The Ledger
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Emil Michael predicts Uber's Postmates and Careem acquisitions will be total write-downs
“I think we, instead of buying Kareem in the Middle East, Postmates, Jump Bike I think all of those will be a hundred percent write downs. Those are some of the worst acquisitions done in tech. Maybe Postmates may be the worst acquisition done tech in the last …”
Lehmann: Postmates-Uber acquisition returned nearly $5B to shareholders
“We negotiated the deal so well, there was no color on the deal. By the time the deal closed, it was almost five billion dollars.”
Lehmann: Every scaled market was profitable for Postmates and DoorDash
“No, I think Tony and I knew from the start that, that this is a tremendous business. If you can scale it and every market that you had at scale was profitable for us, and I know that the same thing was also true for DoorDash.”
Lehmann: Postmates acquisition has not been written off by Uber
“I see no signs of the Postmates acquisition being written off because I think the brand is very strong. It continues to be very strong in LA.”
Singlehurst: Founder zeal matters more in growth investing than competitive analysis
“The thing that I should have placed a much greater weight on. Was the founder of DoorDash and, you know, why he'd started the business and the level of commitment that he had to these small businesses that he was wanting to help and kind of bring online and he…”
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…”
Lehmann: Postmates prioritized deal structure over headline price in Uber merger
“And I think he came out with a number that was around 2.2 or something, and we negotiated it up a little bit, but I didn't want it to push too hard, because the two things that we negotiated for are no breakup, Absolutely no way out and no color on the deal be…”
Andreessen Horowitz passed on Postmates four or five times
“I pitched him four times or five times the entire firm with Postmates. They were smart enough to say no”
Sequoia Passed on Grubhub, Caviar, Postmates, and TaskRabbit
“And actually, between 20 11 and 20 13, we evaluated opportunities to invest in Grubhub, in Caviar, in Postmates, in TaskRabbit, because I was fascinated with this space. We passed on each of those opportunities, not partly because we're somewhat concerned abou…”
Kyle Hill: Homogeneous marketplace workers will eventually be replaced by robots
“I look at those and no offense to any of those companies, but you could probably replace those workers with robots.”
Lehmann: Postmates was preparing for an IPO prior to Uber acquisition
“As a matter of fact, we were planning to go public and would have probably been one of the last companies to do so before, ah, you know, the world ended.”
Lehmann: Postmates had under $100M cash remaining before turning profitable
“We had just under a hundred million dollars left in cash, and our negative gross profit margin was, I think, single digits.”
Lehmann: Major food delivery competitors had sound unit economics and profitability paths
“The fundamentals of, I think, the companies, and I can, I know this for us, but I have some insight in the other players. They were all pretty sound, and by that I mean there was a clear path to profitability. There was a clear understanding of unit economics,…”
Peter Thiel and Brian Singerman were Postmates' only early backers
“When we started out, when Postmates started out, this thing sounded so crazy that the only people that wanted to give us money were Brian Singerman and Peter Thiel.”
Postmates was market leader in California prior to Uber merger
“And with DoorDash being the, clearly the market leader in most of the U.S., but not in California and certain regions that That are very attractive. Where we were the number one.”
Lehmann: Postmates operated standalone for 8-9 months post-Uber acquisition signing
“After we signed the paper, because we had to run the company as a standalone company for, I believe eight, eight, nine months. So we had to hit our quarterly goals. We did not want it to have a scenario where we lose market share because now we're thinking tha…”
Lehmann: Uber and Postmates planned shared backend tech with distinct front-end brands
“When we discussed the merger, we sort of had this idea that you leave these brands, you start uniting the tech underneath, and then at some point it's the same product, but it sort of has a, basically a different name. And that's literally like the one differe…”
Postmates raised approximately $900M in total venture funding
“And look, we raised quite a bit of money. I think we raised around nine hundred million.”
Postmates and Uber held preliminary merger talks 18 months before deal
“A year and a half earlier, there were some preliminary discussions with the Uber team, so there was some familiarity.”
Khosrowshahi: Postmates backend integration enabled aggressive cost cuts for Uber
“While Postmates as an app is still in the app store, they've got millions of loyal customers, all of the backend is essentially being served by our infrastructure, which allowed us to save pretty aggressively as it related to the cost side.”
Lemkin: Postmates sold for nearly $3B despite being the third-place player
“Postmates, like, you know, I used it, but in the US, I think it was number three or number four, and it still sold for almost three billion dollars.”
McLoughlin's first angel check was $10,000 into Postmates in 2011
“And so I invested 10,000 dollars into this entity that became a company that turned into Postmates. And so that was my first ever investment.”