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
Calacanis: Uber and Thumbtack had a combined $9M valuation at first round
“Thumbtack and Uber, You know, they were nine million dollars, and they're like, well, we only want one million dollars more. I was like, no, no, combined. Their valuation was nine million combined when I invested in their first rounds”
Tran King-Yens predicts Uber will become a trillion-dollar company
“Yes. They're changing the way in which people move from A to B, and that, and democratizing that in a way that it's not owned by companies, but by individuals.”
Teare: Series A and B Face Severe Capital Shortage
“There's about five billion dollars available at the seed stage for all the companies every three to five years. There's about one to two billion available at the A and B stage. And then at the growth stage, at the other end, there's more than a hundred billion…”
Ghoorah: Uber will grow into and exceed its $40B valuation
“Uber certainly is a company that can grow into that valuation and frankly exceed it.”
Food Delivery Will Soon Be Significantly Larger Than Uber's Mobility Business
“And for us, like when this deal, you know, we have to go through the sort of requisite regulatory and shareholder processes, but delivery will be a much bigger business for mobility.”
Macdonald: Missing Out on Autonomy Would Be Existential for Uber
“If Uber doesn't have autonomy on our platform, and we will we will, we are investing actively and aggressively to bring it to market, but if we didn't, then it certainly would be existential for our core business.”
Macdonald: Uber's delivery business is nearly mobility's size and growing faster
“Because, I mean, even this sort of like the existential questions we get about AV tend to ignore the fact that we have basically an equally sized food delivery business that's in market leading positions in most of our markets around the world. We get almost z…”
Frankel: Following On in Every Round Boosts Absolute Returns, Not Multiples
“If we follow, our view would be we'd had, we would have had to have followed on in everything, and I think that the absolute return would be better. I don't think that the multiple would necessarily be better on the fund.”
Grinberg: Dozens of Factory clients privately capped employee AI spend
“What's happened with Uber publicly has happened privately with a lot of customers of ours.”
Stebbings: Uber placed a $1,500 individual budget cap on employee AI spending
“Uber announced last night, I think it was, or yesterday, that they were having like a 1500 dollar budget. Per individual.”
Geoffrey Woo: Uber Burned Tens of Billions on Paid Marketing
“I just saw that Bill Gurley was tweeting that you know, paid marketing is, like, the worst form of marketing, and I'm just like, hey, Uber, like, he's most well known for kicking out Travis from Uber, and Uber burnt, like, tens of billions of dollars on straig…”
Rajaram: Uber expanded margins continuously by altering driver pay economics
“Uber, I have to say, I don't know how, if they have raised price or not, but I know that they have basically changed the economics of how much they pay drivers over time so that their margins have just expanded continuously. And they've also raised prices in d…”
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…”
Using massive capital as a weapon rarely succeeds in consumer tech
“Capital as a weapon in consumer, most of the time it's, it doesn't really work. Like I would say TikTok is maybe the exception, maybe Uber.”
Lime Would Not Have Survived the Pandemic Without Acquiring Jump
“Line wouldn't have survived if we did not do that deal.”
Pishevar: Menlo's $26.5M Uber investment grew to nearly $6.7B
“For twenty million at the time, later I got another six and a half million through secondary for Menlo. So that investment at today's prices is worth almost seven billion dollars.”
Pishevar sold all Facebook shares to bet everything on Uber secondary stock
“He allowed me to buy secondary shares from another early person, so I sold all my Facebook shares that had gone public at like, 53 bucks, 58 bucks a share, and I put it all I bet it all, everything I had, I put it all into Uber.”
Villig: Bolt raised $1.5B while competitors raised up to $30B
“There's about seven companies left. What they've been doing better than us is raising money. They've just all raised multitudes of how much we have raised. Many of them have raised five billion. Some of them have raised 15, even thirty billion. Well, we have r…”
Frankel: Founder Collective regrets selling any secondary shares in Trade Desk and Uber
“Well, Trade Desk, I regret every single share I sold. Uber, I regret every single share I sold.”
Frankel: Trade Desk was a bigger outcome for Founder Collective than Uber
“Trade Desk was a bigger outcome for us. Coupang returned the fund, right? Like if, and multiple times.”
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…”
Uber's advertising business has reached a $1 billion run rate
“I think the ads business is a monster. I think ads is really interesting because it's, I think, in a billion dollar run rate now, and what's really interesting is if you think about Uber as a platform, It's the app where you go from, like, point A to point B. …”
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…”
Uber manually onboarded its first million drivers without major digital ad spend
“For probably the first million drivers that we onboarded, a lot of our processes were manual, right? So we weren't doing a lot of like paid spend on Facebook. We were doing a little bit on Craigslist. We weren't doing a ton on Google, but it was really the ope…”
Good annual driver retention for early Uber was 25% to 30%
“I would say, if you started the year with a hundred drivers, I think you would probably have 25 or 30 of them left at the end of the year. That would be good, right?”
Uber's 2021 acquisition of Drizly made little strategic sense
“There were some deals we did in 20, 20, 21 that didn't make a lot of sense. I know Emil talked about Postmates. I think the Drizzly acquisition probably didn't make much sense either.”
Uber is the top global food platform but lost US to DoorDash
“Uber's the number one food delivery platform in the world, but I think we really fumbled the bag in the US with DoorDash. I think we missed out on a huge opportunity.”
Uber built its initial Atlanta driver supply by cold-calling Yelp listings
“When we went into the initial market, we got a Yelp list of all the drivers in the city and sort of like called through and trying to get them to sign up with Uber and, you know, got our initial list of drivers that way and launched a few weeks later with some…”
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…”
Barnes: Analyzing Initial Market Size Causes Investors to Miss Market-Expanding Founders
“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.”
Dara Khosrowshahi Promised Careem Autonomy to Finalize $3.1B Uber Acquisition
“The thing that really made it happen at the end was Dara saying that you guys can continue, continue pushing your purpose, keep your culture, keep your org. I'm just going to replace your shareholders and become a better shareholder.”
Careem Outcompeted Uber in Saudi Arabia by Enabling Cash Payments
“Early in Saudi Saudi Arabia, which is of course the largest market in the region not many people at that time had credit cards, or even if they had credit cards, they were not able to use credit cards, and people just preferred paying in cash. So this was some…”
Braun: Travis Kalanick Is One of the Best Founders Ever
“Travis is one of the best founders I've ever met my entire life.”
Khosrowshahi: Uber slowed feature updates for drivers to avoid payment errors
“We've actually slowed down in terms of some of the velocity of features that we ship for our earners, right? So it's, we're iterating constantly as it relates to eaters, riders, et cetera trying X out or trying Y out. But as it relates to earners, this is how …”
Khosrowshahi: Kareem and Transplace acquisitions are or will be major hits
“I would say probably Kareem or there's a, we're pretty early on in terms of development, but a, an acquisition that we made in with Uber Freight Transplace, which really runs the logistics outsource logistics function of a lot of companies out there. Both of t…”
Khosrowshahi: Uber's past allocations into hardware products were a mistake
“We're not particularly good in hardware, and I think our investment or the capital that we allocated in hardware in the past was a mistake.”
Khosrowshahi: Uber will focus exclusively on software moving forward
“I will tell you right now, based on everything I see, we're going to stay squarely in software, because we're really, really good at it.”
Uber Burned Budget Shifting Driver Ads From Earnings to Flexibility
“We're like, great, we need to, like, shift all of our messaging away from dollars to flexibility, and we spent a ton of money on that type of messaging, and then it just burnt, right? Like, it was just, like, no one clicked, right?”
Uber Built Its Growth Team by Hiring Cross-Functional Leaders Simultaneously
“When we built growth at Uber, like we infused an entire team In one fell swoop, right? Like, and Ed was hired, and he hired myself, a head of product, a head of engineering, a head of design head of analytics.”
Paid Acquisition Drove 40% to 50% of Uber's Global Growth
“When we were doing a billion dollars, that included China, and that was more than 50%, like paid drove a ton of our growth in China. And so, and it was like, it was nonsense. It was just wild. And so, like, let's say six, seven hundred million dollars on, like…”
Uber Never Solved How to Allocate LTV Between Drivers and Riders
“And there's like, this is one of those challenges that like we've had, we had like dozens of data scientists working with it and we never got a great answer to it.”
Uber Dissolved Its Centralized Growth Team Prior to Grenier's Departure
“So like we actually, all of those functions within the growth team eventually actually merged back into the core business to where by the time I left, we actually didn't have a centralized growth team anymore.”
Escobari: General Atlantic passed on Uber's $2B round over market size limits
“So, one of my mistakes as an investor is Anton, my friend Anton Levy, co-president of the farm, invited me to look at Uber, the two billion dollar round, because of the international opportunity, and we went, and we met Travis, The entire black market industry…”
Emil Michael: Uber burned $100M monthly competing against Didi in China
“And we were spending A hundred million dollars a month competing there.”
Benchmark turned a $33M Uber investment into $10B in four years
“Bill Gurley was on our board, lost her nerve. And the reality is there's another economic principle called loss aversion, right? If you invest thirty three million dollars in Uber and it looks like ten billion four years later, ten billion on a thirty three mi…”
Major initiatives drive more growth than hundreds of A/B tests combined
“When I look back at my time at Uber, every year we maybe had one or two things like that that accounted for more growth than everything else combined.”
Hans Tung: Venture scale requires replacing fundamental behavior, not just incumbents
“If you believe that is a substitution of gym membership and enlarging the pie, and you can argue for those that miss Uber or anything that drive sharing, it's a car ownership substitution, not just a substitution of taxi services, then the pie becomes a lot bi…”
Chris Fralic: First Round took secondary liquidity in Uber and Roblox early
“If you look at our investments in our two most notable returns with Uber and with Roblox, we had taken some capital off the table along the way at various points, Which made sense and drove great returns relative to that investment, and yet what was left was s…”