Travis Kalanick

“Travis and I are very good friends, you know, from Uber and have been for a long time. And we, I would be good friends with him if his company failed, and I would invest in his next company”

“He had just been sued for a quarter of a trillion dollars by the movie companies.”

“Anybody that says that they did, other than, you know, Travis and Ryan, who actually did kind of have that vision early on would be lying to you.”

“I've been interviewing with Travis in kind of 2011 for a product role there. And I remember my interviews being at 11 p.m. At night. This is when they were probably, you know, less than a hundred people. 11 p.m. At night. The office is full. And Travis, my int…”

“The biggest miss was Uber and Travis Kalanick was actually in my office with Talking about his angel portfolio years ago, we both had a healthcare IT company. He was in Cario and I was in practice fusion. And I brought him in to talk about, you know, how we ca…”

“In the beginning, it was Garrett, and then I was working out of Travis's house three days a week for like a year, and then it became Jenny Lefcourt, who after, you know, as the needs have changed for the business, the, my mentors have changed.”

“Our first seed round, my very first, well, my first two advisors and angel investors were Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick.”

“Travis has a complicated story, and I think he's sort of developed kind of this legend around him, which is perhaps surprising to the people who know him, because he's actually a really nice guy with, I would say, one of the most strong moral compasses I know,…”

“The more a company scales, all that stuff gets away from you anyway, even if on paper you own more of the company. I mean, you see the stuff that we work, you see like Travis having to leave Uber. Even though they technically legally had control, like what rea…”

“So on one hand, those qualities for Travis are what built Uber. On the other hand, those qualities for Travis are what got him kicked out of Uber.”

“And so I negotiated on valuation because I knew it was a great idea. I just didn't realize how big it would be going back to some of the earlier questions. You asked me, and so I said, here's what I would do, and he never came back to me, which pissed me off, …”

“I met Travis through Red Swoosh. I actually funded that, and so I kept him alive when he was about to die with his previous company, and to his credit, he busted his ass and got it sold, and we made money off of it, so I knew he was a good entrepreneur of”

“In the end, what pushed Travis out was when his team held him accountable. It was when the, you know, his 13 senior managers all wrote a letter that said, dude, you've got to stay out of the company.”

“So when Travis, the CEO of Uber was interviewing me, he actually gave me a challenge problem about Uber promo cards. And he just said, we have these promo cards. We haven't really figured out exactly how we're going to use these yet. Tell me how you would make…”

“We decided to run a test In Hyderabad, India, where we said, let's let riders request their first ride without putting a credit card number in. In fact, we were told by our CEO not to run that test because he felt so strongly against it, but we had so much con…”

“And so we would have growth team meetings with him every Friday morning. We'd usually pull all nighters every Thursday night, preparing for our meeting with him on Friday morning.”

“They do not think they would have as successful as they were if Travis was still CEO of Uber.”

“In the end, what pushed Travis out was when his team held him accountable. It was when the, you know, his 13 senior managers all wrote a letter and said, dude, you gotta stay out of the company. You know, that's really the only force that Silicon Valley leader…”

“So I would have beaten door, we would have beaten DoorDash, guaranteed. We were ahead by 30 points when Travis Night left, so letting that atrophy was not an option.”

“Had I talked to him that day, I would have said, Travis, walk out of the room. If you want to rip up the papers in front of them and we'll get, you know, get a lawyer and whatever. This is ridiculous. You know, there's, this is unfair. This is coercive. And we…”

“I was taken out with Travis because benchmark capital lost their nerve.”

“Travis is one of the best founders I've ever met my entire life.”

“When you get stuck thinking through that and working through the hundred reasons why owning the black car market isn't worth it, then you miss That Travis would figure out UberX.”

“I wish that, you know, Bill Gurley's, you know, firing of Travis, you know, was, you know, sort of talked about more publicly about how morally depraved that entire basically situation was so that people can choose to opt into.”

“I don't think so. I'm a big fan of founder led businesses, and I think Travis is an incredible founder who, you know, should have been given the opportunity to lead Uber into the next generation. It's really unfortunate how things happened and played out. And …”

“The best founders build cults, and they're cult leaders, and I think Travis, what he was really good at was inspiring the team.”

“What I wish I had done or had the wisdom to know to do was what, you know, Sam and his allies did in getting the employees at OpenAI to back Sam and say, if he doesn't come back, we're gonna leave. . It was very powerful, and if we had done that at Uber, becau…”

“I believe that it was, you know, one of the worst venture, ah, decisions ever.”

“About in early August They then sued in Delaware courts after they had already gotten rid of Travis. They then sued to get rid of him and his two board seats that he had gotten that he hadn't appointed yet. So three board seats. So they wanted, you know, effec…”

“Travis Basically for six months was like, you know, telling the taxi commission, the city, government, like, you know, hey, these guys are illegal, like, well, you know, why are you allowing it, et cetera, instead of launching it, you know, as well which was l…”

“And the report, by the way, didn't find anything wrong that, you know, Travis did, or I did, or there was nothing, nothing in there about, you know, him, you know, directly and the recommendation was like to go hire a Sheryl Sandberg, like a chief operating of…”

“And so they got two, two of the greatest minds in Silicon Valley were taken out of the company. This is the greatest value destruction that's happened since firing Steve Jobs at Apple. And it was a massive mistake.”

“These are people that are like, it's not even 10 X, you talk about 10 X engineers, these are like thousand X humans and so I've learned over time that it's worth waiting for the thousand X founders and investing in the future Travis's, or the future Elon's”

“Andreessen, having lost the Uber deal, ended up doing the Lyft deal, and we had, you know, Travis and Emil, you know, they were close to acquiring it acquiring Lyft which, you know but they wanted too much ownership so that luckily didn't work out”

“He architected the fifteen billion dollar raise he had a massive impact on the trajectory of Uber, and he became really Travis's right hand and sparring partner in building, building Uber.”

“So the SoftBank conversations, ironically, Travis and Emil started those conversations, the ultimate twelve billion dollar investment from SoftBank Vision Fund.”

“We found out in our investigation that he hired Some private investigators had weekly meetings about how do we get rid of Travis.”

“Would I invest based on the interview? No, I wouldn't.”

“Cloud kitchens eight years out in the winterland. Do I think it's going to make it? Probably not.”

“They, you know, the humanoid robotics that we all see, they have these legs, they consume a lot of battery life, they're pretty unstable, and most of the time in factory work or logistics, warehouse work, you don't want someone using, you don't need legs, you …”

“I think Travis Uber would be a trillion dollar company today because it would be five years ahead of where it is today.”

“Actually, it turns out, in retrospect, they should have done the Steve Jobs thing. They should have swapped them out, got it public, got a cash flow like crazy, and sometime in 22 should have gotten back and said, now, Now is the time to do autonomy”

“Travis is totally correct. He's making it, it's not humanoids, it's specific purpose robotics. I actually think he's correct. I think we'll look back on the humanoids and go, we got way ahead of ourselves. You actually need specific purpose autonomous thing ma…”

“When we started our autonomous efforts, you know, this is a secret project within Uber... You know, this would have been, you know, I don't know, 2013, 2012, 2013, 2014, we would have quietly started working on this”