Uber

“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…”

“We have like nine of the 10 top Public tech companies as customers and like four of the six top banks and like Uber and Stripe and so on, all these companies using Sourcegraph for code search.”

“Zipline just did a partnership with Uber. I'm investors in both of those companies, obviously, and they are going to do a million deliveries a day.”

“I think membership is the most efficient long-term consumer lever that we've got.”

“The beauty of our model is we're primarily a variable cost model, right? It means when demand drops, great, our costs scale down with it, but it also means that we just don't have a fixed capacity to give away, and so it just makes the challenges for building …”

“For that to even be interesting, I have to see a path within a few years to multiple billions of dollars of GMV, and it just actually constrains your thinking a little bit.”

“The other challenge of standing up a new business with a big company with a big P&L and a big balance sheet is people just get fat on the resources, right? And so you don't build it the way you would build it if you were a startup because you just have more re…”

“It's existential because at the end of the day, it's a better product than our core product in many use cases, and I think those use cases grow over time, and eventually it's better in all use cases.”

“If Uber doesn't have autonomy on our platform, and we will we will, we are investing actively and aggressively to bring it to market, but if we didn't, then it certainly would be existential for our core business.”

“It's the largest single sort of standalone investment we make. Now don't be, you know, don't get me wrong with at a PNL our size, we're moving billions of dollars around every month, but yes, it's the largest single area of investment.”

“When we started our autonomous efforts, you know, this is a secret project within Uber... You know, this would have been, you know, I don't know, 2013, 2012, 2013, 2014, we would have quietly started working on this”

“Our mobility business had lost 84% of our top line in three weeks. The company was burning billions annually. We didn't have a core business producing cash.”

“We're doing like three hundred million trips a week on our core platforms.”

“Even in the largest AV markets, where today we don't have AVs, like San Francisco and LA, our human-driven business is growing faster than the rest of the US.”

“Two of our large, three largest countries by volume are India and Brazil. You know, the average fare in Brazil is like, Three 54 bucks USD and India it's two 53 bucks or something like that. It's going to be decades until the cost of autonomy compresses to the…”

“I think there's going to be more than two winners. Do I think Waymo and Tesla will ultimately be winners? Yes, I do. I don't know who, who's going to bet against either of those, but I think there will be more winners.”

“I think ultimately it's in both of their interests to put their vehicles on our network, even if they have their own robo taxi apps or their own one P apps, even if they work with our competitors on the rideshare side or on the delivery side. I think everyone …”

“I think in the end, distribution wins.”

“I remember the last few weeks in the negotiation, we were burning fifty two million a week in China, just on price subsidies, because there was this heated behind the scenes battle happening To get to the best economics and the ultimate sort of surrender or u…”

“I don't think it was plausible that we were ultimately going to be the market winner. I mean, even for geopolitical reasons alone, like the notion that a U S tech company would ultimately be the largest mobility service in China. I just don't think it's someth…”

“I think the way companies ultimately have to extract AI efficiency, at least from like a pure OPEX perspective, is just in your target setting, hold the constraints tighter. Like, if we really believe that AI is making our employees 10% or 20% or 30% more effi…”

“If you took everything Uber does today and held it static and said, you know, in five years you're going to need more or less people, I'd say, well, we could do everything we do today with less people in five years because of the power of AI, but we're going t…”

“We've not participated historically in the aggregation apps where some, you know, somebody will come to us and pitch and say, hey, you know, give us APIs that give us real-time info on Every car, every Uber car in the network what the price of that ride is, wh…”

“Because, I mean, even this sort of like the existential questions we get about AV tend to ignore the fact that we have basically an equally sized food delivery business that's in market leading positions in most of our markets around the world. We get almost z…”

“And for us, like when this deal, you know, we have to go through the sort of requisite regulatory and shareholder processes, but delivery will be a much bigger business for mobility.”

“It's actually when I first met Wan Shing at Meizuan, actually. And he told me I was crazy. Don't do it. It's the worst idea ever.”

“What you learn when you go and do what we did in China is you learn that when you go and take your business and go to China, you have to start over. So many people think that you can take your business and take it somewhere, which by the way, Uber kind of like…”

“At some point, probably our top 10 cities were all Chinese cities. That's wild. In rides. Yeah. Not in revenue because the rides instead of like at the, in my day, 13 bucks, 15 bucks, whatever they were, these were like three bucks, two bucks type stuff.”

“Now we eventually did get a partner, but instead of giving up 50%, we gave up, I think it was seven percent and it was to Baidu, but it was because we were getting massive regulatory heat. And as long as we had a partner by our side, we could be Chinese.”

“So we were spending, let's say tens of millions of dollars a month fighting DD in all these cities.”

“This is why, you know, like Lyft is smaller than Uber because we were better at this part of this, the thing, and people don't really know that's what it takes.”

“Your network gives you efficiency, which then means you can get to a lower price point without subsidies that the competitor still has to subsidize.”

“Anybody who's a small player in a market, Has a natural advantage if they're well-funded is that you can gain market share very quickly and you can force the big guy to burn money.”

“The other way where there's asymmetric going the other way is recruiting drivers. So for instance, I could give subsidies to drivers. If I'm the big guy, I can give subsidies to drivers that are like they're like thousand dollars. If you join Uber and you're, …”

“We had never at Uber, we never Got a regulation passed that would hurt a competitor. We never would do that. That's just not how we rolled. We never donated to a campaign. Ever. To try to get something passed.”

“When Uber rolled into New York the driver was getting a 12 hour shift seven days a week. But there are 2:12 hour shifts. Each of those drivers was paying 40,000 dollars a year to rent a car for half time.”

“And if people are taking Ubers today in New York and wondering why it's so expensive, And why it's getting more unreliable. It's because after I left Uber, they started passing a bunch of laws that are turning Uber into the taxi system. They've, they have a li…”

“And what happened is the sovereign wealth their sovereign wealth funds in China started pouring billions of dollars into my competitors, Uber's competitors in different regions, so that they would subsidize in those regions and drain my resources.”

“Benchmark was running a war room. They were an unspoken activist investor that was creating a once a week crisis.”

“Five rooms, 12 hours, one week... So I'm in the two hundred fifty million dollar check or over a room. Then there's like a hundred million dollar room and a fifty million dollar room and a twenty five million dollar room. And there'll be a guy in the twenty-fi…”

“The problem was that I ran too close to the line in too many situations that it, when you are big and important, The scrutiny and the expectation is that you don't run that close to line, even if it's correct.”

“Pricing in the transportation space is the sum of all strategy.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 …”

“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.”

“Our first round at Uber was four million pre.”

“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”

“Anthony Lewandowski, of course Eric Maihofer, who ran Uber's advanced technology group. He's running food robotics.”

“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”

“I just interviewed the president of Uber. What is his single biggest fear? It's actually the disaggregation of UI or the removal of UI where you say, I want a car, and ChatGPT automatically routes you to Lyft, Uber or another provider based on price.”

“Uber famously just put a 1500 dollar per employee cap on vibe coding per month. Meta's been reported to do the same.”

“If we follow, our view would be we'd had, we would have had to have followed on in everything, and I think that the absolute return would be better. I don't think that the multiple would necessarily be better on the fund.”

“You know, in retrospect, we probably sold a little too early, so this was early on, you know, this is a business that's getting close to ten billion dollars in valuation, and there's an opportunity to take some off the table, and you're very new.”

“I think every consumer app will get rewritten in the next five to 10 years. You know, why would I not have my agent talk to my DoorDash app or Uber app?”

“Uber made benchmark roughly 640 X versus around 25 X with WeWork.”

“Most people are incapable at this point of imagining a Waymo robo-taxi, an Uber self-driving car, and a robot getting out and bringing the packages to your doorstep. That's gonna happen.”

“In general, even now, like applications like Uber or Lyft, that completely not adapted for elderly adults.”

“It's like not, I guess you were, it's different today, but in my world, we didn't acquire shit. We just built.”

“I never did that. Like we never did that. We basically never ever Proposed or pushed any rule that would be beneficial to us versus somebody else.”