Uber is going to crash in the near future

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Investors, especially private equity, value one thing above all else: the ability to scale. If you show them a market deficiency and say "I can turn 500k into 1m in just two years" your average private equity guy will look at it, see if he can replicate it all over, and if not ignore it. Even if it's completely turn key they'll say "Listen, your little po dunk operation will double my money but I'm looking at getting 50x in just a few years." Silicon valley effectively changed the game on that. Anything that's software instantly scales to whatever you need as long as it doesn't involve real people or real management.

The main issue with this is when Silicon Valley tries to enter the realm of the real.

Transportation, medicine, even HR paperwork.
I spent half a UBER AMA thread mocking them for claiming that an app changelog is not a bridge too far. Every developer in the thread instantly dog piled pointing out that entire OSes have change logs and a three screen app should know what the fuck changed. This small peak into Uber's lack of management gets even more intense. Supposedly entire large projects are being duplicated and there's large amounts of coders doing each others work because no one knows what anyone is doing. This is without even getting into the toxic aspects of of their corporate culture irt racism/sexism.

There's a common piece of hubris in regards to market momentum. As the idea goes, the more money tossed at something, the less likely it is to fail because of internal momentum. Put another way, Rich people don't lose money. This what we're seeing though and what we will see.

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Normally when a silicon valley company fails to demonstrate profitability, one of it's larger groups of private equity will just use another company to buy it. A great example is youtube which scaled wildly but even at scale couldn't turn a great profit because it's insanely expensive to run. Many of the early VCs with it however knew that they had something with marketing power and sold it to another firm they owned a ton of stock in, google. Not only did they get over a billion for it's sale, but they also curbed the costs the thing would have inevitably had when it died on the vine a year later because of their limitations.
Why is that important though?

The reason it's important is there's no bail out game ready for if Uber or similarly hyper oversized VCs go out. There's no Apple or Google that will pay out the 70b investors expect back, hell even a loss for fifty cents on the dollar will be too much for someone to pay as Uber fails. Some competitor will have automated trucking and automated driving and Uber's value will sink like a rock.

This is not because Uber failed from the start. This is not because there's even a flaw in their revenue, it's literally just because the investment class got over chubbed on it and inflated it's value so astronomically that it simply implodes on itself like a dying star.

Uber is not alone in this. The rate of billion dollar unicorns is falling like a rock. VCs are starting to hold money back. The ultimate irony is the Titanic has already been gashed along the side and it's because of the ridiculous valuations in the 2012-2016 block.

>>2002285
This guy seems to know what he's talking about.
>>2002282
How can I short small businesses?

In general, if I want to short businesses that I'm sure will fail, is there a way to make money on that?

Bump. This is actually an interesting thread.

>>2002288
Awesome.

Are you giving us advice to short giant tech companies?

What role specifically do we play in this and how can we make money from it? Or are you just here to post that Uber will fail?

I've read that buying Medallion, a company that does taxi medallion loans, is a roundabout way to short Uber.

Its management is kind of shady though.

>>2002282
I completely agree. I like to think of venture capitalists as professional pyramid schemers. Basically the end goal is to pass it on to the next "sucker" through an ipo or additional rounds of funding. This has seemingly been the norm for some time now look at elon musk companies, snap inc, etc

>>2002379
ik non crypto

OP, except shorting a technology startup index fund or something, is there anything we could actually do about this?

>>2002282
Unfortunately cant short since not had their IPO yet

You forgot to note that Lyft is way better anyways