Uber Stock Quotes

Bizarre and Surprising Insights—Consumer Behavior Insight Organization Suggested Explanation7 Guys literally drool over sports cars. Male college student subjects produce measurably more saliva when presented with images of sports cars or money. Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management Consumer impulses are physiological cousins of hunger. If you buy diapers, you are more likely to also buy beer. A pharmacy chain found this across 90 days of evening shopping across dozens of outlets (urban myth to some, but based on reported results). Osco Drug Daddy needs a beer. Dolls and candy bars. Sixty percent of customers who buy a Barbie doll buy one of three types of candy bars. Walmart Kids come along for errands. Pop-Tarts before a hurricane. Prehurricane, Strawberry Pop-Tart sales increased about sevenfold. Walmart In preparation before an act of nature, people stock up on comfort or nonperishable foods. Staplers reveal hires. The purchase of a stapler often accompanies the purchase of paper, waste baskets, scissors, paper clips, folders, and so on. A large retailer Stapler purchases are often a part of a complete office kit for a new employee. Higher crime, more Uber rides. In San Francisco, the areas with the most prostitution, alcohol, theft, and burglary are most positively correlated with Uber trips. Uber “We hypothesized that crime should be a proxy for nonresidential population.…Uber riders are not causing more crime. Right, guys?” Mac users book more expensive hotels. Orbitz users on an Apple Mac spend up to 30 percent more than Windows users when booking a hotel reservation. Orbitz applies this insight, altering displayed options according to your operating system. Orbitz Macs are often more expensive than Windows computers, so Mac users may on average have greater financial resources. Your inclination to buy varies by time of day. For retail websites, the peak is 8:00 PM; for dating, late at night; for finance, around 1:00 PM; for travel, just after 10:00 AM. This is not the amount of website traffic, but the propensity to buy of those who are already on the website. Survey of websites The impetus to complete certain kinds of transactions is higher during certain times of day. Your e-mail address reveals your level of commitment. Customers who register for a free account with an Earthlink.com e-mail address are almost five times more likely to convert to a paid, premium-level membership than those with a Hotmail.com e-mail address. An online dating website Disclosing permanent or primary e-mail accounts reveals a longer-term intention. Banner ads affect you more than you think. Although you may feel you've learned to ignore them, people who see a merchant's banner ad are 61 percent more likely to subsequently perform a related search, and this drives a 249 percent increase in clicks on the merchant's paid textual ads in the search results. Yahoo! Advertising exerts a subconscious effect. Companies win by not prompting customers to think. Contacting actively engaged customers can backfire—direct mailing financial service customers who have already opened several accounts decreases the chances they will open more accounts (more details in Chapter 7).

SoftBank, however, had invested more than $10 billion into WeWork and gotten nothing in return. The Vision Fund was down nearly $2 billion in the most recent quarter, during which Uber’s stock had slipped. SoftBank shares were down 10 percent since Wingspan’s release. Both WeWork and SoftBank executives were coming to grips with the realization that its IPO might be priced at a level far below its $47 billion valuation. While SoftBank’s preferred shares gave it some protection—it could get its money out before the company’s employees—a valuation below what SoftBank paid for its shares would mean that the firm’s investment was underwater, much as

STRUCTURAL CHANGE: NETWORK EFFECTS TURN FIRMS INSIDE OUT As we’ve seen, in the industrial era, giant companies relied on supply-side economies of scale. By contrast, most Internet era giants rely on demand-side economies of scale. Firms such as Airbnb, Uber, Dropbox, Threadless, Upwork, Google, and Facebook are not valuable because of their cost structures: the capital they employ, the machinery they run, or the human resources they command. They are valuable because of the communities that participate in their platforms. The reason Instagram sold for $1 billion is not its thirteen employees; the reason WhatsApp sold for $19 billion wasn’t its fifty employees. The reasons were the same: the network effects both organizations had created. Standard accounting practices might not factor the value of communities into the value of a firm, but stock markets do.

Here, I must say that some terminology in the language of finance is slightly misleading. Uber’s “loss” largely means heavy investments in other businesses and stock-based compensation stemming from the company's initial public offering. Unsurprisingly, Travis Kalanick, Uber’s co-founder, sold nearly $1 billion in company shares the moment Uber’s IPO lockup period (read: the timeframe when you can’t sell your shares) was over. Duh. When a company files for an IPO instead of bankruptcy, the IPO should be renamed a bailout—because modern business solutions require modern business jargon. #sarcasm