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 80 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 3 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
Horowitz: Uber's post-Kalanick culture became much more milquetoast
“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.”
Kalanick: Uber's 2017 board battle would differ with Andreessen or Horowitz
“That wouldn't have gone that way if Ben or Mark was on the board.”
Kalanick continues to stand by every decision he made at Uber
“I continue to stand by every decision I made at Uber.”
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…”
Balaji Srinivasan: Media targeted Uber and VCs to block libertarian tech
“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…”
Balaji Srinivasan: Uber VCs leaked information because Travis Kalanick resisted IPO
“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.”
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…”
Khan: Uber won ride-hailing; Hailo VCs want immediate exit
“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.”
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: Leading 20,000 people requires being hardcore without being bad
“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.”
Kalanick: Uber's autonomous driving program was second only to Waymo in 2017
“Our timing program was like second to Waymo, but catching up at the time.”
Kalanick: a16z agreed to $375M pre-money valuation for Uber in 2011
“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.”
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…”
Horowitz: Kalanick required complete control in any Uber deal
“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.”
Kalanick: Efficient meal delivery will replace home kitchens like Uber replaced cars
“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.”
Kalanick: Marc Andreessen cut a16z's Uber Series B valuation to $210M
“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.”
Horowitz: Uber would dominate food delivery and autonomy if Kalanick stayed
“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…”
Horowitz: Uber remaining highly valuable post-founder departure is exceptionally rare
“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…”
Casado: AV unit economics remain on par with Uber despite $100B invested
“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.”
Balaji Srinivasan: SpaceX, Uber, and Bitcoin represent network alternatives to states
“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?”
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…”
Ghodsi: Hype around the largest LLMs mirrors 2000s focus on Cisco
“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…”
Robotaxi unit economics remain worse than human drivers despite $75B invested
“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?”
Carlson-Wee: P2P protocols will eventually compete with Web 2.0 giants like Uber and Twitter
“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.”
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.”
Huffington: The majority of Uber drivers work part-time to supplement income
“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.”
Klein: Software alone fails without full-stack startup workflow reengineering
“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…”
Standage: Uber poached Carnegie Mellon's entire robotics department
“We've just seen, for example, Uber has snaffled the entire robotics department for Carnegie Mellon.”
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 …”
Kalanick confirms Anthony Levandowski and Eric Meyhofer joined Atoms robotics
“Anthony Lewandowski, of course Eric Maihofer, who ran Uber's advanced technology group. He's running food robotics.”
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.”
Horowitz: a16z lost Uber's Series B deal to Shervin Pishevar
“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.”
Kalanick: Post-Uber founders are not scared of government regulation
“Entrepreneurs that are coming up since the Uber time. Are not scared of regulation the way that bits.”
Rocha: Uber designer spent two weeks prototyping with Cursor instead of Figma
“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.”
Acharya: Winning AI voice markets will cost less than Uber's landgrab
“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…”
Schroeder: Careem beat Uber in the Middle East by accepting cash payments
“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. …”
Dixon: Venture model denies upside to early network contributors
“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,…”
Departing founders practically bear the burden of proof in IP disputes
“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 …”
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.”
Chen: Uber employees secretly used Slack despite official HipChat mandate
“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…”
Appleby's offshore client list included Nike, Uber, Queen Elizabeth II, and Bono
“Their clients were like Nike and Uber, and as it turned out, The Queen and Bono and all those people were also clients.”
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, …”
Evans argues Uber and Airbnb are not fundamentally tech companies
“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 …”