
Uber Got Otto on the Cheap - Fricken
https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self-driving/turns-out-uber-got-otto-on-the-cheap
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slivym
This is kind of an absurd article. Even assuming that the numbers are right
and that Uber managed to get out of most of the shares since they were due to
Lewandowski, and assuming that the value of those shares have dropped (which
is NOT how you value a deal- it's valued by the share value at the time, not
some random time later). Let's see the opposite side of the coin:

Having bought Otto for basically their 90 employees and putting Lewandowski in
charge of their entire AD operation what do they have now? Lewandowski is
gone, Delaunay is gone. They have a massive law suit on their hands from
Google, and the IP is almost certainly unusable or atleast significantly
diminished in value.

Now their engineering group isn't run by anyone they acquired from Otto, most
of the good engineers have moved on and in a competitive environment where
time to market is essential this disruption has probably lost them a year of
development time relative to their competition. That's not even considering
their competition was already way better funded. Their remaining employees are
facing down the prospect of their shares _dropping_ in value with no one to
sell to and huge taxes from when they vested.

This was probably make or break for Uber in the AD space, and it was break.
After this, any smart CEO would be looking at trying to get acquired by one of
the other AD companies with their key value being the existing user base and
supply/demand technology.

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cdolan
What I find most interesting is that how this entire time, most headlines have
reported a $600+ million number as _fact_.

What is frustrating about that is to the uninformed, it reads like a cash
available on hand, in these people's bank accounts. It appears it was far from
that.

I'm not a Levandowski sympathizer, but these deals for startup founders in an
acquisition are typically complex stock transactions, with strange vesting
rules and tons of ways to get diluted or locked out of a liquidity event. Its
not typically a grand pay day.

In the future I wish blogs & reporters would focus less on the fact that it
was a reported $600+ million, and more on the fact that "it was more than $6
million, and the company had not been around 6 months". That was the real
smoke that led everyone to the fire.

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SOLAR_FIELDS
The most interesting part of this article is discussing Uber’s valuation and
the SoftBank deal. Shortly before this info about the valuation of Otto came
to light, Uber agreed to the SoftBank deal which presumably led some to
believe the company was going through a down round of sorts. Could Uber have
considered devaluing themselves to downplay the impact of Otto’s value as part
of the consideration for this SoftBank deal?

