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 86 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 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: Bill Gurley hired PIs and met weekly to oust Travis Kalanick
“We found out in our investigation that he hired Some private investigators had weekly meetings about how do we get rid of Travis.”
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…”
Ed Baker: Uber secretly ran India test against CEO orders, doubling conversion
“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…”
Pishevar: Holder's investigation report found no personal wrongdoing by Kalanick
“And the report, by the way, didn't find anything wrong that, you know, Travis did, or I did, or there was nothing, nothing in there about, you know, him, you know, directly and the recommendation was like to go hire a Sheryl Sandberg, like a chief operating of…”
Stebbings: 97% of Capital Invested in Uber Will Not Return 1x
“97% of the money that's gone into Uber will not return one X, just given the quantum of money.”
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 …”
Sacca: Travis Kalanick was ousted by 13 Uber managers, not VCs
“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 and said, dude, you gotta stay out of the company. You know, that's really the only force that Silicon Valley leader…”
Kevin Rose: GV deployed its entire $254M annual fund into Uber
“I definitely know that largest GVs ever done is Uber, where it was two hundred and fifty four million, I believe. So it was our entire fund into one of their rounds.”
Uber Burned $52 Million Weekly on Subsidies Before Exiting China
“I remember the last few weeks in the negotiation, we were burning fifty two million a week in China, just on price subsidies, because there was this heated behind the scenes battle happening
To get to the best economics and the ultimate sort of surrender or u…”
Green: Only three $100B+ companies were created post-iPhone
“You know, since the iPhone came out in 2007, 2006, whatever it was, there's only been three companies built that did not exist before. That were a hundred billion dollar companies. ByteDance, Pindo Doe, and Uber.”
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, 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.”
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…”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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”
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…”
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…”
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…”
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.”
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…”
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. …”
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 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…”
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 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.”
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…”
Gurley: Uber in San Francisco was already 10x the local taxi market
“And at the moment he wrote it, the size of Uber in San Francisco was already 10 X the taxi and black car market.”
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.”
Uber's growth team drove Indian expansion by introducing cash payments
“There's a very good example in Uber where, you know, the whole premise was it's a cashless transaction app. And they went to India, which has no credit cards. And the growth team actually ran an experiment by turning on cash to figure out how much it helped wi…”
Tung: Uber turned $1B–$2B investment in China into $7B Didi stake
“They put in about a billion to two in, and they have a stake that's worth seven billion.”
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…”
Ryan Graves built Uber's operational core and expansion playbook
“In Ryan's case, it turned out to be true. I mean, he, he's an amazing guy. And, you know, if you look at You know, the impact that he's had on Uber and the culture there and, you know, how they, you know, kind of started, you know, going from city to city and …”
Polling Shows Most Uber Drivers Prefer Independent Status Over Employee Status
“If you actually look at some of the polls, it's actually not the case. I mean, if you even talk to a lot of Uber drivers, they're not even aware of it, and if you ask them if they prefer to be W-II or T-Nine-I mean, not necessarily in those terms, they say tha…”