The Ledger, every show

“We had the wrong venture capitalists on the board. Unfortunately, in my opinion, it was Bill Gurley at Benchmark.”

“We found out in our investigation that he hired Some private investigators had weekly meetings about how do we get rid of Travis.”

“There's a history of VCs who have done this type of thing and in Benchmark's case, they did it against Naval. They hired private investigators and Naval Ravikant. He had a company called eGroups, and he got thrown out of it.”

“Benchmark.”

“As you saw last month they massacred over 43,000 Iranians who were just peacefully protesting.”

“We found out an investigation that two weeks after I won the case founding Partner of Fusion GPS was sitting at a cafe in DC with a reporter from Fast Company with a memory stick and a fake police report from London about me. And they gave it to the reporter.”

“There's not even a doubt in my mind that they would have used it by now if they had it.”

“And the only leader that is legitimate To lead us to a transition process to become a democracy is the Crown Prince Rezipalavi.”

“I believe if Travis and Emil had stayed at Uber, Uber would be a trillion-dollar company by now.”

“And the report, by the way, didn't find anything wrong that, you know, Travis did, or I did, or there was nothing, nothing in there about, you know, him, you know, directly and the recommendation was like to go hire a Sheryl Sandberg, like a chief operating of…”

“And so they got two, two of the greatest minds in Silicon Valley were taken out of the company. This is the greatest value destruction that's happened since firing Steve Jobs at Apple. And it was a massive mistake.”

“I believe that it was, you know, one of the worst venture, ah, decisions ever.”

“It was worth it to me to, you know, spend millions of dollars on a, legal fees and doing the, we filed seven, four, the latest one is against Fusion GPS, and the judge found with us last year, and is gonna force Fusion GPS to say who hired them”

“Venture capital as it is today, especially with private equity coming downstream and what we've seen with the drunken era venture capital is dead. The venture capital that we grew up with and that we looked up to is that model is gone.”

“Quantum and AI, even at the chipset level, are going to merge. And then that's going to revolutionize all aspects of our lives. We'll find cures to every known disease known to mankind within, I would say, the next 10 years.”

“Don't die in the next 20 years, because we're gonna reach a point of longevity where you'll be able to help, live a healthy life for 150 plus years.”

“Steve Ballmer. You know, the decade that he was CEO of Microsoft, Microsoft was completely just flat, right? And he's now richer than Bill Gates, right?”

“We're gonna basically see new nation states, new countries be started in our lifetimes, and you're gonna see a lot of people opt in to those new, new nations.”

“What I wish I had done or had the wisdom to know to do was what, you know, Sam and his allies did in getting the employees at OpenAI to back Sam and say, if he doesn't come back, we're gonna leave. . It was very powerful, and if we had done that at Uber, becau…”

“When there is a free Iran, there will be a four-month process to get to a referendum and then a six-month process to assemble Iranians to write a constitution and then a fourteen-month process to actually finalize the constitution, And then have a vote on the …”

“Well, the Crown Prince had a system for people to communicate securely with him and his team, and over 50,000 people in the military have actually responded to that.”

“Travis Basically for six months was like, you know, telling the taxi commission, the city, government, like, you know, hey, these guys are illegal, like, well, you know, why are you allowing it, et cetera, instead of launching it, you know, as well which was l…”

“Andreessen, having lost the Uber deal, ended up doing the Lyft deal, and we had, you know, Travis and Emil, you know, they were close to acquiring it acquiring Lyft which, you know but they wanted too much ownership so that luckily didn't work out”

“About in early August They then sued in Delaware courts after they had already gotten rid of Travis. They then sued to get rid of him and his two board seats that he had gotten that he hadn't appointed yet. So three board seats. So they wanted, you know, effec…”

“We make our arguments and the judge finds with us and rejects Benchmark's attempt to get rid of the three board seats.”

“And there were multiple emails from the London police telling the reporter, like, this is not our report.”

“So the SoftBank conversations, ironically, Travis and Emil started those conversations, the ultimate twelve billion dollar investment from SoftBank Vision Fund.”

“So I think in the Trump administration, we'll see changes in that direction of like opening it up. And so that model I think is gonna change.”

“Massa in Saudi, one of the things he talked about is he did his calculations, and the numbers for me make a lot of sense that basically you need to spend, you know, trillions, single digit trillions, and then you're gonna get nine trillion of annual value comi…”

“So I think SpaceX will be a 10 trillion dollar company. It's just getting started.”

“We, if there's any kind of separatist movement, we will lose the goodwill and the support of millions and millions of Iranians.”

“For twenty million at the time, later I got another six and a half million through secondary for Menlo. So that investment at today's prices is worth almost seven billion dollars.”

“He allowed me to buy secondary shares from another early person, so I sold all my Facebook shares that had gone public at like, 53 bucks, 58 bucks a share, and I put it all I bet it all, everything I had, I put it all into Uber.”

“These are people that are like, it's not even 10 X, you talk about 10 X engineers, these are like thousand X humans and so I've learned over time that it's worth waiting for the thousand X founders and investing in the future Travis's, or the future Elon's”

“Nobody can do what Elon's doing. Nobody can do what Travis is doing. No matter how great you are. These are, like, rare, rare Nobel Prize winning, essentially, founders.”

“Once we find out who've, who hired Fusion GPS, then, you know, I think careers are gonna fall.”

“I passed on that company, that was ironically another benchmark company. I passed on that company because it didn't, I remember the dot com crash and all the office buildings being cleared up. And I was like, I don't get this business model. You don't own, own…”

“Liquidity has been a major problem and especially during the four years of Biden and it just coincided with really bad policies and, you know, a derf of M&A lack of IPOs I think that's gonna change in the next four years.”

“Even with tariffs, these, the Chinese electric car companies have gotten to the point that, you know, their cars are like 15,000 dollars, and they're good cars. So even if you add a hundred percent tariff, You're still talking about 30,000 dollars, still affor…”

“There's now hundreds of startups starting new nations.”

“I, so, I brought Snapchat to Menlo. Evan and I hit it off. I really believe that. I was on it in the first 30 days, because my kids were on it, and so they showed it to me, and I was chasing it, and Evan and I hit it off and unfortunately Menlo passed on the, …”

“In my first 90 days, I closed Uber, Warby Parker Tumblr, and Machine Zone.”

“I got more carry than I would have gotten in the fund by agreeing to do deal by deal carry.”

“It was 33 cents a share, effectively based on today's prices, so it would be 33 cents a share.”

“He architected the fifteen billion dollar raise he had a massive impact on the trajectory of Uber, and he became really Travis's right hand and sparring partner in building, building Uber.”

“So I, ah, our fund, we put fifty million into the beginning of Uber China, and then later put another fifty million into Didi when they merged.”

“Solution was I introduced them to Waverly Loans, and we did the largest Waverly Loan in history, which was eighty-three million and bought Garrett Camp's shares for TPG for that amount.”

“I think TPG on that eighty-three million made close to two billion.”