🔮 Uber mirage; treaties; climate jobs; tech policy++ #384

Hi, I’m Azeem Azhar. I convene Exponential View to help us understand how our societies and political economy will change under the force of rapidly accelerating technologies.

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The near future

😮 Ooober
Uber surprised a lot of us and turned cash flow positive in the second quarter. The beat – $308m vs expectations of $109m – is remarkable. So too are other numbers: 1.87bn trips in the quarter, up 22%. This might mean that many of the optimists (and I wasn’t one) were right: Uber could hit the kind of scale that makes its business work. Uber has taken 13 years to get this milestone. Amazon took 14 years before its first profitable (and cashflow positive) year. Can Uber follow in its footsteps? Hubert Horan has been a meticulous analyst of Uber and is not convinced believing “[t]oday, Uber is offering muc…