Uber’s Losses Widen as SoftBank Launches Bid to Buy Shares

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-11-29/uber-s-th...

At this point, two things are clear to me:

1) Uber will IPO, there's just oo much money and influence behind it to stop that.

2) I'd be really worried if I was an employee about my options and also about my job.

Employee's now ahve two large worries hanging over their heads.....

What about my job and what about my options...

With Uber preparing for an IPO, they'll od what most companies do, clean up their balance sheet. And with the losses piling up they'll start cutting costs, which as for most tech companies starts with employee's.

And now I don't htink anyone believes that they'll IPO at anywhere close to the 60+ Billion valuation they had a year ago.

Infact SNAP looks like a great model to study for what an Uber IPO might look like, lots of good first day to week action with price rises but then a steady stream of down days leading up to their first quarter report which will almost certainly show them loosing money and then much larger short interest leading up to a huge lock up expiry of their employee's options.

Given how much money institutional investors put into the company, and the late stage at when they did and given how much they valued the company at, I'd be very afraid if I was an option holding employee at just how many shares are going to flood the market before I get to try and redeem my own options.

And to top it all off, the biggest thing driving their valuation recently, self driving cars, appears to be in serious jeopardy, can anyone make a credible case of Uber having self driving fleet in the next 5 years?

EDIT to those of you who i confused with layoffs. No one is saying that Uber needs to be profitable when they go public, but their burn rate had better be decreasing. T

hey don't need to fire 3 billion dollars worth of salary, no one would think that's a wise move, but they had better show they are moving towards profitability, and the easiest way to show this is a string of quarter where their quarterly loss is decreasing and the easiest way to do that is to cut costs and the largest cost is people.

edit: runway to IPO I meant

2) They're worried the value of their options will drop out before they have the option to exercise them.

Absent cost-cutting, that implies a 9 to 12 month runway. Even if SoftBank injects $1bn, that could only mean a few months’ runway. A large fine in the Waymo case [2] could literally bankrupt them.

[1] https://venturebeat.com/2017/08/23/uber-is-still-burning-cas...

[2] https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/11/29/business/waymo-uber-tr...