Shervin Pishevar on The Epic Uber War and What Really Happened in the Firing of Travis…

Thank you, Harry. It’s it’s

Absolutely. Thank you. My mom passed away last Wednesday. We’re gonna have her funeral in a in a few days, and she was the most incredible human I’ve ever met. She was a teacher for fourteen years in Iran. When we escaped the revolution and came to America, she started all over again. We came with $35, and then, we had to escape. We started with nothing, and my dad drove a taxi while getting his PhD. My mom was a maid and worked two jobs as a cafeteria worker and a maid.

I used to go clean rooms with her. So it was a kinda classic, American dream story. And she took computer programming classes at a college in Maryland while I was a kid. And so she and she would take me to her classes. So I and this was like when they had the paper with the holes in it. You punch the holes, and that that was how they coded in the eighties. And so I I got to kinda see that. And then I saw, the Apple, and I begged for an Apple.

My mom and dad worked overtime for three months to afford it. Back then, was like $3,000, which is a lot in nineteen eighty five, eighty six. And they bought me my first Apple 2C, and I did my first code on it, and that changed my life. And then later, she secretly put on her credit card a laptop when I was at Berkeley, and I didn’t have enough money to get get a laptop. And she put it on her credit card. And I always said that she was my angel my first angel investor, my first believer.

But she really taught me how to dream in color, and I’m finding this process of grieving profound in that I see her now in ways that I couldn’t see her when she was alive.

Absolutely. It was it was a great journey. I started, my first company called WebOS senior year of college, and that’s when my mom bought me the laptop. And I was working a night job to as a security guard to to make enough money to start my company. So I had the the little LG laptop with a dial up connection that was while I was on a in the security job all night working working on on the startup as well. And at WebOS, I started recruiting really young talent.

And at the time, the greatest developers in on the Internet were really young. They were, like, 15 year olds like Anthony Casalena, who’s the founder of Squarespace. There was this kind of realization that I had an eye for talent. And then that led later led to meeting Travis many years later and getting that sense of, like, oh, this Travis is different. How

I met him because Sheryl Sandberg actually was a a mentor of mine. I was building, you know, Facebook apps and iPhone games for my one of my first companies, SGN. Sheryl read an essay that I wrote about entrepreneurship and reached out to me on her own and was like, hey. Could you do lunch? And she had just joined Facebook. And she wanted advice about the App Store and what percentage they should charge. And then I shared that, you know, Apple charges 30%. You could probably charge 30%, which is what they ended up doing.

And so we would meet once a quarter, and she was a great mentor. And then I was selling SGN, and she told me, Shervin, you should go on a venture. You’ll be disruptive. And I was like, I just didn’t think I had a seat at the table. But she sent an email to, like, five top VCs, the next day without telling me. I haven’t seen the email, but I heard it’s really great because I started getting recruited. And I had an offer from Kleiner Perkins and an offer from Menlo, and I ended up going with Menlo.

That really was the beginning of my venture career. I had been an angel investor before that and been, you know, invested in Facebook and other other companies. But when I started at Menlo, I I hit the ground running. And I in my first ninety days, I I closed Uber, Warby Parker, Tumblr, and Machine Zone. It was a really fast start. On the whiteboard, I had a list of companies at the time. This is 2011, June 2011 when I started at Menlo. And Uber was at top of the list.

Airbnb was on the list. Square was on the list. And this was a particularly amazing time in Silicon Valley because these companies were just starting out. No one had heard of them. And so I was in Lowercase as a seed investor and Naval Ravacant had introduced me to Travis over email. I went and used Uber for the first time, and this is when it was like hundreds of cars in San Francisco. And him and Garrett Camp had started the company. And then as a former son of a taxi driver in DC, I I knew a little bit about the taxi market.

So full circle that actually helped me win the deal. And I chased Travis and even before Menlo for a year, I was trying to meet him, and he was difficult to to get to. And so I asked Matt Cohler, who is a a longtime friend. And so Matt promised to say something to him, but, you know, that that you know, I waited for that. But meanwhile, I decided, you know what? You know, this goes to one of my mantras, which is, you know, the answer is always no until you ask.

And so I basically bombarded Travis with references. So I had, like, Drew Houston, who was a dear friend, Sheryl Sandberg, Julius Czajnachowski, all telling him you need to meet with Shervin. And finally, Travis said, he’s publicly said this, that he met with me because he had no choice. He had so many people telling him you need to meet him. So Matt called me in August 2011, six months after Benchmark did their Series with Uber. And and said, hey. We just had our board meeting. We’re gonna raise this the Series B.

Can you meet with Travis tomorrow? So I went to Uber’s, like, first official office and met with him at this table that he later gifted to me as our deal table and signed it, and we hit it off. We we met for, like, two and a half, three hours, realized there was a lot of connection, and I was in the chase for the deal. And then I got a call from Travis, and he was like, hey, homie. He called me homie at the time. I really wanted to do this deal with you, but I have to go with this other firm.

And I I didn’t know which firm it was. It turned out to be Andreessen Horowitz. And then my reaction was as a founder first, not as an investor, and I was like, you know what? Congratulations. I totally understand. But if anything happens in diligence, just know I’m a 100000% behind you, and so you have a strong backup. So negotiate with strength. And I’m really glad I said that because a few weeks later, I was in in Africa giving a keynote for Obama’s entrepreneurship summit. I was in Algeria, I got an unknown call, which I never answer.

But something told me I need to answer this call. I answered the call. It was Travis. And he was like, hey, homie. Remember what you said two weeks ago? Is that still true? And I said, abso fucking lutely it’s true. He was like, can you meet me in Dublin, Ireland tomorrow? And I was like, absolutely. And so I got on the plane, and that led to my other mantra, which is always get on the plane. And that’s made all the difference. It’s just, you know, make the effort, show up, meet with the founder, in person, break bread.

So I flew to Dublin, and we walked the streets, the cobblestone streets of Dublin, had a pint. And it was there that he told me his true vision for Uber, which he kept close to his chest at the time, which was to replace car ownership. And it was at that moment I realized, oh, the TAM is trillions. It’s not all my competitors were were doing their models based on taxi companies and black car companies and not realizing no. No. No. You’re turning every car into an iPhone.

You’re creating a network machine, on wheels. And that leads to a platform. It leads to a two sided marketplace. And so I ran to my hotel and I, wrote a term sheet at 290,000,000. I text him the term sheet and he didn’t answer. And I was like waiting for an hour. I’m like, oh, no. Is he yeah. It’s the worst. It’s you know, is he shopping it? So I I text him again. Was like 300,000,000. And for the first and I think the last time and only time that I’ve ever seen Travis not negotiate, he was like, no. $2.90 is fine.

And I was like, ran straight to his hotel room. And I have a picture I’ll send it to you of us at the door signing the term sheet for 20,000,000 at the time later. I got another 6,500,000 through secondary for Menlo. So that investment at today’s prices is worth almost $7,000,000,000. It was one of those, you know, once in a lifetime investments. 20

26,500,000 turned into, like, 6,700,000,000 at today’s prices. You do this deal as part of Menlo. Correct? Yeah. How long were you at Menlo for? Eighteen months, and then I became an adviser for a year. You get where I’m going with this. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No. It’s was a good ending, though. It was a good ending? Yeah. So I basically worked out an advisory agreement. Because of what I had done, they agreed to give me increased carry deal by deal. So instead of the, you know, getting carry in the fund, I asked for carry in every deal that I did because I had a lot of faith in the deals that I did.

And that turned out to be great. So I got more carry than I would have gotten in the fund by agreeing to do deal by deal carry. So that was a huge thing. And then Travis also, because I was very involved with Uber, I was on the board, you know, and he was making me a strategic adviser after I left Menlo to start Sherpa. And so before I started Sherpa, he allowed me to buy secondary shares from another early person. So I I sold all my Facebook shares that had gone public at, like, $53, $58 a share, and I put it all.

I bet it all. Everything I had, I put it all into Uber. So if Uber didn’t work out, I would have been, you know, bankrupt. Price was this? Uber? Yeah. That was 33¢ a share effectively based on today’s prices, so it would be 33¢ a share. So I had my direct exposure, and I had my my carry deal by deal. So that that worked out. Thank god. Thank god.

It was one of the greatest experiences of my life. You know, watching an entrepreneur of Travis’ quality and being able to work with him very closely. What do you think makes him so good? With Travis, I immediately was like, he’s extremely brilliant. And one story I like to say is I’m I’m close to Yuri Mildner. He’s been a great mentor. I met him when he first did the the Facebook deal, and that’s how I actually met Daniel and Shaq through Yuri. We went on a a meeting and trip together, and Yuri I brought Yuri into Uber.

So I brought a bunch of people into Uber. I could tell you that story at the same 33¢. It’s 290,000,000.

290,000,000 valuation. Yeah. Yuri and and Travis were it became close. We were at this Oscars party that I think CAA was doing, and Yuri, Travis, and I were there. And then Yuri, who’s a mathematician and physicist, had this, you know, hobby of giving Travis really hard math problems. So he, like, gives him this math problem just verbally as we’re sitting there at this Oscar party. And Travis famously, like, paces around all the time. Like, we were at there was a track at the office at Uber with his, like, path that he would walk back and forth.

He would think by walking. And so he’s, like, walking back and forth figuring out this problem. And a lot of my friends in the magnet school, they would see they were the types that could see numbers. I could see him looking up and calculating, and he came back in, like, two or three minutes and he was like, da da da da da da da He said said the equation. Yuri was like, almost. And he was like, oh, and he ran off and walked around and then came back two minutes later and had the right answer all in his head.

But it’s that kind of brilliance. I’ve been lucky to have invested in SpaceX and, you know, become friends with Elon. And later I did Hyperloop, and and I I got to witness what an exceptional and brilliant mind can do. And these are people that are like it’s not even 10 x. You talk about 10 x engineers. These are like thousand x humans. And so I’ve learned over time that it’s it’s worth waiting for the thousand x founders and investing in the future Travis’s or the future Elon’s or, you know, I invested in Airbnb and got to see Brian early on.

There’s a lot of

I don’t agree with that. I think Uber’s culture was was excellent. They were achieving greatness. They were making history. It was the fastest growing company in history, and you can’t get there without being fierce. You can’t get there without working extremely hard. You can’t get there without having really intelligent people coming together to be part of one team.

When you look back now to those

and you’re like, we should have been fiercer. Lyft. We could have been way fiercer on Lyft earlier. In what way? It was the one time I saw Travis hesitate. So what happened was Lyft was, you know, Zimride, and, I had passed on Zimride. And then they saw Uber launch with black cars. And so they launched effectively what became UberX later. We were already working on launching UberX, but they beat us to it and they launched launched with Lyft with the pink mustaches and people’s cars, and and they were illegal.

Like, they didn’t have approval from the San Francisco Taxi Commission. So Travis, basically, for six months was, like, telling the the taxi commission, the city government, like, you know, hey, these guys are illegal. Like, you know, why are you allowing it, etcetera, instead of launching it, you know, as well, which was like the first and last time he ever made that mistake. And in that six months is when Lyft took off, and they ultimately ended up with about 30% market share. They never expanded globally. It’s funny.

Andreessen having lost the Uber deal, they ended up doing the Lyft deal. And we had, you know, Travis and Emil, they were close to to acquiring it, acquiring Lyft, but they wanted too much ownership. So that luckily didn’t work out. But Lyft was I remember taking the first 100 Lyfts to gather intel for for Travis and talking to drivers. And, you know, you sit in the front and you do the fist bump and all of that stuff. So they were onto something, and they beat us to the punch by six months.

And that cost 30% of The US market at the time. Why were you

I was involved in the beginnings of Uber China. There’s a good story about me getting TPG and Bonnermann in there, and I tell that story. It ultimately comes to

So Travis came to me and was like, hey. I I need to recruit, you know, a number two. And this guy, Emil Michael, Michael, everyone speaks really highly of him. Can you help me recruit him? So Travis and I basically divided and conquered, and we both worked on getting Emil. And we were really close to getting him. And in one of the calls, he said, listen. I have these other offers, and they have titles like president of clout or president of jawbone. You know, he wanted a president title or chief operating officer.

And so I called Travis, and I was like, hey. Emil is interested. He wants a title. He’s been offered this title. And and Travis didn’t like titles. So he said, tell him, he can be president of myself on the business card. So I called Emil, and I was like, you know, Travis says you can be president of yourself on the business card. How how kind of you to relay the direct information to the direct admonish that. Yeah. I did not. And and Emil took the president of clout position.

I called Travis and I was like, hey. He took this other position. I you know, look. I’ve in the past, I had experienced, like, losing someone and then getting them later. And if they’re special enough, you’d you’d wanna get them later anyways. So I said, look, I think I know what to say to him to to kinda plant the seed for later. He was like, what are you gonna say? And I was like, this was an IQ test and you failed it. And now that I know Emil, I would never say that to him because he’s one of the smartest people on the planet.

But I’d said it and it worked. And he told me, like, you know, for six months, Uber was, like, going like this and Klout was, you know, doing okay, but not not an Uber. And he was like, damn it. Failed the IQ test. And so later, that year, I organized a trip. I had introduced David Bonnerman and and Coulter to Travis, and we were working on the Series C. So Google was leading the round. And I said to Travis, look. We should get Bonnerman on the board and get TPG as a counterweight to to Google because it’s like, if they’re on the board, you need need a counter.

And then two, Bonnerman could call any leader in the world, and he just passed away last week. And so we had breakfast, they hit it off, and then they invited us to go to the Oscars, with them. So we got on the plane, flew to the Oscars, and then they were like, we’re going to Asia, five countries in six states. Do you wanna come with us? And they had their two planes. And Travis was like, sure. Like, so we got on the plane. We got on the plane again, the the mantra.

We did five countries in six days. I think it was the first time that Travis was in China. And then we introduced him to the CEO of Baidu, and that led to the joint venture that led to Uber China. So that was where it began. And then on that trip, we go to Hong Kong. We’re at this restaurant, and it’s Bonterman, me, Travis, Colter. And I go to the bathroom, and Emil is at the stall next to me. And I’m like, Emil, what are you doing here?

And he was like, I’m here for a wedding. And I was like, we’re all here, Travis. And he came over, and that was it. We closed him that night, and he became chief business officer, and the rest is history. He architected the $15,000,000,000 raise. He had a massive impact on the trajectory of Uber, and he became Travis’s right hand sparring partner in building building Uber.

Look. It costs a lot of money to compete with, Didi and and the other companies. And, essentially, these these companies in China are favorite. It was it was remarkable that we got permission to launch, first of all, as a US company because, like, Google, Facebook, they never were able to launch in China. And so we were really one of the first to be able to launch a consumer Internet product that was an American invention inside of China. So that that was remarkable. I thought it was worth given the size of the market to, as part of our global expansion to be present and to also mitigate the risk by having a joint venture partner that is as strong as Baidu.

Our fund, we put 50,000,000 into the beginning of Uber China and then later put another 50,000,000 into Didi when they merged. And this was when you were doing Sherpa? Yeah. How big was Sherpa? Sherpa, our first fund was small, like a 153,000,000. Second one was like one seventy five. And then the third one, we Yeah. So to put 50 in, you’re like Yeah. And so one thing I did, just a little history on on venture capital, VCs did not like SPVs back then. So I was really the first one to push SPVs hard.

So I’d ended up doing we ended up doing $200,000,000 of SPVs for Uber on top of these other investments. And and then we also brought our LPs into co invest. TPG was one of our LPs at Sherpa. So we brought them in into Uber and they put like 83,000,000. And then Google didn’t wanna share. They want the whole $250,000,000, you know, allocation. And Travis didn’t want more dilution. And so my solution to that was, what’s called Waverly loans, which no one had used in thirty years.

But I used Waverly loans to structure my secondary purchase of shares from an early founder when Travis let me become an adviser and and investor directly when I left Menlo. Basically, way Waverley loans work, it’s like a tax free loan to a founder, and you exchange it for shares later, and you retire the preferred shares that you’re replacing, with common shares. So it’s basically a swap. So I popularized that, and then the TPG solution was I introduced them to Waverley loans, and we did the largest Waverley loan in history, which is 83,000,000, and bought Garrett Camp’s shares for TPG for that amount.

He sold out fully. No. No. He’s he held on a lot to a lot. Yeah. He’s a multibillionaire. I I don’t know, Garrett, but my heart just

Yeah. But, I mean, you know, I think TPG on that 83,000,000 made close to 2,000,000,000.

Yeah. Tame me to that. So we’re looking at global expansion, and you wanna expand to 800 markets and dominate the world. And, at the time, the world was up for grabs, and no one was better at what we were doing than than Uber. So the idea was, okay, we’ve raised this round with Google. That was a Series C, but we wanted to do a much bigger round and a much higher valuation. And so Emil kicked off that fundraising, and this is where the partnership really took hold.

And, they would line up the investors outside so they all saw each other in the hallway. Genius. And then they would have a tight deadline, like, we’re raising this much. We’re gonna expect term sheets by Friday. So it was a very efficient process. That series d, like a year after the series C, which Google and TPG did, that was at 3,000,000,000. This was at 17,000,000,000. And we started off at ten. So Emil was able to negotiate from like $1,011,000,000,000 valuation to 17 because there was so much competition for the deal.

And so like Kleiner Perkins came in, led that deal. I think they put a 100,000,000 in at that round. And then the SoftBank raise and the much bigger raises. And so ultimately, we had billions of dollars to be able to expand around the world, and that led to the market share that that Uber has today.

No. It it was what was required. You know, this is atoms and bits. Like, you need cars and people and labor and millions of them, right, around the world, And you need to be able to subsidize it to get the market share going. I mean, I remember I went to most of the city launches around the world, and we came up with, like, a whole playbook including getting celebrities to come in. In my round, I brought most of Hollywood into Uber. Guy Ossiri likes to joke that, you know, I’ve made more people in the music industry money on on Uber than they have in the music industry.

But I brought Scooter Braun, Troy Carter, Ari Emanuel and and WME, Sofia Bush, Olivia Munn, all invested in that in that Series B at 33¢. So they helped us because when we went around the world and we wanted to launch, it helped to have a celebrity be rider zero or rider one. So I brought Edward Norton into Uber. And so I remember for the LA launch, we were like, okay. We’re gonna have rider zero was was Travis’ parents, his mom and dad. And then rider one, I was I was having dinner with Edward, and he was like, I’m going surfing this weekend.

And I was like, would you mind taking an Uber SUV with your surfboard to the beach and be rider one? And he was like, absolutely. And so he was our rider one, and we we did a blog post about that. And then we replicated that playbook all over the world. So in India, we would launch with a Bollywood player, actor, or a or a cricket player, Snell.

the dream story to date. Yeah. The business did not fray. The business was executing at the highest levels of excellence. So the business is not fraying.

So what went wrong was we had the wrong venture capitalists on the board, and that was unfortunately, in my opinion, I was Bill Bill Gurley at Benchmark. And, you know, I haven’t told many of these stories. I’ve kinda waited until we found out exactly all the things that happened. But, basically, Gurley was pressuring Travis and Uber to go public as soon as possible, pushing for for that. Incessantly did a blog post that didn’t name Uber, but was, like, talking about that these companies need to go public.

At one point, you know, Travis stopped responding to to Gurley because he was, you know, being annoying. And so Gurley is like a six foot ten Texan guy who’s used to, like, getting his way and being listened to and so on. So when Travis stopped, you know, responding to him, we found out in our investigation that he hired, some private investigators, had weekly meetings about how do we get rid of Travis starting in January 2017. And then when the Susan Fowler blog post happened about a month later.

Remind everyone. What was the Susan Fowler blog post? It was an engineer that had a bad experience with a kind of a middle manager, her her, engineering, middle manager who basically harassed her. And so she wrote a blog post about it. I remember that day vividly because Travis and I were in Malibu. We you know, every summer, we rented a a Malibu house with, some good friends of ours. So we had this kinda I call it the last innocent weekend in Silicon Valley. So we had this, you know, great weekend and laughing and and, relaxing after working really hard.

I’d just flown in from China. And the blog post happened, and Emil walked in and was like, hey, guys. Like, you should take a look at this. It’s got 3,000 likes. So we read it. And then Rachel Whetstone called, who was a political operative. Gurley had advised Travis to hire. And it turned out there were two political operatives from Google that were hired, and Rachel was one of them. So Rachel’s on the line, and she immediately says, you know, we need to hire attorney general Holder, which was Obama’s attorney general who had, recently stepped down.

It was at a big law firm. We need to hire attorney general Holder to do an independent investigation of workplace culture. And I looked at him, I was like, it’s a trap. He was in a conversation, so he didn’t hear me, and it went over his head, but he agreed to it. I was the beginning of the end because you’re you’re basically giving up a lot. You’re becoming very vulnerable in that situation. Just for

Well, if, you know, if if someone has a nefarious strategy to get rid of you and you agree to a independent investigation by the attorney general of America, you’re vulnerable. They’re they’re going through every single thing, and it can turn it into something that it’s not. And so things can be manipulated and all of that. Six months later, the report’s supposed to come out. And that week, Travis tragically lost his mother in a boating accident. Mother and father were in a boating accident, and she passed away.

And he was in the hospital. His father was also, like, close to death. And in the middle of that tragedy, Benchmark, Gurley decided to go after Travis. So they delayed the release of the report. And the report, by the way, didn’t find anything wrong that, you know, that Travis did or I did or there was nothing nothing in there about, you know, him directly. And the recommendation was, like, to go hire a Sheryl Sandberg, like a chief operating officer. So Travis was actually in Chicago the week that he lost his mother and recruiting a chief operating officer, you know, dealing with the tragedy and trying to take care of his company.

And Matt Cohler and Peter Fenton show up at his hotel room, surprise him with a letter with five early investors basically saying you need to step down as CEO.

You know, Lowercase, first round capital, Menlo, obviously Benchmark. And they basically said, look, if you don’t resign, we’re gonna release this letter publicly to the press, etcetera. And so Travis was kind of, you know, in the room for hours and hours trying to decide what to do, and he ultimately agreed to step down, which I highly regret because Did he have a choice? I now look at, like, how Sam Altman handled his coup d’etat over a weekend and how he galvanized the employee base. He learned some lessons about what’s happened in the past to Steve Jobs, to to Travis.

He was able to find his way back when he thought he was gone. Right? Could Travis have pushed back and said release the letter? I think he was in a very tragic week in his life where he’s lost his mother, and I’ve just lost my mother. So I understand the grief that you’re going through, especially in a tragedy like a like a boat accident. And so he was very vulnerable and they pounced, which is just unbecoming. Like, it’s not type of behavior any VC or investor should do.

And they took advantage of that fact. And it worked. They got him to to step down. And then what happened, which got me directly engaged in the battle, in the what I call the Uber war, about in early August, they then sued in Delaware courts. After they had already gotten rid of Travis, they then sued to get rid of him and his two board seats that he had gotten that he hadn’t appointed yet. So three board seats. So they wanted, you know, effectively board control, and they sued to get rid of him.

So I hired Quinn Emanuel, John Quinn, who’s like the fiercest litigator in the, world, in the corporate world, and I countersued Benchmark and flew to Delaware, landed, went to this little courthouse. And it made me fall in love with the American justice system because this entire corporate legal system is held up by this tiny little town, little little courthouse. And as I go in the courthouse, we make our arguments, and the judge finds with us and rejects Benchmark’s attempt to get rid of the three board seats.

I remember calling Travis and being like, hey. We won. Your three board seats are protected. Like, appoint them now. He ended up appointing Ursula from Xerox, former CEO of Merrill Lynch, to the board. And then I found out through our investigation, two weeks later after I won this case, there was a firm called Fusion GPS, which is the firm famously that did the Russian dossier against Trump, a fake Russian dossier. Basically, a political operative type firm, former journalist, basically the weaponized arm of the DNC. So they did the Russian dossier against Trump to basically make him lose to to Hillary and then cause all kinds of trouble during the first term.

Really immoral people. And so we found out an investigation that two weeks after I won the case, founding partner of Fusion GPS was sitting in a cafe in DC with a reporter from Fast Company with a memory stick and a fake police report from London about me. They gave it to the reporter. The reporter, we found out, you know, I I filed lawsuits to do discovery, a law called seventeen eighty two that allows if you have a British case, you can actually sue in federal courts in The US.

It’s a treaty from 1782. It allows you to do discovery in federal courts in The US for a case in The UK. So I hired the top expert on seventeen eighty twos and won against Fast Company, and we got discovery on the the emails. And there were multiple emails from the London police telling the reporter, this is not our report. And he still reported it, and it basically threw my life into a tailspin. And so How so? Well, accusing me of of of something awful that I never never did and that, you know, I was innocent of.

And they fabricated a police report in order to get reporters to to do it. And once the first one did it, every other publication did it. And then when we countered with a letter from the London police, saying this is not our report. Basically, quelled that at the time, and then they had continued with, like, five anonymous accusations. And this is in the middle of the Me Too movement. Right? Directly in the middle of it. This is, like, October, November of of two thousand seventeen. So I basically realized, like, if I if I don’t either take a leave of absence or step down, they’re just gonna keep attacking until that happens.

And so they were trying to stop me from because I I had organized a shareholder group, with people like Ron Burkle who had brought into into Uber along with Ashton and and Guy. They had a fund called A Grade. Adam Leber, who is a top music agent, and other investors to basically countersue and fight what was going on. I was meeting with Rajeev Misra about, like, buying Benchmark stake because I was, you know, publicly going on CNBC and saying, hey. We’ll buy Benchmark stake. If you don’t want out of the company, let’s get you out.

And let Why was that not option?

So the SoftBank SoftBank conversations, ironically, Travis and Emil started those conversations. The ultimate $12,000,000,000 investment from SoftBank Vision Fund, they started that that whole negotiation. Then Travis got removed from Uber and and so did Emil at the same time. And so they got two of the greatest minds in Silicon Valley were taken out of the company. This is the greatest value destruction that’s happened since firing Steve Jobs at Apple, And it was a massive mistake. If you look at Tesla, it’s a trillion dollar company now.

I believe if Travis and Emil had stayed at Uber, Uber would be a trillion dollar company by now. They brought in Dara Khorsor Shahi, who’s a a dear friend. So I call Dara the great, you know, stabilizer. He has taken Uber to, you know, a 175,000,000,000 market cap, which is great and profitable. He’s done all of those things. Travis was working on ideas like self driving and automation. He was in pole position at the time. I saw him speak in Saudi Arabia at the FII a couple months ago, and they asked him, like, what would you have done if you had stayed at Uber?

And he specifically went to, like, if you look at all of the great things that are happening in AI and the paper that came out in in 2017, we were on top of that. We were working on things. And so he would have been one of the great AI automation entrepreneurs in the world. He would have applied his intelligence to Uber in a way that nobody can. Nobody can do what Elon’s doing. Nobody can do what Travis is doing. No matter how great you are, these are, like, rare, rare Nobel Prize winning essentially founders.

And so Uber would have been a trillion dollar company. So in their greed to go after their current winnings of billions of dollars, single digit billions, Benchmark and the other investors made a critical mistake. What could have been, what others that are in Tesla or SpaceX, for example, right now who stuck by an exceptional founder with a strong personality like Elon, if they had stuck by Travis, we would be experiencing what they’re all experiencing, which is imagine if Benchmark had kept their ownership of, let’s say, 10%, they would have had a $100,000,000,000 to give to their LPs at this point if they had just not done this.

No. Absolutely not. It’s it’s absolutely the answer is no. And the reason is Benchmark invested in March 2011 is you know? So Benchmark invested in March 2011. I believe it was a $50,000,000 pre money valuation. They put 10,000,000 in. So they were sitting on a massive win. They were only in the company for, like, six years when Gurley went after Travis. And typically, it takes seven to ten years to get to liquidity. So it wasn’t in the zone or the window where you’d be like, ten years, twelve years, we we don’t have liquidity, etcetera.

It’s like, give him four more years. If you had just waited four more years, this would be a trillion dollar company. And when you look at that and the impact it would have had on the world, there’s no justification for it. Do

The perfect storm was that Google at that point saw Travis and Uber and the self driving initiative that Travis is doing as a threat. Look at what they ultimately did to Anthony Levandowski. Right? Travis, you know, recruited. Anthony acquired, you know, his company, Auto, which was the the self driving semi semi trucks. They went after him. They they they tried to put him in jail. He was gonna go to jail until he got pardoned by Trump in the first administration. And so Google was not in the mood to be trying to do anything favorable at the time to for Uber or for Travis.

So they were gonna stay out of it. Other investors, I was honestly disappointed and shocked that so many were easily manipulated by Gurley and Benchmark and that they went along with this scheme, in the sense that, you know, the letter. I don’t think anyone knew the extent to which Gurley had executed the strategy of hiring people, private investigators. Was

I think they took advantage of an accident for It was a architected strategy starting, like I said, January 2017 to get rid of him. I believe that it was one of the worst venture decisions ever and value destruction happened for for everyone involved. And one, venture is too secretive of a industry. And that’s one of the things I I I believe is as this kind of story comes out of what exactly happened at Uber and more will come out as our investigation kind of completes now or kind of in the sixth, seventh year and How much did you spend

I hired the top investigators in the world to figure this out. The fact that we found out it was Fusion GPS, that somebody hired Fusion GPS to fabricate a police report and go after me. And then the fact that they went to that extent, and usually you never find out about these firms because they’re hiding behind multiple layers of law firms, you can’t pierce the veil. So the story of how this firm, you know, figured out is is pretty incredible. So I feel very lucky. And my dad, who’s 86, made me promise to figure out what what happened because people who know me know I was innocent and it was in fact fabricated.

And so we had all the proof and I’ve put that out there because it did hurt my reputation at at the time. And so I had to kinda go through a pretty difficult experience, and it was worth it to me to spend millions of dollars on the legal fees and doing the seventeen eighty two’s. We filed seven four seventeen eighty two’s. The latest one is against Fusion GPS, and the judge found with us last year and is gonna force Fusion GPS to say who hired them.

And so they appealed it, and now we’re waiting for the judge to make the final judgment to force them.

I can’t say publicly who I think hired Fusion GPS, but that that may be for a a second episode when we, when we, get that judgment. Bad actors and bad behavior and and VCs who do things against founders that is unjust, that it’s too secretive, that people are too afraid to talk about it. And what I hope happens Do you think for me, we’re talking about to come out. In my case, there’s definitely more to come out. Once we find out who who hired Fusion GPS, then careers are gonna fall.

Do you think there is a lot more

Oh, yeah. And there’s a history of VCs who have done this type of thing. And in Benchmark’s case, they did it against Naval. They hired private investigators, and Naval Ravicon. He had a company called e groups, and he got thrown out of it. Very similar playbook. And so that’s happened multiple times at Benchmark, and it’s happened in other funds, and it just needs to stop. Also, the political operatives who came into Silicon Valley post Uber and Facebook, it attracted them like flies. And, they started to apply before with

a

Yeah. Yeah. 2017 the period from, like, 2005 to 2015 was incredible. That’s when most of these great companies, whether it was SpaceX or or Tesla or Facebook or Uber were were founded. And there was a culture of, like, meritocracy and everyone was helping each other and open minded and you’d meet at cafes. It was a beautiful era in Silicon Valley. Then what happened is when people realized, oh my god, these people are gonna become billionaires and there’s billions of dollars to be made, you had the carpetbaggers.

You had the political operatives. You had the consultants. You had all these people started to to come in. And then the other thing that happened, and I blame myself a little bit because bringing TPG into Uber and the Series C kicked off the whole wave of private equity coming downstream into venture Series CBA. Like, you know, when you looked at, you know, what happened from 2017 to two thousand twenty one, twenty two in the drunken period, mega funds come in, spread billions of dollars at massive valuations that didn’t make any rational sense.

WeWork as an as an example. $18,000,000,000 went into that company. And I passed on that company. That was ironically another Benchmark company. I passed on that company because I remember the dot com crash and all the office buildings being cleared up. And I was like, I don’t get this business model. You don’t own own it, and and, you could be removed pretty quickly from your customers. So I I didn’t see strength in that business model. But companies with bad business models were getting $18,000,000,000 in cash.

That’s crazy. That’s not classic venture capital. Doug

Venture capital as it is today, especially with private equity coming downstream and what we’ve seen with the drunken era, venture capital is dead. The venture capital that we grew up with and that we looked up to, that model is gone. So why is that model gone? The rate at which companies can be accelerated has grown to the to the point that you can execute on a business plan. In many cases, we’re seeing more and more founders actually self fund or, you know, be able to generate enough success to be able to build the company.

You see more and more opting out of venture capital. The other trend, especially with crypto, is that you have these kind of DeFi and alternative financing mechanisms that are evolving to a point where I think you can actually tokenize venture capital. I think you can democratize venture capital and allow nonaccredited investors to begin investing in the future. And I think we have a moral obligation to open up venture and by early, I mean early stage angel investing in the Facebooks and the SpaceXs of the future, but to let mom and pops be able to invest, small checks be able to invest.

So I think in the Trump administration, we’ll see changes in that direction of, like, opening it up. That model, I think, is gonna is gonna change.

Liquidity has been a major problem and especially during the the four years of Biden. And it just coincided with really bad policies and, you know, a dearth of M and A, lack of IPOs. I think that’s gonna change in the next four years. Think I think I was a early person to come out and support Trump, and I cohosted David Sachs’ fundraiser with back in June 6 and publicly endorse Trump. And most of my my generation, my cohort, people like Elon or David Marcus or Sean from Sequoia, Emil Michael, like, all of these guys and gals are in Palm Beach doing like seventeen hour days.

You know, it’s like the best and the brightest have converged. And also it’s very similar like Silicon Valley goes to Washington, you know? And so I’m very excited because, you know, you look at David Sachs is now the AI, you know, and crypto czar for the president. Elon is running Doge with Vivek. You have some of the brightest minds in the world about to revolutionize the way government works and make it way more efficient. I wrote a proposal about privatizing many aspects of government, including the US Postal Service, which is a big money loser, is not using modern technology to compete with FedEx and UPS and DHL and so on.

And we could do a lot better. Amtrak. Amtrak should be hyper privatized and turned into Hyperloop and high speed rail. We can do really great things and there should be also moonshots for AI for I do a lot in quantum computing. I’ve done it for a long time. I believe AI and quantum are gonna merge and that’s accelerate the future. So I think the market’s waking up, especially after Willow and what Google announced. This has been my thesis for over ten years. There’s another company called Sci Quantum that came out of Cambridge here in The UK.

What do you think

I mean, they’re basically state owned enterprises. Right? So the Chinese government is subsidizing them. And so that’s a major threat to our ability to be competitive. But even with tariffs, the Chinese electric car companies have gotten to the point that, you know, their cars are like $15,000 and they’re good cars. So even if you add a 100% tariff, you’re still talking about $30,000 still affordable to a lot of people. So they’re still gonna be able to compete because their prices are so low. And so that’s something that we need to think through because America has to build its own manufacturing capabilities, especially in the semiconductor space.

So you saw Massa announcing the $100,000,000,000 investment in AI in American economy and and companies. What did you make of that? Massa in Saudi, one of the things he talked about is he he did his calculations, and the numbers for me make a lot of sense. Basically, you need to spend trillions, single digit trillions, and then you’re gonna get 9,000,000,000,000 of annual value coming out of it.

Right. But, you know, I the the scale of what’s happening, everything has gotten bigger and more consequential. I think the next twenty five years is gonna eclipse everything we’ve seen in our lifetime, and we’re about to go through civilizational change in the next twenty years. So, you know, a fund like yours and a fund like mine has a really lucky timing.

People like you, Harry, and others who have great instincts about people and about companies and trends are always going to succeed. They’re going to get in that deal even if they lose it to a bigger VC like I did in the Uber case. Your resilience and your grit matters. So if you can build authentic relationships with the great founders of the next twenty years. You’ll be their partners in building these these amazing trillion dollar companies. I think we’re lucky. I think we went for a drunken period because the business models weren’t actually correct.

But now you’re dealing with AI quantum computing. You’re going to have basically the power, the mind of God in terms of computing power as you saw with Willow. You know, I’ve said for a long time, the reason I’m doing quantum computing is with quantum computing, what I see coming down the pike, we’ll be able to solve problems that would take billions of years to solve. We’ll be able to solve them in hours and days.

Is that like solving climate change change with Yes. And so, you know, where where I think things are gonna go is that quantum and AI, even at the chipset level, are going to merge. And then that’s going to revolutionize all aspects of our lives. We’ll find cures to every known disease known to mankind within, I would say, the next ten years. So one of the things I, you know, started saying before Brian Johnson is a dear friend to my I said to my friends is like, don’t die.

Like, don’t jump out of planes. Don’t ski. Don’t die in the next twenty years because we’re gonna reach a point of longevity where you’ll be able to health live a healthy life for hundred fifty plus years.

Yeah. Absolutely. The level of advancement that we’re about to experience is like a Cambrian explosion of superintelligence. And superintelligence So

I know too much. Like, I’ve I’ve seen some of these technologies that other people haven’t seen that are coming down the pike. I’ve seen technologies that are gonna get us to a million cubits. Like, Google’s at, like, a 100 cubits even with with Willow. You’re talking about a million cubits? That’s the that’s the mind of God. And so you’ll be able to solve problems that would take billions of years to solve in hours and days. And so being able to say, hey. We can basically find a cure for all diseases known to mankind, and and then people are just gonna die from accidents and not not disease.

I didn’t have to lose my mother. So many of our loved ones that we lose to to old age, like, they can live healthier, longer lives and and and stay with us. Fucking love Brian.

Steve Ballmer. You know, the decade that he was CEO of Microsoft, Microsoft was completely just flat, and, he’s now richer than Bill Gates. Right? So he ultimately won. You know, they they did a great job in hiring Satya because Satya’s been, I think, the greatest greatest CEO, one of the greatest CEOs of our lifetimes.

It’s a great question. Before my granddaughter was born, Aurora, I didn’t fully understand what being a grandparent was. I have to tell you, it’s like 10 times more powerful than having a kid. Changed my mind now in this sense that I actually think the whole point of life is to become a grandparent. The it unlocks a level of love that you’ve never experienced in your life. Like, I’m totally obsessed with my granddaughter. I see her every day. I moved across the street from her. She’s the light of my life, and I live for her.

She’s given me a massive boost in energy and drive to make the world a better place for her and her generation. And so I just didn’t realize what being a grandparent was until I became one. And, you know, I became one at 48, so was a young grandpa, a YG, and it’s the most important thing that’s ever happened to me.

I would say it it would be Lowercase, Chris Sacca’s fund. I put a little check-in there and got 4,000,000 out, like 25,000 turned into 4,000,000. So it was it was a legendary fund. I think it was like 10,000,000 and returned like 1,500,000,000 or something. That goes in the record books.

So couple couple ways. One, Elon and I were friends, and then another friend of mine, Justin Fisher Wolfson, who was on the board of of of SGN. Sean Parker was the Founders Fund representative, who led the deal, but Justin was the one that would come to the board meetings and we became really close friends. And, when Yuri did that deal, I went to to Justin’s house. I actually named one thirty seven that night. I looked over as we were talking about, you know, him starting a fund.

And And I was like, what is that number block on your table? And it said 137. And he was like, oh, that’s my grandfather’s number seat on the Wall Street on the exchange. And he bought it after coming to America from Russia. He was a Russian Jew who came with nothing, created success. And I was like, well, that’s that’s the name of your fund, 137. And he was like, you’re right. So anyways, he he’s amassed a he helped bring SpaceX to to Founders Fund. He was like a junior partner associate along with Alex Jacobson who’s this cofounder of one hundred thirty seven.

And so they advocated for the SpaceX investment, and then they did a bunch of secondary when they started one thirty seven. So they’ve done really well. And so he had some available back in 2014 at like a $6,000,000,000 valuation. We put some money in at at that valuation. So I I think I think SpaceX will be a $10,000,000,000,000 company. It’s just getting started.

Yeah. I helped start the network state movement with biology and Joe Lonsdale. I had lunch with Joe, like, two thousand twelve, and I I said, hey. What if we started, you know, new cities that had sovereignty, new city states, and tokenize it and have ownership become citizenship become ownership. We started hosting new city salons, and Balaji came to it, then Balaji wrote Network States, the the book. And then we had the first two Network States summits. That movement led to another mantra of mine, which is great founders should try to start new industries, not just companies.

Should start a completely new industry. Like Hyperloop was a new industry, and in this case, network states and new cities is a new industry. And there’s now hundreds of startups starting new nations. Praxis is another one of them that I’m involved in. That’s one of the largest network states, and they’re looking at a million acres of land in different places in the world and that I’ve been helping them with. But we’re gonna basically see new nation states, new countries be started in our lifetimes, and you’re gonna see a lot of people opt in to those new nations.

So I think that’s that’s one of my probably more controversial, the world map two hundred years ago looks very different than it does today, and it’s gonna look very different in two hundred years. Nations are not supposed to be permanent. They’re supposed to evolve.

I had the opportunity to invest in Snapchat in the seed round, and I had the opportunity to invest in Pinterest in the seed round.

So I brought Snapchat to Menlo. Evan and I hit it off. I really believe that. I was on it in the first thirty days because my kids were on it, And so they showed it to me and I and I was chasing it and Evan and I hit it off. Unfortunately, Menlo passed on that round and then the next round as well. They and then Pinterest, I looked at when I was angel investing. So that was my own, fully my fault. And one lesson I learned there is I did the meeting with Ben because I met him through Jack Abraham, and I had funded Jack when he was 22 in his company, Milo.

And then he introduced me because he he invested in the seed round of Pinterest. Was like, you should take a look at this. And at the time, was talking about, like, social commerce being the next big wave. So it fit perfectly, but I did it as a call instead of a in person meeting. So the one time I didn’t get on the plane, the presentation over the phone wasn’t the same than it would have been if we had met in person. So I passed on it.

The presentation just didn’t hit it for me. But if I had met Ben, I would have gotten a sense of his brilliance, but over the phone, he just didn’t present well at the time. This was like 2,000, I don’t know, 10 or 11.

Honestly, the one I’m really excited about is seventeen eighty nine that my friend, Omid Malik, started. Donald Trump junior just joined as a partner there. They’re going to kill it. I think they’re gonna do some amazing things. Their thesis early on was to invest in companies that are all pro America, anti woke, and that thesis has has worked really well. And I think they’re in a really amazing position to to invest in really incredible companies. So I I really believe in them. Seventeen eighty nine. What fund do you think is most overhyped?

Benchmark. Do you ever speak to

No. No. And then these were these were friends of mine. Like, Cohler was a dear friend and, you know, and and was at his thirtieth birthday party, his fortieth birthday party right before all this happened. And so, you know, we’ve lost dear friendships that were meaningful friendships in our lives because of that battle. The Uber wars is something that should be studied in order to learn lessons about what to do right and what to, you know, what to avoid the types of mistakes that happening.

The strategy of publicly and legally battling was the only strategy that I saw as an effective counter to what was happening at the time. What I wish I had done or had the wisdom to know to do was what, you know, Sam and his allies did in getting the employees at OpenAI to to back Sam and say if he doesn’t come back, we’re we’re gonna leave. That was very powerful. It was very powerful. And if we had done that at Uber because Travis was beloved, so it was Emil.

They were beloved by by the team. And so, you know, they were smart enough that they turned a few key people like Ryan Graves against Travis, and they began collaborating. Do you blame him? Again, he was another dear friend. So it’s it’s tragic, almost Shakespearean, like the friendships that were broken up over over this. And so there was a lot of love there, but I don’t speak to him anymore. I don’t think, you know, others do either. But, you know, he I mean, Travis hired him from a tweet when he was like 28 years old at IBM, made him a billionaire.

And Travis was super loyal to him. Unfortunately, Ryan, for whatever reason, went went to the other side. That was heartbreaking.

I’m extremely loyal. That loyalty has has served me well, but it’s also caused me a lot of pain in my life. And in some ways, my successes have also come from being loyal, people knowing that I wouldn’t do anything like what happened to Travis to a founder. So the same thing that has caused a lot of pain because I fought for people and I’ve taken the bullets and the missiles is also the reason I’m I’m here, and I do have the reputation that I have with great founders.

so

and you’ve been a star. Thank you. And I hope you get on the plane and come to Miami and visit us in Emil sometime. I