David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Let's nail them, though. Let's get crystal on what different folks would paint because I think we've alluded to a lot of things, but I think it's important to paint what different people were saying about the company going into the IPO. The fascinating thing was in the Uber roadshow, they were comparing themselves to Amazon. One of the reasons was not only are we going to develop into this massive global market, but Amazon had this razor thin, they never really made any profit for the longest time. When they IPO'd, they were generating losses. Now, of course, the fallacy there is they were not generating $3 billion of an operating loss, but that is the way that they were positioning it to IPO buyers. They've also shown incredible growth in Uber Eats. It's already more than 13% of Uber's revenue. It's only a few years old. But last year, they did one and a half billion in revenue, the year before was only half a billion in revenue, so just wild bright star there for Uber Eats. I have massive personal gripes with the way this S1 was written because it made my job researching this episode just terrible. They intentionally did this. It feels not dishonest, but in a gray area. It is extremely difficult to figure out how the ride sharing business is doing because Uber has chosen to create a metric called monthly active core platform users. They group core platform as ride sharing, Uber Eats, and new methods of multi modality transport, so scooters, ebikes, and micro mobility. The bull case is that their monthly active core platform users continue to rise. I think a lot of that growth is Uber Eats, but it's really hard to read into that. To the extent that that's the number you're looking at, users continue to rise. I think the other part of the bull case here is that we're still less than two years into Dara being the CEO of Uber. His ability, both through his personality, but also through his background, to be a peacemaker and a dealmaker around the world, and return the unit economics and dynamics of Uber's core operations to something much more profitable and sustainable versus all out wars that they've been in. Yeah. Globally, across all these fragmented markets that is ride sharing, it's one of the largest Uber markets of all time. They are really well-positioned to be the main player in the space and own big chunks of these companies in other markets. At some point, when they are able to ramp down marketing spend, they're going to generate a lot of money. The thing you have to ask yourself is, okay, well, when is the knife fight going to end? What will be the catalyzing event for all companies involved to start making money instead of spending the steal share?…

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