The Uber IPO

[0] Oh my God, this is insane.

[1] I have literally 21 pages of notes in the Google Dax.

[2] Welcome to Season 4, Episode 6 of Acquired, the podcast about technology acquisitions and IPOs.

[3] I'm Ben Gilbert.

[4] I'm David Rosenthal.

[5] And we are your hosts.

[6] We sit here today on the day of Uber's long -awaited IPO, and David, let me tell you I am super pumped to be here today.

[7] Me as well, Ben.

[8] Me as well.

[9] Well, here was my alternate intro, and frankly, I have a few here.

[10] We covered Pinterest and Lyft recently, both valued at about $15 billion.

[11] Today, we are covering a company who has raised over $20 billion in Uber.

[12] Or perhaps this third, Uber just raised $8 billion, or approximately one half of Lyft's entire market cap in its IPO.

[13] Or maybe this fourth one.

[14] Today, we are diving into a company whose epic history is matched only by its epic operating losses with over three billion last year, the largest of any company to ever go public.

[15] But what you really need to know about Uber, they are a broad multi -mobility transportation platform, a hyper -growth food delivery service that leverages Uber's existing customers and driver assets and an international ride -sharing holding company with enormous chunks of DD Yandex taxi and grab and a trucking shipping marketplace called Uber Freight to top it all off.

[16] So holy God, David, there is a lot to cover.

[17] here.

[18] I thought we were doing an Uber episode, not a soft bank episode.

[19] At this point, what's the difference?

[20] What is the difference?

[21] Yep.

[22] All right, well, listeners, before we dive in, I want to say this past week's limited partner bonus show, we had an incredibly appropriate guest joined us for a deep dive on Uber's history, Brian Tolkien.

[23] And Brian was one of Uber's first 100 employees, helped start the product operations group and eventually ran Uber pool when it was first getting off the ground.

[24] And Brian had some really practical insights on how Uber developed their infamous playbooks and launched cities in the early years.

[25] So if you like Acquired and you want to go deeper on company building topics, you should totally consider becoming an LP yourself.

[26] It's brain dead easy.

[27] It takes two taps in 10 seconds and you can listen right here in your favorite podcast player.

[28] And aside from great interviews like Brian, you can also get David and my walkthrough of a term sheet, how VC firms really work, and some of our personal investment theses.

[29] You can click the link in the show notes, join, or go to glow .fm slash acquired.

[30] That's right.

[31] dot fm slash acquired or click the link right in the show notes from this episode and everyone gets a one week trial so feel free to check it out man so professional we've come so far it's great it's funny we're finding fit and how to actually describe that thing i think when we first uh first got started we we were a little all over the place in describing the uh the lp show it's all about the ride it is oh david there we go all right okay listeners now is a great time to thank one of our big partners it acquired, Service Now.

[32] Yes, Service Now is the AI platform for business transformation, helping automate processes, improve service delivery, and increase efficiency.

[33] 85 % of the Fortune 500 runs on them, and they have quickly joined the Microsoft's at the NVIDias as one of the most important enterprise technology vendors in the world.

[34] And, just like them, Service Now has AI baked in everywhere in their platform.

[35] They're also a major partner of both Microsoft and NVIDIA.

[36] I was at NVIDIA's GTC, earlier this year and Jensen brought up ServiceNow and their partnership many times throughout the keynote.

[37] So why is ServiceNow so important to both Nvidia and Microsoft companies we've explored deeply in the last year on the show?

[38] Well, AI in the real world is only as good as the bedrock platform it's built into.

[39] So whether you're looking for AI to supercharge developers and IT, empower and streamline customer service, or enable HR to deliver better employee experiences, service now is the platform that can make it possible.

[40] Interestingly, employees can not only get answers to their questions, but they're offered actions that they can take immediately.

[41] For example, smarter self -service for changing 401K contributions directly through AI -powered chat, or developers building apps faster with AI -powered code generation, or service agents that can use AI to notify you of a product that needs replacement before people even chat with you.

[42] With ServiceNow's platform, your business can put AI to work today.

[43] It's pretty incredible that ServiceNow built AI directly into their platform.

[44] So all the integration work to prepare for it that otherwise would have taken you years is already done.

[45] So if you want to learn more about the ServiceNow platform and how it can turbocharge the time to deploy AI for your business, go over to ServiceNow .com slash acquired.

[46] And when you get in touch, just tell them Ben and David sent you.

[47] Thanks, ServiceNow.

[48] Oof.

[49] Okay, David, that is all that I have, I promise, before you take us back to like sometime in the 1400s when we were like just discovering transportation or something.

[50] Oh, man. I wish I were.

[51] Have I overshot?

[52] You've overshot, but I'm trying to, I don't remember, I'm trying to think if this is the farthest back we've ever gone.

[53] I don't know.

[54] Listen to say, if you remember going back further, let us know.

[55] Hit us up on the slide.

[56] As if there's not enough to talk about an Uber.

[57] Let's let's extend the history even further in the past.

[58] All right.

[59] Here we go.

[60] We're starting appropriately enough in San Francisco, downtown San Francisco, in the year 1889.

[61] Ben's reaction on video was great there.

[62] Okay, so a businessman named F .S. Chadbourne gets off of a ferry at the newly constructed ferry building terminal at the end of Market Street in downtown San Francisco.

[63] An amazing place I love going to the ferry building.

[64] It is a beautiful treasure of downtown San Francisco.

[65] It was built the year prior in 1888.

[66] And Chadbourne gets off of his ferry and he hails what is very common back in the day, a horse -drawn carriage that is driven by what is known as a hack to take him where he is going on his business.

[67] And this horse -drawn carriage is driven by a man named James Nosey Brown.

[68] Why is he called Nosey?

[69] We're about to find out.

[70] Noisy drives Chadbourne not to where he is supposed to be going.

[71] It takes him to an out -of -the -way location, probably in what was then very sketchy Soma, unconfirmed, now also sketchy, home to startups.

[72] And he holds him up.

[73] He says, hey, for me to take you where you're going, I'm going to unclear if he actually threatened his physical safety, but you're going to have to give me more money to take you where you want to go.

[74] Chad Morn, he jumps out of the cab, he runs away.

[75] But he's really pissed.

[76] And he's not just anybody.

[77] He is a wealthy muckety -muck.

[78] and he has contacts in the city government.

[79] He lobbies them to enact.

[80] This has been a totally unregulated industry.

[81] It was just happening people who had these hacks.

[82] I now know where this is going.

[83] Yeah.

[84] Horse -drawn carriages.

[85] They would just line up, do whatever they pleased.

[86] And he lobbies his friends in the government to enact very strict regulations.

[87] And henceforth, in what would come to be known as the Chad -Born, I don't know if his act or whatever, regulations.

[88] All drivers in San Francisco had to be.

[89] be licensed with a badge and that badge number had to match the vehicles number.

[90] And I think it was in a city ordinance.

[91] It gets named after himself.

[92] We jump a couple short years later to New York City, what most people in America think of the center of the cab industry and indeed would become fully 50 % of the entire taxi industry in the U .S. in 1907 where the first cars, the first motorized cabs arrive in New York City.

[93] And a businessman named Henry Allen imports them from France.

[94] And he starts the first gab company, the first network of drivers, a transportation network company, if you will.

[95] And he, he, um, he hires a bunch of drivers.

[96] He has huge success.

[97] There's tons of demand.

[98] This is so much better, so much faster than horse -drawn carriages.

[99] It's cheaper.

[100] Everybody loves it.

[101] This might sound familiar of something that would happen a little over a century later.

[102] Um, but one year in, uh, it becomes clear that not all is utopian in this, this new transportation model in cities the drivers are unhappy and they go on strike and they argue in their strike that Alan had kind of promised them that they were going to be employees they were going to get a pension plan these were going to be great jobs he was going to give like all sorts of benefits it is crazy how what a mirror this is history repeats itself over it over again yeah but the reality is they were not employees they were essentially independent contractors and they got charged by the day they got charged 25 cents a day for a uniform rental fee.

[103] They got charged 10 cents a day for a quote unquote brass polishing fee.

[104] And then they also had to buy their own gasoline.

[105] I think I've seen that brass polishing fee on my Uber receipts from time to time.

[106] Totally.

[107] It's amazing.

[108] This is 1907.

[109] And so they strike.

[110] And this is the beginning of the illustrious history of labor issues in the taxi industry.

[111] We fast forward a couple decades moving quickly here.

[112] It's something else that is going to get mirrored again later on in the episode, 1929, the stock market crash happens and the Great Depression begins.

[113] Now, what happens when this happened?

[114] In the Great Depression, people all over the country lose their jobs.

[115] They're looking for work, part -time work, anything to make some money to get by.

[116] And what is a relatively flexible, easy to start, low amount of training job that you can do, especially in New York City, you can become a cab driver.

[117] So this becomes the backup job for a lot of these people who lost their jobs, on Wall Street or in other industries in the stock market crash in the Depression so much so that car dealers, you know, they can't sell cars to people who are buying them for their personal luxury transportation vehicles.

[118] They start marketing cars to these newly unemployed as job creators.

[119] Buy a car.

[120] Get a job.

[121] You can start driving your own taxi cab.

[122] Wow.

[123] There's like a reminiscent thing of Airbnb here too where it's totally.

[124] Yeah, the very same issue that cities are having with people taking houses out of the supply market to be rented, is happening with cars at this point in.

[125] It's happening with cars.

[126] And so what is this result in?

[127] This results in a huge oversupply of taxi cabs on the streets in New York because a demand for taxi rides is down because everybody's losing their jobs.

[128] Supply is through the roof because everybody who just lost their jobs is now trying to become a taxi cab driver.

[129] And it becomes a total race to the bottom.

[130] Fairs plummet through the floor.

[131] Nobody can make any money.

[132] And it comes a huge problem.

[133] The streets are congested with cabs.

[134] What does New York City respond with and other cities around the country?

[135] They respond with basically creating the medallion system and a bunch of other regulations around it, which limits the number of licensed taxis that can operate in cities, especially New York City, but also San Francisco and other big cities at any given point in time.

[136] And that continues to this day.

[137] That is the taxi industry.

[138] But what happened to all of these other people who had gone out and bought cars and now they were no longer able to operate.

[139] They don't just go away.

[140] This weird, interesting sort of shadow market develops in cities where these people are no longer regulated taxi cab drivers approved by the city and but the regulations for for taxis centered around meters.

[141] So you would hail the taxi and then you would pay a time and mileage fare that was measured and regulated by the city as you we go.

[142] But there was nothing that stopped people on their own from offering flat rate services.

[143] So if you pre -negotiate a rate of where the ride is going and paid up front, then you can do that outside of the existing system.

[144] And this is the beginning of what was first called sedan service, then becomes the limo industry.

[145] This is the for hire industry as, you know, sedan, limo, black car is eventually what it mostly becomes known as.

[146] And then as we'll see, there's kind of some sketchiness that develops in this industry and it becomes a derogatory term sort of known as the gypsy cab industry.

[147] And so this becomes like these two markets, the official regulated taxi market in cities in the U .S. and then the black car market, the for hire market, kind of develop in tandem over the next 100 years.

[148] And the taxi cab industry is highly regulated and the for hire market is relatively less regulated.

[149] There are some kind of sustaining innovations in Clay Christian terms, but nothing disruptive.

[150] The sustaining innovations in the 40s, 1940s, radio dispatch is introduced.

[151] So there's no coordination system.

[152] In the early days, you just hail a cab on the street.

[153] Finally, radio dispatch is invented in the 40s.

[154] Which for anybody who's ever tried to hail a cab through the radio dispatch system, you know exactly how well that works.

[155] Exactly.

[156] And then computerized dispatch in the 80s, but the problem is the taxi drivers are still independent contractors.

[157] So it's kind of like a suggestion.

[158] You know, if a dispatch goes out on the radio or on the computer system to somebody who needs a ride from a given location to a given destination, it's optional whether you go get at them.

[159] If you see a fair on the street along the way, you can just pull over and pick them up instead.

[160] So this kind of a San Francisco taxi driver named John Han wrote a blog post in 2011 right after Uber and Taxi Magic and Cabulus and all the other companies will get into his launch.

[161] And he kind of describes the current situation, he says, you don't have to respond to a radio call if you don't want to.

[162] Remember, dispatch service, we are told, is just a quote unquote information referral service.

[163] This is due to complications that have arisen from independent contractor status.

[164] I guess what that means is that dispatch service doesn't legally entitle any public passenger in any way to a taxi cab that they've just ordered by phone.

[165] They can call, but they're not guaranteed to get one.

[166] It only guarantees that their information will be dispatched to us drivers so that their request will be made known to us.

[167] All right.

[168] This explains a lot.

[169] You can service radio orders if you'd like.

[170] I do.

[171] I like them.

[172] But I guess you could just as well take one and leave the passenger hanging on the phone for fun as a prank so long as you see another fair on the street that could be better anyway.

[173] And then he's like, I don't actually do this, but in theory, I could.

[174] I'm just making a point.

[175] And anybody who is old enough to remember the world before Uber and Lyft and Sidecar and Dede and everybody else, that really was how it worked.

[176] and it was awful.

[177] New York was probably the best American city, the most efficient cab market, but any other city in particularly San Francisco, it was impossible to get a ride as a passenger.

[178] And drivers, they kind of do okay here.

[179] I mean, they're the ones, the cab companies and the drivers are the ones who are always lobbying to sustain the regulation that keeps the industry dynamics like this, but it's not like the drivers are doing great either.

[180] There strikes all the time.

[181] There's tons of labor and rest.

[182] And the industry kind of tick -tocks between drivers doing sort of okay to drivers doing really poorly.

[183] The industry is completely broken.

[184] That goes on for a century.

[185] And then we fast forward to 2008.

[186] And two super critical things happen in 2008 that completely change the course of this market.

[187] One, as we have talked about many times in the last couple months here on the show, Lehman Brothers goes bankrupt and the Great Recession begins.

[188] We're going to come back to that, but the dynamics of what happened here totally mirror what happened 70 years prior in the stock market crash and the Great Recession.

[189] But unlike then, there is another thing that happens, and that is in that in 2008, Apple introduces third -party apps for the iPhone with iPhone OS 2 .0.

[190] That definitely did not exist in 1929.

[191] iPhone 3G and iPhone OS.

[192] It was not iOS yet.

[193] That's right.

[194] It was no iPad.

[195] iPhone OS 2 .0.

[196] So right around this time, a Virginia -based entrepreneur named Tom DiPascale decides that these, I don't think he was necessarily thinking about the effects of the Great Recession and the Lehman Brothers collapse, but he definitely was thinking about iPhone OS 2 .0 and says, this is the wedge to finally bring some modern customer -centric innovation to the city transportation and taxi industry.

[197] And Tom had previously started a software company that was a travel booking tool, and it was acquired by Concur, Seattle Company, and a great technology company.

[198] So he had left Concur, and he starts this new company.

[199] He calls it Taxi Magic.

[200] And his co -founder, interestingly up, is a guy named George Arison.

[201] I know George.

[202] George is, many years later, has become the CEO of Shift, the Use Card Marketplace here in San Francisco.

[203] It's amazing.

[204] Yeah, it can't shake.

[205] It's amazing how much we talk about so much on this show, how small all of these little subworlds and technology are.

[206] And in taxi magic, they're doing a logical thing of saying, gosh, there's all these taxis.

[207] Like, there should be a better interface to hail them.

[208] There should be a better interface to hail them.

[209] Yep.

[210] And the other thing that consumers hated, and I remember this, you could do it in New York, but, not anywhere else, is pay for the rides with credit cards.

[211] You needed to have cash to pay for your taxi rides in every city and in plenty of cabs in New York, too.

[212] So Tom and Taxi Magic, they're like, okay, with this computer in your pocket, you can have a better interface for ordering and dispatching the cabs.

[213] And you can also take payment via credit cards that are built in to this computer in your pocket and pay for them.

[214] And it worked great.

[215] people loved it.

[216] I mean, I remember using taxi magic around this time.

[217] It was fantastic.

[218] In every city except New York in America, it was a like huge revolution, especially in L .A. Um, where Jenny was doing her PhD at UCLA in the time.

[219] We used it all the time there.

[220] But there was just like so many companies that started the very beginning of a wave, they got one big thing wrong.

[221] And that was that they worked within the existing system.

[222] So taxi magic, of course, worked with taxis worked with the cab companies.

[223] And so that meant a couple things that were just sort of big problems.

[224] So one, what the blog post described about how dispatching worked still applied to taxi magic, even though it was now done in a more friendly consumer -facing way.

[225] When a consumer would make a request, it was just a suggestion that went out to all of the drivers in that taxi companies network and the ride wouldn't get assigned to whoever had first dibs on it was not who was closest to the customer it was the driver that had been waiting the longest in the queue so if you think about like any city but even los angeles where taxi magic was most popular la is a huge city it can take two hours to get across the city with traffic and you're getting rides assigned based on where you are in the queue this is how bad the world was before all of these transportation network companies that like that was progress you know and of course the problem still existed that if a taxi magic cab was on the way to pick up a customer and they saw somebody else on the street they could still just pick up the person on the street and cancel the ride boy it really shows how much power is on the supply side and how little power is on the demand side where even with a user interface innovation like that they're still meeting the needs of the supply side which is you've been waiting a long time, you deserve a fair.

[226] You deserve fair.

[227] Yep.

[228] Absolutely.

[229] So, nonetheless, like I said, though, this was like a drop of water in the desert.

[230] Consumers loved it.

[231] Concurr ended up investing in the company.

[232] It's still based in Virginia.

[233] It quickly expands to 25 cities around the country.

[234] And the next year in 2009, a certain venture capitalist who is going to come to play a very large role in this story had been thinking for quite a while about the taxi and the transportation space, and he had invested in some other companies that had taken a marketplace approach to disrupting things like restaurant reservations and reviews online.

[235] And he'd been thinking about there's time might be right for an online marketplace for taxis.

[236] It was, of course, Bill Gurley at Benchmark.

[237] And Bill heard about taxi magic and Tom.

[238] And Tom, of course, was a known entrepreneur.

[239] Bill flies out to Virginia from Silicon Valley.

[240] And he says, this is what I'm looking for, I want to invest in your company.

[241] I want benchmark to lead your series A, concur, had invested a little bit of money before.

[242] I'm offering, I'm going to invest $8 million at a $32 million valuation for the company.

[243] He says, but I think we need to think about expanding out of the taxi market and into the black car market, bring them on as well because all of the things I was describing about the taxi market are kind of limiting and you might be able to solve that in the black car market.

[244] And we could just have a new version of the product.

[245] We can keep taxi magic.

[246] Let's create a new version of the product also called limo magic.

[247] You could see how if you're, if you're the founder of a company and you have a pretty dead set vision of exactly how you think you're going to run your playbook, how this could be a little jarring.

[248] A little jarring.

[249] And we have to say huge thank you to friend of the show, Brad Stone and his book, The Upstarts, where he chronicles all of this.

[250] We're going to refer to Brad many times on this episode.

[251] Tom, exactly Ben, as you say, he says, okay, you know, I appreciate the offer.

[252] But like, this is my company.

[253] I'm a second time entrepreneur.

[254] I know what I'm doing here.

[255] Thank you, Bill.

[256] You're great.

[257] Benchmark is great.

[258] I'm not going to take your money.

[259] He declines the investment.

[260] And that obviously turns out to be the wrong decision on both declining the investment and not doing limo magic.

[261] Taxi magic ultimately would go on to change its name to Curb.

[262] If you came across Curb in the last few years, and it was would get sold to Verifone, which is the company that provides the credit card payment terminals to the back of cabs in a fire sale.

[263] So not the trajectory of what would become Uber.

[264] There's another company, though, that gets started right around this time, sees the same vision.

[265] This one is an even better story.

[266] So back in 2008, I'm guessing this is not Uber.

[267] Well, I'll start telling this story and I'll let you and listeners judge whether it is or isn't.

[268] Back in 2008 in Los Angeles, if you know the history of Weber, you might know a little bit about Los Angeles.

[269] One of the great American corporations, the Best Buy company, Best Buy corporation, had set up an in -house incubator in L .A. I think Best Buy is based in Utah, right?

[270] I don't know.

[271] I believe that's where they're headquarters is.

[272] But they'd set up an innovation incubator in Los Angeles.

[273] And the idea was that retail employees, this was like, this was pre -recession when they set it up.

[274] This was a marketing thing.

[275] Retail employees at Best Buy stores could apply to the incubator with their startup ideas.

[276] And if they got selected to join the incubator, Best Buy would pay for them to move to L .A. for two months and work on it, work on their idea in L .A. for two months.

[277] And then they'd go back to working on the retail floor.

[278] Two months.

[279] I know.

[280] It's completely nutty.

[281] This is completely nutty.

[282] So a geek squad technician named Daniel Garcia had the idea that consumers should be able to see their geek squad cars on a map as it was coming to their house and that this new ability to build applications for iPhone, third -party applications for iPhone, they could build a Geek Squad app that would allow consumers to know, you know, see and track when their Geek Squad service was arriving.

[283] So he goes, he applies the incubator, he gets in.

[284] And the head of the incubator was a guy named John Wolpert.

[285] And John and Daniel kind of realize part way through that this, like, this is okay, like doesn't move the needle on Geek Squad or for Best Buy, but if they applied this to the taxi industry, more broadly, there might be something interesting here.

[286] And so they're riffing on what they could call it.

[287] And it's super fabulous this idea.

[288] They decided, great, we're going to call it cabulous.

[289] Fabulous, fabulous.

[290] And Wolpert, the head of the incubator, he was a former IBM guy.

[291] And he starts to realize as they're digging into this, like, oh, wow, this is big.

[292] And the time is now.

[293] Of course, it's 2008.

[294] Things are starting to go south in the economy, and Best Buy is hurt more than anybody.

[295] Well, not more than any, not more than the banks.

[296] But second to the banks are like the car companies and the, you know, retailers.

[297] And so they say - Large consumer electronics retailers.

[298] Particularly large consumer electronics retailers, exactly.

[299] And so Best Buy, Wolpert goes to the corporate execs at Best Buy and he says, hey, you don't want to be supporting this incubator anymore.

[300] You need to cut costs.

[301] I want to work on this.

[302] Can I just take this idea, Cabulus out of the incubator, move to San Francisco and start building it and working on it.

[303] And they're like, yeah, sure.

[304] Take it, spin it out.

[305] They don't even take any equity.

[306] They don't even have time for this meeting right now.

[307] Yeah, exactly.

[308] Like, my hair is on fire.

[309] So they let it go.

[310] And Wolper, and I believe Daniel 2, Garcia, moved to San Francisco and they build the company.

[311] They start working on Cabulus.

[312] They raise a small angel round and they get a call.

[313] Wilbert gets a call one day.

[314] Knowing Bill, I know this is a exactly how he operates.

[315] He just gets a call.

[316] Wolpert's never talked to Bill Gurley before.

[317] He picks up the phone and it's Bill Gurley.

[318] And Wilfurt's and Gurley says, hey, I hear you're, I heard about what you're doing.

[319] I'm very interested.

[320] I hear you are fundraising right now.

[321] I would like to talk to you about it.

[322] And Wolpert says, you know, we're only raising a very small angel amount.

[323] I know, you know, I don't know if Gurley or Wilpert says this, you know, benchmark doesn't do seed.

[324] They, like, Series A firm.

[325] They invests larger checks.

[326] And unlike most other Series A firms, they basically really mean it when they don't do seed investing.

[327] And so Wilbert says, yeah, we'll talk later.

[328] I really think I just want to raise a small amount right now.

[329] And Gurley says, okay, I'll talk to you later.

[330] What is with these people turning down Bill Gurley?

[331] Like, what are you doing?

[332] Well, it was debatable as we go on through the story.

[333] But for several years, it was probably the best thing.

[334] And still to this day, the best thing for Bill and Benchmark that all these people did turn them down.

[335] So they raise a small angel round.

[336] We'll come back to all the history behind this meeting.

[337] But eventually, while they're up in San Francisco, they get a call, another call from two guys that want to meet that are also working in the transportation industry, two guys named Ryan Graves and Travis Kalanick that want to go take them out to lunch and meet with them and understand what their roadmap is and where they're planning to go with this cabulous thing.

[338] And so the three of those guys, three, those three men sit down to lunch.

[339] And Ryan kind of says, hey, so are you going to stay in the taxi industry or are you thinking about the black car industry?

[340] And Wolpert says, oh, no, no, no, no. We're going to stay in the taxi industry.

[341] We're going to do this with the existing system.

[342] We're going to work with the taxi companies.

[343] This is a highly regulated industry.

[344] This is the only way to go.

[345] And Ryan and Travis say, thank you very much.

[346] They pay for lunch and they walk out.

[347] We'll put a pin in that and come back to it later, but that is, the cabulist would eventually be rebrand as flywheel.

[348] So if you see many of the taxis in San Francisco owned by the DeSoto Cab Company, they did a partnership with Flywheel and they still exist.

[349] And it is a ordering and dispatch system for taxis.

[350] One of the best ways to order an actual taxi.

[351] It is.

[352] It is.

[353] Unfortunately for them, that is not the big market anymore.

[354] Okay.

[355] So who are Ryan and Travis?

[356] People probably know who Travis is, but what is going on here?

[357] Let's come back to the black car industry.

[358] Okay, so it seems obvious.

[359] We've just told you this whole history.

[360] And so many people, so many entrepreneurs, so many venture capitalists had been wanting to disrupt and innovate in transportation.

[361] Everybody knew this was broken.

[362] This was obvious.

[363] Why hadn't people looked at the black car industry before?

[364] Way less regulation in in many states, including California.

[365] It was regulated at the state level, not at the city level.

[366] So if you, to the extent you did have to deal with regulation it was a far easier path what were the barriers seems like way lower barriers to entry well here's why because every time somebody did try to go innovate in the black car industry this is what would happen so people might know about a company named seamless web uh so there was a young corporate lawyer in new york in the late 90s named jason finger and he was eating.

[367] This will also come back.

[368] He was a, like many people in banks and law firms in New York in those days, would eat dinner every night in the office while he was working.

[369] And the ordering system for ordering food and having food delivery delivered was nuts.

[370] And so he came up with this idea of how to organize and deliver food in cities, started Seamless Web.

[371] It became huge.

[372] I used it every night when I was in banking in New York.

[373] It eventually merged with Grubhub.

[374] It's now part Grubhubh, one of the largest food delivery services in the U .S., but Jason thought, like, while he was a couple years into working on seamless, he thought, well, the other thing that lawyers and bankers do in New York is they order black cars.

[375] And there was this opportunity to use the internet to make meal delivery much better.

[376] I could do the same thing with all the black cars that people use.

[377] And so he actually started working on it.

[378] And his idea was that there was going to be seamless, the core product, the meal delivery product was going to become seamless meals and then he was also going to build seamless wheels.

[379] And so he talked to a couple black car companies, he got some supply on board, he was talking to banks and law firms about using him.

[380] And then one day he comes into work and there's a voicemail on his phone in the morning.

[381] And he, and David, I'll stop you here for a moment and say, gosh, you know, food delivery and ride coordinating on a platform, that sounds like a really good idea to combine those two.

[382] Yeah, man, I mean, why wouldn't you do both of those on the same platform?

[383] So he gets into the office and he's got the flashing light on his phone.

[384] This is like the early 2000s.

[385] And he plays the voicemail.

[386] And it's from a blocked number.

[387] So we can't tell what the number's from.

[388] And the voicemail says, he tells us to Bradstone in the upstarts.

[389] Jason, we understand you've been pitching a car service to large enterprises in the New York City area.

[390] We don't think that would be a good idea.

[391] You've got such a beautiful family.

[392] why don't you spend more time with your beautiful baby daughter you've got such a good thing going with your food business why would you want to broaden into other areas click and um wow as you can imagine and if you hadn't put two and two together uh lightly regulated industry growing up in new york city over the past century companies a fragmented and uh not super visible array of companies that operate in them it's run by the mafia so every time time somebody would try and encroach on their turf.

[393] And I think this was probably mostly in New York City, but I bet in lots of other cities around the country, some version of this would play out.

[394] Did Seameless bail on the idea after that?

[395] They bailed, yeah, immediately bailed on the idea.

[396] The meal delivery was working great.

[397] And as the voicemail said, you know, Jason had a young family.

[398] Like, I would do the exact same thing if I were in his position.

[399] And so that was the end of seamless wheels.

[400] And of course, everything ended up great, seamless meals.

[401] You know, like we said, ended up merging with Grubhub, is doing great today.

[402] But so sometimes when you have a situation like that, the only way to break the logjam is just kind of with somebody who doesn't know any better.

[403] So we come back.

[404] We come, it doesn't know or doesn't care.

[405] And we've got two people, one who doesn't know and one who doesn't care.

[406] So in the middle of 2008, a Canadian entrepreneur who is in Silicon Valley, by this point that started a company back in Canada called Stumble Upon.

[407] And this is, of course, Garrett Camp.

[408] And of course, Mark Time, we are, what, like 22 minutes into this episode and now discussing somebody involved in the founding.

[409] Oh, man. This is, uh, uh, apologies for all this backstory.

[410] But I think it's super important.

[411] And like, as we've seen, this, this, all of this history that just played out over 100 years and then over 10 years is going to play out again.

[412] So Garrett had sold stumble upon he had started some stumble upon back in kennedy it sold it to ebay and stubble upon was um stumble upon was content discovery on the internet and he had sold it to ebay the past summer in 2007 for 75 million dollars by the way we covered this in our Skype episode but like eBay went through like this yeah drunken binge of buying all of these companies that did not make sense And, of course, who was the largest venture capital backer of eBay?

[413] It was benchmark.

[414] And as chronicled in the great book, EBOIS, which I think we've recommended many times on this show.

[415] So eBay drunk on their market cap, acquired Skype.

[416] And their insane business model of never holding any inventory on anything.

[417] And you can buy, you know, it's still still to this day.

[418] Are you saying marketplace business models are a good idea, Ben?

[419] kind of mind -blowing that Amazon beat him.

[420] Well, I would, I mean, eBay still doing it.

[421] But yes, yes, different.

[422] The power of marketplace business models.

[423] eBay acquires stumble upon for $75 million.

[424] Garrett is like nominally working at eBay sort of.

[425] He ends up just leaving eBay.

[426] He's moved to San Francisco.

[427] He's still, he's young, he's single.

[428] He's doing what any, maybe not any, but you could imagine somebody, a young single man who's just come to a big city like San Francisco and has millions and millions of dollars would do.

[429] he hangs out all day watching James Bond movies during the day and going out in to nightclubs and partying at night.

[430] Why not?

[431] Why not?

[432] Why not?

[433] He's like 26, 27 and something like that.

[434] Yeah, mid -20s.

[435] And he'd, you know, he'd been working really hard and stumble upon for a little while and coming to this money.

[436] And he wanted to, you know, enjoy the fruits of his labor as as wouldn't blame.

[437] I probably wouldn't make the same decision myself, but that's what he did.

[438] I don't know.

[439] Maybe when I was that age, well, no, Jenny and I've been together since I was like 20.

[440] so no, definitely would not have happened.

[441] Anyway, I don't blame him for doing it.

[442] But both of those things were really important.

[443] He was going out at night, going to nightclubs in San Francisco, having a terrible time getting there and coming back because there were 1 ,500 taxi medallions for all of San Francisco, which is, you know, a major city.

[444] And so he couldn't get around.

[445] And during the day, he talks about this, he was watching James Bond movies and he was watching Casino Royale.

[446] And there's this scene in Casino Royale where Bond summons his car with his phone.

[447] And this is happened in a bunch of Bond movies, but in the Casino Royale version of this, on his phone, he's watching on the screen on a map as the car is coming to him.

[448] Yeah, and Garrett's like, whoa, that's super cool.

[449] And at this point, he had already flipped the switch in his head to screw this taxi thing.

[450] I have a good amount of money.

[451] I'm just going to hire a black car whenever I want to go anywhere.

[452] Like, I'm done with this taxi crap.

[453] Yes, he was done with the taxi crap.

[454] And so what he started to do, you know, and remember, it is hard to remember now.

[455] But if you were in, if you were living in cities in this time, the stigma of the black car industry, the quote -unquote gypsy cab industry was super strong.

[456] Everybody knew, don't talk to them.

[457] These were guys who would be driving cars.

[458] They'd roll down their windows as you're on the street.

[459] If you were trying to hill a cab, they'd be like, you need a ride where you're trying to go?

[460] And everybody's like, don't do that.

[461] Don't do that.

[462] And so Garrett was like, you know what?

[463] How bad can these guys be?

[464] So he starts using it a little bit, and he finds they're actually not that bad.

[465] Like these black car drivers, what they're trying to do, they have their scheduled rides that they're doing for the banks and the law firms and that they're getting through limo companies or, you know, prom nights for high schoolers or whatnot.

[466] But in between those scheduled rides, they're just trying to make some extra money.

[467] And by and large, they're pretty, you know, good people.

[468] They're entrepreneurs.

[469] And so he gets like 15 of these guys numbers on his phone and he stops using the taxi industry.

[470] he just goes through the list when he's when he's out at night calls one then the next says hey you're free can you come get me and he starts building relationships with them and so he's like this is all going through his head he has the black cars he sees the james he sees casino royale he says why don't i just put two and two together and build what i saw in the james bond movie marry it up with my friends who are the black car drivers and have a private driver service on my phone it is amazing that it was that both pieces of that puzzle both going to nightclubs and watching James Bond movies all day were both requirements in in discovering the idea and be able to implement it.

[471] I know.

[472] I know.

[473] And so he's like this he's he's he's very excited, very, very excited about this.

[474] And at the time, he's dating a woman named Melody McCloskey who would go on to become the founder and CEO of Style Seat.

[475] And he tells, he's talking to Melody, he's trying to figure out what to call it.

[476] And Garrett would have this, uh, this turn of phrase.

[477] I don't know if this is from being Canadian or just what, but when things were like really great and he really thought it was awesome, he would call it Uber.

[478] So he would say like, you know, if, uh, if he had like a really great coffee at, you know, psych glass or whatever, said, man, that was an Uber coffee.

[479] And, um, and so he and Melody were talking and he said, you know, this is a quote in, in the upstarts in Brad's book.

[480] He says, Uber, it means great things.

[481] It means greatness.

[482] And that's what he decides to call this service.

[483] Uber.

[484] He calls it Uber Cab.

[485] And he registers the domain name in August of 2008.

[486] So funny that in this A -plus era that we're in and, you know, all these big IPOs that Uber or the most or the greatest or the top or the biggest, you know, is, is exactly that.

[487] Like, it's an very aptly named company.

[488] Very, very aptly named.

[489] So his initial idea, though, he's got this network of drivers and he uses this, he has lots of other friends who are, you know, part of the kind of new Web 2 .0 era entrepreneurs in San Francisco.

[490] He thinks they would like to use this too, this private driver network.

[491] And his idea is he's going to go to sign up these sedan drivers that he knows.

[492] And then he's going to buy a fleet of cars.

[493] He's going to have his own, basically his own black car company.

[494] He wants to buy a fleet of Mercedes S class cars and then Lisa Garage in San Francisco and kind of keep them as his private network that he and his friends would use.

[495] And so he asks, this is great, he asks, he's friends with Tim Ferriss, the angel investor and now a big podcaster.

[496] And he asks Tim Ferriss's assistant to help him research the industry and figure out, you know, can he do this?

[497] And turns out he can.

[498] So this is now at the end of 2008 and all of these ideas are spinning in his head.

[499] And Garrett goes off with a bunch of his friends to Paris at the end of 2008, to the big LeWeb conference, and he's going there because he wants to go to the conference, but also his good buddy, fellow entrepreneur who has recently sold his company, Travis Kalanick, is hosting a bunch of San Francisco entrepreneurs in a really, really cool Uber, one might say, apartment that he has rented out in Paris on the VRBO website.

[500] Which should surprise no one.

[501] like this is it's like the very first thing we learn about Travis in this story is that he has like a swank apartment for a bunch of his like wealthy friends coming in from another city to like have this unique experience like you can already get a picture and the super amazing thing about this is why he was doing this because A that fits with his personality but B he was thinking about his next startup idea and unclear if he had heard about Airbnb but he was.

[502] He was doing this because A, that fits with his personality.

[503] But he was thinking about his next startup idea and unclear if he had heard about Airbnb but he was.

[504] he thought that a network of luxury residences around the world that people might have access to, kind of like, you know, the private homes versus the private driver might be a pretty good idea.

[505] And so he was traveling around the world and looking for any excuse to go to conferences, tech conferences around the world and rent out the fanciest places he could find on VRBO because he was trying to figure out if he wanted to start a company doing that.

[506] And of course, very unlikely he had heard of Airbnb because these companies were started within in three months of each other.

[507] And, of course, Airbnb at this time, you know, was very far from anything luxury.

[508] Brian, Nate and Joe, were not hanging out with the crowd that Garrett and Travis were running in.

[509] That is for sure.

[510] Okay.

[511] So let's say a little bit more about Travis.

[512] Travis is a guy who right before he officially became the CEO of Uber.

[513] He gave a talk on YouTube that we'll link to.

[514] And actually a couple listeners sent to us, which was really great.

[515] Yeah.

[516] And he introduced himself in the talk as he says, I like to think of myself as the wolf in Pulp Fiction.

[517] He is an interesting, interesting character.

[518] And I would say, after having now done many, many hours of research on Travis, I think that is a very accurate characterization.

[519] He has all of the good and bad qualities of the wolf in Pulp Fiction.

[520] And if you haven't seen Pulp Fiction, it's an amazing movie.

[521] I would assume most listeners have.

[522] But go see it and you'll know what we're talking about.

[523] so Travis he grew up in L .A., hence the L .A. Connections for Uber.

[524] He was born in 1976 in a suburb in the San Fernando Valley outside of L .A. His father, Don, had served in the army and was a civil engineer for the city of Los Angeles.

[525] So some like maybe DNA in the family of thinking about city infrastructure.

[526] His mother, Bonnie, sold ads for the newspaper, the Los Angeles Daily News.

[527] And Travis was super smart.

[528] And this is something that comes through that I think has gotten lost in the story of Uber and Travis over the last two years, he is incredibly smart and very much a human, as we will see, and very fallible, but very smart.

[529] And so the lure is when he was growing up in middle school, he got extremely good grades.

[530] He was top of his class and everything.

[531] And in middle school, he was bullied because of that.

[532] And apparently he made a decision one day in middle school to stand up to the bullies that he wasn't going to take it anymore.

[533] And the way he was going to deal with the bullies is he was going to become hyper aggressive and give it right back to them.

[534] And, you know, that is kind of how things go.

[535] He also was naturally quite athletic.

[536] He played football in high school.

[537] He ended up running track.

[538] He was an excellent track runner in high school.

[539] He essentially turned himself into a jock, but he didn't stop studying either and turn off his brain.

[540] And so while he was still in high school, when he took the SATs he got a 1580 on the SATs he aced the math section got an 800 on math and a 780 on verbal and this is really telling you like it's just this also says something about the guy that we know these numbers like I I would oh he's very he's very vocal about the numbers because he started on the back of this he started an SAT prep company to help other kids in the area makes them and profit off of this and I believe the not the name of the company but the class he taught was something like above 1 ,500 or something like that.

[541] And this is great when he was giving in an interview later, he would talk about this and he said, you know, the math, like it would be a 30 minute math section.

[542] I would be done in eight minutes.

[543] The fact that he timed himself to eight minutes, too, is incredible.

[544] But then the verbal was super hard for him.

[545] And he had to like, he had to develop systems to make it work.

[546] And he said, when I would do the verbal, my shoulders would hurt and my neck would hurt.

[547] It would be so hard on himself.

[548] But he persevered and he managed to do it.

[549] And he taught systems to his students to do the same.

[550] So on the back of that score, he goes to UCLA, incredible school.

[551] He becomes a CS major.

[552] And this is in the late 90s.

[553] And he drops out in 1998 to start a startup because this is the dot -com go -go -go -go days.

[554] He and a bunch of classmates start a startup called scour.

[555] Now, this is super important.

[556] This is like in the Tesla episode, the equivalent of where you start learning about what it is that made Elon Elon.

[557] This is what makes Travis, Travis.

[558] He, much like Elon's first company.

[559] So, what was this company started?

[560] It was called Scour.

[561] It was a rip -off of Napster.

[562] But there were a couple particulars about it.

[563] Also, can we talk about how the roots of Facebook and Uber both have a P -to -P file music sharing thing with Wirehog and Scour at their at the earliest days.

[564] Absolutely.

[565] It's a...

[566] I think it says a lot about entrepreneurs in a time where when you see a problem that is possible to exploit, even in a gray, if not very much crossing the line area, like the most aggressive just can't help but go and exploit that thing.

[567] And this was the era where you absolutely could exploit with peer -to -peer transfer.

[568] Absolutely.

[569] And, you know, I think probably much like Uber and, well, not Uber specifically in the early days, but then the peer -to -peer true ride -sharing industry that becomes the big industry that we talked about on the Lyft IPO episode, it's not entirely clear that it's, like, wrong to do this.

[570] Right.

[571] And ultimately, probably better for the, there would be no Spotify if there were no Napster.

[572] 100%.

[573] And, you know, could be sharing anything on there, too.

[574] It's not necessarily, like, explicitly designed to rip off music.

[575] Yeah.

[576] Okay.

[577] So you nailed one of the key things that is different about Scour versus NAPS.

[578] Napster.

[579] There are two.

[580] One is that.

[581] Scower, whereas Napster was architected, it was peer -to -peer file sharing, architected specifically for music.

[582] Scower was meant to scour your hard drive and be for anything, any file.

[583] And what would people want to share besides music?

[584] Well, they might want to share videos and movies.

[585] And so the other thing that was very different about scour was it was based in Los Angeles.

[586] And what is the big industry in Los Angeles?

[587] it's the movie industry so this is uh you know like i said the dot com days the go go go who hears about scour michael ovitz now this might ring some bells for for listeners i don't think we've talked about this too much on the show before but michael ovitz was the famed super agent who started creative artists agency c a he then went on and became the president of disney for two years well kind of co -running disney with michael isner who was CEO they fought and Michael Eisner ended up ousting him after two years.

[588] But Ovitz and CAA became the inspiration for Andreson Horowitz and how how Ovitz architected CAA to have the artist at the center and then all of the suite of services that a talent agency could surround the artist, that was the blueprint for how Mark and Ben envisioned Andreessen Horowitz when they started and really what that's become.

[589] So Ovitz has just been ousted from Disney by Eisner.

[590] And he's looking for, you know, looking around, making some investments, trying to decide what he's going to do next.

[591] He hears about scour.

[592] Boy, these hyper -successful people looking around for their next thing sure are dangerous for these stories.

[593] Sure are dangerous.

[594] So he hears about scour.

[595] And he, along with his buddy, fellow L .A. billionaire Ron Burkle, they meet with the scour team of these dropouts from UCLA, computer science department, who fit, you know, the mold to a T. And they say, all right, guys, we want to invest in your company.

[596] and we're going to give you $4 million, which was a lot back then, even in the GoGo days.

[597] And we're going to give you $4 million, but we're going to do it.

[598] We're going to buy 51 % of the company for $4 million.

[599] This is like an ESPN style first investment.

[600] Totally.

[601] Totally.

[602] And Travis and his co -founders, they're pretty naive and they're like, well, this is cool.

[603] Michael Ovitz and Ron Burkle want to invest in our company.

[604] Like, yeah, let's do this.

[605] So they sign a term sheet.

[606] But OV.

[607] was also known for playing hardball.

[608] So what happens next?

[609] This is like, it is amazing how much this foreshadows what is going to come with Uber.

[610] They signed the term sheet.

[611] After they sign the term sheet, Ovidz delays funding the company.

[612] And Travis and his co -founders are like, what's up?

[613] Like, we signed the term sheet.

[614] We're ready to go.

[615] Wire the money.

[616] We'll give you 51 % of the company.

[617] Ovid starts trying to retrade on the deal.

[618] And he was, you know, famous for being a tough negotiator.

[619] So he locked up, scour, with the term sheet signed, and he wanted to get even more of the company.

[620] So months go by, they're deadlocked in negotiations.

[621] Travis in, you know, what will become a Travis signature here, he's not going to budge.

[622] Ultimately, after a bunch of months go by and the exclusivity period on the term sheet had expired, Travis and his co -founders go on and they start talking to other people about investing in the company.

[623] Also, can we just, I just want to pause and say, that is exactly the wrong mindset for early state.

[624] companies are so fragile at that point that like zero people should be in value capture mode because there's nothing to capture like you have to be in value creation mode a hundred percent I mean this would not fly today but I mean also like I completely agree this was absolutely wrong we're talking about Michael Obitz here he just left Disney like he's used to he's accustomed to negotiations at a at a different stage here this is this is like bringing a bazooka to you know a sandbox a shovel fight a sandbox plastic shovel fight.

[625] So, Obitz flips out and he does what, you know, his nuclear negotiations, he sues the company.

[626] So here we have Travis in his very first company.

[627] He sues the company to consummate the deal and be able to invest in the company.

[628] And Travis is like talking later.

[629] He's like, what investor sues the company so that they can invest in the company?

[630] Foreshadowing.

[631] Ooh, who.

[632] Indeed.

[633] Indeed.

[634] So this is Travis's first, not only CEO experience, but experience with investors and quote unquote venture capital.

[635] So after this lawsuit, you know, again, these are kids who just dropped out of UCLA.

[636] They capitually, they signed the deal.

[637] I don't know what terms it actually ended up getting done at, but it is done.

[638] And Ovitz and Berkel invests.

[639] They control the company.

[640] They control the board.

[641] But Travis and his co -founders are actually building the thing.

[642] And so as we said earlier, the other thing different about Scour versus Napster is you can share anything and you can share movie files.

[643] And they're in L .A. and Michael Ovitz just funded this company.

[644] You can imagine that the Motion Picture Association of America, which also at this point, the recording industry association of America, the RIA, is like, I believe already sued Napster at this point.

[645] They see Scower right in their backyard with Michael Ovitz involved and they're like, oh no, this is, we are not going to go through the same thing that the music industry is going to go through they turn around they sue scour i believe this was it got to this hype because of the like a per instance violation they sued scour for 250 billion dollars that is one quarter of a trillion dollars that you know Travis has got to be like 21 maybe 22 ubers yeah exactly like three ubers today that uh the mpAA sue scour for and obviously they knew they weren't going to pay 250 billion down but they were like we are going to sue you into oblivion um and uh and i think more importantly they were sending a message to michael ovitz of hey man you built your career on the interests of artists and like you just funded a piracy company yeah um and so ovitz as you would imagine gets the message and uh he all of a sudden wants nothing to do with scour so now according this is according to Travis.

[646] Travis has talked about this in an interview.

[647] Supposedly what happens next and Ovitz denies this is that Travis is scheduled to speak at a private entrepreneur's conference that Jason Calacanis is putting on in LA and he's going to go on stage and speak.

[648] And before he goes on stage, he's seated at a table and somebody comes up to him and suggests to him that if he's going go up and talk about everything that's going on and he's going to get asked about the lawsuit, he might not want to mention Ovitz's name.

[649] And there might be consequences if he does.

[650] What is with these failed threats throughout this episode?

[651] I know.

[652] Well, this is the backdrop to Uber.

[653] And of course, this scares even Travis.

[654] And so he goes up and he behaves and, you know, doesn't talk about Ovitz.

[655] And this is in an interview with Jason, Jason Calcanus does with Travis after he starts Uber.

[656] And Travis is like, oh, yeah, I thought I played a cool.

[657] And Jason was like, oh, man, you were sweating bullets up there.

[658] So that happens.

[659] The company ends up filing Chapter 11 bankruptcy to get rid of the lawsuit.

[660] And then the assets of the company gets sold out of bankruptcy.

[661] So the company is torched.

[662] Like, here's Travis.

[663] He has just had this wild experience.

[664] The company was completely torched.

[665] he walks away thankfully with no personal liability but it's over so what does he do next he and one of his co -founders from scour they go and they say you know this technology it is pretty interesting as a technology and this is going to mirror other episodes we've had here unacquired what if rather than using it with a front end to enable illegal peer -to -peer downloads we take the same technology and we use it for moving content around on the internet and who would want to move content around on the internet maybe it's those guys who just suit us the movie studios like they're trying to like online online movie distribution isn't there yet but people are moving content around there's like a little bit like their clips that are being played online um maybe we can help them with their bandwidth by using peer to peer hosting to enable uh to enable better bandwidth management for for these uh movie companies and we should we should on a technical note just just make a point to to folks listening that like when you type in a URL right now on the internet even though it seems like okay cool it goes to the server where that website is hosted and gets it you know in the early days of the internet it had to go literally all the way to the one server where the website was hosted like now things happen much faster because these things are cached all over the place and they're much closer to you not really fully developed at this time nope and uh acamei existed, but was just starting to get going.

[666] So Travis starts, takes this, says, great, I'm going to start my next company.

[667] He calls it Red Swoosh.

[668] And it does this.

[669] It's a competitor to Akamai focused specifically on the movie industry.

[670] And it is also a wild journey.

[671] He ends up running it for, I believe, six or seven years, raises a very, very small amount of money, including from Mark Cuban as an angel.

[672] And Travis ends up not taking a salary for four of those six or seven years that he's running the company.

[673] He moves back in with his parents and he lives at home in L .A. And eventually, we mentioned Akamai, Akamai ends up acquiring the company and consolidating it into Akamai for $19 million.

[674] So finally at the end of this, it's now 10 full years that Travis has been on this grind, starting with dropping out of UCLA.

[675] And he's lived with his parents for a long time.

[676] He's had his safety threatened.

[677] He's been sued for a quarter of a trillion dollars.

[678] And he finally has an exit.

[679] And he makes, I wasn't able to get the final, the exact figure, but several million dollars because he hadn't raised too much money out of that $19 million acquisition.

[680] Yeah.

[681] So the money is one thing that, like, that has happened.

[682] But the mold has been cast for Travis going forward based on just some traumatic experiences.

[683] Incredibly, incredibly traumatic experiences.

[684] So he moves to San Francisco at this point.

[685] I don't know if he'd already moved to San Francisco.

[686] or as part of the sale to Akamai, he, he did.

[687] But this is the backdrop that he's operating in now coming into 2008, where he's angel investing.

[688] He's having fun.

[689] He's going out with Travis also, with Garrett also in San Francisco.

[690] Is he looking for his next thing?

[691] He's looking for his next thing.

[692] He's thinking about this Airbnb idea.

[693] And they go to Paris.

[694] They're in Paris.

[695] And they spend most of the time just Garrett and Travis jamming on these.

[696] ideas, Garrett on his on his James Bond Uber idea and Travis on his, you know, luxury apartments around the world idea.

[697] And throughout the week that they're there in Paris, they start spending more and more time on the Uber idea.

[698] And apparently, according to Melody, they all, all three of them go out to dinner one night at a fancy French restaurant.

[699] And in typical French bistro style, they have paper tablecloths on the, on the table.

[700] And Travis and Garrett are so deep in Uber, discussions that they fill the entire paper tablecloth throughout dinner with sketching out the unit economics of Uber.

[701] It's amazing.

[702] I mean, I want to make some crack here that like maybe they should have sketched the unit economics for Uber on something a little bit more high fidelity than a napkin.

[703] It's not what we're seeing today.

[704] Well, well, no, no, they actually, and this gets back to Travis being really smart.

[705] So the outcome of that, I don't know if it was specifically from that dinner, but the outcome of that week.

[706] is, you know, Garrett was thinking about buying these Mercedes and renting a garage, a garage and storing them themselves.

[707] And Travis, like, based on looking at the economics, he's like, do not buy cars.

[708] Like, whatever you do, do not buy cars, use the existing cars that limo drivers, that sedan drivers already have, and just give them iPhones and put the app on there.

[709] That's all you need to do.

[710] And the economics are going to be so much better.

[711] So by the end of the week, he's convinced Garrett not to not to take the Mercedes approach and Travis is intrigued enough by what's going on he says all right I'm in I'm not going to like join I'm still thinking about other things I might want to do my other angel invest investments but I'll angel invest in this and I'll be like a super advisor to the company this is my favorite part of this story that like he's like committing but like to to what he's like like active you know like I'm gonna yeah Yeah, you know, I'm going to like, I'm not joining, but I'm in.

[712] Yep.

[713] So I believe the idea is that Garrett is really going to run with this.

[714] So they get back to San Francisco.

[715] This is now January 2009.

[716] Garrett, though, well, everybody makes out well.

[717] But what happens next is that eBay comes to their senses, gets to the end of their drunken hangover.

[718] This is, you know, post stock market crash in the recession.

[719] And they're like, why do we own Stumble upon?

[720] And they decide to spin Stumble upon back out.

[721] and Garrett's like, great, I'm going to come back and be the CEO of Stumble Upon again.

[722] So Uber basically gets put on pause, but Travis is still pretty interested in it.

[723] And so he's like still saying to Garrett, you know, hey, let's keep working on this.

[724] They make a little progress.

[725] They go out.

[726] They talk to the black car drivers that Garrett already knows.

[727] They give them phones.

[728] They tried out.

[729] They contracted with a developer who Garrett knew based in New York City, a guy named Oscar Salazar, who was originally from Mexico.

[730] and Oscar built the app in New York City with two contract developers back in Mexico.

[731] And so they had this kind of rudimentary app and they try it out and it sort of works.

[732] And so they do that over the next year in 2009.

[733] And then in January 2010, the two of them decide, hey, there's enough here to actually start a company.

[734] We don't really want to run it.

[735] You know, we're still enjoying our lifestyles.

[736] but what if we recruited somebody to come in and run this company?

[737] And so on January 5th, 2010, Travis tweets, one of the most infamous tweets, famous and infamous tweets in Twitter and all of internet history.

[738] He tweets, quote, looking for, number four, entrepreneurial product manager slash biz dev killer for a location -based service.

[739] dot dot dot pre -launch big all caps big equity big equity big peeps involved dash any tips all caps question mark question mark and before getting into where this leads can we just talk about how broad of a description that is it's a product what biz dev killer right also i mean people in in silicon valley circles and entrepreneurial circles you know new travis at this point but like the broader twitter like who is Travis and what is this what is this what is this tweet.

[740] What is going on here?

[741] It's big.

[742] Nonetheless, in the most fateful Twitter reply to this point in Twitter history, in Chicago, a 27 -year -old GE employee who's in the GE management development and rotational program, which is a fantastic program, a really smart young guy named Ryan Graves.

[743] And a Miami of Ohio graduate.

[744] Indeed, indeed.

[745] Ohio Midwest strong.

[746] He sees the tweet and he replies quote here's a tip email me smiley face graves dot ryan at gmail dot com and that uh with those two fateful tweets a couple weeks later can we say his email address like that on the show what's on it's on twitter so it may or may not be his his email address anymore and and ryan of course now has a has a family office salt order capital which are great investors we're co -investors with them and a few companies here at wave big fans of them he moves out to san francisco from chicago now Ryan's married.

[747] His wife is a school teacher in Chicago, but he sees this is the opportunity.

[748] This is his shot.

[749] And so he moves out to San Francisco and he becomes Uber's first CEO.

[750] Travis and Garrett bring him on.

[751] And that's apparently what the definition of a biz dev killer product, whatever is.

[752] I would love to ask them, how did that, how did that tweet turn into CEO?

[753] We may never know.

[754] But he becomes the first CEO of what?

[755] what is at this point, Uber cab.

[756] So he and Travis start going around the city.

[757] They're signing up more black cab companies and drivers.

[758] In June 2010, they officially launch the non -beta consumer -facing app, writer app to riders.

[759] They have about 10 cars on the platforms.

[760] The app is live in the iOS app store.

[761] They're 10 black cars on the platform in San Francisco.

[762] And they go out to raise a seed round on Angel List, which had just gotten started as well.

[763] And so the email blast gets sent out on Amazon.

[764] list.

[765] And the description is that Garrett, Travis, and Tim Ferriss are investors and advisors.

[766] Ryan Graves is the CEO and only employee of the company.

[767] And it gets blasted out to, I think, something like 170, 175 investors.

[768] Lots of people see it.

[769] Most people don't respond.

[770] Some people respond and want to invest, including first round capital, Rob Hayes, which who leads the round, writes a $600 ,000 check.

[771] Chris Saka invests, invests 300K, Mitch Kapoor invest, Jason Kalakanis, who we talk, invest, friend of the show, Alfred Lynn, who was still at Zappos had not joined Sequoia yet.

[772] He invests in the round.

[773] And once again, they get another call.

[774] I think this was probably a response to the email.

[775] By the way, this is like a crazy superstar party round.

[776] Like, I mean, you always look, it's the who's who on the sort of advisory team, you know, founding -ish team and the who's who in this initial angel round.

[777] Yep.

[778] Totally.

[779] Well, you've got two, you know, proven entrepreneurs who are not running the company.

[780] But, you know, as an investor, you're like, well, maybe, maybe they might run the company.

[781] We'll, we'll see.

[782] They get another response to the email, though, and it is once again, Bill Gurley.

[783] He sees, he either sees or hears about this round that's happening, and he takes Travis and Ryan out to dinner and says, all right, tell me your plans.

[784] Let's talk about this.

[785] What's going on?

[786] And they say, we're raising a seed round, but we have big ambitions here.

[787] And Bill says, okay, benchmark, doesn't do seed, do your, do your seed round, but let's stay in touch.

[788] I'm very interested in this space.

[789] So the seed round ends up getting done.

[790] They raise $1 .3 million in total at a $5 .3 million post money valuation.

[791] Wow.

[792] Even despite trading today in the IPO, that is a long distance, many, many thousands of percent return from that valuation.

[793] And then on July 5th, the day after July 4th, 2010, TechCrunch writes an article announcing the launch of Uber Cab.

[794] I remember reading this.

[795] San Francisco.

[796] It was, as Ryan Tolkien on our latest LP show talked about, it was basically instant product market fit.

[797] I mean, the pent up demand, everything we talked about with Taxi v. Magic and Cabulus, despite all of those problems and how much demand there was for that, finally, a service that is actually going to address riders and solve all of these problems and in a city that is such a big city like San Francisco and has all.

[798] only 1 ,500 taxi cabs, it is off, demand is off the charts.

[799] And they're about to learn the real difficulty of a high growth marketplace business.

[800] You're never in a really good place because either you have too much demand for supply or too much supply for demand and you have to sort of figure out what your strategy is to go get the other side built up just in time for you to overbuild and then need to switch back.

[801] Yep, totally.

[802] So they had hired a driver operations manager to start.

[803] trying to onboard drivers and get things going in San Francisco.

[804] And it was not working out.

[805] It was not going too well.

[806] And this is where one more amazing story happens.

[807] I believe also on Twitter, Jason Calcanus, who had obviously Angel invested in the round, he posted a tweet about the launch of Uber.

[808] And I believe that they were looking for an intern.

[809] And somebody sees that tweet again.

[810] And it doesn't reply to the tweet, but finds, does some sleuthing, finds Ryan Graves email address, didn't take much on Twitter to find it, emails him and says that she wants to apply to be the intern.

[811] And the person who does that is Austin Geite, who rang the bell on the New York Stock Exchange this morning.

[812] Right in the middle of the big group of people.

[813] In the middle of the big group of people.

[814] She is now, I'm pretty sure, the longest serving employee at Uber.

[815] She joins that summer as an intern.

[816] Ryan Graves is on the board, but no longer an employee.

[817] So that's probably a new longer an employee.

[818] Travis obviously is no longer there and I believe I believe all the people who were all all two other people who were there before Austin are gone she becomes the fourth employee of the company and her story is just amazing it's been told but we're going to tell it again here because this is an incredible story Austin grew up in Marin in Marin County just north of San Francisco in the suburbs and she went to she went to Berkeley for undergrad and a short time.

[819] into her time at Berkeley, into her college career, she developed a pretty serious drug addiction.

[820] She's very open and honestly given many interviews about this and a great talk at Fortune about this.

[821] And it basically ruined her life.

[822] And she had to take, she dropped out of college, took several years off of college, worked with her family, and got completely sober.

[823] And then she returned to college in her mid -20s, ended up graduating from Berkeley at age 25.

[824] And it was that summer of 2010 when she graduated and she saw that tweet and she was she had I believe the story she'd applied to be a barista either at Pete's or Starbucks and gotten rejected uh to even go be a barista at uh I believe it was Pete's but ended up getting this internship at Uber and uh you know she says later in this fortune interview she said I think this is just amazing she said I'm so proud of the work my team has done at Uber that I've done at Uber but it's not the proudest thing I've done I'm more proud of being sober and being able to share that with my family means a whole lot more and it's incredible So Austin would join as an intern, and then we mentioned a few minutes ago, the first driver operations manager who was onboarding drivers to try and just get supply to keep up with this crazy demand, wasn't working out.

[825] Austin takes over and becomes the first successful driver operations manager in San Francisco and then would go on to lead and run the launch team for Uber.

[826] And she launched, I believe, just about every city that Uber operates in around the world.

[827] Wow.

[828] Incredible.

[829] okay so things start getting going on the driver onboarding front in in san francisco by the fall in october of 2010 people are starting to notice this is a big thing in san francisco and other people who are in particular people who are starting to notice is the taxi industry and so they uh taxi cabs they show up at the city regulators office and they start loving and say you got to shut these guys down they're taking away our business and what they're doing is illegal and so on in octobering October 2010, while there is a board meeting for Uber going on, and Ryan Graves and Travis and everybody are at first round Capitol's office in the middle of the board meeting, the Uber office gets rated.

[830] And regulators show up and they issue a cease and desist order.

[831] I believe they have like a headshot of Ryan Graves there.

[832] And they're like, this is a wanted man. And they say that Uber has to shut down and stop operating because they are not following the rules, quote unquote.

[833] And to the company and to Travis' credit, again, given all of his background, they say, what rules aren't we following?

[834] You know, Travis is that he would talk about this in an interview later.

[835] You know, this, he says this feels like a quote unquote homecoming for him, you know, after his experience at Scala.

[836] And they had been really careful.

[837] This is, this is another point that has been completely lost in the last couple years of Uber.

[838] They followed the rules.

[839] They were not doing anything illegal.

[840] They were operating in the black cab market that was regulated by the state, not the city.

[841] They were not a taxi company.

[842] And they had been very careful about what they were doing was certainly not envisioned by current regulations, but it was not against the rules.

[843] And so they fight this.

[844] And they end up winning because like I said, the city had no jurisdiction over what they were doing.

[845] They were using black cars.

[846] Given the narrative around this company, that is like a completely lost fact of history.

[847] Yep.

[848] Completely lost back to history, but super important for two reasons.

[849] One, because they win.

[850] And they do not get shut down.

[851] The state of California allows them to continue operating.

[852] The other outcome of this is, you know, I mentioned those quotes about Travis saying this felt like a homecoming.

[853] This is what pushes Travis over the edge to decide, you know what?

[854] This is going to be huge.

[855] I am born to do this.

[856] I need to come in and be the CEO of this company.

[857] The company got raided and the, you know, officials were there.

[858] There was a headshot.

[859] You know, they were looking for this, the CEO.

[860] He was a wanted man. I want to be that guy.

[861] That's it.

[862] This is the company for me. Like he said, it was a homecoming.

[863] Because he went, he was in the meetings with the regulators and he thought, I can do this.

[864] So he comes in, he very amicably with Ryan.

[865] He had hired Ryan.

[866] Ryan becomes, I believe, SPP of operations.

[867] And Travis comes in, becomes the CEO.

[868] He negotiates, he already had a 12 % stake in the company from his advising and angel investment.

[869] He negotiates.

[870] He gets, he gets, a 23 % stake in the company.

[871] This is post seed round as CEO.

[872] And he basically says he's going to devote his entire life to making Uber as big as it possibly can be.

[873] He actually, he, he, uh, Brad writes about this in the book.

[874] He broke up with his longtime girlfriend and he explained, this is a quote.

[875] He said, I realized I was more passionate about this company than I was about her.

[876] I should probably find someone I like at least as much about my job.

[877] But this is probably, no, no mean, slight meant to his girlfriend.

[878] But this is the mindset he's in.

[879] he said, this is his life now.

[880] He is, his mission in life is to build Uber as big as it can possibly be.

[881] You're getting a lot of color on this guy here.

[882] Totally.

[883] So the growth continues.

[884] They go out in the beginning of 2011 to raise a series A. And based on reputation and on his dinner with him early in the year, Travis's goal is Bill Gurley.

[885] And he wants benchmark to lead the series A. And he meets with other firms.

[886] Travis also talks about interviews about the importance of running a process, but he always wants Bill to lead.

[887] And Bill and Benchmark do end up leading.

[888] And he's, Travis's asked later, why do you pick Benchmark?

[889] Jason asked him in this interview.

[890] And his answer is because they're the best.

[891] It's not even a close call.

[892] And Benchmark ends up investing $11 million at a $60 million post.

[893] This is in the beginning of 2011 for an 18 .3 % stake in the company.

[894] Now, that was almost unheard of in those days.

[895] Series A at a $60 million post.

[896] I was at Madrona at the time.

[897] We were doing series A's at like a 12 post.

[898] And then they were three or four million dollar investments.

[899] Indeed, indeed.

[900] So this was a huge, you know, laying of cards on the table.

[901] Bill had found his company.

[902] I mean, I think one of the other things that I remember when I first read Brad's book, the upstarts, and realized all the work that Bill had done for five to 10 years before making this investment on the industry.

[903] And it was the first.

[904] time that really hit me that truly great investors form an opinion about how the world will be and then go try and find the company that they believe will execute to create that future.

[905] And I think, obviously, there's lots of ways to be a great investor.

[906] But learning that is the approach that Bill took here, and the traction they had, of course, but it's no surprise at all that it's a big check at a healthy valuation because it's sort of the consummation of this year's long search.

[907] Yeah, he was ready to go all in.

[908] And I remember, so New York was the second city that when there is the series A, it's clear, it's clear to Bill, it's clear to Travis, it's clear to everybody else in the company.

[909] This is working.

[910] We now need to replicate this in as many cities around the country and world as quickly as possible.

[911] We need Brian Tolkien.

[912] Yeah, exactly.

[913] Well, and they already fortunately had Austin Gait, who led the launch team.

[914] So they go to New York next, the third city of Seattle.

[915] And I remember so vividly, Bill sending an email to Tom Allberg at Marjona, who we had on the show for the Amazon IPO, founder of Madrona, saying, and Bill and Tom knew each other from Amazon and from several investments over the years.

[916] And Bill emailing Tom when Uber was launching in Seattle and saying, I think this is going to be the company that is going to be as big as Amazon.

[917] And it's coming to Seattle.

[918] It's going to be the third city.

[919] Would love anything you can do to help.

[920] at madrona with amazon everybody to help uh to help bring uber to seattle and it's just incredible and i i vividly you know tom forwarded the email to um to everybody at madrona and i remember seeing and i'd heard of uber at that time of course and i was like wow that is that is a really balzy and involved move for a board member to do and uh to try and drum up support and uh obviously bill was right yep in february 2011 uh i believe right after or during as this round was closing there's an amazing video we'll link to in the show notes that Austin Guy took on her phone of they do an Uber happy hour in San Francisco and Travis is kind of giving the welcoming kind of 10 minute talk at the happy hour.

[921] They have all the early employees.

[922] They have the writer community in San Francisco.

[923] They have the top drivers there.

[924] He brings everyone up.

[925] He's super magnanimous.

[926] He thanks them.

[927] He thanks the drivers.

[928] And he says kind of at the end of it, he says, you know, we're here in San Francisco.

[929] This is great.

[930] We're going to be very soon in 15 to 20.

[931] cities, not only in the U .S., but we're going to be all around the world.

[932] And this was, you know, we'd asked Brian Tolgan on the LP show, you know, was there a moment where was it ever a debate at Uber that they would go global or not?

[933] Because obviously no other ride -sharing company really did.

[934] And he said, you know, if there was, it was before I got here.

[935] There never was.

[936] It was Travis's goal from the beginning was, this is working, this is global, we're going to go everywhere.

[937] What was Brian's quote?

[938] The culture was, if it's a city and it's big, we need to be there yesterday.

[939] Yep.

[940] And that is, that is exactly, that is exactly what happens.

[941] So first New York, then Seattle, then Chicago, Boston, and then Paris is the, I guess that would be the sixth city.

[942] And that was, that was a huge, a huge moment for the company.

[943] And, and Travis was insistent that they go to Paris and they go to Paris then, and they go international.

[944] And everybody else in the company was saying, this is crazy.

[945] We can't go international.

[946] We can't.

[947] can't go to Paris.

[948] We were like barely live in the U .S. And he said, no, we have to do this.

[949] We have to do it now.

[950] And we have to, I believe the directive was we're launching in three weeks.

[951] I think it was for Leweb in 2011 Leweb that they had to launch for the Leweb conference there.

[952] And they did it.

[953] And that was the beginning of Uber being an international company.

[954] So by that time, this is now the end of 2011.

[955] Uber is already doing $9 million a month in bookings and almost $2 million a month in net revenue.

[956] For a company that is essentially one year old, the traction is just, just incredible.

[957] Now, launching cities all over the world.

[958] And this is actually the moment where Travis starts thinking, you know what?

[959] This is, we're going all in, pedal to the floor on ride sharing around the world.

[960] But this can be bigger than ride sharing.

[961] You know, and he gives a quote in the Jason Calacanis interview.

[962] He says, we're a logistics company.

[963] And he says, you know, obviously there's ride sharing, but he says, I want stuff brought to me. maybe there's there's one that's you know even more focused uh they were talking about examples of stuff that could be brought to and he said yeah you could do anything like cosmo .com did but maybe there's an even more focused service we can provide where you could say you could say delivery of food as an example like you like to eat at a restaurant they don't do delivery we have liquidity in cars so we can make that really interesting this is the end of 2011 and uh and that was the beginning of what would become uber eats it's so interesting too it's comments like this that that Travis and others that the company would make saying, oh, we could move anything around and then they wouldn't say anything for a year.

[964] And the whole, like, tech world would get up into a tizzy of like, ooh, Uber's going to launch like last mile UPS and deliver, it's going to be a courier service that moves anything around a city.

[965] And, and I mean, that sort of went away with the transition from Travis to Dara, but that always did seem like probably a red herring that was somehow bigger than moving people around was moving non -food stuff around.

[966] But that was always the like, what if they expand into everything?

[967] Yeah.

[968] Well, and it turns out, I mean, maybe eventually they will do everything, but Uber Eats is a monster of a business that will get into and is a huge part, if not all of Uber's growth at this point.

[969] And just kind of amazingly prescient that even that early one year into the company, they were already thinking about it and starting to work on it.

[970] So that at the end of the year, they end up raising what again was, you know, the series A was a landmark series A. the series B was almost as much of a landmark.

[971] They sell 10 % of the company in around, they raised $32 million at a $322 million post money valuation.

[972] It's led by Shervin Pischvar at Menlo Ventures.

[973] They only sold 10 % of the company in the series B, which was crazy back in the day.

[974] And they now have this huge war chest, and then they just keep going city by city by city.

[975] They launch L .A. after that, L .A., as we've talked about on other episodes, Uber completely transformed.

[976] is the series B before we move on from that is the series B the one with the crazy like last minute change on who the investor was yes so we was going to get into this so it was going to be andresen horowitz yeah uh i think this is like telling well i was going to tell it a little later but we'll we'll jump ahead now so yeah Travis wanted andresen to lead the series B and as the story goes andreason was in to do it at a roughly 300 million dollar evaluation but there was a dinner supposedly between Mark Henderson and Travis and after that Andrews and Horowitz decided to lower the offer into a valuation in the low 200 millions and also wanted to include a much larger option pool in the company and Travis would have none of it and that was that was the end and of course then as we're about to see Andrewson Horowitz like planted the seed with Travis before like well if anything weird happens like you know where to come you know where to come to, you know where to find me in.

[977] And so Travis called him up and, and they, they did the deal.

[978] Andresen, of course, then would regret that decision, but not for too, too long because shortly thereafter they would invest in Lyft.

[979] And they would lead Lyft's first round after pivoting into peer -to -peer car sharing and are still one of the largest shareholders of Lyft today.

[980] So, but back to Uber, this is, I would say, the apex of the original Uber.

[981] So we're now, they're at an unprecedented revenue growth rate, their GMVN revenue growth rate.

[982] They're raising unprecedented venture rounds.

[983] They're global.

[984] They're on the path to world domination.

[985] They're at this point, I believe, at about $100 million net revenue run rate.

[986] So like they could go public at this point in time by the old set of rules.

[987] If this were a different point in history, they would have.

[988] They would have.

[989] And maybe they were even thinking about it.

[990] But then history turns on a knife point.

[991] once again, and we will refer listeners to our episode about a month or so ago on the Lyft IPO.

[992] But this is now early 2012, and Homobiles has seeded the concept of peer -to -peer car sharing with sidecar, and sidecar has seeded the concept of peer -to -peer ride sharing with Lyft and sidecar and Lyft.

[993] Which sure feels a lot less legal than what Uber is doing.

[994] It sure does feel a lot less legal.

[995] Yes.

[996] But nonetheless, sidecar and lift launch in San Francisco in the spring and summer of 2012, and it is, you know, we spent all that time describing the regulations in the taxi industry and in the black car industry earlier in the episode, peer -to -peer ride sharing is completely ignoring these regulations and definitely illegal.

[997] You could argue whether Uber was in a gray area.

[998] It was not regulated, but it was not clearly illegal.

[999] What sidecar and lift are doing is clearly illegal.

[1000] Nonetheless, though, Uber and Travis, you know, because of their personality, they've, there are a lot of people in certainly the taxi industry, but especially in regulators and city governments who don't really like them.

[1001] And they're sort of, I wouldn't say happy to see something illegal happening, but they're happy to see competition arising and legitimate threatening competition to Uber.

[1002] So what happens next for the next six months or so?

[1003] Uber and Travis fight really hard to get Lyft and sidecar shut down, and they are lobbying with regulators on the side of regulators for protectionism.

[1004] It's crazy.

[1005] This is like totally, like the history is like glossed way over this, like Uber and the regulators trying to shut down lift.

[1006] Yes, totally.

[1007] And it makes total sense from Uber's perspective.

[1008] And I think, according to Brad, you know, Bill Gurley drove a lot of this thinking on the board, they were terrified of anybody undercutting them on price.

[1009] And what peer -to -peer ride sharing enabled was an undercutting of price.

[1010] And so this was a huge, huge threat.

[1011] And they had realized this when Halo moved over from London to launch in the U .S. Working with taxis, but doing it with a lower take rate, I believe Halo had a 10 % take rate and trying to undercut on price.

[1012] And that was in response to that, Uber had rolled out what was then UberX.

[1013] And UberX was cheaper cars.

[1014] Toyota Priuses, still with licensed drivers, but to compete at a lower take rate margin with Halo.

[1015] I don't think I knew that UberX was licensed drivers when it first launched.

[1016] UberX was licensed drivers.

[1017] It was not peer -to -peer.

[1018] And the original purpose of it was to compete with Halo.

[1019] This massive fear of undercutting on price is such an incredible foreshadow for the financial position that the companies are in today.

[1020] Because high -chairing, as it turns out, is an incredibly price -sensitive market.

[1021] If you open both apps.

[1022] One's a buck cheaper and it's the same, you know, relatively the same distance away.

[1023] You just do it.

[1024] Like there's, there's, um, so little gripping you to one platform or the other.

[1025] And that's one of the reasons why these companies are spending so much money competing with each other to acquire and retain customers.

[1026] Like it, you can see it all the way back, back in this era.

[1027] Totally.

[1028] And so this is, this is the moment where everything changes.

[1029] So, you know, Ben, we joked about unit economics, uh, and the, the table napkins in Paris earlier.

[1030] Yeah.

[1031] Before this happened, the trajectory that Uber was on was the beautiful, typical Silicon Valley story from, you know, that point, up until that point in history.

[1032] They had a beautiful marketplace -based business model.

[1033] They were not taking inventory.

[1034] They were working, you know, they were pushing the edges of regulation, but they were working within regulation.

[1035] The unit economics were incredible.

[1036] Uber was on a $100 million plus revenue run rate.

[1037] I assume not profitable because they were investing so much in growing cities.

[1038] but they probably could have been.

[1039] And I remember people talking about cities being, like, wildly LTV profitable.

[1040] I mean, I forget numbers that were thrown around that I'd heard, but, you know, 9, 10 plus X LTV to KAC for riders and drivers in, riders and drivers in San Francisco.

[1041] And for folks sort of on the, on the fringe of the biz here, that's lifetime customer value to cost to acquire a customer.

[1042] And if it's, if your customer lifetime is 10 times the cost to acquire, that's a great business you got there.

[1043] And an incredible business.

[1044] And it was also an incredible business.

[1045] for drivers.

[1046] There were drivers in San Francisco and other cities that were making hundreds of thousands of dollars on the platform, so much so that drivers were going out and they were, you know, Uber talked about this and Travis talked about this, kind of becoming their own little mini entrepreneurs on the platform, you know, kind of like to Airbnb's chagrin like property managers in Airbnb because they knew that if they got more cars on the system, they could make so much more money.

[1047] It was really working for everyone.

[1048] Then when peer -to -peer launched, it completely shifted the dynamics of the industry.

[1049] one by changing the unit economics, but even more so by impacting, like, it opened the floodgates of supply.

[1050] So now you had, and listener and friend Maxwell has emailed us about this.

[1051] This was the huge change that peer -to -peer ride sharing brought before all of the innovation that was happening with Uber was net good for most players in the industry.

[1052] Like I said, the drivers were doing much better.

[1053] But now when the floodgates of peer -to -peer opened, all of those gains got competed away because the playing field on the supply side just got massively, massively expanded.

[1054] And because of that, then there was also the competition for the demand side between Uber and Lyft and and D .D. and everybody internationally.

[1055] And so they had to spend, the companies had to spend so much on subsidies to bring in riders on the demand side.

[1056] And it completely changed the unit economics.

[1057] So what happens?

[1058] Well, they don't IPO.

[1059] They don't IPO.

[1060] No. And the, For a while, for a number of years, the wisdom becomes certainly at Uber and to a certain extent at other companies too, certainly at Uber, certainly at D .D. The way we can win this is this is a war of attrition.

[1061] We will raise so much money.

[1062] This is we talked about on the Lyft episode.

[1063] What was it like 16 times the amount of capital that Uber raised versus Lyft at one point in time?

[1064] Something like that.

[1065] That we can just, we can just blow away our competitors and crush them into oblivion.

[1066] And once we've crushed them, then the union economics will become more stable and we can return to profitability on these platforms.

[1067] Shouldn't be long.

[1068] Shouldn't be long.

[1069] So in August of 2013, Lyft raised the $60 million from Andreessen in May of 2013.

[1070] In August of 2013, Uber raises $258 million led by Google Ventures with TPG coming in the private equity firm.

[1071] And this is the start of this.

[1072] Instead of just investing those $260 million in the U .S. and competing with Lyft, though, remember Uber's is now international.

[1073] And D .D. in China starts raising huge amounts of capital.

[1074] So Uber's now spreading this capital fighting land wars all around the globe.

[1075] Yeah, Uber's doing a multi -front war.

[1076] Like, they have to capitalize wars on all these different borders.

[1077] All of these, all of these different borders.

[1078] And we should say, too, they are maintaining a very strong leverage position in this negotiation.

[1079] They raised that, whatever, $260 million on a $3 .7 billion post money.

[1080] So this is like, you know, they just got a 10x from.

[1081] that previous round where they were valued at $350 million.

[1082] Totally, which it was, what, 5, 6x from the Series A. Yep.

[1083] And that would have been, you know, and I think people thought about at the time, like, oh, well, that would have been like if they had gone public, maybe they would have gone in public at a relative market cap like this.

[1084] I guess this was just sort of a, you know, private IPO type thing.

[1085] It turns out that was far from the end of the capital racing.

[1086] And we'll skip over a lot of this year in the interest of time.

[1087] But go, go listen to our Lyft episode.

[1088] Go listen to way back our DD episode that we did with Brad Stone.

[1089] And Brad really was the foremost reporter in talking about the dynamics between Uber and D .D. It ended up, the amount of capital that they were raising from sovereign wealth funds, from huge, from hedge funds, from huge, you know, entities pumped the valuations of these companies so much over the next couple of years.

[1090] Uber ends up raising $20 billion in total, Ben, as you alluded to at the top of the show.

[1091] The valuation peaks at $72 billion on the private markets.

[1092] but all of this capital is going into fighting these wars.

[1093] And to list sort of the folks that start coming in here.

[1094] You know, we were talking about this is an era where you would go public.

[1095] I mean, GV made a crazy bet putting an abnormally huge amount of their fund, if not like all of the remaining, there's something wild that happened.

[1096] Well, I believe GV operates on an annual budget cycle from Alphabet.

[1097] Okay.

[1098] But yes, they put in a lot of money.

[1099] Yeah.

[1100] And then you start to see in June of 2014, Fidelity comes in.

[1101] And this changes everything for startups.

[1102] I mean, we talk about the era of stay private longer and while all these companies IPOing now and why haven't they IPOed yet.

[1103] The next set of investors would be Fidelity, Tiro Price, Goldman Sachs.

[1104] Then you start getting into these sort of international, you get Times Internet, Tata Capital, Tiger, soft banked.

[1105] I mean, the list goes on and on from.

[1106] When you get the...

[1107] You're not raising from venture capital.

[1108] The Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund comes in and puts a lot of money into one of these Uber rounds while they're fighting with D .D. That was before the SoftBank Vision Fund.

[1109] And of course, who is the anchor investor in the SoftBank Vision Fund?

[1110] It's the Saudi Arabia Public Investment Fund.

[1111] Yep.

[1112] Yep, yep.

[1113] I think this is an interesting point.

[1114] A few people have asked David and I, and I think there's a lot of good answers floating around.

[1115] But why is this happening now?

[1116] Like, why is this whole A -plus saga, you know, happening in this, like, four to six -month period at the beginning of 2019?

[1117] And I think there's a few reasons.

[1118] One, it's been this bull run for over a decade.

[1119] And, you know, people want to get out before the music stops.

[1120] Companies used to IPO, you know, after three or four years after being founded, especially you look at like Amazon, it was 94 to 97 or something like that.

[1121] Now they're a decade or more.

[1122] They've taken private funding for.

[1123] a long time.

[1124] But there is a time limit to the amount of time that private investors are willing to wait before getting liquidity.

[1125] And we're learning that time is about 10 to 12 years after a company has been founded.

[1126] So a lot of these companies all were started right around the same time in this two -year window following the 2008 recession.

[1127] And a lot of them stayed private longer, took private capital longer.

[1128] And they're facing pressure from their board.

[1129] Many companies in a less documented way to get some liquidity.

[1130] But Uber, in fact, signed an agreement with Goldman four years ago that they needed to go public within four years.

[1131] Otherwise, if they hadn't gone public, then the convertible bond that they took carries a coupon that will increase over time.

[1132] And I think that that clock started in January.

[1133] So they've been sort of racking up fees and debt if they didn't go public.

[1134] And so that's another big trigger of this whole thing is, look, if Uber had to go, then lines up the timing for a lot of these other companies to go to.

[1135] Yeah.

[1136] Well, I think this is what's, there's that, to me, the most interesting takeaway from doing all this research and thinking about it is that this whole era we're in now of all these new sources of capital, late stage sources of capital coming into the private venture back startup market was opened up at really by Uber and by everything we're talking about here.

[1137] It had been happening slowly before then, but this opens the floodgates.

[1138] And it opened the floodgates because Uber, because peer -to -peer ride sharing launched and it changed the economics and Uber now needed to raise all this money.

[1139] And it's just so interesting that like the narrative has been these sources of capital came in because they couldn't find growth in the public markets.

[1140] And like, that's absolutely true.

[1141] It's 100 % true.

[1142] That is why all these other alternative sources of capital are now have been over the last decade interested in investing in private venture back startups.

[1143] But it wasn't like Uber saw this and was like, oh, great source of capital.

[1144] I'm going to do that instead of going public.

[1145] They had to.

[1146] They couldn't go public.

[1147] They needed all this money to fight these wars.

[1148] That's a really great point.

[1149] That trend is now extended to, you know, plenty of companies.

[1150] Even that Airbnb being a great example, they also fought a war, which we will cover when we cover them.

[1151] But it was a much more contained war that they definitively won.

[1152] And so they didn't have these same dynamics.

[1153] And with Uber for a long time until very, recently where Uber sort of cut these deals to merge or take large ownership stakes in some of their competitors internationally instead of competing.

[1154] The thought was, oh my God, the global ride sharing market is one of the biggest markets in history.

[1155] And it is a single market and it's going to be winner take all.

[1156] And it is worth just go, go, go, put as much money into this company as you can because they're going to take it all.

[1157] And then from there, we will get to do all sorts of interesting things in margin expansion over time and whatever else.

[1158] It turned out that wasn't true.

[1159] Like it's not actually a global market.

[1160] They are, you know.

[1161] Well, it's global market, but it's not a global network effect.

[1162] Well, I would say it's a series of markets.

[1163] In the way that sort of like information on the internet is a global market where you can put something out there and it can be consumed everywhere.

[1164] You don't need to sort of like go open each market differently and have completely different products and marketplace dynamics and like ride sharing turns out to be a nationally fragmented market in a way that it's it's not accessible by one company leveraging their asset to just sort of scale perfectly yep so i guess that's that's what i'm getting at here is so then there had to be this this sort of pivot later on where this company had had this huge valuation had been massively capitalized if they're just going to be the North American winner in ride sharing, then they have to be the North American winner in other things, and they should own other companies that are going to, you know, dominate the other parts of global ride sharing.

[1165] And so I think, you know, we saw a pretty definitive shift in strategy when it became clear that it is not one singular large market that they can win.

[1166] Mm -hmm.

[1167] Mm -hmm.

[1168] Yep.

[1169] Both on the capital raising and then on the mergers and acquisitions and divestitures front.

[1170] Yep.

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[1189] Okay.

[1190] So on a normal acquired episode, I think we would wrap things up here in this already extended extra long episode and say, come back for part two the next time where we tell everything that all of you know happened after this.

[1191] Unfortunately, we don't have that luxury because today is the IPO day.

[1192] And we're going to get this out.

[1193] We got to get this out.

[1194] All right.

[1195] So here we go.

[1196] Extra special.

[1197] You thought you had enough drama.

[1198] You didn't have enough drama.

[1199] What happens next?

[1200] We fast forward to January of 2017.

[1201] The Annis Horribillis for Uber and Travis Kalinick.

[1202] What is the backdrop of all this?

[1203] I think it means just like a really bad.

[1204] It's a, it's a, I think it's Latin for a terrible year.

[1205] a horrible year.

[1206] Okay.

[1207] Everybody knows what happens in 2017 to Uber.

[1208] I think having told this whole story and the story of Travis's background and what we were just talking about of this new environment that the company suddenly found, they thought they were going to be the next Google.

[1209] They thought they were going to be the next eBay or Amazon.

[1210] But it turned out the dynamics changed and now they were in this incredibly huge market, but that were the, all the dynamics changed and they had to fight all these wars.

[1211] I can only imagine the toll that that took on the psyche of people at Uber and in particular on Travis.

[1212] And just like I think we've seen with Elon leading up to the episode we did on Tesla and then after that with everything that's happened with Elon Musk over the last year, that's a lot of weight to carry.

[1213] And so I think it's important to keep that in mind as we go through all of these horrible things that are about to happen.

[1214] and honestly horrible things that Travis either did or was party two at Uber.

[1215] Yeah, we should not, because at this point, I think we've played the narrative of everyone else has said terrible things about Uber and Travis, and we want to talk about a lot of the amazing things that the company and he did and a lot of the redeeming qualities.

[1216] We by no means want to say that he had a clean slate, and like lots of people made really bad decisions and did really bad stuff.

[1217] and I think like we should we should just make sure we're super clear on that.

[1218] Totally, totally.

[1219] At the end of the day, everybody, everybody's a human, including and especially founders.

[1220] And humans are capable of being very fallible.

[1221] Listeners, you should know that the header in David's notes for this section is Chapter 4, the system's broken.

[1222] Yes.

[1223] I was actually inspired by Kanye West lyric there, but that's another human for another day.

[1224] Okay, January 2017, Donald Trump has just been inaugurated as the president of the United States.

[1225] I'm living in Paris.

[1226] We're recording acquired episodes remotely over the internet across continents.

[1227] We have Bradstone on the show to talk about everything we're just talking about with Uber and the, the, and Didi and the Uber Didi merger.

[1228] What is the first thing Donald Trump does in his first week in office?

[1229] He enacts the travel ban.

[1230] A terrible, terrible thing.

[1231] in my view, not that this is a political show, but that's like, I will 100 % stand by that statement forever.

[1232] What happens because of the travel ban, people are stranded at airports, and particularly people are stranded at JFK in New York, people who have been flying to and from countries where the travel ban, predominantly Muslim countries where the travel ban is enacted.

[1233] Demand for Uber and Lyft spikes off the charts, particularly at JFK because everybody's stranded there.

[1234] They're trying to get home.

[1235] They're trying to figure out what's going on.

[1236] This completely throws off the market.

[1237] And Uber has, you know, surge.

[1238] Surge is how they respond to, to imbalances in supply and demand.

[1239] They're trying to do the right thing.

[1240] Like the drivers are getting screwed here and the drivers are like putting so much pressure on Uber.

[1241] They geo -fence the JFK airport in New York and enact surge pricing for JFK.

[1242] The reaction to this among the public is not good.

[1243] Now, this is a super interesting story.

[1244] The Lyft, of course, does not go into primetime as Lyft's version of surge.

[1245] in JFK.

[1246] Apparently, at the time, I don't know if it still is, Lyft's technical infrastructure was not architected to be able to turn on and off surge, like draw arbitrary geo -fences.

[1247] And so there are options where either turn on surge on like all of New York or don't turn on surge.

[1248] And that was kind of how, one of the inputs into how they made their decision not to turn on prime time when this happened.

[1249] But so Uber does, Lyft doesn't, you can imagine how this looks, the public excursiates Uber for what happens here, that they're gouging, they're taking advantage of the travel ban.

[1250] They're gouging people, immigrants who have been stranded.

[1251] They're charging them hundreds of dollars to get where they're going.

[1252] People also realize, hey, Trump has enacted this technology advisory council.

[1253] Travis is on Trump's advisory council.

[1254] Is he in league?

[1255] Is he in league with Trump?

[1256] Is he like trying to profit?

[1257] Is Uber trying to profit it on this travel ban, definitely was not the intention or the case.

[1258] And Travis puts out a statement that, like, joining the group, he says, joining the group was not meant to be an endorsement of the president or his agenda, but unfortunately it has been misinterpreted to be exactly that.

[1259] There are many ways in which we will continue to advocate for change on immigration, but staying on the council was going to get in the way of that, and he resigns from the council immediately.

[1260] But, like, the damage is done.

[1261] And what emerges out of this is hashtag delete Uber.

[1262] And, David, this geo -fencing thing, I think that's a pretty underreported.

[1263] little tidbit, I also think, like, people still, when they hear the delete Uber, they link it to all the events that would follow here, and they remember something happened at the airport, but I think there was sort of a massive misconception and misunderstanding between the company what they were able to do, what they were trying to do, and then what they got roasted for.

[1264] Yep, totally.

[1265] I genuinely think they were trying to do the right thing, and they were already under so much pressure from drivers about driver earnings massively declining in this new peer -to -peer world they were trying to do the right thing for drivers I really think that is the case and this was also not like a Travis decision this was you know this was way farther down in the company and I think they were trying to do the right thing however the company deserved everything that was coming next and on this initial spark you can't start a fire unless there's a bunch of fuel around the spark to catch and so they had to accrued a whole bunch of non -goodwill from the public, from drivers, from, you know, all sorts of people that, you know, it could have been any number of sparks, but they had, there was, it was latent bad will.

[1266] Yeah.

[1267] And worst inside the company.

[1268] So very shortly after this, within a couple of weeks, a female Uber engineer named Susan Fowler, I believe was Times person of the year in 2017, I believe, because of this, publishes a blog post announcing that this is this is mid -February that this is her last day at uber she's leaving the company and she tells her story in this blog post about how from day one when she was hired her boss at uber in the engineering organization tried to proposition her for sex and tried to do it over text over chat in recordable ways within the company within company systems.

[1269] She reported it to the company.

[1270] She reported it to HR.

[1271] And what followed is all too common in many industries, and especially the tech industry.

[1272] Nothing happened to him.

[1273] And she was punished.

[1274] And HR gave her the choice, according to her.

[1275] And she documented all of this to either switch teams and not work for this boss anymore, but he would be fine.

[1276] And she would have to change her career.

[1277] Or she could stay and on the team, continue working for him, continue putting up with this and probably be given a poor performance rating, probably because she wouldn't.

[1278] wouldn't have sex with him.

[1279] Just horrifying.

[1280] Like, totally, totally horrifying.

[1281] There's literally nothing else thing to be said.

[1282] And what's even worse, things got even worse from there.

[1283] She continued interacting with HR.

[1284] She did end up eventually transferring to other parts of the company.

[1285] This continued to be a case.

[1286] HR did not acknowledge it did everything wrong.

[1287] And it went up to senior levels of the company who continued to do everything wrong.

[1288] She writes this blog post.

[1289] It is, that is the, if the spark was delete Uber at the airport, this is the, the bomb that goes off.

[1290] And the next week, Travis meets with a group of female engineering leaders within the company, an audio recording of this meeting services.

[1291] And it's basically not particularly flattering.

[1292] Travis doesn't say anything like particularly bad, but he's also not like really empathetic to what's going on here.

[1293] And it's not helped that Travis himself had made plenty of public comments over the past years about how his own sexual conquests, his own partying, you know, back to the Garrett and Travis days going out in San Francisco that started the company.

[1294] And, you know, he, he referred to Uber by a homonym that implies that it allowed him to, to sleep with lots of women.

[1295] Not good.

[1296] On the back of this, the company and the board hires the former attorney general of the U .S. Eric Holder to, who had just left, who was in the Obama administration, to come in and lead a thorough investigation into the company, into HR practices, harassment, everything going on.

[1297] Okay, that's bad.

[1298] next thing that happens, we're now like a week later in the end of February, Google, remember, Google is a major investor in Uber.

[1299] They sue the company.

[1300] They sue Uber because Uber had acquired a company called Auto, which was led by Anthony Lewandowski, who was a former employee within Waymo, Google's self -driving car division.

[1301] And according to Google in the lawsuit, he took most or all of his intellectual property that he had developed at Uber, brought it illegally into Otto.

[1302] Uber acquired auto and now had illegally Google intellectual property around self -driving cars.

[1303] And what was especially a bad look for Uber here was that auto was bought for a good amount of money and hadn't built much.

[1304] And so then the question was like, okay, why did they do that?

[1305] They basically spent, I think it was $650 million to acquire auto.

[1306] Uber did.

[1307] And it was it looked and probably essentially was that they spent that money to acquire Google trade secrets.

[1308] Not good.

[1309] Okay.

[1310] Things keep getting worse.

[1311] 8th, Bloomberg publishes a video that has been leaked, a dash cam video from an Uber driver of Travis in this Uber with probably intoxicated on a night out on the town.

[1312] Getting into an argument with the Uber driver, the Uber driver realizes it's Travis in the back of the car and starts talking to Travis about how his earnings have gone way down on Uber.

[1313] And Travis just starts berating him and yelling at him.

[1314] It's terrible.

[1315] That comes out.

[1316] That's the next body blow.

[1317] And several days later, it comes out that Uber sponsored a trip to escort bar in Seoul, South Korea, with several senior Uber executives participating in this.

[1318] And this has come out as part of Holder's investigation into the company.

[1319] It gets leaked to the press.

[1320] Executives start resigning immediately.

[1321] And they're resigning for two reasons.

[1322] One, so Jeff Jones had just come in from Target to help kind of clean up the image at Uber here.

[1323] Is this was starting to happen?

[1324] He was, I believe, CMO or C -O, he leaves immediately and he resigns and he says, I do not want to be, this is not who I am.

[1325] I do not want to be associated with this company.

[1326] I do not want to be associated with this culture.

[1327] I'm out of here.

[1328] He doesn't even negotiate an exit package.

[1329] He's like, I don't want any stock in this company.

[1330] I'm gone.

[1331] Other executives start resigning because they know that they did really bad things and the investigation is coming for them.

[1332] All told something like six or seven senior executives leave Uber like within the month of March.

[1333] next thing that comes out in May is the New York Times reports that Uber has been using software that it called internally gray ball to mask its activity.

[1334] Uber was continuing to operate in cities with peer -to -peer operate in cities that it shut down peer -to -peer ride sharing.

[1335] Uber was continuing to operate and using this software to mask regulators and police from seeing that they were operating.

[1336] That's pretty bad.

[1337] And an abrupt turnaround from several years earlier, the company was committed to pushing the rules but operating within the rules.

[1338] Then in late may tragedy strikes.

[1339] Travis's parents are involved in a terrible boating accident and his mother is is killed in this boating accident in California.

[1340] His dad's severely injured.

[1341] Again, you know, you can imagine what's going on in his head through all this and the pressure he's dealing with.

[1342] In June, it comes to light that this is the next month.

[1343] It comes to light that Uber, there was another terrible tragedy that had happened in India where a woman was raped and assaulted by an Uber driver during an uber ride the company and india investigated into it and as part of the company's investigation into what happened they illegally access the woman's medical records basically stole the woman's medical records and they wanted to confirm that she was indeed raped because the implication was uber didn't believe that that what she was saying was true god i had not also totally terrible and like i mean it's it's uncomfortable to just like hear it blow by blow by Oh, totally.

[1344] Well, and it's like, these are just facts, you know, this is terrible.

[1345] On June 11th, right after this, the holder report is issued to the Uber board.

[1346] It's really bad.

[1347] The very next day, a senior executive in the company named Emil Michael, who was involved in many of these incidents and who, for a long time, it had a reputation at Uber and within Silicon Valley as an effective operator, but it was no surprise that he was involved in these things.

[1348] He'd been involved in a confrontation with the journalist Sarah Lacey a few years earlier, he resigns the next day under pressure from the board based on what was in the holder report.

[1349] Two days later, on June 13th, the board convinces Travis that he needs to take a three -month leave of absence from the company.

[1350] A, because of everything that's going on and, you know, B, his mother was just killed, tragically.

[1351] His father's in critical condition.

[1352] They ask him to leave the company he agrees to a three -month leave of absence.

[1353] On that same day, this is incredible.

[1354] I remember when this happened.

[1355] I was just like watching a train wreck.

[1356] The same day, there's an all -hands meeting at the company led by several of the Uber board meetings.

[1357] This is the worst.

[1358] During this all -heims meeting, the purpose of which is to talk about all these problems stemming from, you know, the Susan Fowler, what she reported within the company, everything going on to talk about the outcome of the holder report.

[1359] David Bonderman, co -founder of TPG, who is on the board from TPG's investment in Uber is on stage alongside other board members, including Ariana Huffington, who I believe is the only female board member at this point in time at the company.

[1360] And Ariana says to the company, quote, there's a lot of data that shows that when there's one woman on the board of a company, it's much more likely that there will be a second woman on the board.

[1361] And Bonderman makes just like the most awful, awful, awful comment that he interjects here to what Ariana just said.

[1362] He says, actually, what it shows is there's much more likely to be more talking.

[1363] And this is just like the total sexist comment.

[1364] Like what?

[1365] This meeting was called to try and ease everyone's concerns that we are not a bunch of sexist horrible.

[1366] Like what are on earth?

[1367] The worst.

[1368] Thankfully, Bonnerman immediately is kicked off the board like that day.

[1369] That, I mean, how you could even even go there is just beyond the pale.

[1370] He's kicked off the board that day.

[1371] And that is, I think, you know, while secondary to Travis, I think that's kind of the last draw that like something very, very, very fundamentally needs to change in the company.

[1372] And the only thing that is going to do that is a new CEO and completely new, you know, a decapitation of old leadership and new leadership coming in at the top.

[1373] Yep.

[1374] And so this this whole thing started in January.

[1375] It's now June.

[1376] Mid June.

[1377] And we should like take a quick moment and say, you recall from the Lyft episode, they were on the ropes.

[1378] Like they were.

[1379] dead.

[1380] Uber was beating him.

[1381] They raised so much money.

[1382] They were, who would fund Lyft?

[1383] They lost.

[1384] And then this happened.

[1385] Lyfted tried to sell itself.

[1386] Lifted tried to sell itself to Uber, at least once, if not multiple times at this point.

[1387] Uber and Travis believed that they would just crush them.

[1388] They wouldn't have to buy them.

[1389] They could continue operating and all the problems would be solved and then all this happens.

[1390] And so, on June 20th, at this point in time, you know, Benchmark and Bill Gurley as kind of lead investors have been at their wits end trying to deal with this and just a this terrible situation.

[1391] Bill had stepped off the board fellow benchmark partner Matt Kohler had taken his place on the board to try and broker some kind of relationship moving forward here.

[1392] They decide they've had enough.

[1393] So they organize a group of of the core investors, core venture investors in the company, benchmark first round, menlo, lowercase capital, and then they get fidelity involved too.

[1394] They write a letter.

[1395] They all sign a letter.

[1396] And Matt Kohler and fellow benchmark partner, Peter Fenton, they fly to Chicago.

[1397] Travis is in Chicago.

[1398] Remember, he's supposed to be taking a leave of absence from the company.

[1399] He's interviewing a COO candidate for the company.

[1400] And supposedly behind the scenes, he's agitating to try and come back as soon as possible and stay super involved.

[1401] They fly to Chicago.

[1402] They meet Travis at his hotel and they present him with this letter.

[1403] The letter demands that he resigned from the company.

[1404] And there's several hours of negotiation at the end of which Travis signs the letter and he does resign as CEO of the company on June 20th.

[1405] Part of the discussion was that as part of him resigning, he would be able to say it was his decision.

[1406] It was part of everything personally that was going on.

[1407] He'd take some responsibility, but he could say, you know, this was my decision.

[1408] All of this gets leaked to the press in real time, and it becomes clear this is not his decision.

[1409] This was the investors led by benchmark forcing this upon him.

[1410] This is after he's signed that this becomes clear.

[1411] And so he, as one might expect, knowing his history and mental state, he kind of revolts.

[1412] And he starts calling other shareholders within the company to see if he has their support for a vote.

[1413] By the way, this is all reported in the press by great reporting by the New York Times and by Bloomberg and by Brad and his team.

[1414] And he calls for, starts drumming up support for a vote to come back as CEO of the company.

[1415] It's just sad to talk about.

[1416] But I think we have to talk about this.

[1417] A, because it's, it's, I don't think there's any debate that this actually happened.

[1418] And B, this is part of the story.

[1419] So, benchmark in response files a lawsuit to Travis.

[1420] So once again, you have investors suing a CEO of a company, suing Travis, uh, while they're investors in the company.

[1421] Again, unheard of for a, you know, a firm like benchmark to be suing a founder of a company that they had backed.

[1422] But this is what it had come to.

[1423] Uh, and honestly, you know, these were, this is the end of the days of founder friendly.

[1424] You know, and I think that's a good thing.

[1425] Like, it's great to be funnily founders, but there's certain behavior that just cannot be tolerated.

[1426] So benchmark sues Travis for fraud and, uh, and breach of fiduciary duty.

[1427] The way that that all plays out is in negotiations over who is going to replace him as CEO.

[1428] So Travis realizes he doesn't have the support to come in as CEO, but he thinks he can bring somebody in who's going to be supportive of him and his interests in the company as the CEO.

[1429] And he still has several seats on the board.

[1430] His choice is Jeff Immelt, who until recently was, CEO of GE.

[1431] Benchmarks choice is Meg Whitman, who was CEO of eBay, and one of their, you know, best investments and that has played a big role in this story.

[1432] There is a dark horse candidate, though.

[1433] And so everybody...

[1434] And I think both of them, like, I know Meg Whitman at least tweeted, like, yeah, I'm not, like, I don't know what you guys are talking about.

[1435] I'm not taking this job.

[1436] Right.

[1437] They both independently confirmed to the press, like, no, I will not be the CEO of Uber.

[1438] And so everyone's sort of scratching their heads, like, well, who's a going to be.

[1439] Who is going to be the CEO?

[1440] And it's amazing, it is amazing, like, that this does not get, not come out, does not get reported until the announcement is made on Sunday, August 27th, 2017, who the new CEO of Uber is.

[1441] And it is Dara Kaz Rashahi.

[1442] He had been the CEO of Expedia since 2005 and really is an incredible story and an incredible kind of choice to come out of all of this and lead, uh, lead the company through, um, what was probably.

[1443] the most public mess of a venture -back startup to play out in the press, probably ever.

[1444] Yep.

[1445] So Dara's story, like we said, is incredible.

[1446] He grew up, it was born initially in Iran.

[1447] His family was a wealthy Iranian family in the pharmaceutical industry.

[1448] In the late 70s, though, during the Iranian revolution, the company got nationalized.

[1449] They had to escape persecution.

[1450] They move.

[1451] They immigrate to the U .S. with nothing.

[1452] They restart everything as the whole family.

[1453] He grows up in the suburbs of New York.

[1454] When he's 13 in 1982, his father has to go back to Iran to care for his grandfather.

[1455] He didn't see his father again for six years.

[1456] Incredible.

[1457] Despite all this, he goes, he excels in school.

[1458] He ends up going to Brown.

[1459] He then does banking after school at Allen & Company, where his brother also worked at Allen & Company is now an MD at Allen & Company.

[1460] He joins IAC after Allen & Company.

[1461] He becomes the CEO of IAC.

[1462] of course, Barry Diller's media and internet holding company.

[1463] In 2001, IAC buys Expedia with a lot of Dara's work on that.

[1464] Dara, a couple years later, becomes the CEO of Expedia.

[1465] And he is the anti -travis.

[1466] He is a super outspoken critic of Trump and the immigration policies that Trump was putting in place obviously because of his family history and also because that's like the right thing.

[1467] And the board tasked him with basically three things to come in and do three easy tasks.

[1468] one, fix the culture at Uber.

[1469] Two, stem the losses that we've been suffering in these wars all around the world and focus on core markets.

[1470] And three, take the company public and get this done.

[1471] And so this is August 2017.

[1472] I think unquestionably, he has done about as good a job as you can imagine with part one, fixing the culture.

[1473] I think there's still, of course, problems and things to be solved.

[1474] But, like, he comes in and pretty immediately, he revises the core values of the company.

[1475] He settles the Google lawsuit.

[1476] He retains employees.

[1477] He makes great hires.

[1478] And I think, you know, again, still more work to be done.

[1479] But certainly compared to the trajectory that Uber and Uber's culture was on, an unquestionable turnaround.

[1480] Also, on point three of taking the company public, they just went public today.

[1481] But that really starts in January 2018.

[1482] He orchestrates a deal.

[1483] There's all this fighting on the board and with Travis and everybody.

[1484] He orchestrates a deal with SoftBank to come in.

[1485] And so SoftBank leading along with Dragonnear, Sequoia, and Didi itself.

[1486] they do an almost $9 billion transaction with Uber, same size as the IPO that just happened last night and this morning.

[1487] 7 .7 billion of secondary sales, much of which comes from Travis directly, but also from other existing shareholders, including the venture investors, that SoftBank and others buy at a $48 billion valuation, another one and a quarter billion dollars of primary equity from the company at a $70 billion valuation.

[1488] Yeah.

[1489] At the end of the days, some investment into the company to give them cash, but mostly taking money off the table.

[1490] And what a discount.

[1491] Like that previous round with the DD merger had been a $68 billion post.

[1492] This is a $48 billion offer.

[1493] You know, hey, take it or leave it.

[1494] We'll buy your shares at this share price.

[1495] You know, it's a, it's a pretty wild way to buy up to 15 % of a company.

[1496] Totally.

[1497] They get so soft bank gets 15%.

[1498] But more importantly, this cleans up all the problems.

[1499] So benchmark agrees to drop the lawsuit as part of this.

[1500] Travis lays down his arms and everybody unquestionable kind of leader of the company.

[1501] going forward.

[1502] Amazing peacemaker.

[1503] I mean, given the circumstance he was coming into there.

[1504] I mean, coming from, you know, his banking days in IAC and Barry Diller and then Expedia, like you can see how, uh, as great as Jeff Imelden McG Whitman are, like very few other people could have executed this, you know, um, uh, as well as Dara had.

[1505] Now, number two on his task list of getting to, you know, stemming the losses, uh, more questionable.

[1506] Uh, and that takes us to today.

[1507] So obviously yesterday, uh, Thursday, May 9th, Uber priced its IPO at $45 a share towards the bottom of the range or equal to an $82 billion market cap, open trading today on Friday at $42 a share or a $76 billion market cap.

[1508] As we speak, I believe they are trading at $43 .84.

[1509] Oh, wow.

[1510] No, I have down to $41 .76.

[1511] Oh, whoa.

[1512] I just refreshed and saw that too.

[1513] Yeah.

[1514] So still slightly below that opening of $42.

[1515] They're down 7 % off the opening.

[1516] Yeah.

[1517] We'll see what happens in the coming days.

[1518] Yeah, we should say, like, the first day of trading is a pretty terrible predictor of what's going to happen in the next few weeks.

[1519] Yeah.

[1520] Or even the next year, right?

[1521] Like, I mean, we all saw sort of Facebook's trough after IPO.

[1522] Yeah.

[1523] So there we have it.

[1524] The history and facts.

[1525] Wow.

[1526] Oh, man. What a story.

[1527] I mean, what a story.

[1528] I mean, I don't think it's any exaggeration to say like the certainly not the whole story of the time, but like a one of the biggest, if not the biggest stories of our time right now in, you know, in the technology startup and venture capital world.

[1529] Like this is unprecedented on almost every front.

[1530] Yep.

[1531] Well, David, should we, now that we're done with the first section of the show.

[1532] Yeah.

[1533] I think we've probably covered the narrative, you know, the Bull and Bearcase narrative is pretty, pretty thoroughly here.

[1534] Let's nail them, though, because I feel like it's, let's get Crystal on sort of what, what different folks would paint.

[1535] Because I think we've alluded to a lot of things, but I think it's important to sort of paint what different people were saying about the company going into the IPO.

[1536] So the fascinating thing was in the Uber Road Show, they were comparing.

[1537] themselves to Amazon and one of the reasons was not only are we you know going to develop into this massive global market but Amazon famously didn't make a profit for you know had this razor thin they never really made any profit for the longest time and when they IPOed they were generating losses now of course the fallacy there is they were not generating three billion dollars of an operating loss but that is sort of the way that they were positioning it to IPO buyers they've also shown like incredible growth in Uber Eats so it's already more than 13 % of Uber's revenue it's only a few years old but last year they did one and a half billion in revenue the year before was only half a billion in revenue so just wild you know bright star there for for Uber Eats and I have massive personal gripes with the way this S1 was written because it made my job researching this episode just terrible, and they intentionally did this, and you know, it feels not dishonest, but in a gray area, it is extremely difficult to figure out how the ride -sharing business is doing, because Uber has chosen to create a metric called monthly active core platform users, and they group core platform as ride -sharing, Uber -Eats, and new methods of multi -modality transports, so scooters and e -bytes and micro -mobility.

[1538] So the bulk case is that their monthly active core platform users continues to rise.

[1539] I think a lot of that growth is Uber Eats, but really hard to read into that.

[1540] But to the extent that that's the number you're looking at, users continue to rise and...

[1541] Yeah, I think the other part of the bull case here is that we're still less than two years into...

[1542] Dara being the CEO of Uber and his ability, both through his personality, but also through his background, to be a peacemaker and a deal maker around the world and return the dynamics, the unit economics and dynamics of Uber's core operations to something much more profitable and sustainable versus all out wars that they've been in.

[1543] So, yeah, the thing that you, I think, have to believe is, well, look, globally across all these fragmented markets that is ride sharing.

[1544] It's one of the largest Uber markets of all time.

[1545] And, you know, they are really well positioned to be the main player in the space and own big chunks of these companies in other markets.

[1546] And at some point when they are able to ramp down marketing spend, they're going to generate, you know, a lot of money.

[1547] The thing you have to sort of ask yourself is, okay, well, when is the knife fight going to end?

[1548] Like how, what will be the catalyzing event for all companies involved to start making money instead of spending to steal share.

[1549] Yep.

[1550] And with the Lyft IPO, you know, six weeks or so ago, and them now being a public company, I don't see that happening in most U .S. markets any time soon.

[1551] Yeah.

[1552] Yeah.

[1553] Yeah.

[1554] Okay.

[1555] Well, let's go into Bears.

[1556] This may take a little couple minutes.

[1557] So revenue growth has slowed pretty dramatically.

[1558] If you look at the ride -hailing business from 2016 to 17, it grew 100%.

[1559] From 2017 to 18, it grew 42%.

[1560] And then over the last two, maybe three -quarters, it's been basically flat.

[1561] So the growth is not coming from the ride -hailing business.

[1562] So if you want to believe that this is a growth company, and it is, because they're on a lot of vectors, it's not coming from ride -sharing.

[1563] And you have to really be honest with yourself and acknowledge that.

[1564] Well, and a big problem there is that there probably is a lot of growth happening in ride -sharing, but they've also been losing share in the U .S. in their core markets to lift over the last year.

[1565] So there's growth happening in some markets, but attrition happening in others.

[1566] Yes.

[1567] So this is something that was a little buried also in the S -1, but you can find where they come out and say, in 2017, our ride -sharing category position in the U .S. in Canada was significantly impacted by adverse publicity events, which we covered.

[1568] Although the rate of decline in our ride -sharing category position has since, quote -unquote, moderated, our ride -sharing category position generally declined in 2018 in the substantial majority of the regions in which we operate, impacted in part by, of course, heavy subsidies and discounts by our competitors in various markets that we felt compelled to match in order to remain competitive.

[1569] And so the takeaway here is, I think the important word there is moderated.

[1570] They are still losing share in these core ride sharing markets.

[1571] So anyone who wanted to blame delete Uber for Lyft's resurgence and say, but we're all good now, you know, we're a growing share again.

[1572] It's just not the case.

[1573] Yep.

[1574] Another thing, so that's looking at growth.

[1575] and of course the way that these IPOs tend to get valued as growth stocks were early in a company's life.

[1576] There's lots of growth ahead.

[1577] You know, they're going to get more profitable over time.

[1578] They're going to both get more profitable over time and continue to grow at these great rates that they've been growing, not like a little 10 % public company growth rate, but like a, you know, these sort of startup, you know, growing 30, 40 % per year growth rates.

[1579] So I said get more profitable.

[1580] Now, let's dig into that and specifically into contribution margin.

[1581] So the contribution margin for the core platform business, which is, of course, the ride sharing and Uber Eats, which was 18 % a year ago, was actually negative 3 % in Q4 of last year.

[1582] So really sort of dangerous trend there where we start to see them, you know, even...

[1583] And that's a direct reflection of the subsidies and competition.

[1584] Completely.

[1585] It's that and it's because this is all lumped together into one category here.

[1586] It's also very likely due to the aggressive marketing spend for the rapid expansion of Uber Eats.

[1587] But nonetheless, it's a, it's, you know, you don't want to see a contribution margin shrinking as a company is getting more mature.

[1588] Yep.

[1589] So I think those are the two biggest things, the growth in the contribution margin that are scary from a bare perspective.

[1590] One thing to flag is that a lot of very high profile investors, including founder Collective and SoftBank are selling big chunks of their shares in the IPO.

[1591] They sold them last night to new investors in a secondary transaction rather than sort of waiting for the lockup period.

[1592] This, I wouldn't read too much into this because the money's been tied up for a long time.

[1593] They're trying to get liquidity.

[1594] And this is not unprecedented, but it's certainly not an encouraging sign if you're a sort of potential buyer.

[1595] Yeah, I agree not to read too much.

[1596] I mean, these are shareholders that have been holding the shares for a very long time.

[1597] Yes.

[1598] Super fair.

[1599] But no, I think the question is a lot of the questions that emerged when the dynamic changed for Uber, both nationally in the U .S. and globally with the emergence of peer -to -peer ride sharing, you know, the hope was that the massive amounts of capital raised and the operational investments would have settled those questions over the last four or five years.

[1600] They're still very much open questions.

[1601] Doesn't mean the market is still enormous and massive and the potential is there.

[1602] And relative to the It'd be way, way back in the beginning of this episode where there were 1 ,500 taxicab medallions in San Francisco.

[1603] This market is so much bigger and open.

[1604] But who will win and how it will play out and the unit economic impact of that is still an open question.

[1605] Yep.

[1606] The other thing is there's a, this isn't really a bull or bearer, but it's interesting to just think about this.

[1607] 20 % of the value of this company is actually a holding company.

[1608] They own 15 % of D .D. in China.

[1609] 38 % of Yandex taxi in Russia, 23 % of Grab in Southeast Asia.

[1610] And that's $18 billion of equity that they own in these other companies.

[1611] And if everyone remembers the Altaba episode with Yahoo and Alibaba, being a holding company that owns a bunch of other assets, you don't get to value the assets at exactly what they're trading for because they're sort of inherent risk in, well, is this entity going to be able to get liquid on those assets if they ever needed to.

[1612] And so, you know, a good chunk of Uber's valuation is actually holding these foreign ride -sharing companies.

[1613] Yep.

[1614] All right.

[1615] So that's Bull and Bear.

[1616] Let's go and grade this thing.

[1617] Long pause.

[1618] Yeah.

[1619] I'll make a couple points first before we paint sort of what an A -plus would look like if, you know, we had six to 12 months to reflect back on this thing and then, of course, what an F would look like.

[1620] It's worth noting that every shareholder who bought share.

[1621] since, gosh, end of 2015, including everyone who bought in the IPO last night, is now underwater.

[1622] They had a pretty terrible narrative leading up to this thing that was really botched where a year ago, investment bankers were rumoring that there would be a $120 billion market cap for this company when it IPOed.

[1623] And a couple months ago, the rumor sort of changed to $100 billion.

[1624] And then they gave guidance that they were going to have an IPO range that went somewhere from, you know, mid -80s up to low 90s.

[1625] And then they priced at the very bottom of that range.

[1626] So coming into this IPO, it already felt like it had been sliding.

[1627] I mean, the sort of public sentiment was I'm buying something on the way down.

[1628] So it's not surprising that there wasn't a big pop on the first day.

[1629] Uber, to their credit, was conservative on pricing, which I think was a good idea.

[1630] But the question is what do you have to believe to love this right now and one is that ride sharing will somehow get less competitive marketing spend will decrease and you know the other is that um they've built this incredible infrastructure and now they can really light it up with uber eats and other things on their infrastructure that are great businesses but of course um uber eats is also wildly competitive with door dash and grubhub um so that's also not a not a smooth sailing market what this section really tries to get after is great they just raised $9 billion are they going to be able to effectively use that and what will it look like if they effectively use that well they needed to raise a bunch of money like I will say it went well by the criteria of oh my god they needed to raise a bunch of money and get it into the company's coffers and they did there's no pop so people who bought the IPO at least so far did not see an immediate benefit, although, you know, they should be holding for a long time anyway, and we'll see what happens in a year.

[1631] But Uber got basically the most money that they possibly could have out of this IPO.

[1632] The capital markets, yeah.

[1633] Yeah, if they're taking an operating loss of three billion dollars a year.

[1634] Oh, and by the way, they said they think that will continue to increase this year.

[1635] Like, they need a lot of money in order to start to pull out of this thing.

[1636] And it wouldn't surprise me again if we saw a secondary offering at some point where when they felt good about their share price, they tried to sell more of the company.

[1637] Yeah, it very much could happen.

[1638] And I think, I think the question is, yeah, when will, when will it turn?

[1639] But, you know, it's so far, the scale is orders of magnitude larger than Amazon.

[1640] But I will say, this is the Amazon story and the Amazon history.

[1641] And so I think, yeah, the A plus case is exactly what Uber, what Dara and the company have been saying on the road show and through the IPO process, which is, this is Amazon.

[1642] We are bleeding tons of money.

[1643] but we are building this infrastructure across multiple businesses that will, that will be extremely defensible and profitable in the long term.

[1644] And I think that is an incredible story.

[1645] It's a very credible story.

[1646] It's a credible story.

[1647] But the question people are struggling with is how you price it right now.

[1648] But this company is $20 billion and they're, however, 10 years old.

[1649] Like, can we get more than a credible story?

[1650] I know, I know.

[1651] But that's the, so I think that's the, that's the, that's the, that's the, that's the A plus.

[1652] Yeah, 100%.

[1653] And so let's get more specific.

[1654] on what that looks like.

[1655] They are contribution margin positive on the ride sharing business, some small number of years from now, and Uber Eats continues this great growth rate that they're on and also gets profitable.

[1656] Well, and because they, I think the other part of the story is because they share the same infrastructure and supply side across both of those businesses and potentially other businesses in the future, that is going to be a very strong battleship, if you will, that will turn the tide in their fight with competitors that their economics will be fundamentally different than others.

[1657] Because they can afford to spend more on the infrastructure than Lyft or any of these players that don't have something like Eats.

[1658] As they acquire the supply side that they're spending to acquire drivers, they're leveraging that spend across multiple businesses, whereas competitors are only leveraging it across one business.

[1659] Yeah, my other favorite structural advantage of that that I saw was somebody pointed out that if you can keep a driver busy 100 % of the time between Eats and the core ride sharing business, then they have less of an incentive.

[1660] to multi -home on other apps.

[1661] And then if you reduce the supply on Lyft, then it's a worse driver, a worse user experience, et cetera.

[1662] And you can start to tip the field.

[1663] And as we talked about on, you know, another company that Bill Gurley was intimately involved in on our Rover Dog Vacay episode and that I saw firsthand, that is absolutely true.

[1664] If you can tip unit economics in a market in favor of one competitor over the other, they will tip.

[1665] So I think, yeah, the A plus, the A plus scenario is this capital infusion gives them the resources to continue.

[1666] to be able to do that.

[1667] And the F scenario is it just takes too long.

[1668] They go for this and I think it's more likely that like given an infinite time scale in dollars, they'll actually be able to do this.

[1669] I think all the fundamentals hold.

[1670] I think the F scenario is they're not able to access the capital that they need to.

[1671] And I think investors stop signing up to put more cash in before the music stops.

[1672] And I think that there's a very, you know, that could also happen.

[1673] I don't know what happens to Uber at that point, but, you know, that's definitely the downside scenarios.

[1674] They can't get it done in a short enough time frame to not need to go and access new capital in a really either dilutive or, um, or potentially not accessible.

[1675] Yeah.

[1676] Yeah.

[1677] Well, I think that's the, so yeah, if I'm, uh, if I'm in the shoes of, uh, of Dara and, and the Uber board and, uh, at soft bank given their influence here, I'm, I think I would imagine like the $9 billion that they just raised in the IPO like that's my that's my time frame like yep i think you have to believe there is no more capital coming yep that's a great point so all right well the f obviously is that doesn't work uh i'm sure there will be some follow -up episodes we do on this at various transactions along the way so stay tuned to acquired in the coming years but this is just to just to put a bow on this you know and thank you listeners for for bearing with us through this super extended piece um Just like the Lyft IPS, oh, we had to do this here.

[1678] Like, this is the, you know, this is the, not the only, but this is one of the key stories of our time.

[1679] And we, we wanted to do it as justice and be as fair from all sides as I think we could.

[1680] So hit us up with any feedback, but we're, we're super excited to see where things go from here.

[1681] Indeed.

[1682] Our sponsor for this episode is a brand new one for us.

[1683] Statsig.

[1684] So many of you reached out to them after hearing their see.

[1685] CEO, Vijay, on ACQ2, that we are partnering with them as a sponsor of Acquired.

[1686] Yeah, for those of you who haven't listened, Vijay's story is amazing.

[1687] Before founding Statsig, Vijay spent 10 years at Facebook where he led the development of their mobile app ad product, which, as you all know, went on to become a huge part of their business.

[1688] He also had a front row seat to all of the incredible product engineering tools that let Facebook continuously experiment and roll out product features to billions of users around the world.

[1689] Yep.

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[1691] Statscig is a feature management and experimentation platform that helps product teams ship faster, automate A -B testing, and see the impact every feature is having on the core business metrics.

[1692] The tool gives visualizations backed by a powerful stats engine unlocking real -time product observability.

[1693] So what does that actually mean?

[1694] It lets you tie a new feature that you just shipped to a core metric in your business and then instantly know if it made a difference or not in how your customers use your product.

[1695] It's super cool.

[1696] Statsig lets you make actual data -driven decisions about product changes, test them with different user groups around the world, and get statistically accurate reporting on the impact.

[1697] Customers include Notion, Brex, OpenAI, FlipCart, Figma, Microsoft, and Cruise Automation.

[1698] There are, like, so many more that we could name.

[1699] I mean, I'm looking at the list, Plex and Versel, friends of the show at Rec Room, Vanta.

[1700] They, like, literally have hundreds of customers now.

[1701] Also, Statsig is a great platform for rolling out and testing AI product features.

[1702] So for anyone who's used Notion's awesome generative AI features and watched how fast that product has evolved, all of that was managed with Statsig.

[1703] Yep.

[1704] If you're experimenting with new AI features for your product and you want to know if it's really making a difference for your KPI's Statsig is awesome for that.

[1705] They can now ingest data from data warehouses.

[1706] So it works with your company's data wherever it's stored so you can quickly get started no matter how your feature flagging is set up today.

[1707] You don't even have to migrate from any current solution you might have.

[1708] We're pumped to be working with them.

[1709] You can click the link in the show notes or go on over to statSig .com to get started.

[1710] and when you do, just tell them that you heard about them from Ben and David here on Acquired.

[1711] Well, if you aren't subscribed and you like what you hear, you should.

[1712] We will be continuing to cover all of these big upcoming IPOs, and if you want to go deeper on what it's like to build a startup, get interviews with expert operators and VCs, and explore some of David and my personal beliefs.

[1713] You should become a limited partner.

[1714] You can click the link in the show notes or go to glow .fm slash acquired.

[1715] And I promise you'll be overjoyed with how buttery smooth it is to get more acquired right here on your favorite podcast player and everyone gets a free trial.

[1716] So don't be afraid to give it a shot.

[1717] We've got some awesome, awesome episodes coming up and we'll see you next time.

[1718] We'll see you next time.