Uber, another Benchmark company, had recently been valued at $17 billion. Gurley was critiquing an NYU professor who said that Uber’s valuation was inflated “by a factor of 25.” The professor’s analysis presumed that Uber’s total addressable market, or TAM, was the $100 billion taxi-and-limousine market. Gurley believed that Uber’s TAM was every single car on the road—a market theoretically worth $1.3 trillion.
