Why I don't believe in Uber's Success

I live in Singapore and Uber is a little cheaper than the excellent cab services which operated here even before Uber. There is a big competitor to Uber here called Grab. I switched to Uber because their service is good, drivers are gracious and cars are nice and they give me good offers. Last year I took 300 Uber rides, never once taking the usual Comfort Delgro Cab because their drivers suck. If prices were the same, I would pick an Uber over the traditional cab over 90% of the time due to nicer drivers and service consistency across geographies. The rest of the 10% is when I urgently just need to hail a cab.

I don't think you meant to say that Uber won't be a success. You probably meant that you feel it's over valued. Uber is a success. People love it. They pay surge prices for it. I do it all the time. It MAY be over valued but it is already a success. wake up.

As far as an investor in Uber is concerned success means valuation going up; failure means valuation going down.

In my opinion, giving large scale subsidies to customers seems like a business anti-pattern, and is surely gonna kill a lot of startups in near future.

I have been sold to the Idea that Investors are killing any Internet "Business" by advising Founders against simple & straight-forward business plans. They constantly ask founders not to monetize earlier and wait until founders have no choice but to trash out the company/app to advertisers. The End Result is that founders get more and more scared of asking their customers for money.

If It was upto me, I would take 1000 paying customers over 100k free customers any day. Also this would mean free customers(subsidized customers in Uber's case) not hogging company's valueable resources and company could better serve lower number of paying customers.

Edit: I don't really know how to spell "customer".

He addresses that notion:

>In this regard Uber is pretty different from other fast growing startups.

>Economies of scale won’t help, since Uber has a high fixed cost per unit associated with their service - the drivers - that won’t become significantly cheaper as the service grows.

>Network effects are mostly irrelevant for Uber’s business. Yes, they need a large supply of drivers to make the service viable, but this isn’t an advantage of Uber compared to regular cabs which have sufficient availability in most cities. I also don’t see a potential network effect in Uber’s global availability. Most users take rides in their home city and they would happily switch to a local competitor with lower prices, even if that means they would need to use a different service when they are traveling.

Also, Tesla will continue to generate losses until they hit full scale and stop growing, at which point they will have the economies of scale that they need to deliver profits. Amazon's "profits" or "losses" are miniscule in comparison to revenue, because they are reinvesting so much. Uber has huge losses because they are taking a loss on each ride; which would be fine if they would get something out of that growth. Amazon gets better distribution, better deals with manufacturers, and other economies of scale. What efficiency gains does Uber get as it grows? Uber pool? Is that going to be a big profit source in the future?