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 17 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 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
Seibel: Startups copied extreme strategies that Uber never actually practiced
“What's funny about maybe these Uber ones that are slightly different from the Facebook and Google ones is like, I don't think Uber even did these things.”
Seibel: Uber would have failed if it initially launched in NYC
“If Uber had launched in New York City, it wouldn't have worked. Because, like, the pain did not, yeah, did not exist in New York City. The pain was so great, great in San Francisco that everyone was willing to use Uber Black.”
Building dog-walking or weed delivery apps is not saving the world
“Why am I going to go work on Uber for dog walkers? Or how to deliver weed to people better? Which is a, it's a fine problem to work on, but you're not saving the world if you're doing that.”
Reno: Most users choose subscription services to avoid being tied down by ownership
“The reality is most people are using Feather and companies like us whether it's, you know, Rent the Runway or Uber or Lyft or Spotify, et cetera, because they don't necessarily want to own things and have things tying them to a physical space.”
Baker: Uber used a WeChat bot to onboard Chinese drivers until blocked
“One of the engineers on our China growth team built a WeChat bot. WeChat's, you know, like a mess, the messaging app, or the Facebook of, sorry, the Facebook, and also the Internet of China, really. And so we built this WeChat bot, Where, as a driver, you coul…”
Seibel: Investors funded Uber's expansion because of strong local unit economics
“People who were investing in Uber were looking at markets where Uber was doing very well in unit economics and purposely funding them to expand quickly. It wasn't people looking at Uber serving no markets well, burning money left and right, and saying, oh, let…”
Caldwell: YC Repeatedly Funded Failed Ride-Sharing Startups Before Uber
“How many times has YC funded that idea before Uber and it didn't work? This was actually a really common bad startup idea was ride sharing.”
Seibel: Early Uber avoided rider subsidies due to immense natural demand
“So in the extreme beginning of Uber, what was so interesting was that it launched in San Francisco, and it launched as Uber Black, which is a really expensive product, actually. It wasn't well subsidized. And the real value is that it was impossible to get a t…”
Seibel: On-demand marketplace models require easily replaceable labor with common skills
“The Uber model only works because there's a whole bunch of basically replaceable people with a common skill. Well, it turns out the people who've got the skills to watch infants and make parents comfortable with that tend to have nanny jobs where they work lot…”
Gil: Didi will become a company worth over $100 billion
“I think they own 15 to 20% of Didi, which in and of itself is gonna be a hundred billion dollar plus company, so I actually think that worked out really well for them.”
Benet: Storage miners will multi-home across networks like Uber and Lyft drivers
“I actually bet a lot of people will be mining on both networks, or like all, all, all of the networks, and we'll see how that actually plays out and then we'll see, kind of like right now, there's a lot of drivers driving for either Uber or Lyft”
Baker: Uber would have kept growing without any paid acquisition
“Uber would have kept growing even if we had never done any paid acquisition, but especially in a competitive market it kind of makes sense to pay up to what the, that rider or that driver is ultimately going to be worth”
Baker: Uber Merged Core Product and Growth Teams in 2016
“We actually merged the product team and the growth team about a year ago at Uber for largely for those reasons. Especially as we started focusing more on engagement and retention within the growth team. And that's kind of what the core product team was working…”
Baker: Facebook Relied on Organic Growth While Uber Scaled Paid Acquisition
“So, Facebook, we didn't really do very much paid acquisition, but at Uber, we had an entire performance marketing team. Well, initially it was a one-person team, but ultimately became a team where we would actually spend money to acquire both riders and driver…”
Baker: Uber tested phone mentoring by existing drivers for first-time trips
“We also experimented with are there ways we can get potentially existing drivers or other people to, like, get on the phone with a driver and talk them through that, that first that first trip.”
Baker: Uber chose weekly trips as North Star to balance supply and demand
“Ultimately we decided on trips, weekly trips as the North Star metric, because for every trip to take place, you need, ah, riders and you need drivers. And so by having trips as that North Star metric, you could then break that down into the supply side and th…”
Elman: Airbnb's growth team expanded from 3 to over 100 people
“Ed joined Uber to start the growth team when it was five people, and then over the three and a half years became kind of VP of both product and growth for kind of all of Uber, and Gustav joined, and the Airbnb growth team was him and two other people when he g…”