Many of the sillier criticisms of the New York Magazine article have already been properly addressed but here are a few more. <Dominicr> “Uber is a technology

Many of the sillier criticisms of the New York Magazine article have already been properly addressed but here are a few more. <Dominicr> “Uber is a technology company with a taxi service attached.” Complete utter nonsense. Uber has not developed any “technology” products except what’s needed for its taxi service. It doesn’t sell any “technology” products on open markets. Its “technology” is a tiny portion (probably around 5%) of the total cost of providing customers with taxi service. As the article mentions, its dispatching and pricing software is trivial compared to what airlines had decades ago. Since no other consumer product app has ever had meaningful competitive impacts, it is ridiculous to claim that any meaningful portion of Uber’s $70 billion value is due to its wondrous technology. <rdlecler> “The author doesn’t cite growth rates, customer acquisition costs of lifetime value of the customer and without that it’s not clear they know what they’re talking about” You obviously didn’t read the article. It emphasizes, based on published financial data, that Uber’s costs aren’t coming down, except to the extent that they can push driver compensation to (or below) minimum wage levels. It any of the points you raised were actually important, Uber’s losses would not have ballooned to $4.5 billion in its eighth year of operation. <traster> “I'll tell you one thing: I really don't appreciate an article that just continually asserts investors are idiots” At no point does the article say (or suggest) that the investors are idiots. Obviously the vast majority of VC funded companies fail to produce returns for investors. It does clearly suggest that their original vision of outsized returns on the $20 billion investment base won’t be realized unless the IPO succeeds in finding a lot of “greater fools” willing to bail them out. And you fail to provide any logical basis for why Uber would ever be able to produce these outsized returns if the investors hang on. Or why anyone should invest in next year’s IPO.