Uber might be more valuable than Facebook

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New York Mag reports that Uber might eventually be worth more than Facebook.

Amazon grew from selling books alone to carrying a wide range of products by leveraging the warehouse and shipping infrastructure it had established.

Likewise, Uber’s plan is to outgrow its car-service roots, and become, as investor Shervin Pishevar put it, “a digital mesh” capable of providing all kinds of transportation and logistical services to people in the cities it serves. Once it has you summoning cars from your phone, the logic goes, it can use that same back-end technology to hook you in for all other kinds of deliveries — food, clothes, Christmas trees. And eventually, like Amazon, it can become something akin to an all-purpose utility — it’ll just be a way you get things and go places. There’s a reason the company recently changed its tagline from “Everyone’s private driver” to the much broader “Where lifestyle meets logistics.”

  • It’s one of the fastest-growing companies on Earth, having expanded into 22 countries and 60 cities, most in the last several months. (Uber launched in Guangzhou, Abu Dhabi, and New Delhi this week.)
  • It’s making serious money – according to Valleywag’s leaked screenshot, its run-rate (estimated annual revenue, if you extrapolate the numbers we have out to a full year) is more than $200 million. By comparison, Twitter, a company worth $25 billion as of today, did $317 million in revenue last year. By those standards, Uber’s last valuation – $3.5 billion – seems laughably small.
  • It’s hiring like crazy. Just look at its jobs list, or see that it plans to quadruple its staff from last March’s level by next March.
  • It’s filled with experienced business operators and financiers, like Wall Street legend David Bonderman (the founder of TPG Capital, and a new Uber board member). In other words, it’s not one of those Silicon Valley start-ups run by cocky 22-year-olds.
  • It’s now a financial services company.

There are many more cities the company can expand into. They have barely gotten started.

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