So Uber put out its first earnings report as a public company today, and the number that jumped out at everybody was the net loss: just over a billion dollars for the quarter. One billion. In three months. I saw it flash across my Twitter timeline around 4:15 this afternoon and just sat there for a second, coffee going cold, thinking about how weird it is that a company can lose that much money and still be worth tens of billions on paper.
Revenue was actually up, something like 20% year over year, but growth is slowing down from the pace it used to have, and that's apparently the thing spooking people more than the loss itself. The stock's already down a good chunk from where it priced on IPO day back on May 9th, forty-five bucks, and it wasn't exactly soaring before this. Three weeks a public company and already the "is this thing overvalued" chorus is in full swing.
Here's the part that actually got me though, not the spreadsheet stuff. I've been keeping this blog since November 2011, and Uber launched in San Francisco back in 2010 and hit a bunch of other cities right around when I started writing here. I remember the first time I used it, maybe early 2012, it was still just the black car service, no UberX yet, and it cost something like thirty dollars to go four miles across town because that's what a private town car costs. It felt insane and luxurious and a little bit like cheating some system nobody had figured out how to regulate yet. My friend who worked in finance paid for it because I sure wasn't going to.
Now it's this sprawling, loss-making, thirteen-billion-dollar-a-year-in-bookings machine that still can't turn a profit, and somehow that same company is what "cheating the system" grew into. Not a knock exactly, just strange to watch something go from a novelty app three friends and I argued about splitting the cost on, to a publicly traded thing with quarterly earnings calls that move markets. It's the same arc as a lot of stuff I've written about on here over eight years, really, the thing that starts out feeling like a fun hack and ends up being infrastructure everyone complains about and nobody can quite quit.
And can we talk about surge pricing for a second, because this is my actual complaint and I'm allowed one. A company loses a billion dollars a quarter and still charges me 2.9x on a Tuesday night in the rain when I'm trying to get four blocks because the trains are down. I get the economics of it, more demand than drivers, sure. But it's hard to feel bad for the company's bottom line when my personal bottom line just took a $22 hit for what should've been an $8 ride. Somewhere in there the math stopped making sense to me as a rider even if it still makes sense on a whiteboard in a boardroom.
I don't think Uber's going anywhere, to be clear. There's too much infrastructure built around it now, too many people whose entire income depends on the app staying alive, my downstairs neighbor included, he drives four nights a week around his day job. But there's something almost funny about a decade-old idea, get in a stranger's car and pay them through your phone, still not having figured out how to make money doing it at scale. Amazon took years to turn a profit too and everyone forgets that now. Maybe this is just what it looks like in year one of being public, all the losses out in the open where everyone can see them instead of buried in a private cap table nobody outside the company gets to look at.
Anyway. Rain's stopped, I'm walking home instead, and I'm not paying surge prices to prove a point to a company that already knows I will eventually, on some worse night, when it's actually pouring and I'm carrying groceries.