His list of challenges seems infinite.But it's the most basic difficulty that remains the most challenging: Showing that Uber is a real business.Uber has actually been given a great deal of credit for being an ingenious, disruptive company thanks to its capability to make it possible for on-demand ride hailing via its app. There is no evidence to support this idea.Instead, based on the restricted financial information the business has actually shared, coupled with some dripped reports, Uber appears to be just an enormously subsidized taxi service. In one widely mentioned analysis, riders were only paying 41 percent of the cost of a trip through 2015. Of course, Uber has acknowledged this to a degree, stating it
wishes to come in with low rates, dominate a market, and then gradually raise costs gradually. The issue is that it's unclear that Uber has been successfully able to do that anywhere. And with the resurgence of Lyft, it seems far from attaining a market dominance anywhere that would allow it to set prices.Above: Uptown Station: The downtown Oakland structure that Uber purchased in 2015 and now wishes to
sell.Image Credit: VentureBeat/Chris O'Brien Reports that Uber's bookings and incomes continued to increase in the 2nd quarter of this year brought some relief. Its losses decreased, though they remained huge, at $645 million for the quarter. With cash on hand of more than $6 billion, the company might run for a couple of years at that level without having to raise more money.But financiers are nervous to see some type of exit in the type of an IPO. It's unclear they're willing to wait 3 years. Including to the capture, Wall Street has actually made it significantly clear that it's not happy to back IPOs for big, money-losing startups that do not have a clear course toward becoming lucrative, sustainable businesses.Uber supporters appear to think that self-driving vehicles will deliver a wonderful repair to this mess. As soon as the company doesn't have to pay those annoying chauffeurs anymore, the financial resources will make a lot more sense. This is delusional thinking on a variety of levels.Let's presume that Uber gets away the legal cesspool surrounding
charges that its acquisition of Otto was actually a plan to take Google's autonomous technology. The fact is that self-driving automobiles on any kind of significant scale stay years far from truth. The constraints of the technology and policies will imply the implementation will continue to go slow. However looking years down the roadway, even Kalanick had acknowledged that at best, Uber would always be a hybrid of human and self-driving services. When Uber does release self-driving cars, it will produce a host of brand-new expenses for itself, like owning fleets of cars, and paying to preserve them, and spending for places to store them when not in use.Like its core company, there's no clear evidence that self-driving vehicles will shift the economics of Uber.There are most likely other areas that huge money draws that the brand-new CEO might desert reasonably quickly and focus on crucial markets that
could put Uber on a road to being lucrative. This might involve layoffs as workplaces close.After the bloodletting is done and the patient is stabilized, Khosrowshahi might start a determined expansion, market by market, to keep losses from
entering brand-new areas reasonably balanced versus earnings elsewhere. Presuming there are revenues to be had elsewhere.But the tamping down of ambition isn't likely to please everyone, or assist Uber justify an assessment that was based on it conquering the world tomorrow. Sluggish and simple is not the Silicon Valley way.Khosrowshahi is obviously the individual the board believes can master these challenges and bring order from the turmoil that is Uber. It's counting on him to restore one of the most greatly financed startups in Silicon Valley, and show that they were not fools who gave in to hubris and the hypnotic pledges of an entrepreneurial charlatan.They appear to be asking for more than a miracle. They might be requesting the impossible.
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