Neither, and New: Lessons from Uber and Vision Fund

I think Uber missed the opportunity to be a more full fledged wallet (which is what Grab started a few years ago). They have a &quot;cash&quot; product now where you can load money, but it&#x27;s too little too late IMO, and the incentive to load money vs use your cc is small (e.g. tiny discount).<p>Starbucks is the obvious model here...IIRC they have one of the most success mobile payment apps in the country, even competing with Apple Pay despite being relevant to them alone. They have something like $1.6 billion in balances, which they can monetize (free loan + interest).

What happens if people start ordering taxis from within Google Maps? And what if Google Maps adds more taxi services? What if Android starts integrating the function of ordering taxis that way? What would happen to Uber&#x27;s value then?<p>You can&#x27;t &quot;own&quot; a market unless you also entirely own the way people access that market.

When I was in Singapore I used the &quot;grab&quot; app, which is super popular and has both regular taxis and uber-like drivers (and food and other stuff).<p>What&#x27;s different about Singapore and grab? Seems like a good model to me but it must involve heavy regulation to work.

Another great post. Does anyone know what software this blog is published with that creates the hypertext bubble where the content can be extended in a little pop up?

The whole beginning of the article is based on the assumption that Uber&#x27;s story is played out. I don&#x27;t think we can call that one yet, IMHO the market hasn&#x27;t discovered what is Uber WORTH just yet.

This seems to address the larger &quot;what is a tech company&quot; question. Laying tech over the top of what are traditional businesses doesn&#x27;t seem to result in what we might expect as a tech company.

He’s forgetting that Uber’s goal is to be a driverless platform in which case they’d capture significant portions of the drivers margin. Now a software company.<p>On Vision Fund, he seems to think that there is only one viable VC model. I happen to disagree. Warren Buffet made a lot of money investing in boring companies, and now technology is spilling into ancient markets to transform them. Seems like those companies could be just as big if not sufficiently bigger than the incumbent.

This is a great article but I doubt many people will actually make it to the second half...where everything is tied together.

Uber is a taxi company until it can show meaningful revenue from other business models on its platform.

&gt; I am not saying that the category isn’t viable, and technology truly makes these companies different than the incumbents in their space, but they are not necessarily tech companies either.<p>&gt; Neither, and new.