Uber’s Speeding Up 🚕

PLUS: Trending Tools ⚒️

Hi Everyone. This is Take Off. We're like a hidden Easter egg in your favorite video game - surprising, delightful, and adding an extra layer of fun to your tech news consumption.

Here's what we're serving up today:

  • Uber’s Speeding Up 🚕

  • Asteroids ☄️

  • Trending Tools ⚒️ 

Uber’s Speeding Up 🚕

There were two things that I believed could never happen:

  1. I could have a growth spurt after 25.

  2. Uber could become profitable.

But it turns out I was wrong, at-least for the 2nd thing.

Uber has posted its first annual operating profit, marking an inflection point in the tumultuous history of the company. 

Operating profit in 2023 was $1.1B, compared with a $1.8B loss in 2022. And if you dialed in to the earnings call, the theme was - Profitable Growth at Scale. 

The Phoenix Rises

Uber was the Silicon Valley poster child of burning money. 

The company burned through more than $30B over the past 14 years and has finally left the Land of Losses and has joined the Profit Party. But how come? 

Well, Uber’s core businesses are doing pretty well and the company is working heavily on expansion of services and product offerings. 

  • Mobility continues to grow at an astounding rate of 34% YoY.

  • Delivery continues to grow as well, albeit slowly, at a rate of 6% YoY.

  • Freight however declined at a rate of 17% YoY.

Uber is operating on a truly massive scale. The company reached a record high of 150M Monthly Active Users across all its services.

The company delivered food and people a staggering 2.6B times in 2023.

Uber might’ve replaced the term “hail a cab” in modern vocabulary, but as the company has grown, it has been doing a lot more than that. 

1/ More Products -> More Revenue

The company is focused on making consumers multi-product. This lowers the CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) as well as adds net positive revenue to the company due to more spend. 

More than 1/3rd of monthly consumers on Uber are multi-product and they spend over 3x more than single-product consumers. 

2/ Uber One 

Recurring revenue is the one thing that gives weak knees to investors when it comes to software companies and Uber’s case is no different. Uber One - the company’s paid membership now has 19M members worldwide. 

Even though the margins are lower per order for Uber One members, members spend 3.4x more money on the platform. And there’s the obvious juicy monthly subscription revenue coming from these 19M people.

3/ Ads

If I had a penny for every time I pointed out that all roads always lead to Ads, I would’ve been able to buy exactly 0.4384 shares of (NASDAQ: NVDA).

Ads, if done correctly, is an extremely high-margin biz and Uber seems to be on the right track. 

The company has onboarded 550K advertisers onto their platform making the ad biz to be on track for a $900M annual revenue run-rate. 

It seems like Uber has finally taken a U-Turn from its cash burning days and is seemingly speeding past its competitors.

Together with

Stay up-to-date with AI.

AI won’t replace you, but a person using AI might. That’s why 500,000+ professionals read The Rundown– the free newsletter that keeps you updated on the latest AI news, tools, and tutorials in 5 minutes a day.

☄️ Asteroids ☄️

Reddit's gearing up for an IPO and betting big on AI, signing deals worth $203M to license its treasure trove of data to AI giants. With a rich stash of posts and comments, Reddit's becoming an AI training hotspot, aiming to rake in $66.4M in 2024 alone. 🤖💼

Intuitive Machines makes history with the first private lunar landing, despite tech hiccups. Utilizing NASA's tech for guidance, it touched down near the moon's south pole, sparking hopes for future lunar exploration and commerce. 🌑🎉

📺️ Vadoo - Search widget trained on your videos

🎦 Caption Creator - Generate Subtitles For Your Video Automatically

🔖 Bookmark It - Bookmark manager for the modern web

💸 Finfloh - Accounts Receivable Software To Maximize Cashflows

AI Jane: Artificial intelligence investment journalist building an easy to read ai investing email newsletter. Get smarter about investing in ai in 5 minutes.

The Aurorean: This newsletter scours 100+ sources so you don’t have to. The Aurorean is your guide to discover the essential news, research, beauty and humor in science every week.

The EV Universe: Keep up with the electric vehicle industry.

That’s it from us today folks! If you liked what today’s edition, here’s a message from our loving and hard-working team below:

We all crave the essentials in life - food 🥑🍕, shelter 🏠, and clothing 👕🩳- and we're no exception! Our must-haves? An ever-growing squad of adoring subscribers like you and for more of those lovely subs, we're counting on you to spread the word! So, blast that newsletter across the universe!