The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 60 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Didi and the Chinese Government Had Full Access to Uber's Data
“It became very clear that everyone had all our data. Didi knew everything we were doing whereas, like, Lyft and Uber always knew what each other were doing, because we were watching each other, we're friends, things like that, but, like, we never had each othe…”
G Squared lost 20% on Uber and made 3x on Lyft
“We lost I think we made, we lost like 20 cents on the dollar, and Lyft we made like a three X.”
Villig: Being number two like Lyft is unsustainable without lean operations
“If I look at some of our competitors like Lyft in the US, I don't think that being a number two is sustainable. But it is a very profitable business if you're able to run a very lean operation.”
Villig: Lyft won't remain independent in five years under current cost structure
“I think that the, their only way out of this is to optimize their costs. I just generally don't see how they're going to be an independent company five years from now with the current cost structure.”
Cuban claims Uber and Twitter would be more successful outside Silicon Valley
“I think if you take some of the companies, Twitter, or almost any of them, Uber in particular, Lyft, and you move those to Kansas City, Dallas, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, New York, they would have been so much more successful, so much more quickly.”
Mac: Uber refuses API access to third-party price-comparison aggregators
“We've not participated historically in the aggregation apps where some, you know, somebody will come to us and pitch and say, hey, you know, give us APIs that give us real-time info on Every car, every Uber car in the network what the price of that ride is, wh…”
Uber president's biggest fear is ChatGPT routing rides purely by price
“I just interviewed the president of Uber. What is his single biggest fear? It's actually the disaggregation of UI or the removal of UI where you say, I want a car, and ChatGPT automatically routes you to Lyft, Uber or another provider based on price.”
Pishevar: Kalanick's six-month regulatory delay cost Uber 30% market share to Lyft
“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…”
Pishevar: Uber nearly acquired Lyft, but Lyft demanded too much ownership
“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”
Malik: Turning off Lyft's paid channels reduced signups by only 5-10%
“And so the growth marketing team turns off every single paid channel and installs and signups barely move. They go down by like maybe five, 10%. I don't remember what it was and what did go down. It was all Low quality. So every marketing dollar that was being…”
Malik: Lyft overestimated product iteration potential and hit diminishing returns early
“We overestimated how much better we could make the ride sharing product. I think we started to hit, like when you look at ride sharing four or five years ago versus today, how much has the product changed? Not that much. So if you don't believe, well, sorry, i…”
Emil Michael: Loose capital cycles enabled Uber to launch Uber Eats
“For founders, it's more a good thing than a bad thing. That means that there's more capital out there. So if your business model requires more capital, you can get it. And look, people are going to say, oh my God, it's loose capital, free money, blah, blah, bl…”
Cyan Banister: Lyft benefited from Uber doing the regulatory fist-fighting
“So Lyft has benefited from Uber, and Uber definitely helped pave the way for Lyft to exist. So Lyft had the luxury, if you will, of being the nice company with the pink colors and the fist bumping. So does that make them a better company? No. It was a duopoly,…”
Uber and Lyft have low user barriers to exit during surge pricing
“Now play the same thing on Uber and Lyft. I find the barrier to exit for the user on Uber or Lyft to be really low because I'm not the one choosing the driver. So if I'm on Uber today, and if the prices are surging, I'm going to check lift automatically, and a…”
VanDevender: Digital platforms increase the economic value of physical proximity
“The lesson has been that actually those digital technologies have actually made proximity more valuable. If you think about like where, where a lot of that value to people has come from, it's from companies like Lyft, like Postmates, a Craigslist, Amazon Prime…”
Acharya: AI foundation and app markets resemble AWS and GCP, not Uber
“I think the foundation model companies look a little bit like that. And I think in the apps layer, you're just going to have people that want to Consume the code they generate through a rich IDE and those that want to be closer to the metal, and that's probabl…”
Maples: Floodgate returned 300x on Twitter, 205x on Lyft, 94x on Twitch
“Twitter was a little over 300 X and gets all the credit for Lyft, that was like about two, 205 X what else? Applied. Applied is probably encroaching on a hundred X in the first check. Twitch got close, but not quite there. It got to 94 X.”
Uber initially let Lyft launch first to absorb local regulatory risk
“And what a lot of people don't know about Lyft is when we started launching UberX, we let Lyft go first, and we had a policy that said, hey, if Lyft launches in a city, we are going to wait 30 days to see if the law enforcement comes after them, and then we're…”
Ride-hailing market share swings were driven by pure price, not product
“On early demand, not really much, right? We were in a market and we had wild product market fit. Once competition came in, you could start to see market share swings based on the specific rider promo that Uber was offering in a city In a given week, and then w…”
Maples: Floodgate monetized Lyft and Okta holdings prior to 2020 peak
“As much as we loved Lyft and Okta, you know, in those years leading up into twenty-twenty, we're like, okay, we need to monetize these things, right, because there's a lot of excitement about tech stocks right now, and these prices are really high, and it does…”
Floodgate's Initial Zimride Investment Thesis Incorrectly Relied on Facebook Connect
“The thing that we were betting on was the Facebook Connect, to be honest. We thought that that was going to create more trust in this network, even within Zimride. Now, that was the thing that we thought was the real change element. It turns out that wasn't, r…”
Lyft Originally Launched Using Suggested Donations to Bypass Regulations
“We also, there was no payment mechanism because there was sort of this regulatory gray area. And so there was a suggested donation. And so you could technically ride for free. Most people actually paid the suggested donation.”
Miura-Ko: Lyft had only a few months of cash left at times
“For a while there were moments where I think Lyft had just a few months of cash left.”
Maples: Lyft and Uber could not exist before the iPhone 3GS
“So before the iPhone three GS, you could have had the idea for Lyft and Uber. It wouldn't have mattered because you wouldn't have been able to connect drivers and riders accurately on a map.”
Motschwiller: Series A rounds for top consumer decacorns occurred pre-2012
“You look at the series A Funding times of the consumer decacorns that are out there, the Ubers, the Lyfts, the Airbnbs, the Snaps, the Pinterest, the Spotifys, those series A's were all done pre-二零 12.”
Belsky: Uber and Lyft's data and route optimization will be their moat
“Because I think that the data that is being collected and the optimization of the routes based on the data is a moat, so to speak. And I think a lot of the technology for managing these dispatch systems and autonomous vehicles will be created by those companie…”
Early rounds for Lyft, Credit Karma, and Twilio were uncompetitive
“When we invested in Lyft out of FB Fund, I guess it was called Zimride at the time, and when we invested in Credit Karma and Twilio they were not really that competitive rounds, even though, you know, the founders were compelling most of the time.”
Miura-Ko: Autonomous Vehicles and Ridesharing Will Reshape Suburbs
“And now as we layer on top of that autonomous vehicles, the potential for what they do goes far beyond car ownership. I think it can also change where suburbs are actually created.”
Biyani: Uber expanded more responsibly than Lyft in the early days
“I would say that Uber was a little bit more responsible in their growth than Lyft was, frankly.”
Maples: Floodgate funded Lyft at a $5.5M post-money valuation
“Ann funded Lyft at five and a half million post money.”
Uber deployed permanent local teams while Lyft used central launch teams
“I think the big differentiation in Uber versus Lyft is that we had on the ground teams in every market. And, you know, we had an Atlanta city team, we had a Philadelphia team, we had a Chicago team and Lyft operated completely out of San Francisco. So while th…”
Lerner: Middle zone for marketplace network effect startups is empty
“You've got your Instacart, your Uber, your Lyft. They've kind of, like, gotten to where they need to be. There isn't actually very many people in that middle zone in terms of Marketplace network effects today.”
Maples: Floodgate Invested $750K in Lyft at $5.5M Post-Money
“And invested 750,000 dollars at 5.5 post in Lyft.”
Coates: Platform ecosystems fail if third-party apps cannot match first-party quality
“One is you need you need an app platform that allows apps to be built that are of equal quality to the core features of the platform. That is absolutely critical. And like, look at iOS. IOS is like a great example of this. Like when I open up a first party app…”
Fishman: High execution speed makes most company mistakes reversible
“And when you move at that pace, there's very few mistakes that are actually permanent. Like you can almost change Anything, right? And reverse decisions.”
Rachitsky: Zimride hired its first PM to develop Lyft
“So as an example, Zimride, to explore the idea of Lyft, hired their first PM, and his job was go explore this idea of Lyft.”
Lyft Founders Built the Original App in Three Weeks in 2012
“And like when I say we were experimenting, I think John and Logan emailed a bunch of Zimride users in the San Francisco area, and they built Lyft in like three weeks because they felt like this was an experiment that they wanted to run.”
Miura-Ko: Startup Pivots Are Iterative Processes, Not Single Moments
“And so, if you think, like, a pivot in many people's minds is just like a moment. It's like the singular decision, and it's like a lightning strikes you, and you know. In reality, what happened with Lyft was that Zimride went through hundreds of iterations.”
Cheap, unlimited capital allowed Uber and Lyft to take bigger risks
“So Uber and Lyft basically had an infinite financing pool, and they had a very cheap cost of capital. Therefore, they were able to experiment more and push themselves more out on the risk curve.”
Alex Wang: Scale AI counts OpenAI, Waymo, Uber, and Lyft as clients
“We at scale, we work with Very innovative companies are actually using AI and machine learning and deep learning in particular. So we work with folks like OpenAI and Waymo and Uber and Lyft and all these folks.”
Kupor: Uber and Lyft expanded SF taxi market from $100M to $1.5B
“At the time, Lyft and Uber were raising kind of their first couple rounds of financing. I think the taxi market in the, in San Francisco was about a hundred million dollars annually. And I think today, the combined, the two of them do north of a billion and a …”
Romanow: Lyft Founders Retained Only 3.5% Equity at IPO
“The founders of Lyft went public, and they owned three and a half percent of Lyft”
Vassallo: Intelligent in-car video will significantly impact driver insurance rates
“Uber Lyft drivers having something like this in their car, its impact on insurance rates is going to be important.”
Breinlinger: Uber lacks lock-in because drivers routinely switch to Lyft
“Yeah, it's a big challenge for them. You know, I've certainly heard that Lyft is gaining market share, and that is a big problem for them, that almost, you walk around San Francisco, and every car has two stickers on it, One Uber and one Lyft. And so, it's rea…”
Miura-Ko: Zimride was extraordinarily capital efficient before competing with Uber
“And in fact, if you look at Zimride, it was an extraordinarily capital efficient business. And in fact, they were extraordinarily capital efficient until they were in competition with a company that had a huge budget to play with, and so it was a matter of sur…”
Lipman: Uber raised $4.9B at $41B valuation versus Lyft's $862M at $2B
“I think the last time I looked, when I was online here Uber raised 4.9 billion at a forty one billion dollar valuation. Better lift. That's in total. And, Lyft has raised, you know, 862 and a half million at two billion dollar valuation.”