Speaker unverified: evaluation

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…Actually, can we finish Uber and talk about that third question for Uber? Because that sort of feels like for Uber and Lyft, that's where the rubber hits the road on how valuable are they? I think a very challenging characteristic of platforms overall is you don't own your customers. Your customers choose to patronize your platform and they can choose to do the same with another platform. This is a scenario that we call multihoming, and essentially, what we're saying is that a lot of the differential value a platform can generate is a result of the differential scale they have with their participants. Multihoming is what arbitrage out all of that differential value that platforms don't make profits out of their operations. The result of that is you're creating so much value, but all of that gets arbitrage and customers get it but not the owner of the platform itself. In the case of ride-sharing business particularly, the thing you really want to ask yourself is what is preventing my customers from also accessing the other platform that's competing with me? Your customers refer to both your riders and your drivers. It doesn't matter if my platform right now is larger if technically, both groups of my customers can frictionlessly multihome on the other platform. If you always open two apps and look for whichever one that happens to have that ride that's closest to you and always have open two apps to see whichever one gives me the closest rider that I can get matched with, then relative scale does not matter because you're contributing to the same pool of density in your local area. Makes total sense.…

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