Lyft is the first Unicorn which published its S-1 document, i.e. its IPO filing. Is this good news or bad news? Lyft is impressive, two founders who were 22 and 23 when they co-founded their start-up 12 years ago have reached more than $2B in sales with a little less than 5’000 employees in 2018. This is the good part. The less good piece is it took the company more than $5B in equity investment and the reason is simple: Lyft has lost $900M in 2018, and more than $600M in both 2017 and 2016. This is more than $2B cumulative loss. I assume losses were pretty high in the previous years too. YOu can have a look at the cap. table I built from the S-1:

I read recently an article by Tim O’Reilly: The fundamental problem with Silicon Valley’s favorite growth strategy. O’Reilly has doubts about Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh’s claiming that Blitzscaling would be the secret of success for today’s technology businesses. “Imagine, for a moment, a world in which Uber and Lyft hadn’t been able to raise billions of dollars in a winner-takes-all race to dominate the online ride-hailing market. How might that market have developed differently?” I have the same doubts about this crazy strategy but who am I to say?…