Uber CEO calls business 'sustainable' amid huge losses

Realistically, what else could we have expected him to say?<p>&quot;Nope, the company is pretty much fucked. I&#x27;m out of here as soon as I negotiate a large enough golden parachute.&quot;

Its interesting seeing this current trend of &quot;Unicorns&quot; (WeWork, Uber &amp; Lyft) relentlessly pushed to quickly to grow and expand that they&#x27;re getting pushed far past the bounds of a sustainable business.<p>Is this VC&#x2F;Industry pressure that needs to be dialed back?

Uber <i>could</i> easily make a profit.<p>They could double their fares, and fire 90% of their engineers, and for a quarter or two, they&#x27;d make insane profits before the public flocked to other platforms and a lack of product innovation killed them.<p>Think AOL. They still have a lot of dialup customers, and still make profit from them.

Once the VC money dries up, I think it&#x27;s likely that drivers and passengers will still want an app to facilitate the transaction. I&#x27;ve seen it suggested before that such an app could allow both parties to negotiate the rate between them.<p>Does such an app already exist? If so, why isn&#x27;t it more popular? If not, why not?

Imagine the guy up there, screaming &quot;This is hopeless, there&#x27;s no way we are EVER going to make any money!!&quot;<p>So yeah, he&#x27;s supposed to say that. It&#x27;s as if he didn&#x27;t say anything.

How? Like, surely their servers don&#x27;t cost $5B every 3 months, right? Where is this money going?

Dara Khosrowshahi right now: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cdn.vox-cdn.com&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;chorus_image&#x2F;image&#x2F;49493993&#x2F;this-is-fine.0.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;cdn.vox-cdn.com&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;chorus_image&#x2F;image&#x2F;49493993&#x2F;...</a>

The Uber CEO&#x27;s business is &#x27;sustainable&#x27;.<p>The Uber investors and drivers? Not so much.

otherwise he would have resigned. So he chose to keep going, until....

Maybe, just maybe, Uber could become employee owned.

Some will blame the upcoming recession on trump. It’ll actually be caused by another Silicon Valley bubble. They’ve run out of cheap money and now the hobby investors are refusing to take the bait.

Sure, Uber will be sustainable, but only when the price of each ride increases to the point where Taxis are price competitive again. At which point, why would people use an Uber, when they can use a taxi at the same price?<p>There are benefits to Ubers, but 90% of people I know only use them because they are cheaper than a taxi.