Betting The Over/Under On Uber

Betting The Over/Under On Uber

I'm a pretty big believer in bad behavior being a future predictor of additional bad behavior, and when it comes to entrepreneurial endeavors, I find I'm often right.

Uber has certainly been guilty of bad behavior, and doesn't seem to care much.

Lots of the current waves of disruptive innovation are fueled by the optimism and excessive liquidity of the markets. It isn't clear whether they will be sustainable at all, much less in ways that will consistently benefit laborers or consumers.

"When I asked Marco why he was so sure that Juno would still be around, he said, half jokingly, that he had acquired all the wisdom he needed by reading “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” by Douglas Adams. “Oh, my God,” he said. “It’s the Bible. Everything is there.”

In the novel, the main character reflects at one point that the earth was pretty much ruined by all the cars. His name is Arthur Dent. One of his non-terrestrial sidekicks calls himself Ford Prefect, having concluded, after visiting earth, that cars were the planet’s dominant life form. But Adams’s unflattering view of automotive transport didn’t seem to be what Marco had in mind.

I asked Marco to share what he had learned from the book, and he hesitated. “Now you’re putting me on the spot,” he said. After thinking for a few seconds, he went on, “It claims that the math never works in a restaurant, which explains why the bill never adds up.” He wasn’t sure if that was still true, because, he said, he stopped looking at restaurant checks a long time ago—preemptively handing your credit card to the server saves the five minutes it takes to get the bill, look at it, and send it back with the payment.

“It was a very popular book, especially when I was growing up, among geeks in the eighties and nineties,” Marco went on. “You have to ask the founders of Snapchat.”

This was an amusing read, as well:
http://seekingalpha.com/article/4014396-uber-driver-revolt-means-payments

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/juno-takes-on-uber

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