Brad Stone: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. David, it's really interesting to think about how could Uber, Lyft, Didi, how could ridesharing in general be better at building their flywheels for defensibility. I love that point that the network effects are not as strong as an Airbnb or other businesses, at least in a global sense what could they do to bolster that. I think that there’s a belief particularly among some Uber investors that maybe there is a moat, we just don’t see it right now that when the capital environment changes and these companies have to get profitable, we’re going to separate the men from the boys, so to speak. So we don’t yet know because none of these companies have had to get real or rationalize their balance statements. Lyft clearly still loses a lot of money and they discount, they’re still in expansion mode. They don’t have the scale that Uber has. So in some respects it almost might be too early to make a kind of judgement on the value of these businesses and there’s an ambiguity around driverless cars, there’s still some regulatory questions. I mean, I would say that there’s still a lot of regulatory ambiguity around Airbnb. It’s a separate topic but almost like cities are waking up now to the potential and the disruptive power of Airbnb and are beginning to wonder if they want residential community as to have a little hotel sprinkled throughout and all the problems and economic opportunities that brings. So, that’s Airbnb’s challenge. I mean, Uber I think has to hope that we move into a different capital environment and all these companies like Lyft, but also like Juno, this New York startup that’s giving its drivers equity that all that stuff starts to look very unsustainable in an environment where companies have to go public and they have to show profit. Right now, Juno is winning this battle for hearts and minds in New York of drivers because drivers can feel a part of it. We have no idea whether any of that is sustainable. So we’re still at 2017, we’re still kind of high on the drug that is internet stock and this amazing opportunity. I agree, David. It seems to me like the moat is a lot shallower in the ridesharing market but I think that there is a belief and it may be a sort of errant one that time will anoint Uber as the king, and we’ll see. Brad, thank you for bringing your seasoned journalistic take to this and you’re right –…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.