I don’t think we need to jump to “these dummies can’t conceive of a world outside of VC”…
Uber already took a huge amount of VC funding, so mid-size strategies won’t work. Investors would rather risk the whole company on a 1% chance of becoming Google or Home Depot than take a 50% chance of becoming Applebees. Even though Applebees is presumably a nice, profitable business, those kind of numbers are not useful for the portfolio position they have Uber in.
That’s just the reality for the folks running Uber today. If they try to turn it into a mid-sized business, the board will fire them.
If I read the discussion charitably, someone up-thread wanted to shift the conversation to “what should’ve Uber done in 2012?” while their responders think they’re talking about “What can Uber do at this point?”
I don’t think you need to act like we’re incapable of thinking about building businesses smaller than Google.
Uber already took a huge amount of VC funding, so mid-size strategies won’t work. Investors would rather risk the whole company on a 1% chance of becoming Google or Home Depot than take a 50% chance of becoming Applebees. Even though Applebees is presumably a nice, profitable business, those kind of numbers are not useful for the portfolio position they have Uber in.
That’s just the reality for the folks running Uber today. If they try to turn it into a mid-sized business, the board will fire them.
If I read the discussion charitably, someone up-thread wanted to shift the conversation to “what should’ve Uber done in 2012?” while their responders think they’re talking about “What can Uber do at this point?”
I don’t think you need to act like we’re incapable of thinking about building businesses smaller than Google.