Wonder is acquiring Grubhub

Where did all the money go?

Lowered expectations.

Earlier investors. Ever hear of pump and dump? After you sell you’re insulated from future performance as long as you don’t commit actual fraud etc.

Well, when you're in the business of selling a dollar for eighty cents, all the money probably got flushed down the toilet.

You get $10/month dining credits if you’re an Amex card holder. Imagine the cost of all promotions.

I always wondered if the promotions were handled with restaurants more like "we (the platform) recoup our promo losses via the regular platform fee you (the restaurant) pay regardless" or more like "if a customer uses a promotion, we (platform and restaurant) split the loss, unrelated to the regular platform fee". Like when I use a platform promo for reasons well beyond trying a new place for the first time, am I screwing the restaurant, the platform, or some combination?

Where it always goes, to the top.

Mostly the restaurant, at least in the case of these companies' "free delivery" membership deals. Restaurants pay a higher commission on those orders. (Whether that's enough to outweigh the operating deficit built into their current pricing I have no idea, but some fraction is being passed along to their merchant "partners".)

How were they selling a dollar for 80 cents? The actual food is more expensive on grubhub than ordering through the restaurant, and then there are multiple fees on top of that.

But there is the cost of hosting, developers, drivers, etc.

And that's all cost that is not borne by the restaurant.

And there is a limit to how much people would pay to get something delivered. So they're probably pricing the delivery, etc less than they've actually paid.

FAANG salaries and freebies.

> Earlier investors. Ever hear of pump and dump?

When did GrubHub buy early investors' shares with company cash?

Early investors had already “sold” the company well before this transaction: https://about.grubhub.com/news/grubhub-stockholders-approve-...

It was an all stock transaction, so they maintained an indirect stake but it was significantly diluted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_Eat_Takeaway.com Meanwhile Just Eat Takeaway investors got taken for a ride.

Tons of marketing/advertising. The free GrubHub+ subscription through prime probably burned through a lot of cash. I doubt Amazon was paying them very much (if anything) to Grubhub. Then you have all of the corporate staff (around 3k based on google search) who are highly paid.

And the competition from UberEats and Doordash, who also are constantly promoting discounts, free orders, etc. so there's almost no way they can recoup actual costs let alone turn a profit.

We've seen this before and we'll see it again. There are lots of people who will pay for things below cost. Sometimes that cost comes down but a lot of the time it does not especially in relatively affluent countries. I don't have a personal driver or chef like I might have in some places. I do have some other house/yard services but very occasionally and I consider them luxuries.

>Where did all the money go?

all of it, including its future, was valued at $7 billion, but there was never $7 billion in cash. Maybe it was $700 million in cash paid for 10% of it, which would value the whole thing at $7 billion. If that totally-made-up 10% number happens to be the right number, then it hasn't lost much at all overall, but the investor who paid that has to share the sale price with a bunch of other shareholders who paid less. So, this owner lost money, but the firm did not necessarily.

(I'm not saying this is what happened, and maybe a quick google would get us closer to the actual numbers, I'm just saying you have to pay attention to the wording of what is being claimed; media likes to exaggerate.)

what has disappeared is "belief in the future prospects of this company to bring in profits worth $7B" which was why the last investors invested, and why the early investors set up the kitchens and other frameworks to support those hopes. And it's not that the opportunity wasn't a good one, perhaps a competitor "won", or perhaps there are too many competitors trying to share the $7B pie.

FAANG wasn't involved at any point

The 7.5 billion? To the company that previously owned Grubhub. I believe that's how much Just Eat paid for it.

Where did the valuation go? Doordash and Uber Eats managed to eat them alive.

This is a winner takes all market. They spend it on becoming the US leader.

Every country has one platform that wins, everyone else loses the billions. There's no second place.

This does not seem like pump and dump:

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/pumpanddump.asp

There's zero reason for it to be winner take all.

UberEats, DoorDash, whoever

The degree to which startups with unsustainable business models can be called pump and dump schemes is debated. I wasn’t suggesting they committed fraud, but they definitely put their best foot forward before that transaction and believed it was in their interest to sell.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pump_and_dump

Also it’s not just unrelated 3rd parties, Enron was included because: “Enron falsely reported profits which inflated the stock price, they covered the real numbers by using questionable accounting practices. Twenty-nine Enron executives sold overvalued stock for more than a billion dollars before the company went bankrupt.”

If you're in zero interest rate policy, money looks like it's worth almost nothing.

But FAANG-level salaries, right? To compete?

That's called fair market compensation.

I'm not saying it's not. Please read the previous comment for context.