by shira ovideuber technologies incs new chief executive officer has been projecting the image of a kinder gentler more humble and responsible company these are all good things yet under ceo dara khosrowshahi uber continues to articulate a perhaps contradictory strategy he wants the company to spend like crazy but also to pare costs and prepare for an ipo next yearthe cherrypicked financials that uber disclosed on wednesday showed a large and fastgrowing company that continues to post hefty losses uber said that in the first quarter it generated about 26 billion in revenue mostly from the share of each uber ride that the company keeps after handing over the vast majority to drivers that was a 70 percent jump from a year earlier bloomberg news reported uber continues to be unprofitable excluding the effect of the companys sale of its ride businesses in russia and southeast asia its tough to assess how successfully uber is paring costs because the company hasnt reported financial information uniformly which makes it difficult to compare current figures with previous results uber is also spending like mad including to expand outside its ondemand ride business in a statement khosrowshahi said uber planned to revinvest any overperformance of its ondemand ride business into that operation and newer costly projects such as driverless carsthat is not the kind of talk you would expect from the ceo of a company that is trying to get lean and mean for an ipo and until recently i would have thought that uber would have a tough time going public if it was still posting eyepopping losses but then came the successful 2017 ipo of snapchat parent company snap inc which had a short track record in business was burning cash like crazy and whose loss in the year before its ipo amounted to more than 100 percent of its revenue on the same basis ubers firstquarter loss was about 20 percent of its net revenue excluding the effect of the southeast asia and russia sales snap showed that investors were willing to accept hefty valuations for unproven companies with gigantic losses and uncertain business models uber fits that bill at this point i have to question why uber feels the need to go public at all its odd for me to write this i think there is useful discipline in companies being public and companies are better off if they can finance themselves rather than becoming dependent on a constant stream of outside cash but my colleague matt levine has been writing for some time that private companies are the new public companies and uber fits that bill too for years now uber has had a line of investors willing and able to give it capital its employees and early investors are no longer waiting on pins and needles to cash out their shares because investors including the japanese conglomerate softbank have agreed to buy stock directly from some uber workers and shareholders the company also said wednesday that