You're a supermarket, you sell stuff from vendors you buy from. You have gross income minus cost of goods sold. You're a mall, you lease space to vendors. You

You're a supermarket, you sell stuff from vendors you buy from. You have gross income minus cost of goods sold. You're a mall, you lease space to vendors. You have gross income minus expenses. You're not a logistics provider but merely a platform that connects third party service providers to the customer. You tell everyone how much money you hold on to for the third party service providers as... gross income? Lyft and Uber et all are more like PayPal, also playing the game of claiming to not be a bank and for awhile not wanting to be a licensed money transmitter. Last PayPal quarterly earning report they reported $69.74B in payment volume, $2.26B net revenue, $377MM net profit. That makes sense. Here Lyft is saying their gross revenue is $2B. Kind of like how Groupon count all the eggs in their basket before paying out their merchant partners. Maybe a better way to put it is total booking volume $2B, net revenue $400MM, then whatever net profit after expenses. Valuing the business at 10x on $400MM can make sense. The bet is that Lyft can make more money within ten years by sustaining and increasing the dispatch volume or by increasing efficiency and decreasing costs.