Uber’s financial results also looked promising. The company was exhibiting an elusive phenomenon called negative churn, in which users who joined the service were more likely to stay with it and gradually increase their frequency of use than they were to leave. In other words, once customers joined Uber, they turned into a sort of high-yield savings account. The lifetime value of a user seemed unknowable, perhaps unlimited. When someone signed up, according to an early internal estimate, he or she was worth forty or fifty dollars a month in gross revenues and eight to ten dollars in gross
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