Uber in crisis

Those private equity guys who banded together to pressure him to quit? They paid at a valuation of as much of $68 billion to be proud owners of Uber. ... Uber is more valuable than something like 75 percent of the Fortune 500, or at least it was fairly recently.

It's a company that lost $2.8 billion last year and another $708 million in the first quarter of this year.

But hey, the cost of borrowing has been made endlessly cheap, so who cares where capital gets allocated?

 

Uber IS going to add in-app tipping so there's that

 

Whatever happened, it had to have been messy. Bill Gurley stepped down from Uber's board late yesterday.

I don't think this was that that complicated. Those VCs know they are sitting on something sinking in value; even the ones who got in at an early valuation. Kalanick wasn't helping that. As much as Kalanick was a PR liability to their investment, the bigger sin was that he delayed an IPO, because the only reason many of those investors ever forked over money was to lock in the gains of their early investments through an IPO. That window was closing quickly, and Kalanick still being around was going to hurt it. I think they are going to look back and wish they had gotten their IPO MUCH sooner.

 

Sheryl Sandberg's name is in the mix, too. She is supposedly the preferred choice of the board, and she is a good friend of Ariana Huffington, who is the board member pushing hard for a female.

Mayer could actually be a good thing for the investors in that company. They are sitting on a still overvalued asset that needed to go public a year and a half ago for them to cash in on their pay day. Mayer can take the company public and try to salvage what is left in there for them. The one thing they know about her is that she will operate with no doubt that that is what she was hired to do.