Uber, every mention
264 scenes, the whole family · ← back to Uber
tap a year for its mentions
every year anyone Ben Gilbert 85David Rosenthal 82Dara Khosrowshahi 60Packy McCormick 11Brian Koppelman 6Hamilton Helmer 5Jason Calacanis 4Peter Fenton 2Katherine Boyle 2Joseph Gordon-Levitt 2
Verbatim, from the transcripts: the passages where Uber comes up
Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi · Acquired
- ▶ 57:50 Dara Khosrowshahi You come to Uber Eats and Eats is bringing you demand.
- ▶ 58:52 David Rosenthal It's so funny how much of this, you know, goes back to, like, the original 10 years ago, 15 years ago vision for Uber.
- ▶ 1:00:10 Dara Khosrowshahi But at the same time, like, the beauty of Uber is when you get into the actual challenges, like, for example, we launched taxi.
- ▶ 1:00:22 Dara Khosrowshahi So you, uh, hail for an Uber.
- ▶ 1:02:12 Ben Gilbert I think you guys between when you took the job and today turned over basically the entire Uber shareholder base.
- ▶ 1:03:31 David Rosenthal That was probably 15% of the company.
- ▶ 1:04:10 Dara Khosrowshahi oh my god, Travis is selling, what does that mean, et cetera, like, and, and, you know, there's this, everyone wants to create drama around Uber, so it, it's difficult as a leader to, um,
- ▶ 1:04:34 Dara Khosrowshahi He's a founder of the company.
- ▶ 1:05:10 David Rosenthal But like the number of university endowments who through the venture funds that were invested in Uber had
- ▶ 1:05:18 David Rosenthal Large portions of their whole university endowment that were dependent on the private mark of Uber.
- ▶ 1:07:10 Dara Khosrowshahi And at the same time, SoftBank was looking to invest in the company, right?
- ▶ 1:07:39 Dara Khosrowshahi And they both wanted to control the company.
- ▶ 1:08:03 Dara Khosrowshahi And so we had to get SoftBank in, and they wanted to invest in Uber because it was a top brand, had top tech, et cetera.
- ▶ 1:10:09 Dara Khosrowshahi And I mean, Uber had raised the most money of any company, any startup at that point.
- ▶ 1:11:37 Ben Gilbert While Uber is worth nearly eighty billion dollars today, the valuation at the initial seed round in 2010 was five and a half million dollars, with an M.
- ▶ 1:12:02 Ben Gilbert Their Series A was the next year, famously led by Benchmark, where Bill Gurley joined the board at quite the step up in valuation, sixty million dollars, so all those early angels got a ten-x even before Benchmark came in, which was…
- ▶ 1:12:19 David Rosenthal I feel like all these folks involved in the investor group for Uber is like a all-star cast of past acquired subjects and guests and friends of the show.
- ▶ 1:12:28 Ben Gilbert So flashing forward to the IPO in 2019, Uber had raised an astonishing twenty billion dollars while private, plus another eight billion on IPO day.
- ▶ 1:12:39 Ben Gilbert And notably for this new era of Uber, according to PitchBook, that is all the capital that they would need to raise.
- ▶ 1:12:44 Ben Gilbert They got to break even on that cash.
- ▶ 1:12:47 Ben Gilbert Like, no more new raises since IPO day, which was a very new motion for Uber, given their history.
- ▶ 1:12:53 Ben Gilbert PitchBook has tons of other great stats, like Uber's 32,000 employees, all the patents, and great graphs of revenue breakdowns for each year by business unit.
- ▶ 1:13:03 Ben Gilbert And interestingly enough, I just realized looking at this that in the last two years, Uber Freight actually does make up a material amount of their revenue now.
- ▶ 1:13:03 Ben Gilbert And interestingly enough, I just realized looking at this that in the last two years, Uber Freight actually does make up a material amount of their revenue now.
- ▶ 1:25:12 Ben Gilbert If you could only own Uber Eats or Uber the transportation business, which one would you rather own?
- ▶ 1:25:12 Ben Gilbert If you could only own Uber Eats or Uber the transportation business, which one would you rather own?
- ▶ 1:25:20 Dara Khosrowshahi Also, Eats is a transportation business.
- ▶ 1:28:50 Ben Gilbert And so if there's something that you feel is often misunderstood or that you want to say to people that are willing to let a long form argument soak in, what do you think is misunderstood about the company or you or the industry or this…
- ▶ 1:29:31 Dara Khosrowshahi And the fact is that I think Uber was guilty of taking earners for granted because when I first came in and for much of the company, like we were in a state of oversupply, we had too many drivers.
- ▶ 1:29:51 Dara Khosrowshahi And then the way that we organize the company around the earner experience was pretty standard in terms of a B to C business, right?
- ▶ 1:29:59 Dara Khosrowshahi There's a team, you know, there's a team that runs the Uber app.
- ▶ 1:30:02 Dara Khosrowshahi There's a team that runs the Eats app and the team that runs the driver app.
- ▶ 1:30:53 Dara Khosrowshahi And the amount of time that they're spending on the app, most of Uber employees, myself too, like order rides all the time, order eats all the time, you know, you get in, get out, et cetera, but a driver will be spending four hours, five…
- ▶ 1:30:53 Dara Khosrowshahi And the amount of time that they're spending on the app, most of Uber employees, myself too, like order rides all the time, order eats all the time, you know, you get in, get out, et cetera, but a driver will be spending four hours, five…
- ▶ 1:31:43 Dara Khosrowshahi So there's been a pretty important culture change of the company, which is,
- ▶ 1:32:31 Dara Khosrowshahi and I think about, like, what am I going to be proud of at the company?
- ▶ 1:32:47 Dara Khosrowshahi And it's a lot like tech is, you know, you're building for the virtual world, and, and Uber is unique in that it's a technology company that, like, built for the real world, and the impact that we have, especially as it relates to earners,…
- ▶ 1:33:39 David Rosenthal Is Uber the largest earner platform in the world?
- ▶ 1:34:03 Ben Gilbert And Uber has how many earners on the platform?
Lockheed Martin (Audio) · Acquired
- ▶ 59:32 Ben Gilbert This is not going to be a ten billion dollar Uber style business.
Benchmark’s Mitch Lasky and Blake Robbins on The Art of Business in Gaming · Acquired
- ▶ 21:31 Mitch Lasky So, you know, Uber and the taxi industry or Airbnb and the hotel industry where you aggregate demand
Sessions: David Senra (Founders Podcast) · Acquired
- ▶ 1:03:27 David Senra Uh, just pull up Readwise and it
Holiday Special 2022 · Acquired
- ▶ 29:53 David Rosenthal But is there anything that would be like an Uber versus a to-do app?
- ▶ 1:43:43 Ben Gilbert I will say, too, I was in a coffee meeting today where I did need to call an Uber so that I could get back here so that we could record, and, like, it was quite nice being able to, like, have the watch at a super, what's the angle?
Stratechery (with Ben Thompson) · Acquired
- ▶ 6:39 Ben Gilbert David and I, I think, got drinks, and we're talking about Uber, and it was your Don't Blame Uber piece from 2014.
Enron · Acquired
- ▶ 3:20:52 David Rosenthal Even thinking about companies like Uber, the king, the granddaddy of all of the stay private longer.
Benchmark Part II: The Dinner · Acquired
- ▶ 35:17 Ben Gilbert We talked about Uber on our episode, but I want to abstract it to, you know, how you think about this generally.
- ▶ 37:11 Peter Fenton And I think that we could talk about Uber, we could, I have every reason to believe Travis's purpose was, um, the biggest, most extraordinary Uber imaginable.
- ▶ 1:18:49 David Rosenthal Like, like Uber, like Instagram, like it was early, but there was data proving it.
- ▶ 1:22:42 Ben Gilbert It's like Uber.
- ▶ 1:37:09 Eric Vishria Like, Peter was working on Twitter at the time, obviously, Bill with Uber,
- ▶ 1:54:10 Peter Fenton I've read these books about us at Uber or Twitter or WeWork.
ACQ Sessions: Jason Calacanis · Acquired
- ▶ 47:58 David Rosenthal You were, what, the third or fourth investor in Uber?
- ▶ 55:22 Jason Calacanis Like, the DoorDash, Uber, Amazon, Starbucks, absolute, um, uh, race and, and battle to just hire entry-level employees and make it delightful for them is what has driven, um,
- ▶ 1:17:50 David Rosenthal Yeah, but that was like, you know, you know, Urbu was such a baby company back then, and like, you know.
- ▶ 1:18:00 Jason Calacanis Christopher Alec from First Run, you know, invested in the company.
- ▶ 1:19:50 Ben Gilbert Because, like, obviously Uber is some ridiculous multiple on a return, um, but then there's these other ones that are, like, promising, but early, and then there's other ones where it's been a less than Uber multiple, but still a good Uber…
- ▶ 1:21:21 Jason Calacanis A, that is not the case with Uber or Robinhood.
- ▶ 1:42:31 Jason Calacanis If Chamath or Sachs or I or Friedberg were to get but one more deal out of it, and it's an Uber, the economic value is nine figures.
- ▶ 2:06:01 Ben Gilbert Was your Uber investment you personally, or was that Sequoia's money?
Benchmark Part I · Acquired
- ▶ 2:24 Ben Gilbert Semiconductor and networking companies like Synopsys and Juniper Networks, and of course, in the next generation, OpenTable, Zillow, Twitter, Instagram, Uber, WeWork, Snap, Riot Games, Asana, Discord, New Relic, and our friends of the show…
- ▶ 2:50 Ben Gilbert They clearly transitioned from the eBay generation to the Uber generation.
- ▶ 2:15:09 David Rosenthal You can now invest at the Series A post product risk where there's data and you can see if something's working or not, and you can make crazy seeming bets like Uber at a sixty million dollar valuation that are actually like deeply in the…
- ▶ 2:43:28 David Rosenthal You were still looking at early data, but you could look at an Instagram, you could look at an Uber, you could look at a Snap, and you could look at the data and you could say, my God, this is working.
- ▶ 2:45:07 David Rosenthal The other thing that Matt identified, I think long before much of the rest of the investing world and world at large was the dynamics behind Uber.
- ▶ 2:45:21 David Rosenthal But Matt had this saying back then that it was partly, you know, informed by his experience with Uber.
- ▶ 2:49:16 David Rosenthal Uber, Snap, Discord, that gaming company, Stitch Fix, Duo Security, Docker, Elastic, Nextdoor, and WeWork.
- ▶ 2:52:23 David Rosenthal Matt found Uber, but Bill was the right board member.
- ▶ 2:52:26 David Rosenthal And like, you know, well, we'll talk more about Uber in a minute here.
- ▶ 2:54:02 David Rosenthal Alright, so we talk about Uber?
- ▶ 2:54:13 Ben Gilbert In 2018, when that Wall Street Journal piece came out, their holding in Uber was worth eight billion dollars, so that alone would have sixteen-xed the fund.
- ▶ 2:54:45 Ben Gilbert I don't remember the timeframe exactly, but Benchmark sold nine hundred million dollars worth of Uber shares to SoftBank.
- ▶ 2:55:59 David Rosenthal We should definitely, though, talk about Uber.
- ▶ 2:56:02 Ben Gilbert All right, Uber.
- ▶ 2:56:09 David Rosenthal We talked about it all on our Uber episode.
- ▶ 2:56:13 David Rosenthal He tried to get Taxi Magic to become Uber.
- ▶ 2:56:18 Ben Gilbert The original Uber pitch is actually Garrett Camp coming in and pitching the limo thing, and Travis isn't CEO yet, and then finally Travis gets in the seat.
- ▶ 2:56:58 David Rosenthal They knew they wanted to do the deal.
- ▶ 2:57:11 David Rosenthal And so he had taken like an Uber down from San Francisco to
- ▶ 2:58:05 David Rosenthal You know, I mean, great upside, great downside, but like, man, he was good, and Uber was good, and those days were something special.
- ▶ 2:58:18 Ben Gilbert I was like, Jason, an angel investor in Uber?
- ▶ 2:58:21 David Rosenthal Wait, was he the third or the fourth angel investor in Uber?
- ▶ 2:59:16 David Rosenthal Ah, man, the Uber day.
- ▶ 3:00:07 David Rosenthal Of which Uber, you know, becomes a prime example.
- ▶ 3:00:18 Ben Gilbert So there's a thing that we should definitely talk about on the benchmark episode, which is benchmark with their board seat on Uber ends up suing the founder along with a group of other people.
- ▶ 3:00:34 Ben Gilbert Uber had a lot of bad stuff that all sort of happened seemingly all at once.
- ▶ 3:00:40 Ben Gilbert End up in a situation where shareholders were all looking at each other going, we need to replace the CEO, otherwise the company will destroy all the value it's created.
- ▶ 3:01:03 David Rosenthal Uber, I think, was, you know, it was at the forefront of all the stuff that made now a less wistful time, you know, everything, you know, you said.
- ▶ 3:01:10 David Rosenthal And some of those were the company's fault, and some of those were Travis's fault, and some weren't.
- ▶ 3:01:19 David Rosenthal Uber was trying to do the right thing.
- ▶ 3:01:44 Ben Gilbert In which case, many people at Uber were acting with malice.
- ▶ 3:01:49 David Rosenthal You know, there was the attitude that I think needed to, you couldn't have built Uber without of the, hey, the existing laws and regulations are stupid and they don't serve consumers and we need to fight them.
- ▶ 3:02:05 David Rosenthal And the company and Travis never changed that stance.
- ▶ 3:02:22 David Rosenthal And I don't think the company and Travis moved along with them
- ▶ 3:02:31 David Rosenthal And then I think the last one, and I think this obviously, right, like the Uber situation and the WeWork situation too, to a certain extent, but obviously the Uber situation is the end of the Fab Four era.
- ▶ 3:03:02 David Rosenthal You get to a certain point with Uber and, you know, a few years in, like, so we start out with Benchmark and Bill and Travis and the company are besties, you know, lock arms for life, right?
- ▶ 3:03:27 David Rosenthal And then it, it doesn't go right from that to, like, suing the company.
- ▶ 3:03:38 David Rosenthal And not talking about Uber, but clearly he's talking about Uber.
- ▶ 3:03:41 Ben Gilbert And not naming Uber, but saying things like, hey, maybe valuations are out of control.
- ▶ 3:04:03 David Rosenthal Uber hit, what, a seventy billion dollar, I think, valuation.