot of convenience to be gained from their app and matching supply and demand side of the equation
Yes, people forget about the pre-app days when hailing a taxi involved finding a suitable street corner and sticking your hand in the air while often competing with others doing the same. And even in midtown Manhattan, perhaps the best-served area in the country, try hailing a cab during rush hour when it's raining. Taxi services have largely caught up and have apps now, but it was a nightmare for a long time.
Exactly, this hits on an incredibly important point that gets constantly ignored in “disruptive” business models: if a particular market segment is “underserved” then it often means that there are poor cost economics in play. Sure, Uber can reduce those costs through algorithmic central routing and planning, but that only goes so far and some markets are just never going to be profitable to serve (at a given quality of service).
The model is profitable, the price point isnt. It's predatory pricing, sell at a loss to hurt and eliminate competition, when you prevail you own the market.
As a former founder working on the sharing economy/delivery space, UberEats will most likely fail, unless their ATG departments hit home-runs (~5% probability)
The economics are impossible to sustain, and I've been on the ground first hand talked to over 1000 owners at restaurants, grocers etc. Every single one of them has a timeline to get rid of Eats, Doordash, Instacart etc. They're just waiting for the right time to build out their own systems.
There was an enormous opportunity to help them build their systems out that I might pursue if my current venture fails.
If you’ve spoken to so many owners that all want to ditch the platforms mentioned for their own systems, do you feel there is enough interested to justify a venture/product to sell to the owners that gives them the control they are after without having to figure out how to develop an application. Seems like a great opportunity
1) Your domain has a dns op (order placement) record like an mx record. Your op record points to your online pos system. A standard chunk of data is sent by the customer browser and received by your system.
2) You pay a company for marketing+online menu services. You optionally grant them the right to list/crosspost the same data on competing services. You have the choice which menu-fronts are allowed to use your name and advertise your product.
3) The order comes into your system like any other order. This triggers a separate signal to a p2p dispatch network. The dispatch network load balances all the incoming orders, assigning them to drivers in a logical way that hits restaurants and destinations with minimal extra travel.
4) The delivery driver chooses any client they want, that is compatible with the dispatch network. Tasks are routed to their client.
The order placement, pos, and the dispatch network are totally separate technologies, not proprietary vertically integrated institutions.
I think the owners are tired of giving up so much control - your proposal sounds too similar to the platforms they are trying to leave.
Without having the first-hand knowledge of parent comment, my assumption is restaurateurs want more control of both the marketing and the delivery process. I don't think there is enough $ in the pie to pay a third party for marketing and a 3rd party for delivery. I believe the desire is to go back to something they can more directly manage (traditional delivery worked for them), but have an online ordering/POS tool that is easy to use/find from a google search. The consumer does not care if the order is delivered by an employee or someone on a network.
The cost of using drivers between restaurants has to be cheaper than each restaurant having it's own exclusive drivers. Labor is a huge component of restaurant costs, and having idle hands is bad. It's no different than time sharing.
There's no reason they have to use a third party marketing company, if they want to build their own menu and run their own ads.
Yup, I was working on it myself, but shelved it to work on another startup right now.
I wrote a complete system like a Shopify for small retailers integrated with delivery etc. But the code is locked in a private repo for me to get back to if my current startup fails.
You mean like ChowNow? They manage stuff like that.
You do understand that the problem with food delivery isn't the online bit. It's fairly easy to manage the online bit.
Expectation management is a big issue in food delivery business - that turns people away real easy. Miss delivery timing twice and people are much more likely to drop you. Get swamped with calls - people drop you. It's a hellhole of customer service.
Building out a reliable delivery network - is not easy. The farther the delivery goes out - the more complex it gets.
Out of all - Uber has the best solution to evaluate speed of delivery using a car... and OK for bicycles.
I'm sure there are many companies offering them to build put their systems, it's still not that easy. My friend's small company is failing at helping small companies have their own system as we speak. They can always go back to paying some local dude belowe minimim wage to deliver with their own naive paper system
The idea of WeWork was fine (basically a modernized take on office space rental), the execution and management however was a shitshow/dumpster fire of money being pumped to keep it afloat.
My usual self-torturing thought about numbers like these is "Just give me 0.006% of that" [one of those 17,700 millions] "and I wouldn't have to worry about anything forever." A million invested in safe boring things at 3% (which didn't use to be that hard to achieve... not so sure now) yields a basic income of $30k/yr that could pay rent & food in many places. Take the whole $17.7B and do that for the entire population (~17,700) of one of these towns in 2010:
Arcata, CA
Orinda, CA
Central Point, OR
Monroe, WA
Tumwater, WA
Make it "only" $500K each ($15K/yr) and now you're talking more like
This is a good way to look at it. These investors are supposed to be the smart ones allocating capital to good business ideas. It's insane to me that anyone ever invested any money in WeWork.
And I agree with Uber, it's a great idea, but they subsidized their rates to gain market share. Too bad they don't have a plan for how to actually increase their rates to a sustainable level without losing that market share.
I think Uber failed in realizing that it's not that hard to create a clone of them.
Both types of investments are valuable because they cause different skills to be developed in the marketplace.
All those $500k to $1M ideas, if successful, will eventually need to hire the kind of talent that honed their skills at companies like Facebook and Uber.
WeWork I can agree on. Not sure what transferrable engineering skills one can learn and improve on at that company.
> WeWork was a bad idea from the start. Uber is a great idea without a functioning (profitable) business model.
What's the great idea? That you can call a cab using a mobile phone? That already existed before Uber. Or is the idea that you don't have to hire those people?
Calling a cab with a mobile phone is miles apart from the ridesharing experience.
With Uber or Lyft, I get an idea of when the car will show up, what the ride will cost me, I know they'll take my credit card, they won't tell me the machine is broken after trying my card-make me pay cash-only to find out the charge did actually go through, I won't get taken on a grand tour of the city to run the meter up, I won't be subsidizing the ridiculous protectionist racket that is the medallion system, I'll get a nice easy-to-use receipt for expense purposes, and the ride will probably be cheaper. I can also order a car for someone else and send them home on my bill with no hassles on either side (sending a babysitter home, for example).
Since most of my rides are reimbursed anyway, I don't even care that much about the cost spread though it is nice to be prudent with the company's money as well as my own. Even if Uber were the same price, I'd prefer it over cabs. Because it's so much cheaper, I use it more often.
So what you're saying is it's not the idea it's great, it's the execution?
To be entirely honest, I'm not the best person to make these "analysis". I never took a cab before Uber because they were outrageously expensive. I took Uber's cabs because they're dirt cheap. All the things you mentioned are really irrelevant to me. (I'm sure you could call a black cab on the phone and ask them for an estimate....?)
And when Uber eventually runs out of VC money, I'll go back to never taking cabs.
That's basically saying that anything that's not a 100% original idea can not be considered a great idea. There are plenty of things that are built on existing ideas but the execution is part of it.
An idea is useless without good execution and there's no real reason to credit people on ideas, lots of people have good ideas but almost none execute well on it. For example there were plenty of online mapping companies available, but when Google Maps came out they completely dominated because their execution was so good. It's crazy to just reduce that down and say it wasn't a good idea just good execution.
The core of the idea is "make it frictionless for people to hire cars without having to talk on the phone to Danny Devito." I think the idea is actually meaningfully different and if I'm going to take a black car, it's going to be via an app, not a phone call.
OTOH, when I take a limo to and from the airport (well, normally), I call their office and do the scheduling. I know there are people here with an aversion to telephones but this works well for me. Much better than rideshare for this purpose as pickups are often zero-dark-thirty in an area without a lot of drivers. (And, yes, it's relatively pricey but this is usually business.)
I would never take a cab in Rio de Janeiro or Sao Paulo, but I take an Uber frequently.
The really big difference for me here in Brazil, is that I can communicate to someone in case the route is bad, something is stolen, etc. Taking a cab is so ephemeral that I don't even have time to complain or ask for help.
In principle you could also do that with a cab company, right? So the difference is really that you trust Uber. If anything, it's not the idea that's great, it's either the brand or the quality of the service.
In NYC, you can't call cabs. You can call black cars, and schedule them to pick you up for say an early morning ride to the airport where you might not be able to street hail a cab.
The system went like this:
You call some number like 777-7777.
A man with a heavy accent answers gruffly. You tell him where you live and when you want to be picked up. He says "OK", and then you just hope and pray that someone shows up.
The great idea is you don't have to worry about paying the driver, it's all online safely with your credit card. You get a receipt that is easy to expense. There's a record of the trip. The bad things are drivers don't have benefits, there's little or no safety training for those drivers. Contrast with taxis have lots of rules on them, yet still its very common in my experience that they are not clean, the drivers are surly, argue about things like routes, and often don't have working credit card payment systems (and you worry more about a personal transaction stealing something). But many taxis are great, just like many uber drivers are great. There's no perfect system.
> The drop in Uber’s share price was responsible for about $5.2 billion of Vision Fund’s losses in the period, while WeWork contributed $4.6 billion and another $7.5 billion came from the rest of the portfolio
Losing even more on other portfolio businesses, like Oyo (the hotel chain) is going to hurt.
I hope this gets rid of the "out-raise your competitors and spend ridiculous amounts of money on ridiculous money sinks" strategy forever.
> I hope this gets rid of the "out-raise your competitors and spend ridiculous amounts of money on ridiculous money sinks" strategy forever.
I don't think so. We live in a world now where incredible amounts of capital are chasing returns because of zero and negative interest rate policies. The only solution will be regulation.
EDIT: The more interesting question (IMHO) is what happens when all of that capital has nowhere to go? Is there back pressure? How do accumulators of capital react to such forces?
The giant pool of money is consumed by a desperate hunger for any shred of return it can find, and there is an almost limitless supply of smart, creative people who are well-positioned to capitalize on that.
By contrast, there is a finite supply of regulators, and the people who make the laws that the regulators implement are themselves members of the cadre of hungry ghosts who make up the giant pool of money.
With conditions like those, regulation will be doing extremely well to only be 10 or 20 steps behind the market.
> and there is an almost limitless supply of smart, creative people who are well-positioned to capitalize on that.
There are smart and creative people, but those are not the people being provided with capital to execute (see: WeWork, Uber, and most other VC unicorns burning out their runway). But, to your point, definitely right regulation needs to catch up. Fingers crossed it happens before the pitchforks come out [1]. Remember, those who hold vast amounts of the world's wealth are a vocal minority [2]. The same holds for the size of groups with exceedingly high wealth in developed countries [3].
[2] https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/1/22/18192774/oxfam-... ("42 million people, or 0.8 percent of the world’s population, have net worths in excess of $1 million. That group — roughly the global 1 percent — controls 44.8 percent of the world’s wealth. So it really is true that a pretty small number of people control nearly half the world’s wealth. It’s just a bigger small number of people than Oxfam’s reports tend to emphasize.")
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Americans_by_net_worth (The Forbes 400 Richest Americans list has been published annually since 1982. The combined net worth of the 2019 class of the 400 richest Americans was $2.9 trillion, up from $2.7 trillion in 2017. As of October 2019, there were 621 billionaires--a record high--in the United States.)
> The giant pool of money is consumed by a desperate hunger for any shred of return it can find, and there is an almost limitless supply of smart, creative people who are well-positioned to capitalize on that.
The finite regulators are confronted with a very small supply of smart, creative people in a position to capitalize. That group is the opposite of almost limitless, it's scarce.
Why can't regulators easily handle the dozens of deals per year that are of particular significance in VC-money terms? Nothing drastic needs to be done to regulate that scale of deals better, it's not that large in quantity. We're not talking about tens of thousands of very large funding rounds per year, that isn't going to happen.
In a nutshell, because the USA is a capitalist society that's governed by rule of law.
So regulators don't get broad power to approve or deny any business deal based on ad-hoc decisions about whether they think the deal will ultimately be a net positive for the economy 10 years down the line. They get much narrower powers to protect against a specific set of things as laid out in whatever laws comprise their job description. And Congress doesn't usually get involved until after there's already a big smoking crater surrounded by a bunch of upset people.
And don't think that the supply of "smart, creative people in a position to capitalize" is limited to the CEOs of unicorns or anything like that. The supply is actually the total number of entrepreneurial-minded people with an idea and a desire for some capital to help get it off the ground. And the scope of ideas is not limited to silicon valley startups. I'm talking about people the pool of money could throw its funds at, not the (much smaller) set of people it has thrown its funds at in the past, or the (even smaller) set of those people who get bashed in the news.
Yes completely agree. It's hard to get a firm grip on just how deeply unequitable society is today, and how little the big tech corps contribute in taxes.
"JSavageOne 7 hours ago [–]
Corporatocracy is probably the more accurate term, but the term neofeudalism isn't exactly a huge stretch. The only real difference today is that at least in theory a serf can become a lord, but the same power dynamic remains.
When chattel slavery ended many of the freed slaves became sharecroppers, bound to the land by eternal debts that could never be repaid. Although they were no longer legally bound to their "masters", for many their lives were not really any better.
Although in principle the monopolies and the government are separate institutions, we all know that the reality is that our politicians are bought out by the corporations, and the regulators are staffed by ex-employees of the very companies they are supposed to be regulating. We used to bust monopolies, but since the 70s or so the regulators have become very lax, and practically every industry has become more consolidated than it's ever been (finance, advertising, airlines, utilities, telecom, agriculture, healthcare, etc).
What's interesting to me is that whenever Google/Facebook does something authoritarian that would seem to violate some principle of liberty we deem sacred (eg. censorship, violating freedom of speech), many if not most of the comments seem to rationalize the corporation's decision as exercising their own free speech. But when you're Reddit with 430M monthly active users, your userbase is the population equivalent of the world's 3rd largest country, and so you're effectively the equivalent of a nation-state. When you're Amazon with 750k employees, then your employees could fill up a city.
Does the principle of democracy only apply to country's governments, or does it also extend to corporate monopolies?" [1]
IMO land is a horrible investment to sit on, they have acquisition costs, you have to pay annual rates to hold them, they're non revenue generating that as a result can't be claimed as a tax deduction (in Australia at least). They've also been depreciating in value lately, not a great short-term investment.
Better to invest into the Stock Market index until another opportunity opens up.
Localized power brokers like hospital systems and universities address this by being slum lords and slowly acquiring properties in areas of interest.
In many urban environments you’ll see blighted property adjacent to hospitals, etc that is essentially a buffer for future clearance.
It’s a win-win, the institution makes money (at arms length) on the slumlording, and they get incentives to “revitalize” the area when they need a new building.
Depends on the jurisdiction - if there's no CGT, and prices have been trending upwards, then the increase in value dramatically offsets any rates you may pay.
Of course, the upward trend in prices relies on a bigger fool coming into your market, which of late has been Chinese money.
Or stocks. Plain old classic stocks of established companies. S&P 500 historically is depending on which Google result you trust 4-8% per annum, it's hard to beat that on long term - on short term it usually is as many VC and other funds have proven but essentially that's casino bets.
> We live in a world now where incredible amounts of capital are chasing returns because of zero and negative interest rate policies. The only solution will be regulation.
The counter and historically more persuasive argument from the left is that the falling rate of profit will lead to more war and colonization. It’s hard not to see what’s happening in Yemen and the Saudi’s investment in SoftBank through this lens.
The argument dates back to Marx. Marx explicitly (already in the Communist Manifesto) argued that as capitalists run out of new markets to conquer, competition will force them to find their savings elsewhere, and that would inherently mean lowering costs of raw materials or lowering manufacturing costs, and that this this ultimately leads to conflict over property rights and driving down labour costs. He further predicted that this eventual pressure to drive down labour costs would push capitalism into a series of worsening crises on the assumption that driving down labour costs would drive down the market, and leave the market with over-capacity, and so intensify conflict.
Basically Marx assumption was to take capitalists on their word that the free market will drive profit margins towards zero, coupled with the assumption that a lot of people have a lot of vested interest in preventing their profits from going towards zero and will do almost anything to prevent that from happening.
That people still peddle this Leninist garbage is just unbelievable to me.
Saudi have been fighting off and on with the people of that region of 500+ years. Now they have more money. They have always tried to influence what going on there. What is happening there is part of a larger conflict between Saudi/US and Iran as well. How it related to falling interest rates or whatever is beyond me.
And SoftBank simply has to do with the Saudis knowing that Oil money will go away and they are not capable of correctly reorganizing their state, so they think they can just buy stock to finance their nonsense government polices in the long run.
All of this is explained 100x better with an incompetent government that happens to sit on natural resources, rather then some Marxist critic of Capitalism.
> Saudi have been fighting off and on with the people of that region of 500+ years.
The Saudi nation-state did not exist 500 years ago and the regional conflicts have more to do with the recent history of British and American imperialism in the region than any ahistorical, Orientalist casting of eternal conflicts in the Middle East. Should we understand the Nazi's assault on Britain primarily through the lens of Saxon raiding during the Middle Ages?
> And SoftBank simply has to do with the Saudis knowing that Oil money will go away and they are not capable of correctly reorganizing their state, so they think they can just buy stock to finance their nonsense government polices in the long run.
This is literally a vulgar form of the Leninist argument?
I didn't not claim that the modern war was directly related to some historical deterministic path. Just that regional power trying to control other weaker regional powers is not at all new in Arabia.
It is pretty much standard politics that happens during all political systems, and thus can not be blamed on some theory of capitalist overproduction.
While the Saudi state didn't exist 500 years ago, the roots Saudi power is older then 1744.
My point was more that influence politics in the region is very old and thus any explanation that is derived from some set of economic relations that exist now can not explain most of it.
> This is literally a vulgar form of the Leninist argument?
Leninist argument is about Capitalism, where based on the Marxist theory of over production countries go out to expand the market for their product. They have to do this because on Marxist cycle theory, capitalist production leads to overproduction, and then those products can fall in price so much that there is no more profit, so you need to find new markets.
First of all, this does not apply to Saudi Arabia because that cycle theory really doesn't make much sense for their economy. Saudis do the opposite where the artificially limit the production at all times, so their is no element of a market over-producing constantly.
Saudi does not go to Yemen to buy raw resources, turn them into product and sells them back to the Yemeni, that is how Lenin envisioned it.
If you wanted to make a Leninist type of argument, even if doesn't really fit, you could argue that Saudis invade Yemen so Yemenis had to buy their product. However that makes no sense as Yemen does not consume much oil and are a marginal costumer.
Really the point here is that all these things have been explained 100x better by academc of economics and political science but instead people keep repeating 100 communist propaganda and apply it to ever situation even if it is pretty far removed from the theory of those communists.
Whatever you think of it, this "Leninist garbage" predates Lenins birth by several decades. It's a central thesis of Marx, not Lenin.
And Marx' did not see crises driven by chasing profit as somehow anything unique to capitalism or a criticism, but a general pattern of economic development under any system that growth continues until the growth under a given mode of production gets to a point where further growth challenges the limits of the system and leads to crises that eventually drives change to the system. There's no value judgment in Marx views on that - he saw it as a natural cycle.
If you want to try to apply that, whether you agree it has validity or not, to the Saudis, they are now constrained by the limits of their resource extraction, and trying to address that and continue growth is forcing them to try to convert from a semi-feudal economy where the top layers are all driven by resource extraction, land ownership and patronage, towards a more capitalist economy. The problem they are facing is how to transition their wealth while staying in power, and that creates a dynamic that will be changing based on how secure they feel their position is, and to what extent they are successful in shifting their base of power away from resource extraction.
Uber's sales pitch was always "We're going to charge artificially low prices for a while in order to crush the competition, and, once we achieve monopoly status, we'll start jacking prices up." It's hard for me, as a consumer, to see what they're doing as a benefit to me in the long term.
Given that that's the basic business strategy behind all of these hyper-capitalized startups, I have similar suspicions around food delivery companies. As it stands, I'm guessing that it's affecting me more immediately, too, as restaurants raise their prices in order to cover whatever large cut the GrubHubs and DoorDashes of the world are taking. Similar to how everything's just 5% more expensive now to cover the money that's being skimmed off of every transaction in the form of credit card fees that have been justified to consumers with the promise that they'll give 1/5 of what they took back to you in the form of "rewards".
The collateral damage is immense, to both gig workers and in the case of food delivery, restaurants who do the actual work of making the food.
EDIT: I mean, just go UBI instead of advocating for siphoning sovereign fund dollars from ruthless dictators and unsophisticated investors like Masayoshi Son. Save us all the paperwork and bikeshedding about not being able to afford what we clearly (based on central bank monetary policy) can afford. I will certainly miss the Matt Levine pieces about these folks though.
How restaurants suffered? I mean if restaurants were so unable to cooperate to set up their own delivery service to compete against the VC funded ones, then they were already well destined to go out of business.
(And I'm not saying the state shouldn't step in, because these are the typical pathological market states that need some intervention.)
Delivery services have monopolized many peoples restaurant ordering habits. Many restaurants have their own delivery service, but people don't use it because they order from grubhub/doordash/uber eats instead. If the restaurants take themselves off the services people don't order from them anymore.
So it turns people value UX and simplicity than restaurant diversity. And I'm not exactly blaming them. Restaurants' own ordering/delivery systems all usually suck.
Where I live, we have these services, but I don’t see huge push of Grubhub/DoorDash/Uber. If anything, restaurants are all setting up their own ordering platforms.
This is a tired argument. We live in a society, not Somalia. Government exists to regulate to protect citizens, and I'm starting to believe these arguments are put forth to give these monstrosities more time before death gasps.
This is laughable, since the government also created an artificial taxi monopoly that benefitted no one but a small subset of people.
Uber is a godsend to millions of people and drivers around the world, to say otherwise in order to drive your political agenda it’s akin to living under a rock.
And if you want some proof, just ask every Uber driver if they would be sad or happy if the service disappeared tomorrow and hear their answers. There is a world out there that lives and thrives thanks to companies like Uber.
Somalia became a failed state after their 21-year socialist experiment completely destroyed the economy and they haven't recovered from it since:
> The Somali Democratic Republic, the Marxist–Leninist military government gave to Somalia under President Major General Mohamed Siad Barre, after seizing power in a coup d'état on 21 October 1969.
> Barre's administration ruled Somalia for the next 21 years until Somalia collapsed into anarchy in 1991.
2020 is the first time since 1969 that Somalians will have a one-man one-vote election. Probably not the best place from which to base your economic/political attacks...
Besides, the vast majority of libertarians want a smaller gov, not no government. Stable courts/police/military run by the state is almost always assumed. Only the fringiest of fringe left/right groups calling for stateless anarchy:
Uber is artificially starving out the markets it enters by offering dumping prices. Restaurants are similarly dragged into participating at gunpoint (in particular, the likes of DoorDash, Yelp and GrubHub will absolutely hold the restaurant's reputation hostage until it joins the platform).
Wrong. Uber made the market bigger and a result to that there are more people overall working for the transportation industry. It’s not like every Uber driver would have been a taxi driver if Uber didn’t exist..
Of course it made the market bigger, because it forced the competitors to lower prices to unsustainable levels. Lower prices = more demand = more supply = bigger market. For now.
It's also true that the more fast neutrons hit your fissile matter, the more energy you can extract faster. Yet it doesn't make an atomic bomb work as a viable power source.
But doing so is a classic Prisoner's Dilemma in the short term - if you don't acquiesce to Uber Eats delivery fees, but your competitors do, who captures the market share? Even if it isn't fruitful for them in the long term, it shafts you in the short term.
>> what happens when all of that capital has nowhere to go? Is there back pressure?
Perhaps what happens is that expensive (i.e., in terms of fees) investment vehicles end up investing in easily available assets (e.g., Uber stock, which is public.)
Anyone know if SoftBank earns carry on this part of the portfolio? Why would LPs want SoftBank to have any funds in a publicly traded asset and pay fees for that?
What's the problem exactly, and how would regulation work to address it?
I feel that people gravely misunderstand capital, interest rate, and so on. Capital accumulation is not the same as expanding the money supply (so taking out a loan) - even if both are somehow denominated in USD. If we have too much financial capital - as you pointed out, chasing returns - that just means its real value depreciates compared to other things. (Eg. capital goods, labor, return generating assets, etc. - That's why we see asset bubbles, and investment in a lot of ventures, that then pays huge salaries.)
But it doesn't matter how much money chases how little, the important thing is the real growth, aggregate demand (total compensation), technological change (productivity), and so on.
There's back-pressure (falling profits, slowing growth, recession, depression, shrinking economy, rising unemployment, a vicious cycle), but also there's always a place for financial capital to go. Namely there are always new ideas to try, there are always things to invest in.
For example, there are always more riskier and more longer term investments, such as education (lending people money to retrain and switch to a higher paying job - a bit like student loans, but a lot more like coding bootcamps). Infrastructure (public transport, energy, housing), and so on.
Profit (real capital) comes from economic surplus, and that comes from technological change (economies of scale, efficiency, etc). And fundamentally it seems advanced economies are very resistant to switch to more efficient forms. ( http://www.vitalsigns.mtc.ca.gov/time-spent-congestion --- and it took a pandemic to try to make home office really viable; see also how much money people spend on healthcare, yet how inefficient it is)
Without real economic surplus a bigger money supply is just inflation. (That's why some people freak out when they see central banks doing quantitative easing, but they forget that central banks look at inflation, and they do QE to keep inflation above 0.)
So eventually, either we invest in big changes to go up the efficiency ladder, stagnate, or worst case the promised new projects don't deliver (because there was not enough aggregate demand to subscribe/buy/rent/use the new shiny thing, or it was not green enough, so it was not a good market fit), eventually the financial sector starts to run out of equity to risk, and we fall into the debt trap that caused Japan's lost decade.
(And that's why central banks all around the world are able to just foot the bill, because it doesn't cause inflation as long as that money is basically just gets rolled over into new loans/bonds/etc. most of it goes nowhere.)
> The only people who lose in this equation are the ones who accepted those risks.
And, more importantly, also the people who are collateral damage of this. I.e. the people in your or mine neighbourhood. The local restaurants, the local drivers, the local renters.
All this money raised isn't just sitting there doing nothing, it's disrupting markets - the way a disruptor wielded by a Klingon or Romulan would disrupt your body. By the time the disruption ends, your body won't work. These markets won't work either.
> The local restaurants, the local drivers, the local renters
1) Restaurants are making extra money they wouldn't have made otherwise, with zero upfront risk of hiring additional employees, capital equipment, etc.
2) Drivers are making extra money on capital equipment they've already purchased and time they would have otherwise not used to be compensated for.
3) Buyers are spending more money on food as a result.
> These markets won't work either.
But no one is forcing people to buy food using food delivery apps. They're actively choosing to do so. I recently ordered a value meal from Wendy's via Doordash. It was nearly twice as much as I would have paid if I walked into the restaurant (because of fees, etc). But I chose to spend that much. At some point, that's unsustainable and I won't be able to afford doing that for much longer.
The only people at a loss here are sharedholders. I'm desperately confused why so many people think this is a bad thing for the common person.
> I'm desperately confused why so many people think this is a bad thing for the common person.
Because it's not sustainable. It's the food market equivalent of stripmining. At some point, the restaurants will collapse or quit offering delivery this way, and you'll be left with less restaurants and more expensive delivery (if any at all), and Doordash will implode. Longer-term, the owners of the company are the only ones benefitting here (worth remembering that when startups talk about an exit, it usually means the top employees dumping the company and getting away with riches; the company is going to eventually die, as intended to).
Uhh, you realise food delivery was a thing before all these startups, right? The startups built an app, they didn't invent the concept nor the demand of food delivery.
There's a piece of investment wisdom that says "the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent" - or, applied here, Uber's going to take a while longer to die than your startup.
> or, applied here, Uber's going to take a while longer to die than your startup.
So what? I'm so confused by this. This is exactly the point of "taking more money than you need". If Uber has a huge warchest of cash it means it can pivot as it pleases. Isn't this good investment advice then?
If Uber dies before making any money, and some other company would've made money but Uber killed it, then the investment in Uber was a bad investment (no return) and in addition prevented what might have been a good investment from working out.
Or in words that matter to me as a consumer - Uber, an unsustainable company, killed an industry that will not immediately recover when Uber dies.
> I hope this gets rid of the "out-raise your competitors and spend ridiculous amounts of money on ridiculous money sinks" strategy forever.
Narrator: It didn't.
As long as there is greed and speculation, people will continue to fall for schemes like these.
People, especially here on HN, like to talk about how big of a ponzi scheme cryptocurrencies are, but they are just a reflection of other such systems in the offline world. They just happen in time-scales of weeks and months rather than years and decades.
From [2], SoftBank lent billions for employees to invest. That's incredible and dubious! I've been offered to purchase stock of my employer at reduced prices if I hold it for X time, but never been offered a loan to do it.
>> SoftBank lent billions for employees to invest. That's incredible and dubious!
In some ways, this is great. It shows that fund executives' interests are aligned with the long-term returns of the fund. It shows they are there for the carry returns and not just the annual admin fees. It gives execs skin in the game.
People keep saying this, but in reality all this ever seems to do is to give employees an incentive to boost the share price. If you have an employee that works hard to create long term value for the company you can review their performance at the end of the year and make a judgement that they've created long term value in a sustainable way and you can give them a big bonus or increase their salary. If you give them massive amounts of stock, suddenly you're powerless, it doesn't matter what they're doing to boost the stock price, as long as they bump the price they're going to get a good income no matter what you think of their performance.
Bonuses end up becoming political exercises. If you can keep bonuses aligned with value, that is great but I've seen otherwise many times.
Serious question - are there really many bad ways to bump up the stock price?
There is financial engineering (like stock buy-backs), you can just disallow that and remove the problem.
There is unnecessary M&A, but if the employees are running amok with unnecessary M&A, you have much bigger problems.
There are illegal things -- but we have the law to take care of that.
There are extractive measures (e.g., squeeze blood from workers, suppliers), but if that is allowed, then the "value" you see from that is likely also "value" you'd reflect on the annual bonus.
I wonder how much good vs damage SoftBank has done to tech companies, or was it just te normal consequence of the end of the tech bubble? I don't mean Uber, WeWork and the high profile ones, but the less news worthy failures. What do I mean?
SoftBank funded companies were told to grow at any cost, scale to become the market leader. A lot of companies weren't mature enough, or maybe not viable enough to do so and just burnt through cash and ended up with nothing as a result.
I wonder how they would have done had they not had such a strong drive to grow at any cost?
This has downstream implications for global stability. Much of that money comes from Gulf states, including Saudi Arabia, who need investment returns to replace dwindling oil revenues. Revenues which prop up an extremely generous entitlements system that has kept the royal family in power.
WeWork seemed like a poor investment anyway. Pandemic or no pandemic, the economy was heading for a reset after 10 years of a good run. Why they expanded their building so quickly is beyond me, and it's left the whole business extremely open to a downturn. I've worked in a lot of the buildings in London and watched it explode since coming to the city. It started as a great idea and built on community, but it lost a lot of that with generic same same buildings. Money sinks. Something other spaces are doing far better, focusing on certain industries and startup communities.
I work in the industry (yes, the whole debacle has been fairly entertaining).
From what I've heard, Neumann was 100% convinced that the 16Bn financing round was a sure thing (and the rapid growth was how he positioned himself for it). I don't know whether he meant to ride off the sunset, or (as our ceo put it), rely on the fact that even if the business is unsustainable, tens of billions of cash means that you won't go bankrupt for a long time.
You know, i would say no. I would actually like to thank softbank for taking the risks that it did, as it should be a very interesting business study to look at what, and how, they did what they did.
They made collosal mistakes/mis-judgements, sure - but look at how much can be learned from what they have done.
I would like to know even more about all the details of what they have done. I would like to see if i could learn - even for just the acedemic aspect of it - all the mistakes they made, their reasonings behind what decisions they made etc.
Its a fascinating study, if you think about it.
Look at the companies we are talking about they failed upon; uber, we-work and oyo are mentioned just in this HN thread.
All of which are “household names” to silicon valley.
Recall the articles about how OYO was “revolutionizing what we thought of hotels....
Man, that guy/company got mad press praise.
So, i want to learn as much as i can about everything softbank did.
That, and the name of the fund ended up being hilariously wrong. They have invested in things where a 10 year old could have pointed out obvious fallacies.
Saudi investors must be really pissed off, they look like complete fools now (having just been parted with quite a bit of their money). If I were Masayoshi Son, I wouldn't step in a Saudi embassy for all the money in the world now.
Oh well if they blow up it's actually capitalism working right for once. Too bad they own ARM, that's more or less the only thing of value that could be lost imho.
I find it very difficult to see where ARM fits, it really should be an independent company. Since everyone who sees the most value in buying it shouldn't be allowed to. Can you imagine if Apple snapped it up? Or Qualcomm? Or even Intel?
> Can you imagine if Apple snapped it up? Or Qualcomm? Or even Intel?
Apple perhaps, but they tend to avoid generic M&A like this. They tend to only do M&A when there is a very strong fit; they’ll happily continue to license ARM’s IP.
The others each have offerings that compete with ARM, so on that alone, they wouldn’t be able to close the sale unless regulators are completely asleep at the wheel.
There's heavy speculation of Apple ditching Intel for the ARM platform, it'd be interesting to see if it could actually happen. It has to be an opportunistic move
"Private valuations have become disconnected from public reality"
If you bought Amazon when it was valued at $50 billion, you would have (small) profits even if you bought 20 WeWorks at $50 billion as well. If you could bring it down to 10 WeWorks per Amazon you'd make enormous returns.
Not sure I'd want to hand over my non-existent fortune to Masayoshi Son, but I wouldn't blame someone who did.
just to play devil's advocate: this day and age, is there anything better they could've invested in? Equities PE ratio is at all time highes and it's getting ever harder for early stage start ups to succeed. There's more and more monopolies and fewer and fewer startups able to succeed. But, there's a ton of money out there sloshing around looking for returns. I think it's just a case of too much capital chasing too few opportunities.
Until, we as a society start creating the necessary conditions for more opportunities to create actual wealth, we're going to keep seeing these types of low yield investments.
>just to play devil's advocate: this day and age, is there anything better they could've invested in?
I mean, biotech, clean energy, healthcare, pharmaceuticals or anything else that's risky but at least you have huge upside in case something succeeds?
Or alternatively take the money to emergent markets and fund startups in Africa, at least there you have some huge potential for growth even if the products are boring.
To be fair, so much of this is driven by market forces and Covid in general.
Only WeWork was written down, the rest is the market absolutely tanking. I mean if you followed the index funds, you'd be posting ~20% losses right now. Earlier it was 30%.
I definitely would not want to be those portfolio managers right now, but it's not all completely them... yet.
Might be true, but building a multibillion dollar investment strategy that falls apart during a market downturn is a very financial crisisy thing to do. Its easy to make money during a bull market, just toss money into an index fund.
Uber and WeWork were both banking on increased travel and office presence. Seems like a dumb thing to do now that COVID has plowed everyone into remote work. It might have been a dumb thing to do even before.
Crises tend to accelerate underlying societal changes. Remote work and online ordering were already at an all time high. The virus has pushed this increasing demand ahead a decade or more. Now I can even see my doctor from home, something unthinkable a few months ago. Travel is increasingly reserved for leisure. Uber might be okay but WeWork is on the wrong side of this. WeWork was a societal stepping-stone to remote work. We've blown past that checkpoint far sooner than expected
It's not really the stick market that's causing this, since few of Softbank's investments have IPOed yet. (The WeWork bubble, in particular, started deflating when they tried to list it.)
The more immediate cause is that many of their companies are not profitable, which investors were willing to overlook because they were enticed by future profits. But now COVID is wreaking havoc on the whole economy, and these companies don't have any sort of path to profitability within a foreseeable timeframe.
Saudi-Arabian oil (read: blood) money. With Peak Oil around the corner (if it hasn't already hit thanks to corona), the Saudi dictatorship is in desperate need for a way to finance their lavish lifestyle and handouts, or it faces rebellion.
The only thing buying the Saudi government peace at the moment from both religious salafi extremists on one end and a young Westernized population on the other hand is extremely generous handouts which in turn depend on an oil price around 80-90$ range IIRC. But cheap US/CA fracking and shale oil have been attacking that price level for quite some time which also is problematic for the Russian economy for similar reasons, so both SA and RU are hellbent on destroying the US/CA domestic oil industry (which is highly leveraged and debt financed), which complicates matters even more.
There is no way peak oil (which I assume is peak oil demand, not supply) is going to happen anytime soon. Too much of the world has massive energy needs in order to develop (almost all of Africa, large parts of South America and Asia) and oil will be a huge part of the energy mix given its advantages. The current coronavirus situation might depress oil demand for a bit, but unless living standards get permanently stuck at low levels in the developing world oil demand is going to grow for the foreseeable future. Of course, how Saudia Arabia does depends on how long their reserves last, and many people believe they've overstated the amount of oil they have remaining.
Africa can satisfy lots of its energy needs with essentially free solar, plus Africa has lots of local oil, they don't need the Saudis.
As for oil demand: many Western countries have by now recognized their toxic dependency on oil. Plastics are being fought against worldwide, electric mobility is more or less mainstream with Tesla and ICE phase-outs across Europe, business air travel will be mostly replaced with teleconferences...
I think you are underestimating the convenience of oil relative to other forms of energy. Also, Saudi Arabia has a mostly functioning government, which is not really true of most African countries and Saudi Arabia is one of the lowest cost producers. Maybe some African countries can compete on price, but not until they increase their engineering capacity and reduce corruption.
Edit: Even if the world does go all in on electric vehicles, you still have to mine all the metals that go into their motors and batteries. That is going to be a huge shock to the mining industry. Probably on a level to the commodity supercycle that China's growth caused. I don't see any way that metals production can be ramped up heavily without an increase in oil demand.
>"Too much of the world has massive energy needs in order to develop (almost all of Africa, large parts of South America and Asia) and oil will be a huge part of the energy mix given its advantages."
Nigeria, Algeria and Angola are all big petro-states. Africa does not need to buy from Saudi. In South America both Brazil and Venezuela are huge petro-states and so they are not dependent on Saudi Oil either.
I just finished reading https://www.billiondollarwhale.com/ book. The book tells a story how 11Billion USD were stolen. After seeing $17B losses I hardly can believe that a big chunk of it or most of it were not funnelled to support a lavish lifestyle of connected people.
The more I read about WeWork, the more insane it is to me. I don't really blame the charlatans at WeWork, it's hard to blame people for taking money on a product. And they probably do think it's a good business plan.
No, I blame the people giving them billions of dollars. These "investors" are complete idiots. It's shocking to me how little they understand about the companies they invest in.
One look at WeWorks "business plan" and I knew it was all bullshit. It's just ridiculous that so many "smart investors" gave them money.
Was anyone (with remarkable or relevant VC experience) criticizing SoftBank Vision's fund approach before all this debacle?
I remember a lot of articles praising it and basically claiming that their boldness and aggressiveness were going to create never seen returns / disrupt the VC industry forever.
It pains me to see such massive amounts of money wasted on a real estate ponzi scheme and a ride sharing company with a weak revenue model.
If they're going to call themselves a "vision fund" that focuses on moonshots, and has the risk appetite to lose large sums of money doing that, at least invest in actual moonshots.
Biotech, green energy, new forms of transportation like Hyperloop and improved supersonic jet designs. There are so many breakthroughs that need lots of funding and can be quite profitable if successful.
I would love to see funds like SoftBank invest more in the SpaceX's of the world less in the WeWorks of the world.
The Vision fund is heavily invested in businesses that are negatively impacted by COVID-19. Are there any bright spots in the portfolio? Was diversification not possble?
Change your perspective: this is not SoftBank losing money, this is the middle class gaining a free lunch. It's a massive redistribution of wealth from investors to consumers.
Some of this is also just hitting the undo button. Softbank had a murky habit of leading back to back rounds, so they were effectively dictating the market for their own investments. It’s like if you invest in my business at a $10 valuation, and then a year later you invest at a $30 valuation, and a year after that your accountants force you to carry it at the original $10 valuation. You’re undoing previous paper gains, but nothing really changed.
Valuations are not zero sum. On a cash flow basis, I think that’s pretty simple: consumers via subsidies. But on the mark to market side, if I invest $10 at $100 valuation and the company lists on a stock exchange where investors only value the company at $50, I’ve lost $5 and nobody has gained anything.
This is great news! Uber had a great idea but is run and mismanaged by the scum of humanity. Perhaps Sons investments would to better in the hands of ethical leaders.
I'll never forget the day Uber deleted $300 I had earned right out of my driver account. I fought with them for a month and never got it back. The state and feds couldn't have cared less. This company has a license to steal. It's caught up with them.
I look forward to the day the robot takes over and fires everyone.
17,700,000,000
17,700 at $1mm 35,400 at $500k
That's a lot of ideas getting fuel and a lot of people being put to work. Even if you filter through for high quality ideas and teams, this is still a better use of those funds.
WeWork was a bad idea from the start. Uber is a great idea without a functioning (profitable) business model.
As an entrepreneur, this kind of news drives me batty.