Kalanick: Founders should start fundraising auctions with intentionally low prices
Travis Kalanick · Excellence Is the Capacity To Take Pain | Travis Kalanick, Founder of Uber · Aug 16, 2026 · at 1:14:29
Travis Kalanick, co-founder of Uber, explains his fundraising auction mechanics and why anchoring to a high asking price harms founder leverage.
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“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 you have to be careful. It's very easy to get sucked into that where you're like, you get some signal that it should be a price and you get attached to it. And then that becomes your price, but you haven't cleared the market. So you have to be very careful about that. So you get attached to the price. And so then when I throw a price out, you're on the other side of the table and you like, you come in under it and now we negotiate, right? It's a very bad place to be from my perspective where you really want to be is you want to start at a low price.”
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