Brad Stone: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. To your point about network effects, it seems like with Airbnb it’s highly advantageous to have people everywhere on a single network since they travel a lot or you could imagine like eBay or Amazon where it’s even stronger of a network effect because literally it’s all shipping. It doesn’t matter where you are. But with Uber, shy of having to download a new app when you go to a new place, it really doesn’t seem that strong. It seems like these pockets of network effects that better describe the service. Yeah. And there’s a belief at Uber that kind of technology will make a difference and they can move kind of learnings around the world. But it’s just not clear to me. Like the continued strength of Lyft in a lot of US cities I think is indicative of like maybe as long as you pick somebody up within 3 minutes, maybe nothing else matters. Ola in India, knowing that market, knowing the cash habits of those people, knowing just how to press the buttons of city governments or what to do in streets that are just utterly congested, I mean that’s an advantage. Not to say that Uber doesn’t have that because they have local offices and very smart general managers but I think there’s a reason that Uber hasn’t run the table yet. Right. To your point, it's not that they aren’t great at those things. It’s that they don’t have a structural advantage by gaining the position that they’re in to necessarily make that N+1 market any easier than the N market.…

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