[digz]

This is an important point. Further to that, Uber should be a company with very clearly understood ROI. They put X number of dollars into a new city and get Y number of users and make Z number of dollars over a few years. Because they've done this in dozens of cities, they've got these numbers down. From Uber's perspective, any money they raise should look as much like debt as possible. Why? Debt means existing shareholders won't be diluted. If a growth company can safely issue debt, it always will. Probably not realistic for Uber to issue 1.2B in straight debt today (interest on that would amount to roughly 20-40% of their current revenue), so they would seek as much of the economics of the raise to resemble debt as possible. The more it resembles debt, the less we learn from the headline numbers about implied valuation.