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.
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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…”
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…”
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 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'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…”
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”
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'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…”
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.”
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.”
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…”
Calacanis pledges to invest in Travis Kalanick's next company if Uber fails
“Travis and I are very good friends, you know, from Uber and have been for a long time. And we, I would be good friends with him if his company failed, and I would invest in his next company”
Mac: Uber is doing about 300 million trips weekly on core platforms
“We're doing like three hundred million trips a week on our core platforms.”
Uber Mobility Revenue Dropped 84% in Three Weeks During COVID
“Our mobility business had lost 84% of our top line in three weeks. The company was burning billions annually. We didn't have a core business producing cash.”
Stebbings: Benchmark returned roughly 640x on Uber versus 25x on WeWork
“Uber made benchmark roughly 640 X versus around 25 X with WeWork.”
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.”
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.”
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 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…”
Khosrowshahi: Uber completed two billion trips in the previous quarter
“Now in this last quarter, two billion times a quarter.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
Yamashita: Uber structured all team KPI trees under trip count
“At Uber, at the very top was trips. Everything cascaded from there.”
Pishevar: Uber's Series D valuation was negotiated up to $17B from $10B
“So that Series D, like a year after the Series C, which Google and TPG did, that was at three billion. This was at seventeen billion, and we started off at 10. So, Emil was able to negotiate from, like, 10, eleven billion valuation to 17, because there was so …”
Careem completed a corporate spin-out with regional investors and Uber
“We have done a spin out thanks to their help with some regional investors on board now.”
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.”
Khosrowshahi: Uber provides income to over five million earners globally
“You know, we are an incredibly important entity in terms of Transportation and cities in terms of earning power for over five million earners.”