When a company that makes nothing, owns nothing, and does nothing other than connect potential users with providers of a service is approaching parity with the world's biggest industrial companies in terms of market cap, then no fucking shit there's a bubble. I don't understand why we're even debating it.
Hey, middle men have made money since practically the dawn of time. But I think it's a bad sign when your business model is making a product that you designed in a month that connects A to B. It's not exactly hard for any competition to match that once you've proved that link is money-making.
Connecting people is important in our economy. But it's easily done by any number of sales people. Uber found a good way of doing sales. That's it. How many people do they employ? How much infrastructure did they build? Etc. This isn't a real economy they're creating. It's a temporary fill in a gap in the market--a gap that was mainly created by excessive government regulation. Once that gap is closed, and the market is fixed, Uber is worthless.
> It's not exactly hard for any competition to match that once you've proved that link is money-making. Yep. Uber doesn't have a sustainable business because they'll be trivially outcompeted. You can already see this happening; cities with alternatives to Uber (lyft/etc) have cheaper rates.
I also feel like Uber is overvalued, but: they are sill valuable. They've basically introduced arbitrage into an industry that previously had a massive amount of underused supply, and in the process substantially dropped the cost of that service. This is a valuable service