This is surprising, as most entrepreneurs are nice guys who demonstrate deep humility.
I have yet to figure out how they will be able to grow enough to justify these investments. They would have to take over the world’s car service and taxi business. But all they have is a handy way to book cars, and for the time being, a way to get around consumer protection laws and drivers willing to absorb most of the costs. Other ride providers are sure to streamline their booking systems and mimic some of the features of uber, so how much of the market share can they realistically gain and hold onto?
I suppose one could grease enough palms to keep the balls juggling for quite a awhile. And if a couple of billion in investments overseas are properly routed - they’ll be available when enronmobile crashes.
It isn’t clear that they’ll be successful; but there is no particular reason to suspect that uber is only interested in being a don’t-call-us-a-taxi-company.
Their approach could theoretically be applied to any data-driven piecework that can be ordered and farmed out through a smartphone and currently has enough friction (or barriers to entry) that it can be profitably undercut by somebody willing to ignore such problems-for-other-people.
I’m inclined to be pessimistic about what it will look like; but there are probably a fair few things where a supply of day laborers with GPS locators and an API could be quite handy.
I have yet to figure out how they will be able to grow enough to justify these investments
And you never will figure it out. The magic of the interweb is not constrained by basic logic.
“Despite”
Can you say “bubble?”
Somebody is going to lose Webvans full of money.
The company is currently valued at $40 billion. That is nuckin’ futs.
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
