The Uber - Didi Chuxing Merger with Brad Stone, author of The Upstarts & The Everything Store | Acquired Podcast

Intel + MobileyeThis is the context for Intel’s acquisition. First off, yes, it is ridiculously expensive. The purchase price of $14.71 billion (once you back out Mobileye’s cash-on-hand) equates to an EBITDA multiple of 118; it helps that Intel is paying with overseas cash, which the company hasn’t paid taxes on. And second, I’ve long argued that ... See more

The ambition to be global from day one was very rare before Uber. This ambition requires a blitz-scaling mentality

For example, GoTo Group, parent company of the ride-sharing service Gojek, now powers more than 2 percent of Indonesia’s over $1 trillion GDP, creating millions of jobs and bringing nearly 2 billion annual transactions into the taxable formal economy. This gives Gojek a massive base of public support. Second, these companies won’t remain companies ... See more

SoftBank brashly poured billions of dollars into “tech-enabled businesses” with large CapEx requirements, like WeWork and a dog walking company, Wag, and pushed them to grow fast. That’s how we found ourselves in the situation we did at Breather, faced with a competitor that pursued growth to the exclusion of unit economics.

After a couple of years of explosive growth and gladiatorial competition, the manic production of new O2O models cooled off. Many overnight O2O unicorns died once the subsidy-fueled growth ended. But the innovators and gladiators who survived—like Wang Xing’s Meituan Dianping—multiplied their already billion-dollar valuations by fundamentally resha

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