From June 5 to June 8, Techstars Startup Week West Slope will be happening on the western slope in Colorado, with the main event in Grand Junction.

I’m doing a Keynote at on Thursday, June 6 from 11:30am – 1:00pm at Colorado Mesa University. I’ll be talking about building startup communities outside Colorado’s front range in a fireside chat / AMA format.

Startup communities in Colorado that are outside the front range (Boulder, Denver, Colorado Springs, and Fort Collins) have become something that my partner Seth Levine and I have been very involved in the past few years. Seth’s providing a lot of on the ground leadership, through his work with Startup Colorado and the Greater Colorado Venture Fund. I try to show up or help remotely whenever I can and Amy and I have been writing plenty of checks from our Anchor Point Foundation to support various initiatives.

We have family in Hotchkiss, a house in Aspen, and have spent a lot of time in Summit County over the past decade when we had a house in Keystone. There are magical things going on all over Colorado, especially on the western slope. I have a strong belief that startup communities should exist everywhere and can have a meaningful impact on cities outside the large urban concentrations that we have in many parts of the U.S.

What’s happening in Colorado’s Western Slope is powerful and an example that can be used through the U.S. and the world. If you are interested, come join us at Techstars Startup Week West Slope to learn more.

You don't end up in charge of a multi-billion-dollar venture fund filled with some of the world's hottest young companies without thinking multiple steps ahead.

Just ask Rajeev Misra, the CEO of SoftBank Investment Advisers. He's modeled out his version of the future and deployed his firm's capital accordingly. It currently comprises the $100 billion Vision Fund— the single biggest venture fund in existence.

A quick peak inside Misra's Vision Fund portfolio is a veritable who's who of startup royalty. It includes WeWork, Uber, DoorDash, and Slack among the crown jewels. Once a company is brought into the fold at SoftBank, the mandate is straightforward enough: if you grow enough, you'll get more money.

At the recent Milken Institute Global Conference, Misra spoke about what he looks for in the roughly 80 companies featured in the Vision Fund at a given time.

Read more: The CEO of SoftBank Investment Advisers, who runs the world's biggest venture fund, offers an inside look at how he picks which companies to lavish with billions of capital

At the core of it, Misra likes so-called platform businesses that can use money to invest in technology and achieve greater scale. There's also the added element of how potential target companies will work in tandem with existing portfolio holdings. Those types of synergies can make individual firms even stronger.

But that was just part of Misra's interview at Milken. As a final question, the interviewer — none other than Michael Milken himself — asked the Vision Fund CEO where he sees the world in 10 years.

The ensuing response offered an incredible look into how Misra sees the world morphing over the coming decade. It also provides crucial context around some of the investments already present in the portfolio — ones that were clearly made with these paradigm-altering forecasts in mind.

"The disruptors will be disrupted in the next 5 or 10 years," Misra said. "I believe that a lot of what we take for granted today — like the smartphone, which didn't exist 12 years ago — will change dramatically."

He continued: "That relates to retail outlets, hotels, mobility, the way we consume food at restaurants."

Read more: Buy Amazon and Google, sell Apple and Exxon: Here's an in-depth look at Goldman Sachs' newly unveiled strategy for fighting the trade war

Here are the major themes he's watching (all quotes attributable to Misra):

Mobility

"I believe mobility will change dramatically," Misra said. "By 2022 or 2023 I believe there will be thousands of autonomous vehicles in the streets of major cities in the West. We are investors in GM Cruise."

And self-driving cars are just part of the equation for the Vision Fund. It's also invested in companies that use artificial intelligence and other technology to make driving safer (Nauto, Cambridge Mobile Telematics.) Not to mention a smattering of global car-rental and auto-retail firms.

Ownership

Speaking of car-rental companies, Misra also delivered the following prediction relating to overall ownership of goods and products.

"I believe ownership of products will be very different," he said. "Co-living is going to go up. Cities will change. You won't need as much real estate for parking or retail shops. People won't buy a second or third car. The entire auto industry will change."

New synergies between existing businesses

As mentioned previously, Misra is interested not only in great standalone businesses, but also those that can unlock new value when viewed in tandem with existing portfolio companies.

He provided a prime example of in the form of two current holdings: ParkJockey and DoorDash. When viewed alongside SoftBank's efforts in the electric-car space, it all suddenly makes a whole lot of sense.

"ParkJockey owns 6,000 parking lots," Misra said. "We converted about 20% of those lots to electric-car-charging docks."

He continued: "They each have heat maps from DoorDash with demand from every zip code, so we know what people want to eat in that neighborhood."

Increased power to consumers and suppliers

"Power is being democratized, and it's heading toward the consumer," Misra said. "The consumer will get cheaper goods and services with better quality. All the inefficiencies that they wipe out will keep inflation at bay, as we've seen the last couple years."

He added: "It will also give some power to the suppliers, and take away inefficiencies between suppliers and consumers. It will take out some of the middle men."

WhatsApp was hacked and attackers installed sophisticated spyware on an unknown number of people's smartphones.

The Facebook subsidiary, which has 1.5 billion users, said an advanced cyber actor infected an unknown number of people's devices with the malware, which it said it discovered in early May.

The Financial Times first reported the vulnerability. It said the bad actors were able to install the surveillance technology by phoning the target through WhatsApp's call functionality, giving them access to information including location data and private messages.

The FT reported that the spyware was developed by Israel's NSO Group, whose Pegasus software is known to have been used against human rights activists. The firm denied any involvement in a statement to the FT.

Read more: A Facebook cofounder has written a blistering New York Times op-ed arguing that Mark Zuckerberg's social network should be torn apart

"This attack has all the hallmarks of a private company known to work with governments to deliver spyware that reportedly takes over the functions of mobile phone operating systems," WhatsApp said in a statement to the FT.

"We have briefed a number of human rights organisations to share the information we can, and to work with them to notify civil society."

In a statement sent to Business Insider, a spokesman added: "WhatsApp encourages people to upgrade to the latest version of our app, as well as keep their mobile operating system up to date, to protect against potential targeted exploits designed to compromise information stored on mobile devices. We are constantly working alongside industry partners to provide the latest security enhancements to help protect our users."

A notice on Facebook said the issue impacted both Android, iPhones, and Windows phones. An update was released on Monday that should resolve the issue and users are being urged to update, regardless of whether they have had any suspicious call activity.

Citing a source, the FT reported that the US Department of Justice was notified about the hack last month.

Investors who bought Beyond Meat stock during its public offering in early May saw a 163% pop on the first day, setting a new record and a celebratory tone for a busy IPO season which has seen half a dozen high-value companies enter the public markets.

While new heights may indicate that things can only go downhill from there, UBS analyst Jason Draho thinks it's too early to call the IPO market a bubble, Draho wrote in a note published Monday.

"Triple-digit returns beg the question of whether another IPO bubble is forming. It's fair to say that the IPO market is getting warmer just based on the returns," Draho said. "These returns suggest a hot, not bubbly, IPO market, but there has been an inflection around the Lyft IPO, as the market has gotten hotter since then."

Instead, the longterm momentum of the market will reveal itself in midsummer or fall, once the first of the big IPOs of the year report their second and third quarter earnings and investors get a sense of whether the companies are actually worth what they trade at, Draho reckons.

Read more: These are the slides about Slack's spending, sales and customer growth that the CFO is betting its IPO on

"That's also when six-month lock-up agreements begin to expire, enabling pre-IPO shareholders to start selling in large scale, potentially putting downward pressure on stock prices," Draho said. "All this suggests a runway of about six more months for this hot IPO market, after which it could continue or sputter out, depending on how the current IPOs perform."

In addition to the performance of companies like Zoom and Uber, Draho thinks the market could eventually cool off simply because there aren't enough unicorn companies going public.

"There needs to be an actual supply of IPOs, ideally by unicorns, for a hot market to even exist," he wrote. "Unlike the dotcom era when companies went public after only a few years of operations in order to raise capital, startups today have greater access to private capital and are staying private much longer. Consequently, we should expect far fewer IPOs in this hot market, barring a shift toward much earlier public listings."

Amazon Web Services had a head start in 2006 when it offered software developers something they couldn't refuse: access to virtually unlimited computing power in Amazon's data centers.

And that's how Amazon's cloud got started. It quickly picked up popularity among developers and large companies as well. When Microsoft eventually decided it need to get into the cloud business, it played to its strengths and sold its service to its longstanding enterprise customers.

But that balance of power is now set to change, at least if Microsoft has its way.

Microsoft has begun an all-out charm offensive to woo the software developers that have traditionally flocked to Amazon's AWS.

Through a combination of new products, high-priced acquisitions and public displays of affection for developer principles, Microsoft hopes to convince the creators of the next generation of apps and services that its cloud is the right foundation to build on.

It's still early in the process, and there's no guarantee that Microsoft will succeed. But embracing the developer community and incorporating open source projects — or, projects that any developer can use, download and modify for free —will benefit Microsoft in the long term, analysts say.

"Microsoft is working really hard at making a big tent for where all developers can contribute and take advantage of the tools that we had," Jean Atelsek, analyst at 451 Research, told Business Insider.

The GitHub acquisition

Microsoft's most high-profile effort to go after developers was its $7.5 billion acquisition of GitHub last October, bringing in not only the popular open source code hosting site under its fold, but also an entire community of more than 30 million developers.

When Microsoft and GitHub first announced this, there was some consternation among developers, as they worried that GitHub will become more closed off and leave developers stuck with only Microsoft technologies.

Previously, Atelsek says, Microsoft had a reputation for taking over a piece of software, adopting it to its platform, and essentially killing it. But with GitHub, the opposite has happened.

Since GitHub's acquisition, it has launched unlimited private code hosting — something developers long asked for. And on Friday it launched the first major new product since the acquisition, GitHub Package Registry, to help developers manage software packages.

Read more: GitHub just launched its first big new product since Microsoft bought it for $7.5 billion, and it's a crucial service for developers

"Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub does not seem to be pushing developers away," Raimo Lenschow, managing director at Barclays, wrote in a note. "Microsoft is taking baby steps to cross-promote Azure without pushing its user base away, which makes sense to us."

"The new open mentality"

Microsoft has also made a host of other announcements to curry favor with developers.

Previously, Microsoft announced it would build its browser Edge to support Google's open source web engine Chromium. For many developers, this was good news — it makes it easier for them to develop sites that are compatible with multiple browsers, rather than having to create separate versions.

"It's a really good example of the new open mentality that Microsoft has," said Ed Anderson, an analyst at industry research firm Gartner. "Microsoft will benefit from using Chromium. They'll get the developer base. At the same time, [developers will] be able to contribute back to Microsoft innovations. I think it's kind of a win-win for everybody."

Microsoft also made a major announcement with the open source operating system Linux that's popular with developers. The full Linux kernel will now be shipped with Windows 10. This lets Windows 10 users run a full-on version of Linux on their Windows desktops. It's another sign of Microsoft's strategy in cozying up to developers.

Read more: Microsoft is building the full Linux kernel into Windows 10 as a way to pry developers away from their Apple MacBooks

Finally, Lenschow said that when it comes to Microsoft's products, "AI is being injected into everything."

For example, Microsoft's Visual Studio Code, or its widely used code editor, has become the top open source project on GitHub. And at the Build conference, Microsoft launched enhancements to make programming even easier, such as an artificial intelligence feature that suggests code alternatives to build applications more efficiently, based on data from GitHub's top projects.

"To us, this is a positive change, as AI shifts from a talking point to something in practice. Microsoft enables the use of AI technology by making it easier for developers to adopt it through toolkits," Lenschow wrote.

Taking on Amazon

With all these announcements, this shows Microsoft embracing open source as a central part of its strategy — a turnaround from the past, when Microsoft waged a war on Linux.

The biggest takeaway, Lenschow writes, is that Microsoft has undergone a cultural change that focuses on developers.

"We got the sense from talking to developers that Azure no longer lacks the capabilities other public cloud platforms have and is increasingly viewed as developer friendly," Lenschow wrote.

Welcoming more developers is a crucial first step to take on Amazon. Besides that, analysts say Microsoft should continue doing what it does best: capitalizing on its relationships with enterprise customers.

"I think Microsoft just needs to keep executing the way they are," Sanjeev Mohan, an analyst at Gartner, told Business Insider. "The customers need to feel that they are being listened to and they can trust a partner, and Microsoft is demonstrating that."

JPMorgan is turning to one of Silicon Valley's hottest startups for help with its cloud strategy.

The bank has started working with cloud-based data warehouse Snowflake as part of its developing public cloud strategy, according to a source familiar with the matter.

JPMorgan's motivation for teaming up with the $3.5 billion startup stems from Snowflake's potential to help the bank manage large data sets across multiple public cloud platforms, according to the source.

As Wall Street grows more comfortable using the public cloud, many firms are considering how to split work across the three main providers, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. While most banks would prefer to be cloud agnostic — maintaining the ability to seamlessly move between clouds — doing so is no easy task.

The biggest hurdle for most firms are applications or tools that require significant amounts of data, a common occurrence in finance. In such cases, a firm is forced to pick one provider, or else face steep costs to maintain data on all the public clouds it hopes to use.

Read more: Wall Street is finally willing to go to Amazon's, Google's, or Microsoft's cloud, but nobody can agree on the best way to do it: 'If you pick a favorite and you're wrong, you're fired'

Snowflake alleviates that issue, allowing a firm to replicate data kept on AWS over to Azure or vice versa. Firms only pay fees when they start running applications or tools on either of the clouds. This gives firms the flexibility to move work between multiple clouds while still keeping operating costs low.

A JPMorgan spokeswoman declined to comment.

"Snowflake recognizes the business value for financial services organizations in having a common platform and a consistent experience across multiple clouds," a Snowflake spokeswoman said. "Users with a multi-cloud strategy that includes Azure and AWS, now have a common, cloud-built data warehouse platform and experience with Snowflake."

To be clear, Snowflake is not the only cloud-related database the bank is working with, the source said. But as one of the biggest banks on Wall Street, nabbing JPMorgan's business is a big win for Snowflake.

See more: Famous exec Bob Muglia is out as CEO of $3.5 billion Snowflake, just weeks after saying an IPO isn't imminent

Snowflake has risen to prominence in recent years as cloud adoption has exploded across various industries. The company has raised $923 million from the likes of Sequoia, Red Point, Sutter Hill, and Capital One Growth Ventures, among others.

More recently, Snowflake has been in the news following the departure of former CEO Bob Muglia. A former top executive at Microsoft who was famously fired by Steve Ballmer twice, Muglia joined Snowflake when the company was only a 30-person team and had yet to make any sales.

JPMorgan's decision to work with Snowflake was made prior to Muglia's departure.

Muglia was replaced by Frank Slootman, who has a history of taking companies public, leading some to speculate he'll do the same for Snowflake.

Slootman hasn't wasted time in his new role, replacing two senior executives with former colleagues he worked with while at cloud-computing company ServiceNow.

Getty/Spencer Platt

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi addressed his company's abysmal initial public offering in an email to employees on Monday.

The chief executive sought to reassure employees that while Uber's IPO did not yield the first-day results the company had hoped for, they should keep in mind that several high-profile technology companies sputtered in their debuts only to surge in later years.

He pointed to Facebook and Amazon.

"Remember that the Facebook and Amazon post-IPO trading was incredibly difficult for those companies,"  Khosrowshahi wrote in the email to employees that was posted on Twitter by New York Times reporter Mike Isaac. "And look at how they have delivered since."

When asked about the email, an Uber representative pointed Markets Insider to Isaac's tweet.

Read more: 'Our stock did not trade as well as we had hoped': Read the reassuring email Uber's CEO sent employees following its disastrous IPO

Uber shares plunged 12.4% Monday, to close at $36.43, after sinking nearly 8% on Friday. The second ride-hailing company to hit the US market priced its IPO at $45 a share on Thursday and saw a $42 debut on Friday morning.

To put its dismal showing another way, Uber's first day of trading turned out the largest one-day dollar loss of a US-listed IPO, according to analysis from Jay Ritter, a professor at the University of Florida who has long specialized in IPO market research.

Consider that performance against Amazon and Facebook, which debuted in May 1997 and May 2012, respectively.

In split-adjusted terms, Amazon opened at $2.44 a share and tumbled to $1.96 by the close its first day of trading. The stock moved sideways until July 1 of that year, taking nearly two months to finally reclaim its opening price. (Amazon debuted on the Nasdaq at $16 a share). 

Facebook's debut was more fraught. The social network in 2012 saw the biggest first-month drop of any large US IPO in history, according to Dealogic. The shares plunged 21% and failed to recapture their opening price for about 16 months.

Since the close of trading on their respective IPO days, Facebook has gained 377% and Amazon is up 93,542%.

Khosrowshahi's plea to employees was not unlike advice from analysts and money managers who urge investors not to consider companies' early stock-market movements as indicative of the long-term story.

"There are many versions of our future that are highly profitable and valuable, and there are of course some that are less so," Khosrowshahi wrote. "During times of negative market sentiment, the pessimistic voices get louder, and the optimistic voices pull back."

He added: "Obviously our stock did not trade as well as we had hoped post-IPO."

Khosrowshahi is leading the company through its debut at a difficult moment for the stock market.

Global markets have fallen under pressure in recent weeks amid the ongoing trade war between the US and China. Stocks fell on Monday after China said it would hike tariffs on US goods in a retaliatory measure. US markets remain near all-time highs despite the recent volatility.

Now read more Uber coverage from Markets Insider and Business Insider:

Stalled out: Why the rush of IPOs from big, unprofitable companies like Uber and Lyft could throw the entire market off track

Uber is tanking after logging the biggest first-day dollar loss in US IPO history

Meet Austin Geidt, the Uber exec whose life is the stuff of Silicon Valley legend, who joined the company as an intern in 2010, got sober at age 20, and just rang the company's IPO bell

Markets Insider

One of America's most famous science communicator is pissed off, and the kiddie gloves are off.

Bill Nye is best known for his 1990s public television program, "Bill Nye the Science Guy," but he has since made many appearances in films and television shows, served as a science adviser for the Obama administration, and recently hosted a Netflix documentary series called "Bill Nye Saves the World."

On Sunday, Nye joined the talk-show host John Oliver on "Last Week Tonight" to offer up a fiery public service announcement. In the segment, Oliver was discussing the Green New Deal, a proposed set of regulations and initiatives that hopes to make the US carbon-neutral in 10 years and create jobs in the process. The concept has been championed by many Democrats, notably Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Oliver said it has catalyzed a debate about climate legislation across the country (even though Green New Deal legislation has stagnated in Congress).

Oliver added, however, that we're far from out of the woods when it comes to curbing carbon emissions. Then he invited Nye to share his thoughts on the matter — and Nye got real.

Wearing his familiar lab coat, bow tie, and safety glasses, Nye stood behind a table. In front of him sat a globe, a bucket of sand, a flame-retardant blanket, and a fire extinguisher.

"I've got an experiment for you — safety glasses on," he said. "By the end of this century, if emissions keep rising, the average temperature on Earth could go up another 4 to 8 degrees. What I'm saying is the planet's on f---ing fire."

Then Nye pulled a blowtorch from under the table and set the globe alight.

"There are a lot of things we could do to put it out. Are any of them free?" Nye asked, pointing to the three objects on the table that could extinguish the flames.

"No, of course not — nothing's free, you idiots. Grow the f--- up," he said. "You're not children anymore. I didn't mind explaining photosynthesis to you when you were 12, but you're adults now and this is an actual crisis. Got it? Safety glasses off motherf---ers."

Here's the clip:

Here are some of the real and scary numbers behind Nye's tirade:

The scientist has good reason to be angry.

You can watch the full segment from "Last Week Tonight" below.

When Microsoft reported its earnings last quarter, it said its cloud business grew 73%.

Microsoft is locked in competition with Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud for a larger slice of the cloud market. While AWS has the bulk of the market share, Microsoft's Azure cloud has seen major growth in recent years as well, taking advantage of its longstanding history with enterprise customers.

Microsoft has ramped up its artificial intelligence abilities. And it's been a longtime supporter of hybrid cloud technology, which allows customers to run their workloads on both remote cloud servers and in their own data centers — Google and AWS are just starting to introduce similar products.

Read more: $30 billion Paychex explains why it's betting on Microsoft's cloud, which it says 'far exceeded' its rivals

Microsoft also has an advantage in winning over retail customers, who may see Amazon as a looming competitor. And lately, Microsoft has been wrestling with AWS over a $10 billion cloud contract with the Pentagon that could change the balance of power in the cloud business.

Business Insider spoke with numerous Microsoft customers at its annual Microsoft Build developer conference in Seattle last week. These developers and executives have used tools from Microsoft's cloud, and in many cases, from Amazon's AWS as well.

If you're trying to get an on-the-ground snapshot of the current state of affairs in the cloud wars, these are the people you want to talk to.

Here's what they have to say about the differences between the two cloud rivals, and about how Microsoft's effort to vanquish Amazon in this massive market is coming along:

YouTube is making a renewed push for six-second ads, even as marketers cool on the format.

To counter consumers' slipping attention spans, YouTube, Snap, and TV networks started pushing six-second ads a couple years ago. On Monday, Google-owned YouTube rolled out a tool called Bumper Machine that uses machine learning to cut videos into six-second clips that marketers can run as unskippable ads in videos. YouTube said the tool analyzes videos up to 90 seconds long for features such as products, logos, human faces, and contrast.

In a blog post, YouTube acknowledged that creating six-second ads can be a challenge for advertisers.

"Since introducing six-second bumper ads in 2016 as a way to help you reach more mobile viewers, we've found that they punch far above their weight when it comes to effectiveness," Vishal Sharma, the vice president of product management at YouTube, wrote. "But producing a six-second video requires additional time and resources that not every team has."

New research from analytics firm MediaRadar confirms that advertisers are challenged by the format.

In the first quarter of 2019, according to MediaRadar:

"We're seeing that longer ads are coming back," Todd Krizelman, CEO and cofounder of MediaRadar, said. "It's hard to sell stuff in six seconds, no matter how cool or innovative the brand."

YouTube declined to comment on MediaRadar's research.

Creative agencies struggle with shorter ads

Agencies don't have the resources to make multiple ad formats for specific platforms.

Jennifer Kohl, the senior vice president and executive director of integrated media at VMLY&R, said that six-second ads should not have a full story arc or be cut down versions of longer ads.

"Marketers need to look at the six-second creative as a micro-message — they are snapshot messages that are discrete enough to stand alone, but can be used together to tell a larger story," she said. "The simpler the message, the better."

Gary Stein, the head of media of Eleven, added that six-second ads often feel rushed and aren't designed with specific creativity.

"The mistake that everyone made was that they were counting down versus counting up," he said. "Google is very good at machine learning and artificial intelligence — that might be a way of solving a problem."

TV is also having a hard time with 6-second ads

TV networks like Fox, NBC, and ABC have experimented with six-second ads over the past couple years to cut down on advertising time within programs and give marketers more flexibility with TV.

VMLY&R's Kohl said that while networks have been pushing for more six-second ads, particularly in live sports programs, the ad format isn't catching on.

"The favorites continue to be 15 seconds and 30 seconds, with long form playing a specific role as well," she said.

According to MediaRadar, nearly no advertisers ran six-second TV ads during the first quarter.

As YouTube and other digital platforms angle for more TV dollars from advertisers, advertisers are less worried about grabbing consumers' attention instantly and are putting longer ads online, Krizelman said.

"Online is looking more and more like television, and there's a lot of reasons why television works," he said. "Increasingly, the two are marching towards some middle ground."

Uber's unimpressive initial public offering shouldn't have surprised anyone.

Lyft's share price had already tanked following its debut on the public markets, and Uber underpriced its offering so that it could offer some kind of IPO "pop" and avoid Lyft's fate — and even that wasn't enough to dupe investors.

Beyond the bummer IPO, Uber's once majestic mega-unicorn valuation had already been questioned, notably by an early 2018 investment by SoftBank that knocked 30% off Uber's then theoretical market capitalization of almost $70 billion.

Throw in the company's plentiful personal problems and a US-China trade war, and you have a troubled lead-up to ringing the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange last week.

The markets are now taking the stuffing out of Uber, the first stage of a more rational assessment of the company's actual business.

But, even with all the initial Wall Street hating and shares down 12% out of the box, Uber is still valued at more than $70 billion — nearly $20 billion more than General Motors.

Read more: Uber wanted to be a monopoly — but it may have to settle for the next best thing

For Uber, the short-term path is clear. The company must continue to grow revenue at the expense of profits, which have thus far been nonexistent and aren't likely to materialize anytime soon.

The top line is tasty: Uber brought in more than $11 billion in 2018, but converting that ocean of cash into a positive bottom line is going to be elusive.

In the short term, Uber doesn't have many choices

Cut prices! Robert Galbraith/Reuters

To a degree, Uber is a victim of its own success: It dominates the ride-hailing market, but it isn't a monopoly. When I talked to Evan Rawley, a Columbia Business School professor, about this in 2017, he suggested that Uber would control 70% of the market while pesky Lyft would capture about 30%. That's a lopsided duopoly, but it means that because of its scale, Uber's only path to maintaining its market share is lower pricing.

This is a good deal for consumers because they'll pay less for Uber's ride-hailing service. (Lyft will have to decide if it follows Uber in lowering prices or if it's willing to give up share in hope of profits. And if its stock tanks enough, there might be a future in which Uber buys Lyft outright. The two have had acquisition talks before.)

But what about Uber raising prices? Wouldn't that mitigate investor concerns?

Uber could sacrifice some market share, but that would be shortsighted. We essentially have the Amazon model here: CEO Jeff Bezos convinced investors that profits were pointless if they undermined the grander goal of market dominance. That ideology has guided Amazon for decades as it has delivered the best possible prices to consumers (we can debate the ethics of that strategy, but there's no question that pricing is where Amazon has won).

The 'platform' theory of Uber's future

An Uber Eats rider cycles through central London. Jack Taylor/Getty Images

Khosrowshahi has also indicated that Uber might pursue new lines of business — or if self-driving cars can eliminate drivers, an obvious major cost, turbocharge the current core business ($1 billion in pre-IPO new investment flowed into that part of the company in April).

Then there's the "platform" concept: Uber could provide a variety of new services to its 91 million active users, and any or all of them could be profitable.

"There are many versions of our future that are highly profitable and valuable, and there are of course some that are less so," Khosrowshahi wrote in a leaked email to Uber employees.

Uber Eats and the logistics and shipping operation are examples. And there's the mountain of location data that Uber collects; I've talked to a lot of folks in the transportation business about how big data is where the real money will be.

Uber could also turn itself into an advertiser on wheels, not just empowering brands with the vast amounts of data it collects but also potentially giving them screen time while a passenger is bored in the back seat.

Of course, the risk that no new business pans out is real. If you have high hopes, you can buy the stock now. But unless you're prepared to hold it for a long time — like an Amazon-grade time frame — you're liable to have your tolerance for frustration tested.

Khosrowshahi? Or Kalanick?

The wrong CEO, pre-IPO. But now? Josiah Kamau/BuzzFoto via Getty Images

Ironically, as much as Khosrowshahi may have been the right guy to lead Uber through its crisis and prepare the ground for an IPO free of controversy, he might not be the best executive to oversee a money-losing campaign of brutal price-cutting, and he might also be uncomfortable selling new lines of business to investors mainly to increase revenue to pay for the aforementioned price-cutting.

Travis Kalanick was better equipped to ride the monster that Uber was, still is, and needs to be if it's going to remain dominant until it can replace cars that need drivers with cars that don't (worry not, by the way, if Uber can't develop its own autonomous tech — Waymo will be happy to sell it to Uber, in exchange for access to millions of customers and their data).

But Kalanick isn't coming back. He wasn't even allowed by his board to ring the opening bell. So Khosrowshahi will need to figure out how to channel the more ruthless business side of his predecessor's nature if he's to stay at the helm.

Can he do it? Maybe, if he realizes that what Uber needs now is aggressive leadership rather than benign stewardship.

Sure, the company looks huge, but smartphone-enabled ride-hailing is still a new business, and nobody knows how to make it profitable at scale.

Wall Street might be grousing, but Uber is too big to vanish. It isn't so big, however, that it can't be chipped down if it fails to make the most of its advantage — that very largeness.

Uber is a monster. Now it just needs to act like it.

Following is a transcript of the video.

Narrator: If you're watching this video, there's a good chance your data has been hacked, leaked, or stolen. Over a billion users were affected by data breaches in 2018, and it seems like there are reports of new hacks every week. Can you even use the internet without your information eventually leaking? What's going on with your data?

We trust companies with a lot of our data. Unfortunately, we don't always know how the data's being used or if it's protected. Third parties accessing your information without your permission is never good. But there are actually a bunch of ways your information can be exposed. Large data breaches can leak data from multiple companies, often containing information of millions of users. In 2018, a leak called Collection #1 was released on the file-hosting site Mega. Collection #1 contained millions of passwords and emails all collected from previous data breaches. But sometimes the attacks are more specific.

Hackers often target individual companies to gain access to their user data. The largest hack so far was the Yahoo hack. In 2013, 3 billion user accounts were compromised. The breach included user phone numbers, birth dates, and even security questions and answers. Even though that breach happened in 2013, users didn't know the full scale until three years later. More recently, T-Mobile was targeted by hackers who stole the data of 2 million users. These types of hacks are all too common nowadays. But it gets worse.

Third parties can have access to your data even if there was no hack. When you sign into an app or a game with Facebook, you're sharing some of your data, and it's hard to know how the data you share is being used or who has access to it. In 2015, the app This Is Your Digital Life shared user data with third parties like Cambridge Analytica. Facebook gave the app access to user-profile data and information on subjects each user was interested in. Users of the app had no idea this data was being used, and in April, Business Insider reported that Facebook had unintentionally uploaded 1.5 million email contacts without user permission. Facebook has even been criticized for using phone numbers used to verify passwords to instead target ads, taking something that was supposed to be used for security and using it to improve ad tracking.

Sometimes there isn't even malicious intent, just negligence. In 2018, The Wall Street Journal reported that a bug in Google Plus could have exposed the data of hundreds of thousands of users. Google claims no user data was misused, but they failed to disclose this issue for months.

OK, so this type of thing happens a lot, and your data is probably out there. But how does this actually affect you? At best, it doesn't. If your email address is leaked, for example, there isn't much that hackers can do without having other information. But it gets worse when more private information is exposed. If passwords and emails are leaked, you're at risk of having your account stolen or accessed by someone else. And depending on where the data came from and how often it was used, it could mean someone now has access to your email login, online bank accounts, or other very sensitive data. The worst-case scenario can include things like credit-card fraud and identity theft. These breaches have serious impacts beyond bad PR for a company, and they're actually getting worse.

The number and size of data breaches has skyrocketed in the last decade. According to research from Norton Lifelock, more than a billion adults have been the victim of a cyber crime. OK, so at this point, you're probably a little freaked out and are wondering what you can do to protect your data.

1. Find out if your data has been leaked

First, check if your data has been leaked. The website Have I Been Pwned has a database of information that has been exposed. You can input your info like an email address or old passwords to see if that data has been leaked.

2. Change your passwords

If it has, change those passwords right away.

3. Vary your passwords

Speaking of passwords, using the same password for everything is a horrible idea. If one account is compromised, all of your accounts will be at risk.

4. Use a password manager

Instead, use a password manager, like LastPass or 1Password. A password manager securely stores your passwords and can help you generate unique ones that are hard to crack with brute-force hacking.

5. Set up two-factor authentication

Additionally, setting up two-factor authentication for your accounts can prevent someone who has that password from accessing that account. If you're feeling overly vulnerable or paranoid, you can even purchase a device like YubiKey to add even more security to your accounts. Even something as simple as keeping your apps and computer up-to-date can help prevent malicious attacks.

6. Turn off ad tracking

Next, turn off ad tracking when available. We give a lot of information to online advertisers without even knowing it, but some services give users the option to limit what is being shared.

7. Switch your browser

If you wanna go even further, you can use a browser like Firefox Focus, which acts as always-on incognito mode, enabling a private-browsing session that shares and retains less data than traditional browsers.

8. Get a paid VPN

Finally, using a paid VPN can hide your internet traffic and IP address from third parties. A VPN can also protect your data when you're using public WiFi. It will encrypt your data, making it much more difficult for anyone to steal it from an open network.

9. Monitor your credit

If you think sensitive data has leaked, that could allow for fraud or identity theft. Be sure to contact your credit-card company and credit-reporting bureaus. You can also monitor your credit yourself via sites like Credit Sesame, which will alert you if there are any inquiries into your credit.

This is a lot, I know. Being on the internet means we're always sharing some kind of data. You can't stop a company from getting hacked, but you can limit how much information you share.