Welcome to another weekend bonus episode of the Tech Mem Ride Home.

I'm Brian McCullough.

So I knew that Uber was gonna go public this this week and it occurred to me that since this

podcast has started, my default position has been Uber.

Super cool company, but a lot of people have a lot of doubts about Uber and I

realized I had never explained that or gone into detail about why people tend to

feel that way unlike how we've done with other things.

So I reached out to Shiro Ovide at Bloomberg, not to talk trash about Uber, but to, let's just say, get skeptic's take about Uber's business model which is of

course the ride hailing business model generally which is also the sharing economy business model in a way so in that vein we also talk a bit about

we work which people are also skeptical of please enjoy

essentially if if it's at all possible to summarize this,

what would the skeptics take on Uber's business model be?

Because it's not just that they're losing money. There's a whole ton of

unicorns that are going public losing money. Why are people skeptical of

Uber from a very fundamental level that almost maybe they could never ever make money?

Yeah, fair enough. So it's not just that Uber is losing money.

It's that it's losing a lot of money, right? So Uber's operating loss last year,

which is basically the net income it reports minus their taxes and other stuff was $3 billion and that is the biggest

loss for a company right before it goes public ever. So you know the scale of Boopers losses are huge and to be

fair right this is also a big company it's 10 years old it has 11 billion dollars

plus of revenue. It is big, but it is in this unusual position where again, it's 10 years old, it's very big, it still loses money, and if you look just kind of at the economics of the business that it outlines to investors,

I mean you could certainly make an argument that this is going to be a great business at some point, but you could certainly make the argument that a demand for Uber's product doesn't exist unless it'sizes the heck out of it either pays drivers

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