Uber

“The conversation started with us talking about Uber and I said, I recommended you to the job.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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, …”