Dan Primack: belief

Transcript context

…So, let’s talk about what we don’t learn in this document. When we were talking about doing this episode, I’m my head I’m like, “Okay, I want to tell people what the macro story is here,” and then the question in my mind was, is this actually a good business at steady state if we were to stop expanding? I’m scrolling and scrolling hundreds of pages. You can’t actually ascertain, “Hey, of the cohort of your buildings that are at scale, what are the gross margins? What are the unit economics?” They keep saying, “We have really strong unit economics,” and then the only financials they give are these massively blended ones, that is, a very, very basic P&L that shows the business, including all of the expansion. It’s really difficult to tease out what losses are from marketing versus what losses are actually incurred at maturity. They have this silly graph that has no Y axis with this curve that basically show, “Hey the buildings are break-even after six months,” but not much more detail than that. No, and then you would have thought by the time they file this one, learned a lesson from Uber, which had a similar problem. Look. Every single company I think I ever talked to tells me that even though they’re losing a lot of money, their unit economics are fantastic. I waited for someone to say, “Well, you know economics are kind of mediocre.” No. You know economics are always great. But you’re right and that was an issue with Uber. They don’t tell investors [...] there.…

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