Ben Gilbert: prediction

Transcript context

…Yeah. To me, the most interesting takeaway from doing all this research and thinking about it is that this whole era we're in now of all these new sources of capital, late stage sources of capital coming into the private venture back startup market, it was opened up really by Uber and by everything we're talking about here. It had been happening slowly before then, but this opens the floodgates. It opened the floodgates because peer to peer ride sharing launched. It changed the economics, and Uber now needed to raise all this money. It's just so interesting that the narrative has been these sources of capital came in because they couldn't find growth in the public markets. That's absolutely true. It's 100% true. That is why all these other alternative sources of capital are now, have been over the last decade, interested in investing in private venture-backed startups. But it wasn't like Uber saw this and was like, oh, great source of capital, I'm going to do that instead of going public. They had to, they couldn't go public. They needed all this money to fight these wars. That trend is now extended to plenty of companies, Airbnb being a great example. They also fought a war, which we will cover when we cover them, but it was a much more contained war that they definitively won. They didn't have the same dynamics. With Uber for a long time, until very recently, where Uber cut these deals to merge or take large owners to ship stakes in some of their competitors internationally instead of competing, the thought was, oh, my God, the global ride sharing market is one of the biggest markets in history. It is a single market, it's going to be a winner take all, and it is worth just go go go, put as much money into this company as you can, because they're going to take it all. From there, we will get to do all interesting things and margin expansion over time and whatever else. It turned out that that wasn't true. It's not actually a global market. It's global market, but it's not a global network effect.…

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