The Ledger, every show

“You definitely shouldn't raise from benchmark capital.”

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

“They made Apple invest a billion dollars in Didi, and Apple doesn't invest anything in anybody.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The way I think about it is an operator who's running a company is a, if they're good, is a grandmaster of chess. The VC, and by the way, that grandmaster of chess, this operator, entrepreneur, Is playing this chess match somewhere between 60 and 80 hours a we…”

“Like if an antelope limps in the Serengeti, the lion will take it down even if it's not hungry. Can't even fucking help it. It's just what is, what he does. And that's kind of the nature of most VCs. This, the nature of it is they will, if the, if you are on t…”

“10%. And then the one percent is helpful.”

“Federal preemption is good When you are pro regulatory capture.”

“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.”

“If we did it business at Uber, my 2017 would have been a different year.”

“That wouldn't have gone that way if Ben or Mark was on the board.”

“I continue to stand by every decision I made at Uber.”

“We had this thing where we would, against Lyft, we would we would recruit the drivers on Lyft to bring them over to Uber, so that it was hard for Lyft to build supply. And we would aggressively do it, and we had a program for it internally, which we called sho…”

“That's why I didn't buy Lyft.”

“I like to go to the line. We should be like a few inches off the line. That's a good thing to do.”

“The real point of banning under-sixteen is so that you can force adults to identify themselves and de-anonymize themselves so you can set up a full-scale censorship regime, which they're sort of contemplating in the UK.”

“I did not take money from Masa. So he begged me to take money for years, and we did not take it because he is a, he's a, what's the word I'm looking for? He's a promiscuous investor. So once he invests in you should probably count on him and using your informa…”

“If an investor is running a political oppo campaign against you for six months, sort of generating a crisis every week for six months straight, it's going to wear you down.”

“It's I wouldn't call myself anti-humanoid. It's just what we're doing is not that. It's specialized robotics that it's not like we make robotics and anybody can have some. It's more like robotics and AI that go after an industry, one industry at a time.”

“And the only way to get progress In a democracy is for that politician who seeks to be popular when he's under threat. When there is a threat of disruption or instability is the only time you'll get progress in Western democracy.”

“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, …”

“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.”

“If you just go take the first term sheet, Getting around done will actually take longer because there's no alternatives. You don't have alternatives. And then it gets weird. And then the VC will just keep pushing, pushing, pushing, pushing, getting more, more,…”

“When it's average, it's super important To tell a beautiful story that's woven, like that, that, that's like a story that numbers are woven through. It's a beautiful, entertaining, interesting story with analytical numbers woven through it. And you basically g…”

“The right way to do it is to start with a low price... So a lot of entrepreneurs, they go and they say, they really have a, remember I said, attached to a process, not a price. So a lot of entrepreneurs will get attached to the price and not the process. And y…”

“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.”

“Because we can go to a gold mine right now, go to a gold mine CEO and ask whether he wants 20% more gold per year. Why? Because when you automate it, that's the output.”

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

“Systems of software, sensors, robotics, and AI used to automate operations of entire industrial sectors. Ok, that's what we do. I don't know if anybody else does it. I mean, there are people doing it that they don't call it this. We're one of the main guys doi…”

“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 …”

“Is production of food going to get automated? And is the delivery of food going to get automated? I think we'd all say yes. And if that's the case, then there will be a service that, that prepares and delivers that food at cheaper than going to the grocery sto…”

“Who's the best of the best at industrial AI? Anybody want to guess? It's really obvious. His name rhymes with Shmilon, ok? He's the best of the best. And he'll just keep going and keep doing lots more, even if what you do now is not what he does now. So if you…”

“Elon buying Twitter is like the beginning of us being able to speak our minds and for disagreeing to not be illegal.”

“The pronto technology has got gotten past human productivity, which means you go to a gold mine CEO, you talk about go to market, you go to a gold mine CEO and you say, would you like to have 20% more gold per year?”

“So look, every bad thing that you see in transport, like systemically and any, anything in transport that you view as systemically bad, Was most likely pushed by the trial lawyers and the insurance companies. Every single bad rule that's weird and dumb, the in…”

“When the food is coming out of our facilities, there's probably like a machine that holds food at temperature. That's like a box on wheels. I call them autonomous burritos and It brings it to your home, and it costs 75 cents instead of, like, the 12 dollars pe…”

“The meaningful thing about Adam's food is, can you make the preparation and delivery of a quality meal so efficient that it approaches the cost of going to the grocery store? If it does, You do to the kitchen what Uber did to the car.”

“In this particular case, Yuri was almost coming over the top, so we got to three 75, with a three seven hundred seventy five million pre, with a 16 Z. Yuri almost came in at 400, but he was like, nah, I can't do it.”

“And he said, look, I know we talked about three 75, but went to the partnership. They don't agree, or they just didn't think it was the right number. We're the best we're going to be able to do is two 10.”

“Our timing program was like second to Waymo, but catching up at the time.”

“The way you call projects, it has to be appropriate for, like, a ten-year-old basketball team. So it went from shoplift to the national, sorry, the North American Championship Series. We call it the NACS. And we had a whole very heavy-duty initiative called th…”

“Once we get the couriers, the robotic couriers, you go from 12 dollars a drop for each meal to 50 cents. A dollar of distribution cost per meal.”

“I don't believe it was a physical versus digital thing. I believe it was a moment in time in the COVID, ZERP, massive money going in. We hadn't seen inflation yet. It was all of that happening. And the investor class was basically deciding we're going to look …”

“Guys, like, we should watch for this in the autonomous car space too. Cities may get acute and start doing things like that. And what they did on scooters, they could do on cars.”