I think none of his claims about the cause are the real one. It's more like: Uber undercut taxis by using VC money to try to buy market share, which worked, but now they have to raise prices and less people want to use it (plus there was a demand shock caused by covid). See this with Airbnb too. They're no longer cheaper than a hotel in many cases and the experience has declined for a variety of reasons.

Let’s ignore the elephant in the room about canceling the founder CEO, and look at the brain drain claim instead. I could maybe buy that argument if they were facing technical/scaling challenges, but that’s not the case – was there also brain drain of the top marketing and sales talent in Silicon Valley?

I guess there was probably a big exodus of people after the IPO. All those employees were locked into their positions due to 90 day exercise windows. Once the stock was liquid they had no reason to stay anymore. Then there was the whole “Uber is an immoral company” shtick that gave employees yet another reason to leave (to go work for more upstanding companies like Facebook, I’m sure).

Yeah, it’s no surprise Uber is having trouble. Demoralize your work force, make enemies of regulators and drivers, experience a multi-year global pandemic... none of these things are auspicious signs on their own. Taken together, it’s hard to imagine that Uber hasn’t peaked.

Or, how about this: the projections have always been absurdely inflated and were effectively predicated on not having to follow any local rules, thus avoiding the time to market and legal overhead that traditional companies face when doing business.

You cannot ignore reality forever. What you can do, as Uber proved, is borrow against the future and playing the VC ponzi game until that game no longer works... and hopefully you've IPO'd so the real cost of your early profits is distributed over the foolish greater population.

seems like a seething former exec trying to dunk on current leadership. Reality is that the former leadership team sold a bunch of lies about self-driving cars creating massive profits that never had a chance at working. Valuation would have never been that high if it wasn't for the AI self-driving cars being shilled

I've never been convinced that you can make this model profitable if you expect to pay the drivers a living wage. People are price sensitive which limits how much you can charge. (This goes for other delivery services too like DoorDash.) If you charge the customer enough to cover all the expenses and pay a decent wage it results in a price high enough to cut into demand. At some point we may find the right marginal pricing model for all this but I have yet to see it.

Last time I tried to get an Uber, the app found me a ride then when he was on his way he cancelled the ride. I go on the app and get another ride, on the way he cancelled the ride...

I called a regular black cab and got picked up in 5 mins. I assume both got a more profitable / closer ride on the way to pick me up, so ditched me and got that one. That shit doesn't fly with black cabs here.

Uber Eats gained ground incredibly rapidly on other delivery options in my market, and then basically just as rapidly has lost it to DoorDash in the last couple years. It's very curious - did they just initially light money on fire for market share and now are suffering because DoorDash was willing to do the same to them? Or is there some deeper difference?

What a weird tweet. Firstly, the "goal" was set for two years after 2017, so how is this the 4th annual reminder? Secondly, according to a random google link [1], Uber market cap has exceeded $100B in the last year. Stocks go up and down, that's in their nature.

[1] https://companiesmarketcap.com/uber/marketcap/

I used to think that Uber eats meant that an Uber would be dispatched to pick up my food for me, which lined up with it being more expensive than other available options. This struck me as super wasteful and simultaneously dodgy, so I never used it initially, and have never had a reason to use it even after discovering it is actually a different model.

He mentions DoorDash. The service was launched in 2013. Back then I would have assumed that online food delivery already had dominant players and it would be hard for a startup to get significant traction.

How did DoorDash overcome that and become to the biggest food delivery service?

seems like it roughly did hit that goal earlier this year before receding down on delta fears

I'd give them a pass due to the pandemic. This was a force majeure event.

This isn't a technical goal. Why should anyone but Uber's investors care?