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121789today at 6:10 PM2 repliesview on HN

uber sure....but how did wework survive? they are a smoldering husk of a failed company looted by its founder


Replies

hamdingerstoday at 6:39 PM

I'm sitting in one right now and don't see any smoldering...

show 2 replies
naravaratoday at 6:20 PM

The company’s gone but the assets just got sold to other commercial real estate firms.

Uber was basically only ever software to help people use their own cars so a very small part of their valuation was physical stuff to upkeep, it was just deals and obligations they had.

Not sure how it shakes out for Anthropic and OpenAI. There’s a lot of physical capacity that needs to be built out and can depreciate. But there’s also a lot of network effects and dependencies being built in with enterprise users.

I don’t know how swappable the tooling is either. I think over the long term the UI, model training and documentation, and infrastructure are going to end up being run by different parties and I’m not sure which leg of that chain ends up in a position to skim most of the profit off. My guess is that Apple and Google end up raking in all the money since they control the OS and app stores while the rest of the stack gets driven down to being generic commodities. At least where mass market consumer adoption is concerned.