Uber investor Gurley: spending billions on self-driving was a waste - Business Insider

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One of Uber's earliest investors says the billions it spent on self-driving were a 'waste of money'

Friday, Gurley lamented that Uber dumped so much capital into its self-driving unit, called the Advanced Technologies Group . Gurley's firm, Benchmark Capital, first invested in Uber in 2011, according to Pitchbook data. Gurley sat on Uber's board until 2017.

"We probably burned $2.5 billion on autonomous that was a waste of money," Gurley said, adding that in retrospect that sum would have been better spent on growing Uber Eats. "These ideas where you use capital as a weapon to build liquidity and then emerge out of it later is a really hard and dangerous game, and you need the capital markets to support it," Gurley said.

Uber has historically struggled to turn a profit — it reported an adjusted net loss of $8.5 billion in 2019, for example — leading it to double down on core businesses and trim some capital-intensive side projects as the pandemic slashed revenues. In December, the company announced plans to

 

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Friendly reminder that startup founders shouldn't just jump on the trendy bandwagon.

I think it was early, but self-driving vehicles will eventually become the norm. It's just a matter of time.

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