He's right. You can't double count the revenue of your partners. That would be like eBay posting revenue of $300 billion. Or the NYSE posting revenue as all trades executed rather than their commission.
Lyft is still under $200 million and is raising at 25x revenue or so.
I think it gets worse before it gets better. Early generation self driving cars will move slower than human piloted cars, who take greater safety risks in the name of speed.
Anyone who has hired contractors knows where the line is. The damning part is the drivers have Uber provided iPhones in their cars. You have to provide your own equipment to be a contractor.
Private sector wages are quite high in places like San Francisco. Large successful corporations are great at incentivizing would-be startup owners into staying. Large companies are making money, the employees are creating value, and they're realizing some of the value as personal wealth.
People launch businesses when they have no better opportunity in front of them. In a rising economy with a record stock market, even the most capable people are finding significant upside within the companies they're employed by.
Institutionals and investment banks are higher up the chain. Accredited investors serve as front-line angels that fund would-be entrepreneurs, and then the aforementioned parties provide them with liquidity (distribution and marketing of the company's other shares to more sophisticated investors).
Corporate savings are high across a broad basket of companies like the S&P500 because the earnings of multinationals are parked in Luxembourg, avoiding US taxes. We've all read about the Double Dutch and other IP licensing schemes that avoid taxes for Google, Apple and others. I personally feel these funds are waiting for a US corporate income tax holiday, perhaps under the guise of creating new jobs and investment domestically. The stock price of companies like Apple has their cash balance as "money good", meaning the market doesn't believe they'll pay tax on the $150 billion parked overseas.
Sam's zero interest rate point is the most salient to the startup world. It forces accredited investors to chase asset classes like technology startups for yield. You also see it in the midwest in oil, gas and other natural resource drilling/mining. These are long term 10 year investments for these investors to park their cash.
Twitter is probably the best technology company that has ever helped this community. They built bootstrap to help start of all your companies, and open sourced Mesos for when you get big. If rvm was saveable they would have not rewrote that mono app into services. A tuned JVM is a great compromise of performance and development flexibility.
Validating performance testing simulations. Tie the inputs of the load generators to the outputs from the application server logs and verify the system works as designed at scale.
If you're using the swipe-to-unlock, you've already lost. Use a strong password, which serves as entropy for encrypting the disk (and check that option).
Lyft is still under $200 million and is raising at 25x revenue or so.