The thing that's so interesting about private markets is that the fundamental informational advantage is not that you have better data — it's that you have access to data at all. In public markets, everyone has the same 10-K. In private markets, whether you get the information memo is itself a function of your network and reputation.
The real magic of Uber is that we have the demand side — hundreds of millions of people who want to go somewhere or get something — and we have the supply side — tens of millions of drivers and couriers. And if you can bring autonomous vehicles into that network, they just become another form of supply. They don't replace the network; they extend it.
The other thing that's really important in this world is that the flywheels tend to be self-reinforcing in a way that creates winner-take-most dynamics. The best models attract the most users, which generates the most data, which trains the best next models. And so you end up with a situation where the leaders tend to pull away from the pack over time rather than revert to the mean.
The best technology companies, they don't think product first. They think about what problem they're solving for whom, and they think about the network. If you solve a problem for a network of people, then the more people who have that problem and join your network, the more powerful your solution becomes.
