Uber, every mention
102 scenes (2022), the whole family · ← back to Uber
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every year 2022 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
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.
- ▶ 3:04:21 David Rosenthal Never by an order of magnitude had that happened, and all of a sudden the rules of the game have changed, and things are very different, and the amount of pressure on the company, on Benchmark, on the board, on the LPs of Benchmark.
- ▶ 3:04:50 David Rosenthal Uber is not getting marked to market, but you are getting your quarterly marks from Benchmark Fund Seven based on the valuations that Uber has achieved.
- ▶ 3:05:17 Ben Gilbert Thousands and thousands of people, in addition to all the employees and all the customers and the drivers on the platform, like you actually have these thousands, if not tens of thousands of people impacted by these paper valuations at…
- ▶ 3:12:30 David Rosenthal So now in 2017, really kind of in the midst of all the Uber stuff going down, Benchmark brings on another general partner.
- ▶ 3:42:53 Ben Gilbert Uber, Snap, eBay, Riot, Twitter, Discord is still privately held, but, you know, will be a big win.
Amazon Web Services · Acquired
- ▶ 1:20:42 David Rosenthal Dropbox, Instagram, Airbnb, Uber, Zynga, all of these companies.
- ▶ 1:31:28 David Rosenthal Airbnb, Uber, you know, Instagram and the like.
Amazon.com · Acquired
- ▶ 1:23:01 Ben Gilbert I mean, it's one of these situations, it's like an Uber or a Twitter, where you have this idea, and then you put it up, and then that's exactly the thing that people want.
The Playbook: Lessons from 200+ Company Stories · Acquired
- ▶ 34:46 David Rosenthal Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Tesla, McKinsey, Uber, Twitter, Ford, Stripe, Starbucks, Fidelity, Convoy, Modern Treasury.
American Dynamism (with Katherine Boyle) · Acquired
- ▶ 16:50 Katherine Boyle Intelligence agencies or NASA, you know, the kind of classical realm, but also things like Lyft and Uber that were completely transforming public transportation in cities across America.
- ▶ 19:26 Katherine Boyle And so if you talk to people who are in the bureaucracy of government, it's like their private life of catching the Uber to go home, the DoorDash so they can get food delivered.
- ▶ 50:15 David Rosenthal Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Tesla, McKinsey, Uber, Twitter, Autodesk.
Capital-Efficient Growth (with Zoom CEO Eric Yuan & Veeva CEO Peter Gassner) · Acquired
- ▶ 36:03 David Rosenthal They work with Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, McKinsey, Uber, Twitter, Autodesk.
Platforms and Power (with Hamilton Helmer and Chenyi Shi) · Acquired
- ▶ 12:25 Chenyi Shi If we come up with a framework to understand platforms, they should work as well for an Uber or Airbnb of today as they should work for the matchmakers 3000 years ago.
- ▶ 19:05 Hamilton Helmer And so I'll give you an example in Uber.
- ▶ 19:25 Hamilton Helmer By having more drivers and more passengers, it makes it possible for Uber to
- ▶ 21:04 Hamilton Helmer However, I'd argue all other people at Uber and Lyft that know this much better than we do, I'd argue that's not a linear function, right?
- ▶ 23:03 David Rosenthal Well, actually maybe first, can we finish Uber and talk about that third question for Uber?
- ▶ 23:06 David Rosenthal Cause that sort of feels like for Uber at least and Lyft, that's where the rubber hits the road on how valuable are they?
- ▶ 24:47 Ben Gilbert At one point I started a startup that actually got killed by Uber, not willing to play ball with us and cutting off our API, but it's effectively a meta search for ride sharing to be able to find the fastest, closest ride to you…
- ▶ 27:26 Chenyi Shi So the case of Uber and Lyft, we are, Ben, as you said, the drive is undifferentiated.
- ▶ 1:06:45 Hamilton Helmer You know, it's when a driver joins Uber, he makes the platform more valuable to passengers because more efficient route structures are now enabled, right?
- ▶ 1:08:20 Hamilton Helmer I'd say indirect network effects like the one in, in Uber are much more common.
- ▶ 1:10:13 Ben Gilbert Uber and Twitter and Autodesk and a bunch of other great now customers.
- ▶ 1:21:19 David Rosenthal The easy, obvious example of this that has been discussed much in the past decade is Airbnb versus Uber, right?
- ▶ 1:21:31 David Rosenthal Whereas, you know, Uber, it's like, yeah, I can get a car on Uber or Lyft or DD or whatever.
Altimeter (with Brad Gerstner) · Acquired
- ▶ 2:28 Ben Gilbert He led the SPAC that took Grab public in Southeast Asia, and he is widely known as one of the most knowledgeable people in the world on the business of online travel after his involvement in Expedia, Orbitz, Uber, and many others.
Super Pumped (with Brian Koppelman and Joseph Gordon-Levitt) · Acquired
- ▶ 0:55 Ben Gilbert David, I feel like today is the natural culmination of a journey we started in May of 2019 when we did our Uber episode on the day of their IPO.
- ▶ 1:07 Ben Gilbert Well, for listeners who don't know, the events of, you know, Uber leading all the way up through their IPO, and the implosion around that, and the just insane story that all of that was, is coming out as a Showtime series on February 27th…
- ▶ 12:56 David Rosenthal That must just be fun, and it's so, like, well-written profanity, too, and so Uber.
- ▶ 13:47 Joseph Gordon-Levitt To me, Uber serves as a excellent example of a larger trend that I think needs to be talked about, which is what happens when the modus operandi is profits above all.
- ▶ 16:02 Brian Koppelman And so to us, Uber, yeah, there are many Silicon Valley stories, but to us, the Uber story in the way that Mike takes you into it,
- ▶ 16:12 Brian Koppelman The Uber story is one that raises those questions, and we hope the series raises those questions, and maybe the series posits some theories.
- ▶ 26:44 Brian Koppelman In a way that serves us, because we all take Ubers.
- ▶ 26:48 Brian Koppelman But in a way that serves that individual more, and that does a disservice to huge swaths of people that we're not thinking about as we get into the back of the Uber.
- ▶ 26:58 Brian Koppelman So if you get into the back of the Uber and you're like, that guy's cool, but for one moment you think about the person in the office who maybe wasn't treated right, or the driver who thought he was going to have a fleet of cars because…
- ▶ 27:16 Brian Koppelman Maybe you'll just have a moment of empathy for your Uber driver that you wouldn't have.
- ▶ 31:48 David Rosenthal Supposedly, according to what we found, part of his original inspiration for Uber was watching, uh, Casino Royale, the first Daniel Craig James Bond film.
- ▶ 32:26 Ben Gilbert And, you know, so we did this big two and a half hour research episode on, on Uber, and so David and I did a hundred hours of research, and so we found like the quote unquote founding story of Uber, where they're looking over from the…
- ▶ 56:15 Ben Gilbert It turns out a whole bunch of consumers who did these virtual in-home experiences in April of 2020 also worked at places like Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, McKinsey, Uber, Twitter, Autodesk, etc.
- ▶ 1:00:58 Joseph Gordon-Levitt Is interesting to me about the Uber story that I was touching on earlier also, which is a lot of it does come down to what's the incentive?
- ▶ 1:03:29 Ben Gilbert Many of you were very, very close to this story, and so it'll be fascinating to experience it as a series when so many of you experienced it, either through a friend or family member or you personally being at Uber as a lot of these events…
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