Uber

“And in the same sense, Airbnb and Uber and Lyft are fundamentally enabled by smartphones. They may, they would not be possible without smartphones. They certainly wouldn't be possible without the internet, but they're not in The technology business. They're no…”

“Starbucks has tens of millions of credit cards on file. Uber does, Lyft does, even United Airlines does.”

“Ethereum, for example, has, depending on the day, you know, above a 50, 60, seventy million seventy billion market cap, right? So if you think about the corollary of a similarly sized company here, here in the Bay Area, Uber might be an apt analogy. Uber has t…”

“So, during the entire lifetimes of both of those companies, there's always been an excess of demand, and supply has always struggled to keep up.”

“And without that kind of unlock, without expanding it to the unlicensed pool of potential drivers there's no way that Uber or Lyft could be anywhere near the size they are today.”

“Doing a full stack startup does not mean like take Uber for example. Yes, they did the full stack, but they didn't buy a 100,000 cars on day one, right? They you know, they figured out, okay, here is an ultimate ambition. Maybe they weren't even thinking about…”

“10 years ago it would have taken you a hundred million dollars just to get the app out of the door. Today, you can get that out of the door for five.”

“And I think that then again, in like 10 or 15 years, you'll be able to build a logistics company on top of Uber or Lyft for logistics or something like that, because those things will also be reduced APIs.”

“And the interesting thing that is starting to happen with computing and with software now is it's pushing out of the technology industry. And so when you have, you know, when you have mobile everywhere, when you have payments being pulled in, when you look at …”

“And then as a consequence, by the way, as a business, businesses like Lyft and Uber have the potential to be far larger than anybody anticipated and far larger than the taxi market ever was because they're unlocking behaviors that were never possible without, …”

“And so the technology fades more and more into the background as an enabler for other experiences that are not about how fast you run this program. Rather, it is about you lift your wrist, and you tap on Uber, and you press yes, and then you drop your wrist. R…”

“I think self-driving cars are actually gonna be, I think they're actually gonna be owned by hedge funds. So I guarantee they're not going to want to take responsibility. So I think what's going to happen is hedge funds are going to spend a billion dollars and …”

“If they had to live by all the laws of, like they were a hotel, I mean, that doesn't make any sense, or Lyft, or Uber. Having to, you know, be under the regulatory confines of the old taxi laws. We would never have this competition innovation coming to consume…”

“We've just seen, for example, Uber has snaffled the entire robotics department for Carnegie Mellon.”

“Halo is basically a London niche company funded by VCs who, if they could get an exit, would take their exit tomorrow and get out of the business, because Uber has won in that space.”

“Consumers have come to expect that everything works the way Skype works the way Uber works. You know, you basically get what you want to get it now. You know how much you pay for it. You know how quickly it's going to arrive, but banks, you know, aren't quite …”

“Services like Lyft and Uber which will likely be the first delivery mechanism on the, for the mass market for self-driving cars.”

“The challenge is, if you go into the realm of money, and you say, you know what, KYC. Know your customer laws. AML. Anti-money laundering laws. Those are stupid and antiquated. We're not going to follow those. You go to jail. So the consequences are much, much…”

“People have told me that I was stupid because I chose the other way. I spent about nine months before showing the product to anyone, going through the FCA, then FSA regulation process and licensing. So we took the way, unlike Uber or Airbnb, to be a fully lice…”

“We think it's crystal clear that Uber and Lyft are going to be a much safer way to do transportation. Than taxis, which have All kinds of historical issues that we just got used to.”

“One thing that we, I think, have found is that inventing cool new software actually is not the answer. That in order for a lot of these cool new software companies to begin to change their markets, workflow is much, much tougher than people realize. And so the…”

“The majority of Uber drivers are part-time. And they have other jobs or they drive for other companies. Many are doing it to supplement their income rather than as their primary job.”

“There's 450,000 drivers on the app every month.”

“In the meantime, Travis and I have had a lot of conversations about sleep. His views of sleep have changed. Like many of the founders, as we talked earlier, he too believed that being perpetually exhausted was a badge of honor. And a sign of being incredibly p…”

“I think cars become very modular. I think you have a basic chassis and drive train. And then it can be easily outfitted and perhaps outfitted by the fleet owner to be a really small, it takes two people to work to it's for a date night. And the fleet owners wi…”

“One of the impacts of the autonomous car introduction is a dramatic reduction in the cost of getting from here to there. So if you think about a current cab ride or Uber has a huge labor component, and it also has an insurance component, but the cost of gettin…”

“I would dare say that The decision for our competitor to stay in that city actually led to more cities and more jurisdictions trying to follow the lead that Houston put out there because they believed, and rightfully so, that, hey, a company can clearly operat…”

“One of the hardest decisions that we had to make as a team back in 2014, which is our first decision to leave a major city. One of the first cities that was developing an ordinance was the city of Houston. And ultimately the ordinance that they developed was n…”

“Because if you own all the cars, they're going to be lightly utilized at the times when there's not lots of passengers.”

“Our agency head at the Department of Weights and Measures told us that his plan during the Super Bowl was to shut down Uber and Lyft with a sting, and we thought this guy didn't pay much attention to the campaign. So we returned him to the private sector that …”

“Many of the major Web two point O companies that have seen a substantial growth in the last 15 years, this is Twitter, Tumblr, Etsy, eBay, Uber, every single one of these companies could someday see competition from a peer peer-to-peer protocol.”

“Their clients were like Nike and Uber, and as it turned out, The Queen and Bono and all those people were also clients.”

“One of the funny anecdotes at Uber was that for a long time we were officially on HipChat, but there were so many teams across the company that would have their little secret Slack, you know, team chat going because they just didn't want to deal with it. I fee…”

“You see several gangs in the United States that are doing similar schemes where they take stolen credit cards and then sign up as Uber drivers and run credit cards through Uber or through Lyft or through various other sort of sharing economy type services.”

“So Facebook has Scuba. Google has Dremel, Rasta, and a whole bunch of others. Airbnb built Superset. Uber built Aries DB.”

“And the challenge with these cases is you're kind of proving the negative, right? So in that case, you know, ah, you know, Anthony Lewandowski, who was the person, he had to prove that, you know, he didn't take anything, right? As opposed to them proving that …”

“Lyft, Uber, they're doing it. Airbnb probably is going to do it. They're also going to have companies that have not even been internet companies starting to offer this.”

“The model for these business models for these companies is essentially baked around, you know, advertising and transaction fees, and they're, you know, sort of traditional companies that are funded by people like us, like venture capitalists and entrepreneurs,…”

“That's not how the great ideas arrive. They don't look like that. They look like very specific. They look like very specific theories, not general theories. And so they tend to be very specific to the details of the market involved.”

“Uber and Lyft both spend hundreds of dollars acquiring drivers, and then they have to make up that cost through margin on rides.”

“Well, local is all about density. Density, density, density, and you know, people really kind of open too many markets at the same time, but if you can get product market fit in one city and then the next one and next one, and I think Uber did a really good th…”

“One of the biggest and obvious ones was they began to offer cash payments in when you finish your ride in a Korean car, because they knew that most people in the Middle East were not comfortable yet in the safety and protection of doing a digital transaction. …”

“The way we came up with this was in 2012 to 2014, we analyzed the 200 fastest growing unicorns in the world and said, how are they doing this? How's Uber scaling so fast or Airbnb or Ted or others? And we found that all of these organizations had what we call …”

“What we find with exponential organizations, they found a way of dropping the cost of supply exponentially, right? So you think about Airbnb, the cost of adding a room to their inventory is near zero. If you're hired, you have to build a hotel. Same with Uber …”

“We've been working at this for decades. We've invested seventy-five billion dollars, and the unit economics are still not on par with, like, a human Uber driver, right?”

“So I think it's a little bit like right now like that. Who has the largest LLM? Obviously whoever can build the largest one that can train it the most obviously will own all of AI and all the future of humanity. But just like the internet, someone will show up…”

“Instacart and DoorDash are still our customers today. Uber Eats and Uber still our customers.”

“We've invested seventy five billion dollars as an industry, and while we do have autonomous vehicles on the road, and they're great, and they're solving real problems, the unit economics are still worse than, say, Uber and Lyft, because they're competing again…”

“Yeah, I mean, it's certainly gonna be less expensive than Uber to go win the market, but yes, I mean, as Ben said many times, you have to both make a product people want, and then you have to go take the market, get from zero market share to all the market sha…”

“This is a designer that works at Uber, and he was telling me how, like, for the past two weeks, he didn't open Figma. He was just building all these prototypes using Cursor, using vZero, using these tools that are now available for folks.”

“Why they go after Uber, right? They didn't want another trillion dollar company, certainly not a libertarian one. Why they go after VCs? They're the ones distributing capital. If they go after these nexus points, these critical nodes, they could try to hit tho…”

“At Uber, like the VCs there wanted money and Travis didn't want to sell or IPO. So that's why they did it in part.”

“SpaceX's network, NASA's state. Uber is the network. Taxi medallions are the state. Bitcoin is the network. The Fed is the state and so on and so forth, right?”

“The actual regulator of taxis is Uber or Lyft because they have real-time tracking. They have star ratings on both sides. Or your you know, some, you know, the FCC or something like who issued licenses. Well, the actual regulator of speech or what have you sai…”

“The story for autonomous vehicles is, is that even after the industry's put a hundred billion dollars in it, a hundred billion, the unit economics are still, you know, let's call it on par with Uber.”

“Our timing program was like second to Waymo, but catching up at the time.”

“In this particular case, Yuri was almost coming over the top, so we got to three 75, with a three seven hundred seventy five million pre, with a 16 Z. Yuri almost came in at 400, but he was like, nah, I can't do it.”

“The way you call projects, it has to be appropriate for, like, a ten-year-old basketball team. So it went from shoplift to the national, sorry, the North American Championship Series. We call it the NACS. And we had a whole very heavy-duty initiative called th…”

“That wouldn't have gone that way if Ben or Mark was on the board.”

“So, and you know, in order to Dave and Catch, I ended up having to go on the board. Like, I took over that board seat to kind of help them through that.”

“Yeah, there was no way to cross a deal with him, other than if he gave him the company. And he could just fire everybody instantly.”

“I continue to stand by every decision I made at Uber.”

“That's why I didn't buy Lyft.”

“We had this thing where we would, against Lyft, we would we would recruit the drivers on Lyft to bring them over to Uber, so that it was hard for Lyft to build supply. And we would aggressively do it, and we had a program for it internally, which we called sho…”

“The meaningful thing about Adam's food is, can you make the preparation and delivery of a quality meal so efficient that it approaches the cost of going to the grocery store? If it does, You do to the kitchen what Uber did to the car.”

“And he said, look, I know we talked about three 75, but went to the partnership. They don't agree, or they just didn't think it was the right number. We're the best we're going to be able to do is two 10.”

“There was also this other thing that would happen, so this is like, 2000, I think this really started in 2014, 15, et cetera, is Emile and I would meet up with Mark and Ben at this, Super undercover restaurant.”

“Ok, but, like, I just assumed we were doing the deal, and then the next thing I knew Shervin had the deal, and I was like, jeez.”

“Uber would be I'll just say considerably larger and more important and more central company today. There's no question. I mean, first of all, it would have won food. No question. Uber was dominating food at the time, and it would have also been, for sure, a le…”

“And so to build, you know, to build a company, you know, a great company, it's always a great entrepreneur, and so when we looked at it, we're like, there's a very few entrepreneurs, you know, in the history of the valley that built something like Uber and tha…”

“Entrepreneurs that are coming up since the Uber time. Are not scared of regulation the way that bits.”

“I wouldn't do anything different. And it's easy to say now, but I got a lot of shit for that for a long time. But it was basically, I would sit across the table from the guys, and I just didn't It was just clear that we were very culturally different, and you …”

“Our first round at Uber was four million pre.”

“Gautam, who was the CFO over at Uber has joined Adams. That's a recent thing. Ganesh, who was A VP or SVP of engineering over at Uber has just joined Adams”

“We've been doing this for a long time, ok? This is a continuation of a lot of the awesome things we did back in the Uber day.”

“How do you lead 20,000 people and get them oriented towards a beautiful mission? And those 20,000 people are great minds, optimistic, good people. How do you do that? You can't do that by being a bad person. But you have to be hardcore.”

“This is a couple of companies before Uber. I did a peer to peer file sharing system, got sued for a quarter of a trillion dollars by 33 of the largest media companies in the world”

“The culture they went to, which was a reaction to the resistance, just ended up being a much more milquetoast culture than the original Uber culture was a special very pronounced culture.”

“Anthony Lewandowski, of course Eric Maihofer, who ran Uber's advanced technology group. He's running food robotics.”

“A GP can get fired for missing out, you know, the next, you know, Facebook, the next Uber, right? Like, that is error of omission, and like, that's fireable. But LPs on the flip side only get fired if you invest into a mentor. So in some respects, like, the in…”