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
Pishevar: TPG bought $83M of Garrett Camp's Uber shares via Waverly Loan
“Solution was I introduced them to Waverly Loans, and we did the largest Waverly Loan in history, which was eighty-three million and bought Garrett Camp's shares for TPG for that amount.”
Pishevar: Emil Michael architected Uber's $15B fundraising efforts
“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.”
Pishevar purchased secondary Uber stock at effective 33 cents per share
“It was 33 cents a share, effectively based on today's prices, so it would be 33 cents a share.”
Hommels: Uber's San Francisco revenue exceeded the total initial taxi market
“So at, look at my famous quote always is when Uber started in in San Francisco, people said, but the taxi market is only two hundred fifty million, and today Uber's revenue in San Francisco is six hundred million.”
Hamid: Prefers capital-efficient startups over capital-intensive models like DoorDash
“I, I'm, those are not my kind of businesses. I like more capital efficiency but I can get behind them.”
Uber-Instacart partnership strengthens their position against DoorDash
“I was reading about the deal that they made with, between Uber and Instacart, and I think that's brilliant, like, both of them, right? Like, it positioned them much better in restaurant delivery against players like, you know DoorDash.”
Carter: Interview Assignments Should Take Under Two Hours on Ubiquitous Companies
“What I found works best is pick an assignment that truly shouldn't take more than an hour or two before you hit diminishing returns. On, you know, spending more cycles on it. And that number two is either more of like a hypothetical scenario or it's a company …”
Uber paid early city drivers $20-$30 per hour in guaranteed subsidies
“In the early days, we paid a driver 20 or 30 dollars an hour to sit there, right? And you know, this lasted probably 60 or 90 days into a market launch, and then after, you know, it became clear that the driver was making 20, more than 20 or 30 dollars an hour…”
Uber's unit economics worsened in 2014 due to intense market competition
“Even though we were in 2014 and the business was five years along, like, the unit economics as we launched Hooper X and had more competitors actually got worse over time because you started spending so much money to acquire drivers, to acquire riders”
Uber offered free UberX rides throughout South by Southwest 2014
“So, what we decided to do Was we decided to do free UberX for all of South by Southwest.”
Early rideshare growth was driven by driver acquisition, not rider marketing
“It wasn't really about like growth marketing in terms of like growing the rider side. It was just how many drivers can you get? And that sort of drove the network effect and helped you get bigger.”
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…”
Lehmann: Dara Khosrowshahi has made Uber his own
“And a for non-founder CEO, he really has, I think he has made this company his.”
Fenton: Accounting startups win just by making the product somewhat enjoyable
“When Uber was going against the taxi industry, the NPS scores on taxis was so bad, right? Like even if Uber was mediocre, it would still be way better. And he said accounting gave him the exact same vibes. Like the status quo is just so bad that if you can mak…”
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.”
Careem Employees Refused to Wear Black Due to Intense Uber Rivalry
“Was heading a company whose name was a four letter word at Karim. There were people at Karim that would not wear black because that color was black.”
Sheikha: Careem founders feared Uber acquisition would erase company culture
“We felt that it would be a shame to lose such a unique and special start to a competitor who's most likely going to merge it eventually, and the Korean brand, and the Korean purpose, and the Korean culture will disappear.”
Careem's $3.1B Uber Acquisition Created 75 USD Millionaires Among Employees
“I think in dollar terms, there were 75 millionaires. In that term, there were, I think, 300 plus.”
Khosrowshahi: Uber completed two billion trips in the previous quarter
“Now in this last quarter, two billion times a quarter.”
Local Uber Teams Ran Facebook Ads on 200 Personal Credit Cards
“At any given time, there were probably, like, 200 personal credit cards buying ads on Facebook, and it used to drive me mad, and, like, initially I went out with, like, a very, like, firm grip on, like, you can't do that, like, stop doing that, like, we have i…”
Uber Spent $1 Billion Per Year on Growth Marketing
“I mean, we were spending a billion dollars a year at one point.”
Emil Michael: Uber is among few global ride-sharing firms with net debt
“It's one of the only ride sharing the companies in the world with net debt.”
Emil Michael: Hyper-growth startups must transition from tribes to governed civilizations
“Cause what I described companies when they're startups as tribes, And as your tribe gets bigger, you start to intersect with other tribes and you better become a civilization or the tribes are going to be at war. So you build these companies. They're actually …”
Kanovich: Requests from Airbnb and Uber drove dLocal's expansion into payouts
“Airbnb came to us and Uber came to us and say, we want to do the opposite flow. We want to do payouts. Great. That's our product strategy. We are now going to do payouts.”
Mohnot: Uber raised $25B in VC to reach a $50B enterprise value
“And you've seen it with the likes of Uber, you know, today, a fifty billion dollar enterprise value. There's twenty-five billion dollars of venture capital money that went into that company.”
Yanisse: Checkr suffered 2019 headwinds when gig economy clients went public
“2019, you know, was starting to get some business headwinds because we grew very fast in the gig economy and with tech customers and those companies like, you know, Uber, DoorDash and others went public at those days and then started to suffer themselves. So t…”
Thomas Tull passed on early Uber and Airbnb investments
“I had an opportunity to invest in Uber and Airbnb early. And to be honest, I completely missed the shared economy. I just thought, that's strange. You know, you would go and rent someone's room or you would, and obviously completely blew that and didn't have a…”
Travis Kalanick tested Ed Baker with an Uber promo card case study
“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…”
Ed Baker: Facebook and Uber growth leaders reported directly to CEO
“And in both of those cases, they had separate growth teams where the growth leader reported directly to the CEO. And these teams were structured cross-functionally.”
Uber's rider app driver button matched all paid marketing driver signups
“By adding that little button in the rider app that said become a driver, suddenly we had as many new drivers signing up from that button as we did from all of our paid marketing efforts combined.”
Bill Gurley presented six vetted public CFO candidates at an Uber meeting
“We were in an early Uber board meeting once, and we needed a CFO. And I kind of, I, They said, okay, we need a CFO. And I stopped and I think, okay, like who could be a CFO? And I'm thinking of like old Google people who were like director of finance and maybe…”
Lazerow passed on early angel investments in Instagram and Uber in 2011
“So, my biggest misses were really as a personal investor, you know, sitting in a hotel room in 2011 with Kevin Systrom and Travis from Uber and, you know, having the opportunity, but not raising my hand and saying like, hey, I'd love to invest, right?”
First Round Capital's Second Fund Included Uber, Square, and Roblox
“It turns out that fund had Uber and Square and Roblox in it.”
TPG invested in Uber's Series D at a $3B valuation
“And one of the very first investments we did was an investment into Uber's series D round. When it was valued at, you know, at the time felt like a very rich price of three billion dollars.”
Jain: Uber estimated a $4.2B TAM initially, now handles nearly $60B
“Uber, of course, you've seen the first deck, right, talks about the TAM being 4.2 billion dollars. And they now do almost sixty billion dollars in bookings.”
Fontana: AngelList discovered Uber and Opendoor before other investors
“And at AngelList, we found companies like Ubers, Imogen, and Opendoor before anyone else, or before many others.”
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 …”
Airbnb, Uber, and Amazon all launched in seemingly small niche markets
“All of those companies look small in the beginning, you know, Airbnb, Dropbox, Pinterest, like the lists, you know, even Uber in the beginning, they all looked like they were going after something small in the beginning, Amazon just doing books.”
Frankel: Nobody could have predicted Uber's market size at seed stage
“Uber, which Eric participated in at the get-go, looked like a better way of calling limos. No one in their mind could have known how big that was going to be.”
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.”
Waxman: Selling late-stage Uber stakes on secondaries makes sense to reallocate capital
“I think that there probably are some sensible situations that probably if I were an Uber now, not to pick on them, I would be ready to be liquid and figure that the, you know, maybe the next billion dollars I could catch somewhere else.”
Real estate tech represents $250B+ in public and private market value
“So if you just look at, you know, two of the three largest unicorns today are real estate and hospitality tech. We work in Airbnb after Uber. And then beyond them, there's another two hundred and fifty billion of real estate and hospitality tech companies out …”
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…”