When Uber’s board of directors searched for a new CEO to replace Travis Kalanick during the summer of 2017, they landed on Dara Khosrowshahi, an investment banker-turned internet dealmaker. Khosrowshahi had spent nearly two decades of his career working at online travel giant Expedia and before that at IAC, a holding company with a portfolio of over 150 media and internet brands, where he learned the art of the business deal — buying, selling, and spinning off companies (IAC purchased Expedia in 2001). Now nearly three years since taking the helm, Uber is starting to follow the same acquisitive, deal-heavy playbook that has become a corporate signature for Khosrowshahi.

w ^母鸡董事尤伯杯的董事会寻找新CEO夏季华氏度 2017年期间替换特拉维斯·卡拉尼克，他们降落在达拉霍斯劳沙希，投资银行家出身的互联网交易撮合者。 Khosrowshahi在职业生涯的近二十年里曾在在线旅游巨头Expedia工作，在此之前，他在IAC 控股公司 ，该公司拥有150多个媒体和互联网品牌，他从中学习了商业交易的技巧-买卖，剥离公司(IAC在2001年购买了Expedia)。 接任掌舵人已经近三年了，Uber开始沿用同一笔可交易的，沉重的交易手册，该手册已成为Khosrowshahi的公司签名。

While Uber is most associated with ride-sharing, its Uber Eats business has been a bigger growth story. In Q4 of 2019, Eats was 32% of Uber’s gross bookings (the total dollar value of its services, including ride-sharing, Uber Eats, Uber Freight, etc.), but accounted for 51% of the company’s gross bookings’ growth. That trend rocketed up in Q1 of 2020, with Eats adding $1.6 billion in bookings compared to the year before, while gross bookings for the Rides business shrank by 5% from the year before.

虽然Uber与乘车共享关系最为密切，但其Uber Eats业务却是一个更大的增长故事。 在2019年第四季度，Eats占Uber 总预订量的32％(其服务的总美元价值，包括乘车共享，Uber Eats，Uber Freight等)，但占公司总预订量增长的 51％。 这种趋势在2020年第一季度激增，与Eats相比，前一年的预订量增加了16亿美元，而Rides业务的总预订量比去年下降了5％。

Food delivery is an exciting sector precisely because it’s growing so fast. There’s really just one problem: Delivery businesses work best when they have high market share, and every delivery player is gunning for growth (the classic example here being FedEx and UPS). Uber Eats, Grubhub, Doordash, and Postmates have spent the last few years flooding the market — desperately signing up restaurants and bombarding customers with coupons, discounts, loyalty programs, and more — in an effort to do anything and everything to snap up customers and keep them.

粮食交付是一个令人兴奋的领域，正是因为它发展如此之快 。 实际上只有一个问题：交付业务拥有较高的市场份额时，它们的运作效率最高，并且每个交付参与者都渴望增长(此处的典型示例是FedEx和UPS)。 过去几年，Uber Eats，Grubhub，Doordash和Postmates纷纷涌入市场-拼命签约餐厅，并使用优惠券，折扣，忠诚度计划等轰炸客户-竭尽全力抢购客户并保留它们。

破解外卖业务模式 (Cracking the business model of food delivery)

There are two basic approaches to the food delivery business: One method is to build a passive, two-sided marketplace that matches customers with restaurants and lets them figure out the transaction. That model is attractive because it’s capital-light — build a website, hire nimble customer service support teams, and hope that the network effect takes care of itself.

餐饮业务有两种基本方法：一种方法是建立一个被动的，双向的市场，使顾客与餐馆相匹配并让他们确定交易。 该模型之所以吸引人，是因为它是轻量级的资本-建立网站，雇用灵活的客户服务支持团队，并希望网络效应能自行解决。

The only drawback here is that the logistics are challenging and also inconsistent. Some restaurants deliver promptly and reliably. Some are not so great. Marketplaces shine when the customer is indifferent to the brand name of the ultimate seller; if people go to Seamless to order from one particular sushi restaurant, Seamless can’t charge that restaurant much. If they go to Seamless to buy sushi, and there are a couple dozen sushi restaurants in delivery range, those restaurants bid up to their entire margin to reach number one on the platform.

唯一的缺点是后勤工作既困难又不一致。 一些餐馆会Swift而可靠地发货。 有些不是那么好。 当顾客对最终卖方的品牌漠不关心时，市场就会发光。 如果人们从一间特定的寿司餐厅到Seamless公司订购，那么Seamless公司就不会向该餐厅收取太多费用。 如果他们去Seamless购买寿司，并且送货范围内有几十家寿司餐厅，那么这些餐厅会竞价获得最高利润，从而在平台上排名第一。

In food delivery, Uber faced the classic business dilemma: build it, or buy it?

在送餐方面，Uber面临着经典的经营困境：建造还是购买？

But if the restaurants handle delivery, their incentive is to skimp on speed and focus on quality — so the paradox of the asset-light delivery model is that when pricing power is highest (because the brand that matters is the platform, not the restaurant), delivery problems are the worst — and reflect poorly on the platform, not the restaurant.

但是，如果餐厅处理交付，那么他们的动机就是跳过速度并专注于质量-因此轻资产交付模型的悖论在于，当定价能力最高时(因为重要的品牌是平台，而不是餐厅) ，送货问题是最严重的-并反映在平台而不是餐厅上。

That leaves the other approach: offering a platform and overseeing delivery, too.

剩下的另一种方法是：提供一个平台并监督交付。

This has a number of advantages. For restaurants that don’t normally handle delivery, the sales process is easier: Instead of asking them to offer a new product, the platform allows them to focus on their core business (making food) and add a new revenue source with minimal inconvenience. It helps customers by offering a more consistent and streamlined delivery experience. And there are economies of scale from having one network that services multiple customers — it maximizes utilization, the sine qua non of any logistics business.

这具有许多优点。 对于通常不处理外卖的餐馆，销售过程会更容易：该平台无需要求他们提供新产品，而是使他们能够专注于自己的核心业务(做饭)，并在带来最小麻烦的情况下增加了新的收入来源。 它通过提供更加一致和简化的交付体验来帮助客户。 拥有一个为多个客户提供服务的网络可以带来规模经济，它可以最大限度地提高利用率，这是任何物流业务的先决条件 。

The only drawback is that delivery is a challenging, low-margin business. It requires a large workforce, high fixed costs, and facility to deal with uncertainty. Chicago-based Grubhub, which was recently acquired for $7.3 billion in stock by European food delivery service Just Eat Takeaway, launched a delivery service in mid-2014, and gradually expanded it across the U.S. But they were never especially exciting. Grubhub was intended to be an app that connected people to restaurants, not a courier service that delivered pizza.

唯一的缺点是交付是一项具有挑战性的低利润业务。 它需要大量的劳动力，高昂的固定成本以及应对不确定性的便利。 总部位于芝加哥的Grubhub最近被欧洲送餐服务Just Just Takeaway以73亿美元的股票收购，于2014年中推出了送餐服务，并逐渐在美国范围内扩展，但从来没有特别令人兴奋。 Grubhub旨在成为将人们连接到餐厅的应用程序，而不是提供比萨饼的快递服务。

For one kind of company, though, that fixed cost was not especially high: Uber already had a delivery network, matching commuters to drivers. They’d experimented with other kinds of courier services, like the short-lived UberRUSH, an on-demand package delivery service directly competing with Postmates in 2015. As Uber expanded its core ride-sharing service, it learned two things: 1) ride-sharing businesses are very expensive to operate, and 2) once they’re in place, it’s relatively easy to add additional logistics operations.

但是，对于一家公司来说，固定成本并不是特别高：Uber 已经有了一个送货网络，可以将通勤者与驾驶员相匹配。 他们还尝试了其他种类的快递服务，例如寿命短的UberRUSH ，这是2015年与Postmates直接竞争的按需包裹递送服务。随着Uber扩展其核心乘车共享服务，它学到了两点：1)乘车共享业务的运营成本非常高，并且2)一旦成立，添加其他物流业务相对容易。

In food delivery, Uber faced the classic business dilemma: build it, or buy it?

在送餐方面，Uber面临着经典的经营困境：建造还是购买？

Uber probably had a different vocabulary in their hyper-competitive recent past during the Travis Kalanick era. “Acquire or annihilate,” perhaps. Originally, they chose the annihilation strategy, expanding Eats into markets like New York (where Grubhub’s Seamless brand already had a significant position), Chicago (Grubhub’s home turf), and the Bay Area, home to Doordash, Postmates, and an ever-rotating cast of delivery services targeting a narrow and hyper-specific slice of the market, from Sprig to Munchery to Maple to Spoonrocket (for a while in 2015, it looked like San Francisco’s entire economy was an effort to convert venture capital dollars into on-demand burritos).

在特拉维斯·卡兰尼克(Travis Kalanick)时代，优步(Uber)在竞争异常激烈的过去可能有不同的词汇。 也许是“获取或歼灭”。 最初，他们选择了an灭策略，将Eats扩展到纽约(Grubhub的Seamless品牌已经占有重要地位)，芝加哥(Grubhub的家乡)和湾区(Doordash，Postmates和不断变化的地区)的市场的送货服务施放瞄准市场的狭小和Hyper-特定片，从小枝至Munchery到枫到Spoonrocket (在2015年时，它看起来像旧金山的整个经济是为了转换创投美元到点播墨西哥卷饼)。

大流行如何影响了交付格局 (How the pandemic has shaped the delivery landscape)

But in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis, the math has changed. At first glance it would appear that ubiquitous lockdowns would be great for delivery. But as it turns out, the most reliable customers for food delivery companies were office workers, and a combination of convenient access to at-home snack options and corporate belt-tightening crimped those dinner delivery budgets.

但是在Covid-19危机之后，数学已经改变。 乍一看，无处不在的锁定对于交付来说似乎很棒。 但事实证明，送餐公司最可信赖的客户是办公室工作人员，而方便地获得居家零食和紧缩公司皮带的结合使晚餐送餐的预算减少了。

Uber’s Postmates bet is an interesting one: It’s doubling down on the delivery-as-logistics bet over the delivery-as-online-platform play.

优步(Uber)的Postmates赌注是一个有趣的赌注：它比“按物流交付”平台对“按物流交付”的赌注加倍。

As a result, the inevitable food delivery consolidation accelerated. In a matter of months after the pandemic hit, Uber and Grubhub went through extended negotiations over a merger, but ultimately couldn’t come to an agreement; both companies worried about antitrust scrutiny and couldn’t find a mutually agreeable price that factored that risk in. But once a company is for sale, the sale process has its own momentum. Just Eat Takeaway — a European delivery conglomerate cobbled together through acquisitions in the U.K., Netherlands, Italy, France, Switzerland, and other places — made a winning bid for Grubhub.

结果，不可避免的食品交付整合加速了。 在大流行爆发后的短短几个月内，Uber和Grubhub就合并进行了长时间的谈判，但最终未能达成协议。 两家公司都担心反托拉斯审查，无法找到将这一风险因素考虑在内的双方同意的价格。但是，一旦公司被出售，出售过程就会有自己的动力。 通过在英国，荷兰，意大利，法国，瑞士和其他地方的收购而拼凑而成的欧洲快递集团Just Eat Takeaway赢得了Grubhub的中标。

A month later, Uber settled. They paid $2.65 billion in stock for Postmates, the number four player in the U.S. food delivery business. Uber’s Postmates bet is an interesting one: It’s doubling down on the delivery-as-logistics bet over the delivery-as-online-platform play. Thanks to the vagaries of the delivery market, where every major entrant tried to dominate every market, there are only a handful of cities where Uber and Postmates together would have a majority of transactions. Outside of Los Angeles and Miami, the market will remain fragmented between the major players.

一个月后，优步安定下来。 他们以26.5亿美元的股票收购了美国食品配送业务中排名第四的Postmates。 优步(Uber)的Postmates赌注是一个有趣的赌注：它比“在线交付平台”游戏的“按物流交付”赌注加倍。 由于交付市场的变化无常，每个主要进入者都试图占领每个市场，因此只有少数几个城市的Uber和Postmates在一起拥有大部分交易。 在洛杉矶和迈阿密以外，主要参与者之间的市场仍将分散。

送餐公开上市为何如此重要 (Why it matters that food delivery is going public)

The market’s consolidation isn’t over yet, though the acquisition phase probably is. Now, two of the big three — Uber/Postmates and Just Eat/Grubhub — are publicly traded. And Doordash has confidentially filed to go public, too. This means that all three companies will have continuous access to capital. If they believe that delivery will work once the market’s a little bigger, they’ll keep on investing (and losing money, and subsidizing the occasional pizza arbitrage while they’re at it). Given how much antitrust skepticism Uber received over Grubhub, it’s hard to argue that Uber-sized companies can make meaningful acquisitions in the near future. It’s all about organic growth, instead.

尽管收购阶段可能已经结束，但市场整合尚未结束。 现在，三大巨头中的两个-Uber / Postmates和Just Eat / Grubhub-已公开交易。 Doordash也秘密地公开上市 。 这意味着所有三家公司都将持续获得资本。 如果他们认为一旦市场扩大一点就可以交货，那么他们将继续进行投资(亏损，并在市场上偶尔补贴比萨套利 )。 鉴于Uber在Grubhub上收到了多少反垄断怀疑论，很难说Uber规模的公司可以在不久的将来进行有意义的收购。 相反，这完全是关于有机增长。

But the fact that these companies are going public has another side effect: Public market retail investors are much more sensitive to short-term profits than private investors. A venture fund typically wants to make 10x or more on an early stage deal and to make at least 2x to 3x on later-stage ones. So they tend to invest in companies that are going to transform themselves, or their industry, before the exit. But public market investors are often looking for the chance to make a quick 5%–10%, or a steady 10%+ annually. They don’t want transformation; they want incremental improvement.

但是，这些公司上市的事实还有另一个副作用：与私人投资者相比，公开市场零售投资者对短期利润更为敏感。 风险基金通常希望在早期交易中赚10倍或以上，而在后期交易中赚至少2倍至3倍。 因此，他们倾向于在退出之前投资于将要改变自身或行业的公司。 但是，公开市场投资者经常寻找机会快速赚取5％–10％或每年稳定增长10％以上的机会。 他们不想转型；他们不想转型。 他们希望逐步改进。

When the shareholder list is short, and it includes people like Softbank’s Masa Son, companies burn cash to grow fast (Softbank backed both Uber and Doordash when they were private). But when the list is longer, and includes a diverse basket of stakeholders, including conservative mutual funds, itchy-fingered hedge funds, and frenetic Robinhood day traders, the incentive shifts. A sweeping change in delivery economics is hard to pull off, but incremental improvements led by less-aggressive discounting and smaller marketing budgets could happen. Delivery is not at the point where there’s a single obvious winner, so everyone’s goal is to make tied-for-second-place as profitable as possible.

当股东名单很短时，包括软银的马萨·松这样的人，公司会烧掉现金以快速增长( 软银在私有时支持Uber和Doordash)。 但是，如果名单更长，并且包括一揽子利益相关者，包括保守的共同基金，手指发痒的对冲基金和疯狂的罗宾汉日间交易者 ，那么动机就会改变。 交付经济学的全面变革很难实现，但由于折扣力度较小和营销预算较小而导致的增量改进可能会发生。 交付并不是唯一一个明显的赢家，因此每个人的目标都是使并列第二的利润尽可能多。