You&#x27;re a supermarket, you sell stuff from vendors you buy from. You have gross income minus cost of goods sold.<p>You&#x27;re a mall, you lease space to vendors. You have gross income minus expenses.<p>You&#x27;re not a logistics provider but merely a platform that connects third party service providers to the customer. You tell everyone how much money you hold on to for the third party service providers as... gross income?<p>Lyft and Uber et all are more like PayPal, also playing the game of claiming to not be a bank and for awhile not wanting to be a licensed money transmitter.<p>Last PayPal quarterly earning report they reported $69.74B in payment volume, $2.26B net revenue, $377MM net profit.<p>That makes sense.<p>Here Lyft is saying their gross revenue is $2B. Kind of like how Groupon count all the eggs in their basket before paying out their merchant partners.<p>Maybe a better way to put it is total booking volume $2B, net revenue $400MM, then whatever net profit after expenses.<p>Valuing the business at 10x on $400MM can make sense. The bet is that Lyft can make more money within ten years by sustaining and increasing the dispatch volume or by increasing efficiency and decreasing costs.