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 37 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 2 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
Kalanick: Uber declined to acquire Lyft over cultural integration challenges
“That's why I didn't buy Lyft.”
Kalanick: Uber ran internal program 'shoplifting' to recruit Lyft drivers
“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…”
Srinivasan: Tech platforms replaced government agencies as functional industry regulators
“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…”
Uber staying in Houston led to harsher rideshare regulations nationwide
“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…”
Kalanick: Not acquiring Lyft was right due to incompatible corporate cultures
“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 …”
Kalanick: Uber renamed Lyft recruitment program from 'shoplift' to 'NACS'
“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…”
Casado: Autonomous vehicle unit economics remain worse than Uber and Lyft
“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…”
Dixon: Crypto will reinvent Airbnb, WhatsApp, and Lyft by 2030
“Hospitality, services like Airbnb, messaging, things like WhatsApp, ride sharing, services like Lyft, you know, I think all of these, I believe we'll see over the next decade, all of these things kind of reinvented.”
Ducey: Arizona fired agency head who planned sting against Uber and Lyft
“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 …”
O'Reilly: Owning autonomous fleets creates off-peak utilization problems
“Because if you own all the cars, they're going to be lightly utilized at the times when there's not lots of passengers.”
Andreessen: Hedge funds will buy and own autonomous car fleets
“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 …”
Vertical marketplaces outperform horizontal ones by optimizing for specific use cases
“Early in people marketplaces, you had the horizontals of TaskRabbit or Zarli, where you could ask people to do anything, and the paradox of choice and the lack of optimization against specific verticals, no one knew what to do with it, so they really didn't do…”
Horowitz personally took over Lyft board seat after rocky initial launch
“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.”
De La Garza: US gangs use Uber and Lyft to launder stolen credit cards
“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.”
Operationally similar competitors cannot gain regulatory advantage over each other
“So ultimately I don't think there's really any way to get a competitive advantage when you are in the same sandbox.”
Andreessen: Uber and Lyft are crystal clear safer alternatives to traditional taxis
“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.”
Walden: Legacy Taxi and Hotel Regulations Would Have Stifled Airbnb and Uber
“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…”
Andreessen: Ridesharing markets will far surpass the legacy taxi industry
“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, …”
Li Jin: Uber and Lyft required unlicensed drivers to reach scale
“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.”
Evans: Airbnb, Uber, and Lyft are not fundamentally technology companies
“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…”
Kalanick: a16z's initial Lyft investment was valued at $210 million
“And the deal on Lyft was two 10.”
Pathak: Airbnb and non-internet companies will soon launch embedded financial products
“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.”
Alex Rampell: Almost every new tech startup de facto uses Stripe
“Pretty much any company that's starting today is almost de facto using Stripe.”
O'Reilly: Ride-sharing speed comes from elastic supply, not the app
“The app is only a tiny part of the business model because the fact that Lyft can deliver three minute pickup times is because all these part-time drivers showing up in their own car so that supply automatically rises as there's more demand.”
Mack: Lyft adds $750M in local spending and saves 100M commute hours
“We add three quarters of a billion dollars in local spending to communities. We've cut a hundred million hours off people's commutes, etc.”
Okpaku: Lyft grassroots campaign crashed a city's email server
“We've had email campaigns that have literally accidentally, but shut down a city's email server because there were so many citizens writing in so much.”
Okpaku: Lyft created passenger insurance superior to standard taxi policies
“First of all, we created a new form of insurance that was basically higher than any insurance for taxi for taxi passengers across the country.”
Okpaku: Early Municipal Laws Set Precedents That Subsequent Jurisdictions Copy
“When you're dealing with a new industry like ride sharing, That has not yet issued any sort of legislation or regulations that that framework has not yet been created. You have, in my opinion, really one chance to get that right. If you have one law on the boo…”
Lyft exited Houston in 2014 over regulations while Uber stayed
“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…”
Pope: Fleet owners will let riders order modular cars customized with specific options
“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…”
Collison: Lyft drivers use Stripe Express Pay for instant debit payouts
“We worked with Lyft back a couple months ago to roll at Express Pay, where rather than just kind of sending money to their drivers via bank transfer, they can send it instantaneously to their drivers kind of directly over debit card rails, and now almost half …”
Paulus: Ridesharing platforms will deliver self-driving cars to mass market first
“Services like Lyft and Uber which will likely be the first delivery mechanism on the, for the mass market for self-driving cars.”
Srinivasan: Uber and Lyft will become logistics APIs within 15 years
“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.”
Strange: Uber and Lyft spend hundreds of dollars to acquire each driver
“Uber and Lyft both spend hundreds of dollars acquiring drivers, and then they have to make up that cost through margin on rides.”
Cordova: Lyft scaled via Google Maps, Twilio, and Stripe APIs
“Rather than having to build, like, mapping and logistic services, they're integrating with Google Maps. Rather than building out, like, a push notification or phone verification system, they're using Twilio. Rather than having to build their own payment servic…”
Lyft founders praised Brian Roberts as transformational within weeks of hiring
“One of the amazing examples was really at Lyft with the hire of Brian Roberts and had an immediate impact with Logan and John early on, like within weeks, they called up and said, this guy has been transformational to our business.”