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Uber Hacks and Bitcoin Futures
- panarky 9y agoWhat is Uber? Why is it a $70-billion-or-whatever company? You could tell a bunch of stories -- it is an app company, a taxi company, a driverless-car company -- but one possibility is that it is a regulatory-evasion company. I am a finance guy, and I think a lot about "regulatory arbitrage" as a source of value, and it seems to me that a lot of Uber's value comes from a form of regulatory arbitrage. But it is not the form of regulatory arbitrage that I am familiar with, where you carefully analyze the rules in order to build products that get the best possible treatment under different regulatory regimes. It is more just "hey a good arbitrage would be to ignore these regulations." If that is the core idea that made your company successful, it is going to pervade a lot of your decisions, not just the ones about taxi licensing. And it's going to be hard to pivot away from it.