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
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.”
Liu: Ethereum Foundation employs 5 to 10 people despite $70B market cap
“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…”
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…”
Kha: GPs are fired for missing winners while LPs fear bad investments
“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…”
Kalanick says former Uber CFO and engineering VP joined Atoms
“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”
Kalanick: Uber held secret meetings with a16z during Lyft rivalry
“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.”
Ismail: Study of 200 unicorns found 100% had a Massive Transformative Purpose
“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 …”
Ismail: Reducing marginal cost of supply to zero drives market cap growth
“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 …”
Local marketplaces often fail by expanding nationally before achieving city-level density
“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…”
Andreessen: Great startup ideas stem from market-specific dynamics, not generic formulas
“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.”
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.”
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…”
Roberts: Autonomous Vehicles Will Dramatically Reduce Transportation Costs
“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…”
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…”
Huffington: Uber CEO Travis Kalanick no longer views exhaustion as a badge
“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…”
Rampell: Violating AML and KYC laws leads to prison, unlike ride-sharing infractions
“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…”
TransferWise spent nine months securing UK regulatory licenses before launching product
“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…”
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.”
Hinrikus: Banking expectations are set by seamless apps like Uber and Skype
“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 …”
Evans: Technology UX is shifting from explicit interaction to frictionless micro-tasks
“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…”
Srinivasan: Full-stack startups should stage integration rather than attempting it immediately
“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…”
Evans: Launching a major app costs $5M today versus $100M previously
“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.”
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.”
Li Jin: Airbnb and Uber were consistently constrained by supply
“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.”
Kalanick: Uber's first venture round had a $4M pre-money valuation
“Our first round at Uber was four million pre.”
Kalanick: Physical AI work continues the mission started at Uber
“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.”
Kalanick: Scour was sued for $250B by 33 major media companies
“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”
Gardner: Instacart, DoorDash, and Uber remain active Marqeta enterprise customers
“Instacart and DoorDash are still our customers today. Uber Eats and Uber still our customers.”
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.”
Naous: Major tech companies built proprietary internal operational analytics tools
“So Facebook has Scuba. Google has Dremel, Rasta, and a whole bunch of others. Airbnb built Superset. Uber built Aries DB.”