Hamilton Helmer: prediction

Transcript context

…Wow, that's so interesting. Along those lines, it's so interesting to see Uber and Lyft these days. In theory they both had some sort of strong network effect. I was just looking, so Lyft is 5% the market cap of Uber. Is there a lesson from just what it is that allowed Uber to just win and kind of run away with the market essentially? I'm not entirely sure, I'll take a guess, but take it as a unformed guess. I haven't really studied it carefully. I think that over time there, if I had to guess, I'd say they're probably modest scale economies in the business. And over time Uber has just very successfully played a war of attrition. And that's both been in how they run their... They made one initial misstep, which is they misdefined their business. They said it was international transportation and it's not. That business is extremely geographically specific. If you have a great position in the Bay Area, it doesn't help you in London. And so their forays into China and everything really didn't make, but they pulled back on that, focused down on understanding their source of power, which was a geographically specific scale economy. And then they've done interesting things like Uber Eats where they've tried to utilize the platform that they have to get other opportunities for the one side of their platform, the drivers. And so if I had to guess, I'd say it was a well-played war of attrition with modest scale economies. And is that attrition coming from a source of power or is that just like a broader, more strict?…

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