It seems like just yesterday that people were protesting Uber for disrupting the traditional taxi business. Now the question has become: are AVs about to disrupt Uber?
Over the last six months, Uber's stock price has declined nearly 19%. At the time of writing this post, its market cap is around $155 billion, compared to Waymo's private market valuation of $126 billion (though I'm sure many would argue this is a wee bit high).
The market seems to think that self-driving cars are a two-horse race between Waymo and Tesla. If this is true, what role will Uber play?
Uber has naturally tried to assuage concerns. Alongside their Q4 2025 earnings, they published a 13-page "spotlight" on AVs, where they argued, don't worry, everything is fine:
AVs will change how trips are supplied, but not how demand is aggregated. History suggests that over time as supply fragments and technology commoditizes, the platform that can bring the highest utilization to assets, and superior reliability to customers, will capture a large share of value. That is the role Uber is set up to play.
One of the arguments for this is that rideshare demand is highly variable throughout a week. A typical Monday can be less than half of a Saturday night, and daily troughs can decline to something like 5% of peaks.
So, if you try and service this demand variability with only AVs, you're going to have a lot of underutilized vehicles during off-peak times. This makes sense to me right now, but I'm not certain it will persist or always matter as the space evolves.
When Uber sold its AV division in 2020, I understood why (to try and reach profitability), but it always felt a little unsettling to me. AVs were very clearly the future — are you sure you want to sell this off?
Now I suspect they'll have to re-enter in a meaningful way. They're going to need to do it as long as the market continues to believe the current narrative.
I use Uber on a regular basis, but I already have the Waymo app on my phone (I downloaded it on a long layover in SFO where I contemplated a joy ride). As soon as rides become available in Toronto at reasonable prices, I wouldn't think twice about switching.
Cover photo by clement proust on Unsplash
Stock graph from the WSJ
Demand chart from Uber Q4 2025 Earnings — Autonomous Vehicles Spotlight
Earlier this month, self-driving car company Waymo announced that it had raised $16 billion (largely from its parent company, Alphabet) at a $126 billion post-money valuation. This is a big number. And according to Bloomberg, the company's annualized revenue run rate is around $350 million, meaning its current valuation is sitting at 360x revenue.
Multiples can often be sky-high for new, huge-bet companies, but Om Malik recently offered an interesting take on the "physics of the problem."
As of the end of 2025, Waymo was operating approximately 2,500 vehicles across its cities, with San Francisco and Los Angeles currently responsible for about 68% of the company's rides. And these cars are already running 16 hours a day, with an estimated 18 minutes of average idle time between trips.
To get from 400,000 trips per week (where they are today) to 1 million trips per week (where they want to be by the end of 2026), Om estimates that the company will need to add at least another 3,500 vehicles to its fleet.
If I then ask Gemini to extrapolate this out such that its revenue increases enough to drop its multiple down to 30x revenue, the company needs a global fleet close to 25,000 vehicles. That's ~22,500 more than it has today, and at $175k per Jaguar, that's an additional $4 billion in vehicles.
I guess it has the money for that, but it'll be fascinating to see how easily the company is able to scale around the world. This year, the plan is to expand to 20 more cities (with a list that erroneously leaves out Toronto). If successful, this will have a profound impact on our cities. And the lofty valuation represents an expectation that it will be.
Cover photo by Josh Hild
A closed-end real estate fund is an investment vehicle with a finite life (call it anywhere from 5 to 12 years, plus extension options). These types of funds have a specific timeframe for raising capital, investing, harvesting the investments they have made, and then distributing proceeds to investors. This is in contrast to an open-ended fund, also known as an "evergreen" fund, which has an infinite life and can accept investments throughout its lifespan.
As a result of these differences, closed-end funds are often used for opportunistic or value-add opportunities where the defined strategy is to buy, fix/develop, and then sell, whereas open-ended funds are often used for core opportunities, where the assets are intended to be held indefinitely for income. Neither fund structure is inherently good or bad; each has its benefits and drawbacks.
However, the perceived weighting of these benefits and drawbacks shifts during market cycles. Since global real estate markets started to turn downward in 2022, the ability to be patient and think long-term has become a key ingredient for survival. You may have done everything you said you would do perfectly, but the market may not be there to grant you the liquidity you had originally planned for.
Now the question becomes: How patient can and should we be?
In my opinion, the greatest opportunities exist for (1) the larger firms that have a strong balance sheet and defensible income-producing properties and (2) the smaller, nimble firms that can capitalize on the dislocation in the market (and aren't overly burdened with legacy assets that are sucking up resources and capacity).
This perspective is true of other sectors as well. This weekend, venture capitalist Chris Dixon of a16z wrote a post titled, "
It seems like just yesterday that people were protesting Uber for disrupting the traditional taxi business. Now the question has become: are AVs about to disrupt Uber?
Over the last six months, Uber's stock price has declined nearly 19%. At the time of writing this post, its market cap is around $155 billion, compared to Waymo's private market valuation of $126 billion (though I'm sure many would argue this is a wee bit high).
The market seems to think that self-driving cars are a two-horse race between Waymo and Tesla. If this is true, what role will Uber play?
Uber has naturally tried to assuage concerns. Alongside their Q4 2025 earnings, they published a 13-page "spotlight" on AVs, where they argued, don't worry, everything is fine:
AVs will change how trips are supplied, but not how demand is aggregated. History suggests that over time as supply fragments and technology commoditizes, the platform that can bring the highest utilization to assets, and superior reliability to customers, will capture a large share of value. That is the role Uber is set up to play.
One of the arguments for this is that rideshare demand is highly variable throughout a week. A typical Monday can be less than half of a Saturday night, and daily troughs can decline to something like 5% of peaks.
So, if you try and service this demand variability with only AVs, you're going to have a lot of underutilized vehicles during off-peak times. This makes sense to me right now, but I'm not certain it will persist or always matter as the space evolves.
When Uber sold its AV division in 2020, I understood why (to try and reach profitability), but it always felt a little unsettling to me. AVs were very clearly the future — are you sure you want to sell this off?
Now I suspect they'll have to re-enter in a meaningful way. They're going to need to do it as long as the market continues to believe the current narrative.
I use Uber on a regular basis, but I already have the Waymo app on my phone (I downloaded it on a long layover in SFO where I contemplated a joy ride). As soon as rides become available in Toronto at reasonable prices, I wouldn't think twice about switching.
Cover photo by clement proust on Unsplash
Stock graph from the WSJ
Demand chart from Uber Q4 2025 Earnings — Autonomous Vehicles Spotlight
Earlier this month, self-driving car company Waymo announced that it had raised $16 billion (largely from its parent company, Alphabet) at a $126 billion post-money valuation. This is a big number. And according to Bloomberg, the company's annualized revenue run rate is around $350 million, meaning its current valuation is sitting at 360x revenue.
Multiples can often be sky-high for new, huge-bet companies, but Om Malik recently offered an interesting take on the "physics of the problem."
As of the end of 2025, Waymo was operating approximately 2,500 vehicles across its cities, with San Francisco and Los Angeles currently responsible for about 68% of the company's rides. And these cars are already running 16 hours a day, with an estimated 18 minutes of average idle time between trips.
To get from 400,000 trips per week (where they are today) to 1 million trips per week (where they want to be by the end of 2026), Om estimates that the company will need to add at least another 3,500 vehicles to its fleet.
If I then ask Gemini to extrapolate this out such that its revenue increases enough to drop its multiple down to 30x revenue, the company needs a global fleet close to 25,000 vehicles. That's ~22,500 more than it has today, and at $175k per Jaguar, that's an additional $4 billion in vehicles.
I guess it has the money for that, but it'll be fascinating to see how easily the company is able to scale around the world. This year, the plan is to expand to 20 more cities (with a list that erroneously leaves out Toronto). If successful, this will have a profound impact on our cities. And the lofty valuation represents an expectation that it will be.
Cover photo by Josh Hild
A closed-end real estate fund is an investment vehicle with a finite life (call it anywhere from 5 to 12 years, plus extension options). These types of funds have a specific timeframe for raising capital, investing, harvesting the investments they have made, and then distributing proceeds to investors. This is in contrast to an open-ended fund, also known as an "evergreen" fund, which has an infinite life and can accept investments throughout its lifespan.
As a result of these differences, closed-end funds are often used for opportunistic or value-add opportunities where the defined strategy is to buy, fix/develop, and then sell, whereas open-ended funds are often used for core opportunities, where the assets are intended to be held indefinitely for income. Neither fund structure is inherently good or bad; each has its benefits and drawbacks.
However, the perceived weighting of these benefits and drawbacks shifts during market cycles. Since global real estate markets started to turn downward in 2022, the ability to be patient and think long-term has become a key ingredient for survival. You may have done everything you said you would do perfectly, but the market may not be there to grant you the liquidity you had originally planned for.
Now the question becomes: How patient can and should we be?
In my opinion, the greatest opportunities exist for (1) the larger firms that have a strong balance sheet and defensible income-producing properties and (2) the smaller, nimble firms that can capitalize on the dislocation in the market (and aren't overly burdened with legacy assets that are sucking up resources and capacity).
This perspective is true of other sectors as well. This weekend, venture capitalist Chris Dixon of a16z wrote a post titled, "
The fact that he wrote this post says a lot, I think, about the psyche of investors today. The perceived weighting has changed, and people are now investing and building more for the future. As the late Charlie Munger once said, "The big money is not in the buying and the selling, but in the waiting."
Cover photo by KAi'S PHOTOGRAPHY on Unsplash
The fact that he wrote this post says a lot, I think, about the psyche of investors today. The perceived weighting has changed, and people are now investing and building more for the future. As the late Charlie Munger once said, "The big money is not in the buying and the selling, but in the waiting."
Cover photo by KAi'S PHOTOGRAPHY on Unsplash
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