The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 72 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 4 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Calacanis: Driving, delivery, and warehouse jobs will inevitably be automated away
“If you think about the average American citizen, you know, they have somebody in their family who drives for Uber or DoorDash, they have truck drivers, they have Amazon factory workers, and all those jobs are going away. It's just a matter of when.”
Travis Kalanick reveals he rejected Masa Son's money for funding competitors
“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…”
Kalanick: Major Uber Investor Ran 6-Month PR Opposition Campaign Against Him
“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.”
Calacanis: Uber and Waymo stopped recruiting drivers in scaled autonomous markets
“If you talk to Uber and Waymo in the cities where Waymo is present and has gotten past a couple of hundred cars, they've stopped recruiting drivers. Drivers are either static or going down in those markets.”
Kalanick: In capital-intensive markets, fundraising is a core competency
“In the Uber world early days, if you didn't have capital, it didn't matter how good your app was, because Masa is going to put a billion dollars into your competitor, and you're going to lose 20% market share tomorrow. So a critical competency, in fact, your w…”
Uber expects to employ more human drivers in five to seven years
“So I think for the next five to seven years, we're going to have more human drivers and delivery people just because we're going so quickly.”
Financial firms will own large autonomous vehicle fleets within ten years
“10 years down the line, you know, there are these things called REITs, real estate investment trucks. You're going to have fleets. You're going to have financial owners that own big fleets of cars that are on our network, maybe on other networks.”
Austin Uber drivers earn as much or more following Waymo's local launch
“Austin drivers now are making as much or more money than they were before we introduced Waymo.”
Autonomous vehicle job displacement will become a real issue in 10-15 years
“But I think, you know, 10 to 15 years from now, this is going to be a real issue.”
Chamath: Uber would become a trillion-dollar company if Travis Kalanick returned as CEO
“If you came back, it would be a trillion dollar company with you back in that seat.”
Bannister: Tesla should acquire Uber if it enters the robotaxi market
“If they enter the robo taxi market, I actually think they should buy Uber.”
Calacanis predicts massive consolidation between Tesla, Uber, Waymo, and delivery apps
“I think the age of autonomy is here, and I think there is going to be Some partnerships that will happen between Amazon, DoorDash, Uber, Tesla, Waymo, and that cohort, and I would not be surprised to see Tesla could buy Uber right now for but 10% of its market…”
Kalanick: Uber gained market share whenever competitors skipped surge pricing
“Any time we were doing surge pricing and our competitor wasn't, we knew we were gaining market share because somebody could just come to us and get a ride when in the other system they couldn't.”
San Francisco Threatened Kalanick With 90 Days in Jail Per Uber Ride
“I got threatened by the city of San Francisco and the state of California three months after we launched Uber with 90 days in jail for every ride that had occurred.”
Uber Gave Cities 30 Days To Enforce Lyft Regulations Before Launching
“Each and every city we went to, we would send, we would wait for Lyft to launch. And then we would basically say to the city, we'd send them a letter saying, there's this really cool thing called ride sharing. This company called Lyft is doing it. We think it'…”
Calacanis: Athena is growing faster than Uber and Robinhood did
“It's the fastest growing company I've ever seen. And I'm including Uber in that it has been growing at you know, A rate that I'll just say is faster than Uber and Robinhood when we were investing in them tens of millions of dollars.”
Chamath: Tesla would dominate ride-hailing if it cuts prices
“So if Tesla enters in as a third player in that field and just guts pricing, which I think would make sense for them to do, I think this thing is just gangbusters nuclear.”
Kalanick: 13% of San Francisco vehicle miles were Uber when he departed
“When I left Uber, 13% of all San Francisco miles were Uber miles.”
Tesla currently intends to launch its robotaxi network independently without Uber
“At this point they're looking to go it alone”
Robots and drones could eventually cover over 50% of Uber's delivery market
“Those two together we think can cover 50 plus percent of our delivery TAM, so to speak.”
Uber is partnered with Chinese autonomous operators Baidu, WeRide, and Pony
“So there are Baidu WeRide, Pony are all on the road today, no safety driver. We are partners with all of them.”
Uber will temporarily use its balance sheet to finance autonomous vehicle fleets
“Between now and the end state, we will take balance sheet risk, because we can sign up. We know exactly how much revenue a car can produce in said market, because that, because cars are already producing revenue, so we can sign up for the revenue. We will prov…”
Uber requires autonomous vehicle partners to be multiple times safer than humans
“Our different definition of safety is multiple times safer than a human being, which is achievable.”
Kalanick denies Pony AI deal but admits inbound autonomous vehicle interest
“There's no real deal right now, but there is definitely some inbound.”
Friedberg notes Waymo captured 22% of the San Francisco rideshare market
“Waymo launched in SF in August, 20, 23 in kind of an open market way. Uber and Lyft were 66 and 34% market share at the time. And in 15 months in November of 2024, Waymo is now a 22% market share of rides in SF, which is the same as Lyft and Uber is now down t…”
Sacks: Uber users do not want cross-selling travel clutter
“I don't think users of the Uber app want to be cross sold when they book a taxi, okay? They just want to be able to Effect their transaction as efficiently as possible.”
Mawakana: Waymo can't become profitable by building everything in-house
“We have the partnership with Uber because we think it's important for us to create an AV ecosystem around this technology. Like, this isn't going to be, we've created technology and we're going to figure out everything ourselves. Like, that would be foolish an…”
Kalanick: Average Uber driver worked eight hours weekly during his tenure
“And let's be clear, the average Uber driver during my, you know, let's say at the end of my tenure was eight hours a week.”
Kalanick: Uber turned $1.5 billion into an $8–$9 billion Didi stake
“So we turned a bill and a half into eight or nine. I can't remember the exact math, but it's something like that.”
Uber Burned $75 Million Per Week During China Battle Peak
“So I think at the peak right before, right as we were negotiating the term sheet, we pushed, we were burning, I think it was. Seventy five million dollars a week.”
Chamath: Uber and Lyft profitability relies on raising prices
“Uber and Lyft seemingly are profitable because they find pricing power to raise prices.”
Calacanis: Kalanick was banned from stage at Uber IPO bell ringing
“He was disinvited. So he was there on the floor. It was very awkward. And then they didn't have him go up and ring the bell or be even there when Dara rang the bell. It was because it was so controversial. They didn't, they banned him.”
Calacanis: Uber is the most successful startup from the last market cycle
“This is a company that five years ago the press and the fake news were saying could never be profitable and was going to fail, and now it is the most successful new startup in the last cycle. Bigger than everybody.”
Friedberg: Uber went from $9B loss to $5B EBITDA run rate
“When he took over that business, I think it was an eight to nine billion dollar net loss in 2019. Five billion dollar EBITDA run rate right now.”
Chamath: DoorDash has the biggest upside among delivery and platform stocks
“Now, I think of all the three businesses, Dash probably has the biggest upside, quite just like, again, Parm's length. I don't own any of these three stocks. I'm just saying business model quality, Dash seems infinitely scalable.”
Gurley: Super Pumped TV series was inaccurate and fabricated scenes
“Super Pump was not accurate just because they made up a lot of scenes. Like, Drummond wasn't very active at all, but he's in a lot of the scenes, so a lot of them were made up.”
Sacks argues Uber would not have succeeded without Travis Kalanick's aggressiveness
“TK was a super aggressive personality. The company would not have been as successful.”
Calacanis: Uber and Zipline Partnership Will Reach 1 Million Daily Deliveries
“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.”
Calacanis: Autonomous vehicles and robots will deliver packages to doorsteps
“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.”
Friar: Markets reward long-term durability over being first to IPO
“In the end, the market is a weighing machine, not a popularity machine. No one remembers who went first, Google or Yahoo, Lyft or Uber”
Calacanis: Uber bought a data labeling firm for driver transition
“They bought a data labeling company and they're taking the drivers and saying, hey, you want to do some data labeling over here and actually creating AI jobs for them.”
Calacanis: Headcounts at Meta, Uber, and Amazon have dropped from peak levels
“You know, Meta peaked at 86,000 employees now at 75. Uber at 33, now at 31. And Amazon, where you would think you'd have a lot of growth here they're at, they peaked at 1.6 and now they're down at 1.55.”
Sam Altman and Jason Calacanis sourced Stripe and Uber for Sequoia
“You helped us with the investment in Uber. Sam Altman was in that group as well. He helped with an investment in a little company called Stripe.”
Uber has no plans to enter the food roboticization business
“And I think as the cost of labor is going up all of these businesses are building, are investing increasingly in robotic station. It's not something that we are getting into.”
Uber generated over $8.5 billion in cash flow over the last year
“The past 12 months we've had over eight and a half billion of cash flow.”
Uber collaborates with ousted founder Travis Kalanick's CloudKitchens business
“So we're, we actually work with Travis and his cloud kitchens business.”
Sacks: Uber beats Lyft primarily because passenger wait times are lower
“This is why Uber is beating Lyft is, oh, and the wait time is lower.”
Calacanis: Google, Uber, Airbnb, Meta doubled revenue per employee in 2-3 years
“If you look at Google, Uber, Airbnb, and Facebook Meta, They have the same number or less employees than they did three years ago, but they're all growing in that 20 to 30% a year, which means in but two to three years, each of those companies has doubled reve…”