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>During Amazon’s unprofitable years many people were saying the exact same things about Amazon that people say about Uber now. Maybe "people were saying" the s

>During Amazon’s unprofitable years many people were saying the exact same things about Amazon that people say about Uber now. Maybe "people were saying" the same things about Amazon then as Uber now, but that doesn't mean they are correct. Completely different business models. Amazon had billions in free cash flow going back to 2005, just no accounting profits. Uber has negative free cash flow. We hear the same thing about Tesla ("they're reinvesting profits!"), but they have something like $10B negative free cash flow since inception. All profitable companies are alike; each unprofitable company is unprofitable in its own way.

8ytecoder 7y ago
People look at profits with a narrow focus. It's entirely possible for a widely profitable company to have no future than a company reporting a narrow loss. It's also possible that a company has reached it's end of days for lack of a way to sustain profits. Hypothetically speaking, if there were a reporting mechanism that clearly separated operational expenditure from re-investments, Amazon and Uber would likely be in two different ends altogether. More importantly, Amazon didn't just reinvest into existing products, they were also adding entire new categories of businesses (AWS), new models of operation (2-day shipping) and relentlessly adding new categories (wider selection) - all at the same time. It's possible that Uber might be doing something similar, I'm just not that aware of the breakdown of Uber's expenditures and losses.