Bill Gurley

You state your answer with great confidence, but I think you are wrong. In the US (where Netflix is based), the "first sale doctrine" has been held to allow the rental of any legally purchased DVD (even those purchased at Walmart):

Because of the first-sale doctrine, any DVD reseller,
including Netflix, can basically buy a DVD at WalMart, and
turn around and rent it to someone else the very same day.
The content owners have absolutely no control over whether
the copy can be resold or rented. Period. As such, Netflix
has the ability to rent (via DVD) any movie which has ever
been sold on DVD, and its costs are relatively fixed as a
result of the retail price of the actual DVD.

http://abovethecrowd.com/2011/09/18/understanding-why-netflix-changed-pricing/

In your defense, it appears that many lawyers also do not understand this law. Here for example we see three saying that rental of consumer DVD's is clearly illegal, and two saying that it's just fine: http://www.avvo.com/legal-answers/is-it-legal-to-rent-out-dvd-s-i-ve-purchased--815989.html

This is probably because various studios have attempted to convince the public that rental of consumer DVD's is not allowed, even though falsely marking DVD's in this way is probably not legal: http://williampatry.blogspot.com/2007/05/first-sale-fandango.html

But while I'm pretty certain you are wrong, and although I think I understand the law here, I am not a lawyer, much less a specialist in copyright…

Bill Gurley of Benchmark Capital foresaw Android's rise, and wrote an excellent essay about it in early 2011, "The Freight Train That Is Android."[1] His main point: Google is not trying to make a profit on Android; they're trying only to control the key layers between themselves and the consumer, by making these layers free or even less than free, which is a HUGE problem for Android's competitors, who must make a profit.

As he put it, "I don’t know if a large organized industry has ever faced this fierce a form of competition – someone who is not trying to 'win' in the classic sense. They want market share, but they don’t need economics. Imagine if Ford were faced with GM paying people to take Chevrolets? How many would they be able to sell? What if you received $0.10 for every free Pepsi you consumed? Would you still pay $1.50 for a Coke?"

I highly recommend you read (or re-read) Bill's prescient essay.

--

[1] http://abovethecrowd.com/2011/03/24/freight-train-that-is-android/

I am blaming Silicon Valley for building a hype machine that valued appearance over substance, short-term paper gains over long-term value creation. Again.

And I'm hardly the only one saying this. Bill Gurley, a partner at Benchmark, made it clear that we've been dealing with a bubble, and said that the best possible thing that could happen was "a return to an appreciation for sound business execution". [1]

Nobody minds minds that we have companies that fail. That's the game. But when we create companies that burn ten million, a hundred million, maybe a billion dollars and never could have succeeded, then that is a major fuckup that is on us.

Even if you don't care about wasting OPM at that scale, just think of the number of seed and A-round companies that Theranos's $686.3M could have funded. If our job is to make interesting mistakes, we should be maximizing the amount learned per venture dollar.

[1] http://abovethecrowd.com/2016/04/21/on-the-road-to-recap/

The Uber article that you referred to as Nate Silver is not actually by him. Its by Ashwath Damodaran (The NYU corp finance prof)

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/uber-isnt-worth-17-billion/

His basic assumption was to use the taxi market as the total addressable market (TAM)

Bill Gurley, a VC from Benchmark and one of the investors in Uber, lays out alternative scenarios for TAM including going after car ownership.
http://abovethecrowd.com/2014/07/11/how-to-miss-by-a-mile-an-alternative-look-at-ubers-potential-market-size/

Damodaran's response to Gurley concedes its probable/plausible/possible for uber to get into non-Taxi and larger markets:
http://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.in/2014/07/possible-plausible-and-probable-big.html

Bottom line: the optionality of uber going into these larger markets is what is driving these valuations

Sam HAS to play down the fact that we are in a tech bubble. He is, after all, a venture capitalist, so do note the conflict of interest here.

My friend referred me to this Bill Gurley article [1]. My metric for whether there is another bubble is not so sophisticated. I feel that there is a bubble when celebrities (like sports personalities) begin investing in questionable startups [2][3]. Harkens back to the '99 bubble.

Edit: Before you bring up Ashton Kutcher, a single data point does not a trend make. But yes, we've been in a bubble long before he began investing actually.

[1]: http://abovethecrowd.com/2014/01/24/on-bubbles/

[2]: http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/04/kobe-bryant-silicon-valley-tech-bro

[3]: https://e27.co/boxing-champion-manny-pacquiao-throws-his-hat-into-the-startup-ring-invests-in-singapores-gtoken-20160606/

Most people (IMO correctly) assume that the point of Android is to make Google the default search on mobile phones. As more and more people use mobile devices to search, and search is after all Google's core business, it has an enormous interest in tapping into the mobile search market. And I'm guessing many users will choose to use the default search provider the phone uses.

So the theoretical threat is that Amazon/Apple will negotiate a deal with Microsoft to use Bing as the default search on their phones, thus losing Google a lot of customers.

More about their Android strategy here: http://abovethecrowd.com/2011/03/24/freight-train-that-is-android/.