It is being played like a winner-takes-it-all right now (it may or may not be such a market). So it is a game of being the one that is left standing, once the others fall off. In this kind of game, speeding more is done as a strategy to increase the chances of other competitors running out of cash or otherwise hitting a wall. Sustainability is the opposite of the goal being pursued... Whether one reaches "AGI" is not considered important either, as long as one can starve out most competitors.
And for the newcomers, the scale needs to be bigger than what the incumbents (Google and Microsoft) have as discretionary spending - which is at least a few billion per year. Because at that rate, those companies can sustain it forever and would be default winners. So I think yearly expenditure is going to be 20B year++
It's the Uber business plan - losing money until the competition loses more and goes out of business. So far Lyft seems to be doing okay, which proves the business plan doesn't really work.
Uber market cap makes places it in the top100 in the world, whereas Lyft is around 1/25th of Uber in market cap, and not even top1000. I would consider that a success...
That is basically as much winner-takes-it-all one can realistically get in a global market. Cases where the top is just 5x the runner up would still be very winner oriented.
Because the competition hasn't gone out of business (at least outside the US where tons of other ride hailing apps are available in most major locales) and because 16 (SIXTEEN!!!) years after founding Uber is still net profit negative: over its lifetime it has lost more money than it made.
The only people that really benefited from Uber are:
2. if you add Uber's financial numbers since creation, the crazy amount of VC that was invested Uber would have provided better returns by investing it in the S&P 500.
3. Uber will settle in as a boring, profitable company that's going to be a side note in both the history of tech and also of transportation and will primarily be remembered for eroding worker rights.
So the much, much riskier Uber investment has barely matched a passive S&P 500 investment over the same time frame. And the business itself has lost money, more money was put into it than has been gotten back so far.
I'm not even sure why I'm in this conversation as it seems ideological. I bring up facts and you bring up... vibes?
I was replying to this: "So far Lyft seems to be doing okay, which proves the business plan doesn't really work." when I said Uber is profitable
Your retort to that was S&P grew more than Uber, which is a nonsensical argument. Our standard for what is a good business is if it grows faster than S&P after going public?
Edit: I dug up some research related to this, most companies do worse than S&P after becoming public. What's your point then?
I'm not sure many investors are investing their own money. They are investing other people's money, maybe owned by shareholders of large companies in turn owned by our pension funds.
The kind of thing that happens is Joe Bloggs runs the Fidelity Hot Tech fund, up 50% over the last three years. Then when it crashes that's closed and Joe is switched to the Fidelity Safe Income fund with no down years for the last five years.
And for the newcomers, the scale needs to be bigger than what the incumbents (Google and Microsoft) have as discretionary spending - which is at least a few billion per year. Because at that rate, those companies can sustain it forever and would be default winners. So I think yearly expenditure is going to be 20B year++