The biggest risk for Uber is actually AV technology working perfectly and Uber not being a part of it. Because if AV technology works perfectly and Uber's not a part of it, then you essentially have players who have a lower cost structure than us who can come in and compete with us and essentially make our service irrelevant.
The formula that I used was when the company is doing well, double down. When the company is doing not so well, double down. I think that's actually the right formula because the greatest risk for Uber was irrelevance. If you slow down, you get lapped.
The S-curve is a very well-known concept in technology investing, but what's less appreciated is that the most dangerous moment is often at the top of the S-curve, when a technology looks the most dominant and the most entrenched. That's precisely when the next S-curve is being born underneath it, and the incumbents are most blind to the threat.
The insight is that if AV technology works, then every player in the space needs Uber more than Uber needs them, because we bring the demand. We bring the customers. We bring the transaction. And I think we are going to be the storefront for autonomous mobility for the world.
The mistake most investors make is they think about technology investing as a static exercise — you find a great company, you understand its competitive position, you underwrite the earnings, and you hold it. But technology is defined by change, and so you need to have a framework for thinking about how industries evolve over time.
The other thing about platform transitions is that they reset competitive advantage. So the incumbents that have accumulated distribution and integration and switching costs — those advantages largely reset with platform transitions. That's what makes them so valuable for investors; new winners can emerge from what looks like chaos.
The big players, the OEMs, they didn't want to give up their customer relationship. And I think that was a mistake, because the customer relationship is actually a burden when you're going through this transition — you're on the hook for the whole experience. We were able to essentially be asset-light, take the best of breed from all of these networks, and essentially build a better product for consumers.
The big opportunity for us is to use AI to make every single driver a top-rated driver and make every single eater a top-rated eater, because we have data that no one else has. We have 150 million people who are using our platform on a monthly basis, and we understand exactly what they want.
I would describe AI is all chip no salsa and that is real insight like what is it you're going to do differently with your business what is it that's unique about your business most new businesses make no sense at the outset otherwise they would already exist.
Without a coherent industrial strategy covering energy, skills, investment, and R and D, we're effectively putting headwinds in front of our most productive exporters rather than giving them a competitive advantage.
If you can do it and then I can do it and then Tyler can do it and then and then anyone with access to a coding model can build it very quickly we're going to erode each other's markets and trade market cap very quickly
Getting a 2x over a decade is not what I think people were expecting from Uber under Travis's leadership. Uh, it and Lyft has fallen to just five billion. like he won the capital war and Dar has done a great job managing the business, but I feel like a lot of the success of Uber has been built on the foundation that Travis set up.
if one or two places can change their relative importance in technology within such a short time span, you know, five to seven years, and it's not just China, you know Canada, for instance, the outsize role that it has played in AI research. You know, much of the AI boom that we see today comes from just a couple of major advancements in AI that happened, for instance, alexnet, which was this seismic event in neural networks.
But if TSMC is bottlenecked and TSMC is sort of riskoff and they're not going to be, you know, guiding to like insane capex numbers while every American hyperscaler is, well, that creates an opportunity for Samsung.
if one or two places can change their relative importance in technology within such a short time span, you know, five to seven years, and it's not just China, you know Canada, for instance, the outsize role that it has played in AI research.
I don't want to compete with someone in our audience that is gets to spend 100% of their time on something when we can only spend like 10% of their time on it. Like they're going to smoke us.
It's basically impossible to sum up Yahoo's story over the last 25 years, but the short version is that once upon a time, Yahoo paid Google to run the search box on its website, and everything immediately went sideways.
One of the things John talks about is cultivating the best seat in your industry – the seat with the best perspective, the most information, the best systems.
3mo ago
Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.
