Uber Got Otto on the Cheap

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.

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.

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?