
Uber Hacks and Bitcoin Futures - panarky
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-11-22/uber-hacks-and-bitcoin-futures
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panarky
_What is Uber? Why is it a $70-billion-or-whatever company?

You could tell a bunch of stories -- it is an app company, a taxi company, a
driverless-car company -- but one possibility is that it is a regulatory-
evasion company.

I am a finance guy, and I think a lot about "regulatory arbitrage" as a source
of value, and it seems to me that a lot of Uber's value comes from a form of
regulatory arbitrage.

But it is not the form of regulatory arbitrage that I am familiar with, where
you carefully analyze the rules in order to build products that get the best
possible treatment under different regulatory regimes.

It is more just "hey a good arbitrage would be to ignore these regulations."

If that is the core idea that made your company successful, it is going to
pervade a lot of your decisions, not just the ones about taxi licensing. And
it's going to be hard to pivot away from it._

