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 296 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 8 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
Benchmark sued Travis Kalanick in Delaware court over Uber board seats
“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…”
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”
Pishevar: Kalanick and Michael initiated SoftBank's $12B Uber deal
“So the SoftBank conversations, ironically, Travis and Emil started those conversations, the ultimate twelve billion dollar investment from SoftBank Vision Fund.”
Uber Elevate distracted from the core mission and hindered company growth
“We tried to do too much. Simply put specifically, you know, we were looking at like doing like a vertical takeoff and landing type, like helicopter play. We were doing Uber elevate. There were just a lot of things that became distractions from the core mission…”
Uber partnering with Waymo and Cruise is the right long-term strategy
“I think the decision to partner with You know, the leading AV players in the space, doing things with, like, the Waymos and the Cruises of the world, and trying to bring their fleets onto Uber is the right long-term strategy.”
Uber, Airbnb, Meta, and Revolut didn't use event tracking early on
“I actually think that if you look at Uber, Airbnb, Meta, they don't use events, or at least not in the early days. We didn't use events at Revolut.”
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: 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.”
Tisch: Small stakes in outlier companies outperform strict ownership targets
“Every VC's math works if you fund great companies. And so it's not about This, like, ownership threshold. If anybody owned one percent of Facebook, one percent of Uber.1% of Coinbase, your math works. Your math works really well, and it scales.”
Sheikha Regrets $3.1B Uber Deal Didn't Financially Benefit Careem's Drivers
“I wish we could have done more for our captains. As a part of the exit process. You know, Kareem was built by these captains and we are close to many of them. And if I look at them today, they're still doing what they were doing 10 years ago. And that saddens …”
Sheikha: Careem's Board Was Deeply Divided Over the $3.1B Uber Acquisition
“And it was a contentious process where there were some investors that wanted to sell and there were others that didn't want to sell. And it ended up creating a big divide in the port that made things quite challenging.”
Claure: Three of Uber's Top Five Global Cities Were in LatAm
“When we were investors in Uber, you know, we had to keep it a secret that after New York, three of the top five cities were Latin American cities.”
Khosrowshahi: Best Travis legacy was talent; worst was brand damage
“Best thing I'd say is is a bar for talent. Travis went after incredibly talented people, and I got to keep some of them, which is great. Worst thing, I think it was just the brand damage as it related to Uber, the enterprise.”
Emil Michael: Uber should have forced scared early investors to take liquidity
“And so more, the thing we, I wish we did more of Uber is give more investors liquidity when they get scared. I would be like Venturex sell. Like, I'll find you someone to sell to sell, go get the second G six and the, you know, the whatever. The discovery prop…”
Emil Michael: Uber grew faster than any company in history, including Google
“We grew faster than any company in the world, both geographically And revenue wise, including Google.”
Emil Michael: Uber's valuation under CEO Dara Khosrowshahi trails the Nasdaq
“The company's valuation Is lower today than it was when Dara took over. And even if you account for the macro environment, the Nasdaq's still up 50%, he's down 50%.”
Emil Michael: Uber's acquisition of Otto destroyed its relationship with Google
“I'd say that the deal that Was under my watch. I didn't like it at the time, but I, you know, it got done was Uber acquiring auto, which was the autonomous car division that that gets started out of Google guys. It was, and I didn't like it for different reaso…”
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…”
Baker: Defying CEO to test credit-card-free signups doubled Uber's Hyderabad conversions
“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…”
Friedberg: DoorDash succeeded because Travis Kalanick left Uber
“They do not think they would have as successful as they were if Travis was still CEO of Uber.”
Bill Gurley: Power-law returns make late-stage venture investors valuation-agnostic
“It's easy to become valuation agnostic to a certain extent, because you've seen, if you hit a winner, if you hit a snowflake, if you hit a Uber or whatever, it ends up being a hundred X more than where you are today, so you become indifferent.”
Baker: Uber growth team pulled weekly Thursday all-nighters for Kalanick
“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.”
Travis Kalanick was ousted after 13 senior Uber managers demanded his exit
“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.”
Sacca: Uber's IPO would have gone differently without SoftBank's DoorDash funding
“Uber's IPO would have gone very differently if they hadn't funded DoorDash.”
Rabois: Copying Uber's distributed local market team model is a bad idea
“Second, and related to that, we built insanely dumb idea of building like a distributed team, like in local markets, which is the bad idea taken from Uber was never a good idea in the first place. It might have even been a bad idea for Uber, but it was a bad i…”
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,…”
Cuban: The same qualities built Uber and got Travis Kalanick ousted
“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.”
Cuban passed on Uber's seed round after negotiating valuation with Travis Kalanick
“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, …”
Vlad Magdalin: Contractual board control is an illusion as startups scale
“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…”
Polovets: Overpaying across a seed portfolio cuts overall fund returns in half
“I do believe price is important. I think everybody talks about if you invest in Uber, then the seed price doesn't matter. And I think if you invest in Uber, that's true. The seed price doesn't matter. But I think the challenge is that most investors think most…”
Phin Barnes: Entry Price Matters Even in Outlier Investments Like Uber
“The basic math is even if you invest in Uber at a five million dollar post versus a fifteen million dollar post, the return that you generate is three X, like the basic math still holds. And so while it's an Epic investment, if you invested in a fifteen millio…”
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…”
Waxman: Analytical TAM models systematically miss startups that fundamentally change markets
“And I just think if you study the market, like any way you analytically go at that market, when you see an Uber kind of pitch, you're going to miss it if what the company does is change the market.”
Waxman: No early Uber investor imagined it growing beyond black car industry
“I doubt that if you went back, and maybe some are revising history, I don't know, but I doubt if you went back to any of the investors who looked at Uber, I doubt any of them imagined that it could be bigger than the black car industry. And maybe a few imagine…”
Tim Harris: Uber is a business model innovation, not a tech company
“So the venture capitalists have been investing in mostly business model innovations as a distinction from technology innovations, and those are things like, when you think about it, Uber isn't really a tech company, right? They build a, an app, so they use tec…”
Uber, Airbnb, and Twitter Could Be Profitable by Cutting Spend 10%
“Today, Uber or Airbnb want to be profitable, or Twitter wants to be massively profitable. If they were to cut their spending 10, 20%, all of a sudden those companies look massively profitable. The only reason they're losing money is because they've chosen to c…”
Sean Rad says top tech companies begin as passion projects, not missions
“Evan Spiegel in, in starting Snapchat or Uber and Twitter and all these companies that tend to have an impact on society. Or Facebook, they start out as little passion projects. They don't start out as missions to kind of change the world.”
Breinlinger: On-demand 'Uber for locksmiths' models are terrible marketplace ideas
“Where people run into mistakes is where they might try to do the Uber for locksmiths. To me, that's just a terrible market because you just don't use locksmiths very often.”
Srinivasan predicts Uber and Airbnb will become multi-hundred billion dollar companies
“I think it's quite possible that those become multi-hundred billion dollar companies.”
Srinivasan: Uber and Airbnb have created one trillion dollars in societal value
“The rest of it is probably on the order of a trillion dollars in value that's being created if you were to compare it to what happened before.”
Cohen: Hot startup deals often turn out to fail
“But you know, it turns out that the hot deal, something I've learned is, is often the one that doesn't work. And when you see Uber for the first time, or you see, you know, a company that ultimately didn't do well, you're just as excited about both of them.”
First Round will not declare Uber a win until cash is returned
“I mean, my ultimate goal is to, you know, take money from my investors and invest it in companies and return multiples on that one. I haven't done that. Right. And so until that happens, I don't think I don't even call it a success right now. Come on. It's a m…”
No seed investor predicted Uber's ultimate scale except its founders
“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.”
De Masi: Uber and Airbnb are burning massive cash defending network effects
“Other than Uber and Airbnb, I can't think of you with the same sort of network effects. And you can see how much money it's taking them to defend that. I mean, even the private company info that's leaked there is they're all hosing through cash.”
Tim Draper: Bitcoin and blockchain will disrupt venture capital like Uber
“All of these things, Bitcoin, the blockchain, there are going to be new technologies applied to venture capital just the way file sharing was applied to the music industry, or Uber was applied to the taxi industry. I think venture capital is going to be change…”
West Coast tech hubs in NYC risk stifling local giants
“All the big companies from the West Coast have set up product offices here over the past five years, and I think that that might on one hand prevent the emergence of a standalone New York A monster, but it also brings more talent here, and so you've seen what …”
Following on in every Uber round wouldn't double Founder Collective's returns
“If we had invested in every single round we still wouldn't, I don't think, come close to doubling what our current value is.”
Ver Ploeg: Uber's growth mirrors early Google, justifying its valuation
“You know, I haven't seen their financials, but, you know, I've talked to their investors who have, and, you know, they say things like, you know, it's financials are like the early days of Google, that, you know, it really is growing that Stratospherically, an…”