# Postmates Founder Basti Lehmann on How the Uber Deal Went Down and How a $2.65BN Deal Turned into $5BN Why Great VCs Add No Value and VC Value Add is BS Marketing & Why The Biggest Companies in History Will be Born Today and Replace Incumbents 20VC · Apr 8, 2024 · 59 min · 12,138 words Speakers: Bastian Lehmann, Harry Stebbings Source: https://www.996.fm/episodes/20vc--ep-c754cdf6/ ## Cold open **Bastian Lehmann** [0:00]: Here's another thing that I think people don't fully understand. We negotiated the deal so well. There was no color on the deal. By the time the deal closed, it was almost $5,000,000,000. We had just under a $100,000,000 left in cash and our negative gross profit margin was, I think, single digits. Two or three quarters later, we we were profitable as a company. Most companies fail because the founders give up, and that's it. We refuse to give up. **Harry Stebbings** [0:24]: This is 20 VC ## Intro **Harry Stebbings** [0:25]: with me, Harry Stebbings, what a show we have for you today, Postmates. What an incredible journey. It was acquired for $2,650,000,000, but no. It actually turned out to be $5,000,000,000 with the stock price of Uber rising. The story of the acquisition, how it went down with all the details, Bastian Lehmann, Postmates found, and former CEO in the hot seat today to reveal all. But before we dive into the show today, ## Sponsor read **Harry Stebbings** [0:50]: we're all trying to grow our businesses here. So let's be real for a second. We all know that your website shouldn't be this static asset. It should be a dynamic part of your strategy that really drives conversions. That's marketing one zero one. But here's a number for you. 54% of leaders say web updates take too long. That's over half of you listening right now. And that's where Webflow comes in. 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If they were to describe a young Bastian in Germany, what would they have said about you and how you were? **Bastian Lehmann** [3:50]: Well, first of all, you you know, in 1977, that's when I was born, 1980 in Germany, you have to understand everything was still black and white. But what would they say? Probably very curious child, you know, I like to play a lot. I think I was always onto something. As a matter of fact, think I was out of the house most of the time. I think as soon as I could get out of the house, I would just be somewhere, Play in the forest or run around, you know, we had a group of friends. We did exhibitions and then, you know, that sort of stuff. **Harry Stebbings** [4:17]: I love that. Can I ask you? I I always struck with the question of skill versus luck in life. How do you think about the importance of skill versus luck in life? What are your thoughts on that? I I **Bastian Lehmann** [4:28]: don't really believe in luck much, but I also don't have a definite answer. I I think I believe in determination and grit and **Harry Stebbings** [4:33]: hard **Bastian Lehmann** [4:34]: work. **Harry Stebbings** [4:34]: If we'd, like, isolate a point in your life that was a needle moving moment for your career, when you reflect, what do you think the most needle moving moment was? Was it the move to The US? Was it selling Postmates? What was that art? That was the big move. **Bastian Lehmann** [4:48]: Definitely moving to The US was a huge part and I think it's important to understand I wanted to be in The US almost all my entire life. I remember very vividly this is actually a great story. So what happened is that I was obsessed with computers pretty much as long as I can remember. And I love the idea that I can just hack things and something comes back. So when we first got internet access, I incurred these bills of like ridiculous amounts of money. And I grew up in a fairly modest house and my mom had sometimes three jobs, so we didn't had a lot of money. And back then, you remember, it's a dial up, so you pay per minute or you pay per hour depending on your plan. After a while, I decided that I could run a BBS, like a little software that allowed other people to connect to my computer. And obviously that was a very boring affair because only one other person could connect to your computer. Right? So you run this bulletin board and and you designed it and I don't even know what you had on there. You had you had probably photos of Claudia Schiffer. To that extent, content was available And this person, his name was Annie Mello. He came online or that was his name and we started talking, he's like, well, what's your setup? And he had I'm like, well, you know, just I think I had a fourteen four k modem and and I said like, you know, I I don't really know much about the Internet or anything and I also can't be connected to the Internet because it costs a lot of money. And he said, you don't know how to surf in the Internet for free. And I'm like, no, I don't know. And he said, well, you need to get a US calling card. Because how it works, he said, in The US, they have like AT and T or they have MCI WorldCom for long distance calls and collect calls or calls abroad. In The US, they punch in this calling card number and a pin code and then they can use a telephone boost for free or they can they can call when they're abroad and it gets charged to their account. So a week later, he wanted to come by and obviously, I never I never met this person and it turns out he was like 40 and my mom was very very skeptical of of this person. She's like, you leave the door open. But this guy was a complete nerd and he taught me literally what I had to do is I had to get a phone book from The US somehow and then I had to call people in The US and had to tell them that I would be a, you know, a service agent from MCI or from AT and T and that there was a problem with their account and that, you know, I needed to verify their calling card number and their PIN code. This is a true story. So at some point, my parents were divorced and here's the one good thing my dad did for me. He got me a phone book from San Francisco, a Pacific Bell phone book from San Francisco. And me and a friend of mine, we would hit the phone and we would call people in San Francisco Francisco and practice our American accent to sound like we're from MCI WorldCom or from AT and T depending on the phone number. We would ask for their calling card number and at some point after weeks of effort, someone also gave us the pin code without being too suspicious. So then what we would do, we would have that calling card number and the PIN code, we would call our dial up provider, we would so so you you you would call a toll free number from from AT and T in Germany, you would punch in the calling card number, you would punch in the PIN code, you would then unplug the phone, plug in the modem, dial the number from your internet provider, and you would surf. So in a way, my career probably has started embezzling T or MCI in San Francisco. **Harry Stebbings** [7:53]: They're gonna come after you after this show. This is the retribution that they've been waiting for. Can I ask you a bit of a weird one? I hope it's okay. You mentioned that your parents divorced. How old were you and did that impact you? **Bastian Lehmann** [8:05]: Oh, yeah. I think it impacted me tremendously. I think I was six and my brother must have been like almost three. How did it impact you? I had a pretty perfect life up to that point. After that, it got a lot more, you know, complicated. We wanted to be with my mom. She has been there for us and I she's she's the person I love the most in my life and she was just a remarkably strong woman. Never talked bad about my dad even though there were a lot of things that that he did that would have made it easy for her to discuss them with us. She just plowed on and I think she gave literally the next eighteen years of her life to make sure that we are grow up to be to be two capable capable boys. Right? **Harry Stebbings** [8:43]: Mothers are the most incredible thing. Can I ask you, you mentioned the three jobs that she had there? Yeah. Is that where you think you got your grit and steedliness and ambition from? Where do you think about the source of where you got that muster? You probably gotta **Bastian Lehmann** [8:58]: suffer a little bit to be resilient, so it probably has to do with that. One morning, I grew I woke up and I I must have been around 14 and my mom wasn't there. It was early in the morning and I waited for her that that she came back and and she told me that she had to do another job in the morning to help clean a building somewhere because we just didn't had enough money at the time. And I couldn't believe it because you you have to understand that when I say that we grew up modest, I'm not talking about a level that it was apparent to me every day. Things were limited, but I wouldn't walk around and feeling poor. But I think I didn't realize how tight things were until we talked about that and until she told me that. I I remember that that I said, you know, I will make so much money that my mom can have whatever she wants, and it was incredibly important to me to make sure that she has whatever she needs as soon as I could do that. **Harry Stebbings** [9:47]: We have some things in common, my friend, that makes me very happy to hear. Before we dive into the Uber acquisition, I spoke to Nabil before the show, and I'm looking at my notes now. He said that you led a team that was in wartime mode the entire history under huge stress and that you are not a cuddly CEO. What was the most memorable wartime moment in the company history of most stress that you remember? **Bastian Lehmann** [10:13]: Oh, I think Nabila's right, but I I wanna say I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it tremendously because I really do believe that you have to measure yourself in life and I think this journey of running that company for ten years absolutely did that. The war time was defined by us being so focused and so determined to create a successful company. You you have to understand, I truly believe that everybody who worked at Postmates loved that company from the bottom of their heart. It was a group of people who couldn't drive us apart with whatever came at us. Any VC funding a competitor, Uber, threats, rumors. We were so focused on our mission. We were so focused because we loved the company. I woke up ten years in a row and I and everyday, I couldn't believe it. I'm like, I can't believe that I get to do this and that I can be with these people. What was the biggest oh shit moment? It it was rough for a while when competitors raised bigger and bigger funding rounds. And, look, we raised quite a bit of money. I think we raised around 900,000,000. So by no means small change, but it was really scary at times when you see the pace of which competitors raised money and and did so very successfully. **Harry Stebbings** [11:23]: For Founders listening, when your competitors raise a lot of money, should they raise it too, or is it just a race to the bottom then on cash? What are your lessons on when comps raise that you give to founders? **Bastian Lehmann** [11:35]: Well, I I think it entirely depends on the situation. In our case, I think what happened is that we opened up this market of on demand delivery and by the time competitors came along and by the time competitors had their first funding round and by the time everybody saw the potential, there was an inflection point in the market when the only thing that mattered was more capital to do more advertising. You you you have to understand that this was, I think, the largest consumer battleground for five to six years. Billions of dollars deployed in in advertising, in marketing, in grabbing market share. But and this is something that from the outside was hard to understand, but it is the reason why ultimately almost every VC firm invested in one of the players, the fundamentals of the companies. I I know this for us, but I have some insight in the other players. They were all pretty sound. And by that I mean there was a clear path to profitability, there was a clear understanding of unit economics, how they work, where the gross margins need to be, all three companies I think had people that could execute very well against the goals. So that is a moment in time when you should raise a lot of money. **Harry Stebbings** [12:40]: Do you think that's actually the case, dude? Like, I, you know, I I invest in the space, but, like, I think the awareness that actually they were pretty tough business models to make work. The margins were super low. The density required was super high. The AOVs were too low. The labor costs were too high. I think there was a realization that they were bad business models. **Bastian Lehmann** [12:58]: No. I think Tony and I knew from the start that this is a tremendous business if you can scale it and every market that you had at scale was profitable for us and I know that the same thing was also true for DoorDash. It is a misconception of that space in general. Look, it is a tough business. It's a lot it's a lot tougher than a SaaS company where you just press a button and then you you go get a coffee and you and you made a million dollars in revenues. We're we're moving about bits and bytes, moving things in the real world. Right? You're you're programmed people. There's a million things that can go wrong. All of the things that you said are right, but it's important to realize the moment in time that I'm talking about. I'm talking about the moment in time when there was enough evidence, maybe around the series b or starting going into series c, that people that had the insights and looked at the numbers, we could clearly articulate how we would get there. When Postmates started out, this thing sounded so crazy that the only people that wanted to give us money were Brian Singerman and Peter Thiel. And I think the only reason they gave us money is because nobody else said they would give us money and Peter and Brian probably thought it's a smart thing to do. Dude, you're very vocal on VCs, which I always find an entertaining take. VCs are very vocal on on on founders, so I think somebody has to, every once in a while, has to give some feedback. **Harry Stebbings** [14:09]: This is gonna be a fun show, my friend. But when Founders Fund invest in your series a and lead that as first institutional lead, how do you weigh the importance of VC brand is my question? Does it really make a difference to company's trajectory when a tier one leads you around? Back then, it meant **Bastian Lehmann** [14:24]: a lot to us that we had a known company as the lead investor. And I do believe that it sets up a signal, but I think a good signal can save a bad company. And it'll come down at the end of the day to your execution. A lot of times, even the great VCs and a lot of hype can't really change the outcome of a company. What was the hardest round to raise? **Harry Stebbings** [14:46]: Everyone. Every single round. Talk to me, as we progress, the business matures, it gets larger, How did the Uber acquisition play out? We put it on Twitter. I got a lot of DMs being like, I want the story. Can you just take me to the story of how it played out? **Bastian Lehmann** [15:02]: Dara called me, and he said, do you wanna do you wanna discuss merging the companies? And I said, yeah. Let's do it. Fits in a tweet. That's how easy it was. You guys then meet. Where do you meet? How does the meeting go? What are the thoughts? It was during COVID. We met at Alta Plaza Park. It's sorta I think it's a mean point between where we both lived at the time. A year and a half earlier, there were some preliminary discussions with the with the Uber team, so there was some familiarity. But, ultimately, I think it wasn't the right time for either party. We raised more money, and I think Uber had to explore more what they wanted and what they can do with Uber Eats. Ultimately, they had a change in leadership on the Uber Eats side. Pierre was now in charge, and I think Dara was very bullish about Uber Eats, especially because of COVID. Right? Their rights business was basically nonexistent. And with DoorDash being clearly the market leader in most of The US, but not in California and certain regions that are very attractive where we were the number one, They saw the great opportunity for consolidation, and the whole thing was was very pleasant, I have to say. **Harry Stebbings** [16:05]: Okay. So we have that meeting. We have that discussion. Again, I you said let's let's smash this podcast, so I'm just gonna go for the questions, and you can rip me if I'm going too far. Someone said that Postmates was running out of cash. This was like an emergency deal that landed super freaking well. Is that fair? **Bastian Lehmann** [16:23]: No. No. I I I I actually love sort of defending the legacy here a little bit. You know, sometimes when you fight giants, you know, the war can get nasty and Infowar is definitely part of that. So first of all, let's just look at the facts. It's very easy. Uber obviously had to file an s four at the time that they purchased Postmates and you can look it up. We had just under $100,000,000 left in cash and our negative gross profit margin was, I think, single digits. Two or three quarters later, we were profitable as a company, positive cash flow. So we were in a position that we didn't have to sell. As a matter of fact, we were planning to go public and would have probably been one of the last companies to do so before, you know, the world ended and we were excited about it. But when we looked at everything that was on the table, we had done the best job we could for ten years to grow an amazing company. I think it was the furthest that we could have moved the company. We believed it was best as part of something bigger because the market needed to consolidate at some point. **Harry Stebbings** [17:27]: Why? Like, why could you not have done more, Bastian? You're a seedy founder. You're an ambitious guy. You're a great CEO. Was it tempting to go it alone? Yeah. Absolutely. And **Bastian Lehmann** [17:36]: I I had a great belief that we could continue as a standalone company, but ultimately, I think I put the ego a little aside and it's not easy. I wanted to be CEO of a publicly traded company. I I was looking forward to that and I think I would do a great job at it and I may get another shot at it. But here's another thing that I think people don't fully understand. We negotiated the deal so well. There was no color on the deal. By the time the deal closed, it was almost $5,000,000,000, which is amazing. **Harry Stebbings** [18:05]: It's reported to be 2.65. **Bastian Lehmann** [18:08]: Yeah. That of obviously, that was the price that was announced, but there was no color on the exchange ratio and obviously, we benefited from the Uber share price that was, I think, in the when we got the shares, the Uber shares were at around $31. When the deal finally closed and we got approval, it was at 53, I believe, or 55. The money returned to shareholders is was almost 5,000,000,000, and I have sold almost none of my shares. So I'm still rooting for Uber. Uber's **Harry Stebbings** [18:34]: share price today is $75.75. Yeah. It's a bit down, isn't it? Yep. Wow. That is insane. How did you come to the price when you were sitting with Dara? How does one price the asset that is Postmates at that stage? Does he throw out a number? Do you throw out a number? What does that look like? **Bastian Lehmann** [18:51]: Well, I think it's probably a mix of last valuation and then you look at multiple on forward looking revenue and sort of a mixed bag really. And I think he came he came out with a number that was that was around 2.2 or something and we negotiated it up a little bit, but I didn't want it to push too hard because the two things that we negotiated for are no breakup, absolutely no way out, and no color on the deal because we sort of knew that the street would probably appreciate the acquisition, and it did. So those elements were more important to us than pushing the price on paper to a 3,000,000,000 and maybe living with certain uncertainties. **Harry Stebbings** [19:30]: Fuck me. So how much of the companies you own, Bastian? Like, 20%? I **Bastian Lehmann** [19:36]: it it doesn't matter. Wow. What did the board say? I think Brian Zingerman was excited to the extent, and he said, you did it, Bastian. I I really think he said that exact same sentence, and that was sort of the end of the excitement. And and that, I mean, meant meant a great deal coming from him. **Harry Stebbings** [19:53]: Listen. That's as good as you're gonna get, so just embrace that. Yeah. I know. What are your biggest lessons then to founders on how to get acquired and how to sell your company the right way? Most companies fail because the founders give up, and that's it. We refuse to give up. You said before that Dara is one of the best non founder CEOs alive. I'd love to unpack that. Why do you think that is? What makes him so good in your mind? So first of all, I **Bastian Lehmann** [20:18]: think he has an ability to give the people that work for him a lot of autonomy. When I started working with him and see how he works, at first, thought that that was a weakness. And I had this feeling like, man, he's not really that involved in all of these things. But, boy, I I think it's just a great way of how he leads the company. And he is involved, but not to the extent that I was involved or that I thought people would be involved. But he rewards a group of people with trust and he he picked a lot of good people that ended up working for him that executed very well. He's a very calculated risk taker. I think when he took over the job, I think he had a pretty good understanding that he can turn the company around and what needed to get done more so than than the street understood and would give him credit for. I think he has maneuvered legislation, any sort of cultural issues in the company, external expectations very well. And for a non founder CEO, he really has I think he has made this company his. And what is remarkable is if you have people two, three years ago that talk about it, they're like, Dara, you know, at some point maybe, you know, Travis comes back and this the whole Apple thing. You know, we love these stories in in Silicon Valley. We love it. It's the stuff that movies are made of. Right? But you know this guy just showed up at work, did his thing, you would have CNBC, you would have Bloomberg. They would just say nothing nice about it at all and every every moment in time that they could mention that Uber has not been has not exceeded their their IPO share price was good enough for it. This guy just keeps on executing, and now you turn on CNBC, you read Bloomberg, one of the best CEOs, incredible guy, unbelievable, give him a billion dollar salary. How can he have done this? You know, here's a CEO that knows how to run a business, and it's sort of like, yeah, he did that. **Harry Stebbings** [22:08]: Can I ask you again a final one and then we're gonna move to new company? Someone messaged me and said, basically, Dara's written off the Drizzly and the Postmates acquisition. What does Bastian think? How do you think about that? Was that right? Does that feel good? What are the thoughts? **Bastian Lehmann** [22:23]: So first of all, I I couldn't care less about it because I'm not in charge at Uber and I don't run the company. And however, Dara wants to run the company, it he probably will do what's best for the company. But I see no signs of the Postmates acquisition being written off because I think the brand is very strong. It continues to be very strong in LA and unless I haven't gotten the the memo that they're that they're shutting Postmates down, I think it it it continues to be a great brand. Maybe ultimately, it is smart to consolidate to one brand, but when we discussed the merger, we sort of had this idea that you leave these brands, you start uniting the tech underneath, and then at some point, it's the same product, but it sort of has basically a different name. And and and that's that's literally like the the one difference, and you you can use these brands to maybe appeal to slightly different audiences. But if they change their mind, then that's fine. Maybe I can buy the domain back. **Harry Stebbings** [23:16]: So then we have the earnout and progressing through that. You then have a good amount of money, and you're thinking about what to do next. Talk to me about the decision making process there, Bastian. You could have done anything. You could stay at Uber. You could be a big time exec. What was the decision making process? **Bastian Lehmann** [23:32]: Well, I tried to do nothing. But if you have a family, then it's hard to find time to do nothing. So for a while, I I was just enjoying that. But if your mind keeps wondering about things that could be done and ideas that you could work on, I love building products and I love running teams and I love being in a room full of engineers and and and working on ideas and see things come to life. I try to do the investing thing and I do some investments, but it does not derive me the same amount of joy than actively building something. **Harry Stebbings** [24:03]: Now you start a second company then. What are the single biggest pros? If we start on positives, what are the biggest pros of being a second time founder, Bastian? **Bastian Lehmann** [24:12]: If you're a second time founder that has returned capital, I think you have a set of pros. It's very easy to raise money, you can select the people that you wanna work with, it is fairly easy to assemble a team, And because you have done certain things, you don't know how to be successful again, but you know how to run a lot of the processes and a lot of the red tape and a lot of the things that would really consume you the first time around. Now you know how to do these things, and so you can be fairly efficient in getting started. **Harry Stebbings** [24:43]: Often, it's not knowing what to do right. It's knowing what not to do. The mistakes that one normally makes. You said about selecting the VCs and having the ability to. With the ability to select, how do you select the **Bastian Lehmann** [24:55]: VCs you work with? If you ran a company for ten years, you have met people that you maybe always wish you would have worked with. And for me personally, Marc Andreessen was is one of my heroes, and this is a guy whose software I grew up with, whose browser arguably changed how we access information. I pitched him four times or five times the entire firm with Postmates. They were smart enough to say no, but it was amazing to be able to just just reach out and and I think there was a mutual feeling from his side. He was excited to work with me as well. **Harry Stebbings** [25:25]: How did that round come together? You ping him and you're like, hey, I'm starting something new. Can I come meet you? He pinged me actually because **Bastian Lehmann** [25:32]: a friend told him that I was working on something and he called me and I said, I don't I don't even know if that idea is good. And he said, do you wanna do it again? And I said, yes. It's like, well, then I'm I'm sure you'll figure something out. That was the extent of the fundraise. **Harry Stebbings** [25:44]: So who did the price? Who did the negotiation? Like, how does that work? **Bastian Lehmann** [25:48]: We we didn't negotiate on the terms much. We just discussed what we believe to be reasonable for a cold start series a at a price that is not too high, and that's it, really. What did you have in terms of company at that point? **Harry Stebbings** [26:00]: Three cofounders, a problem space that we've been looking at. Did you worry that it was too much too soon? One of the challenges is it's too easy to raise money, and then you have the luxury of not being thrifty, being able to spend on whatever you want. Were you concerned about having too much too soon? Yeah. I I I still am. **Bastian Lehmann** [26:17]: But only to the extent that I'm concerned about any of these things up to the point where I know that the new company is a success. Right? So I I don't think there's any set of circumstances that will necessarily dictate that outcome. If you have too little, you're worried that maybe you should have raised more. If you raise money, you may be worried that you have too much, and do you detect complacency somewhere? **Harry Stebbings** [26:42]: We will see. It's it's always one way a lot people say, oh, raise whatever you can, and you just put it in a separate bank account on a rainy day. And I always find founders spend rainy day funds when it's not raining. **Bastian Lehmann** [26:53]: We we sort of raised an amount that would allow us to do three or four startups in one. If you think about it, something that Marc and I often talk about is if you run a company, you wanna test a set of hypotheses, that's your job as a CEO. Right? And you and you and you wanna run down that list. And if you find that some of them work, you sort of wanna increase the velocity and and and really get to the point where you know if this thing works or not. And I think the idea behind TipTop is that we like this space, but we will explore it to the extent that if we believe that we have a tiger by the tail and that we see this thing moving in the direction that we like, we will continue testing hypotheses or we will we will move to a different space. And that would be there will be no problem. And not for the team, not for myself, and I don't think for anybody who invested. The idea is that that we'll figure something out. **Harry Stebbings** [27:39]: Where is the conviction bar on where you are with TipTop? Is it like 50% proven? 3070%? It's a great question. It's a **Bastian Lehmann** [27:48]: very good idea. We're very convinced of that. It is a very slick product. We're very convinced of that. We are trying to understand the market size and the impact that we can have with our energy. **Harry Stebbings** [28:01]: We're not sure where that where that is yet. How do you determine when to cut something and move on? Is there a defining metric? Like, if we don't have x number of users by x date, we kill it. You can do it that **Bastian Lehmann** [28:12]: way. And and I'm sure it's there there are people that are like that. Who do I know who's extremely smart and would run a company like this? Patrick and John Collison. I think they're like the perfect example. I'm I'm sure they have a metric. I admire them and we're very fortunate to call them friends. The the most important thing to realize is that it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. We we we tend to take everything way too seriously. Like, oh, if if I fail, the the world will think nobody cares. It takes a minute for everybody to get over it. Right? So something else will happen. Elon will tweet something and that's what we care about the minute after somebody just thought about you. So it it really doesn't matter. Like, there there is no right or wrong way. There is nobody who knows the master plan, and it really does not matter. **Harry Stebbings** [28:58]: I find it incredibly reassuring to remember that you are not nearly as important as you think you are. Yeah. But nobody is. Right? That's the thing nothing is. I ask you? I think one challenging or interesting element is financial position changes with your second company if the first was successful. You know, you no longer need it financially to work. How does starting a company, Rich, change your mindset, approach, ambition the second time around? Well, that is **Bastian Lehmann** [29:26]: a fair question. I had very little when I started Postmates and we put it all on that thing. Right? And we felt like we had to push that little carriage up for up the mountain for ten years. Right? And at any moment, there were there was not a moment in time when we were convinced that that we've made it. But we had the ultimate energy because we felt that this is what had to had to get done. But at least 50 of that was also a chip that we had on our shoulder that we wanted to prove that we can do this. And that is something that all the money in the world can't really compensate for. That's why people strive for greatness. That's why people strive to do certain things because there is a **Harry Stebbings** [30:03]: desire to do something. But how does starting a company the second time differ when you're starting it rich? **Bastian Lehmann** [30:10]: Well, I don't I don't need a salary, so I don't pay myself a salary. That sort of comes in handy. **Harry Stebbings** [30:15]: Are you more courageous in the bets that you take because you're not worried about the downside? Are you more fast moving? **Bastian Lehmann** [30:20]: I think **Harry Stebbings** [30:21]: we as a company **Bastian Lehmann** [30:22]: and I've been very focused to not have any sort of external things influence our decision making. We try to be very humble. We try to be nimble. We try to move very fast, we try to write a lot of code, assess problems. We try to do that without the assumption that we're better off because of anything that happened before. **Harry Stebbings** [30:40]: I'm sorry for jumping around. When when the money does land, does it land in one go? Do you get like but I'm being serious, like, do you just get like a notification like here is like, you know, x million dollars and you're like, wow, that's great. Or does it come in drip feeds? How long does it take? Like, just how does it work? **Bastian Lehmann** [30:57]: What's really interesting is that you think it's this moment, but the whole thing almost takes a year. You sign a deal and then of course, you know, DOJ, in our case, the DOJ had a few questions and they submitted a request and and we had to answer that and and then the then that you get the go and then the deal closes and then there is a company called Shareworks that deals with the transition of shares between two parties, and and they take custody. You get access to it. And then there's a clawback. In our case, it was a there was no clawback, I believe, company wide clawback, but we just had a small amount of shares that did vest after, like, three months or something. So but, yeah, at some point, you your bank calls you and says, like, yeah. We got your shares. Do do you wanna see do you wanna see your bank account? I guess that's what they ask you. Yeah. How did you feel in that moment? The bizarre thing is that you prepare for that moment for a year. Right? It's not like winning the lottery and you're like, and there it is. Right? It's sort of like we knew we had sold the company a year earlier. In your mind, you probably go over that moment then many times. Right? But I was so focused at that moment in time was the transition of the company. Right? So you have to understand up until the Department of Justice cleared the thing, was a fair chance that this would have not been possible. There was no moment in time when we celebrated after we signed the paper because we had to run the company as a standalone company for, I believe, eight eight nine months. So we had to hit our quarterly goals. We did not wanted to have a scenario where we lose market share because now we're thinking that we're selling the company. So you run these things as as very separate businesses. It's very anticlimactic, I would say. I wish there would have been a moment. And on top of that, it was COVID. So the one thing that I'm extremely sad about is that I did not ever get to celebrate with our 2,000 employees at a party in a room and have a blast. That was a very strange feeling. Everyone walked away sort of in with masks and, you know, five feet distant. A very strange end to, like, a ten year church like community and and being in the office for eighteen hours most days, including the weekends. Like, it was very strange. But I'm **Harry Stebbings** [33:08]: sure your wife must have been thrilled when the cash landed. I I do have to ask. As we said, you're very vocal about venture investors. As a venture investor, I agree with some and disagree with others. You said before that 99% of VCs are idiots, Bastian. How do you find the 1% that are not, and do you really think that? I would **Bastian Lehmann** [33:29]: probably today say that 99% are sheep. Why do you think they're sheep? That that's probably enough to be somewhat successful. There is a mass sort of thinking, and it's very self informed, and there's very few people that understand where things should go and and where the opportunities lie, and there is the majority of all people are just echo chambers of whatever that is, and and there is a great desire in most VCs that I know to not bump in bump around the edges too much and just do that thing and just, you know, follow that path. What what whatever is the creed of the moment and and whatever you wanna discuss in regards to that. Like, it's rough to be a little different and try to convince people. **Harry Stebbings** [34:21]: That's why I think it's the same with LPs. I I quite often will say to LPs, you know, you get paid for the courageous bats that you take, not the safe decisions that you make. I think it's very much the same in venture, by the way. This is a business of anomalies, and so I completely agree with you. I think one of the interesting elements is venture value add. A lot of founders say, oh, I'm thinking about this VC or that VC because they bring this and this and this. How do you think about venture value add? And you've said before the best VCs in the world are humble enough to realize that they're not going to change the outcome. How do you advise founders on venture value add? Well, first of **Bastian Lehmann** [34:58]: all, I I think that statement is is completely correct. It is my fundamental belief. The greatest VCs that I have met are the people that know this. When the company was bought, when the deal got closed, I remember having coffee with Brian Zingerman, and we both lived in Noy Valley at the time. So and I was curious. I'm like, hey. How is it being a VC? What's how do you do it at Founders Fund? Do you think I could do it? And I think he said something. He said, I don't know if you can do it, but I don't think you can do it, and I don't think you would be good at it. And I'm like and I'm like I'm like, why do you think that? He's like, well, you care too much. Like, you're an operator. You wanna you believe that you can change things, and you can do that when you're running your company. When you're an investor, you have to realize that there's nothing you can do. It doesn't matter. So at Founders Fund, they they obviously believe in this very deeply. We just saw this obviously with with keys leaving there and and being somewhere else. The belief is that there is very little you can do to actually move the needle other than writing the check. And then in the best case, stay out of the way, and that's why they believe that board seats are, you know, all the downside and very little upside. All of it is rooted in this belief that why would you be the guy that knows best how to do something and push these founders to do a certain thing? I believe the best VCs in the world believe that. I I do not believe that Marc loses a sleepless night over what I'm working on. I I believe that he may not even care and that is totally okay with me because that is the job of the people running the company. And the investments that I have made, when I give someone a check, then I try to stay out of it because I think Brian Zingerman is also one of the most intelligent people I know and I think he he's right. I think value add is a great marketing tool that VCs have discovered that if they use it, they can attract talent, they can attract LPs, and by doing that, they also increase their own value in the chain of how money flows. **Harry Stebbings** [36:59]: That's mostly what it is. You said another thing, final one on fundraising. But you said when you feel like you have to convince someone to really work hard on your space or to convince someone, walk away. Why is that? Why why is having to educate your investor a bad thing? **Bastian Lehmann** [37:16]: I'm a little jaded here, so but one is allowed to be to be jaded or influenced by one own experience. Even though I try to separate these things a lot, I do believe that there's unlimited amount of capital out there and I believe that it is easier and it's better worth your time by focusing on the people that initially believe in that than than trying to ride two or three rounds with the same VC firm and spend two hours going into unit economics where the outcome of any of these meetings will evidently be that they write down the unit economics neatly and then invest in your competitor. So it is very important to understand when a VC is trying to understand your business or when a VC is trying to understand your business to the extent of also another business at the same time. So oftentimes when you spend a lot of time and you feel like every meeting you have to you have to really dig incredibly deep. Again, I if you are a VC that needs that much conviction regardless of the check size, already a red flag. And I find it will only get worse from there. It will only get worse because good luck with the next board meeting and the subsequent board meeting and not hitting a number and losing a percent market share. We had all types of investors in the company. It's not fun. Did you enjoy board meetings? I was not really good at first at running board meetings. I grew up running this company, and I don't mean like in a sense of from a from a young buck to like a teenager, but I think as a businessman, when when I started the company versus eleven years later, I grew up as a person and I obviously honed my skills. So the first couple of board meetings, I think, were I didn't have the headspace to even think about the board really. So I was I was so focused into the daily operations of the company. It was hard for me to have even predictions or sort of to even focus on explaining things to someone else. And after a while when we got external investors that were not just Scott Bannister who was the first on the board and Brian, sort of I had to learn that part of that ultimately is also to align the board and to make sure that the that it's not just in your head, but that you communicate it to the board. What I found to be a very good strategy is to actually have the board meeting and non board meeting and do a dinner the night before with a presentation sent out a week, but at least a few days ahead of time. At the board dinner, you discuss any sort of tension that there may be hitting your numbers or beating them or fundraising or updates or whatever it is, competition, so that you can then have a board meeting that is very short, very focused on just a few things that people commented on in the week leading up to the board meeting with the board deck that you provided. And it also gives everybody this feeling that, oh, we just sat together last night. Right? So a lot of anxiety is out of the room. You know? People got to be used to the quirks again that they may have forgotten about because, you know, it's people are I love people. We're all different. Right? That that worked very well for me towards the end. **Harry Stebbings** [40:19]: I love that, and I really like that separation between the board dinner and the actual board meeting and actually segmenting the content in that way. I do have to go for some hot takes, Bastian. It'd be wrong for me not to. And, you know, as you said, VC is a sheep. What could it be? Why why don't we talk about AI? And you teased me with having some controversial hot takes, but you didn't actually go into them. And so you said inference computers, and that was it. What's your hot hot take on inference computers? I think there were **Bastian Lehmann** [40:47]: three sort of areas that I wrote down. I think personal AI is another one. Cost of Alarms. Yeah. Great. I think that obviously AI or machine learning has opened this great new paradigm and way of thinking and honestly has has has given tech a much needed boost and enthusiasm, which I think is fantastic. I believe that one of the overlooked areas of the current state of AI and the large language models that we're using is that they're still very expensive. They're dramatically more expensive than a Google search and as a result of that, we don't really have any great killer apps beyond the chatbot and anything you build on LLMs is very expensive because compute is very expensive and obviously there's even on on the compute that's available shortage of that compute. Right? So now most of that goes into training these models, which is done in the cloud and which is done on large GPUs and it's a fantastic use case for that. When it comes to AI and personal AI, we may be at a moment in time where there is there is an opportunity for a new computer, a new type of computer that we may see in every home. A computer that runs your own personal AI on a chip that does not have to be as powerful as the most powerful NVIDIA chips. As a matter of fact, it could be a chip just designed for inference and just designed for for doing that very specific work. And that computer is is not a computer with a screen, it won't be a computer that you sort of even necessarily interact with, but it it it will be a piece that other devices could interact with and that powers a large language model if you want to, hopefully an open source one, and that will behave like a platform that has your personal weights, your personal preferences, that is connected to the world in the way that you want to. **Harry Stebbings** [42:31]: Why would you need an a a computer separate in the home for that? Surely, the the preference is the data would be stored in a cloud provider, very much like having an OpenAI account that has your personalizations and preferences baked into that. **Bastian Lehmann** [42:44]: No. Actually not. For two reasons. First of all, you want the inference to happen as closest to the source of data as possible. And I like to argue that once a model is trained, then you get all the signals from your house, from your life, and in that moment is actually when inference is the most powerful. You if you have data in the cloud and you need to computing on that data, sure, but not if it's data that is maybe to do around your home. Right? So inference is very powerful the closer it is to the source of data, given that if you think about a personal assistant, the personal assistant needs a lot of information about you and inputs. That's why you would see that at home. It also is the only way right now to do it cost effectively. If you have personalized weights, if you have personalized numbers, your LLM in the cloud will cost a lot of money and it can't even do things real time right now for you because of the cost. You can run it at home and the only cost is your electricity. That's another reason. I talked to a few founders about this over the last couple of weeks. A lot of folks are convinced that this is sort of when you had these huge timeshare mainframe and you had to go into them and you have to pay per minute and you have to pay per use and the thing came back and then Apple came and Apple won and you had a board that you can hack against at home and that allowed you to do your own thing. So I may be wrong, but I think there is something here. **Harry Stebbings** [44:00]: Is Apple not best placed? If you think about being closest to the source as being fundamental, is Apple's monopoly on hardware and phone usage and device not putting them best place to run these models locally on device. **Bastian Lehmann** [44:14]: Yeah. A couple of more hot takes that most people will not agree with, and I'm happy to be wrong. I think the phone is dead. That's the first problem that will happen very soon. I believe that AI happened too fast and Apple is caught in sort of the inventor's dilemma here. I'm sure that they could eventually put an additional chip in an iPhone that does inference and allows you to run these models more efficiently, but I doubt that it will be interesting enough for the group of people that I have in mind and wanna tinker with with the technology. So Why is the phone dead? I think it had a good run, man, but but I think we I think we have to call it we have to call it what it is. Look at us. What replaces it? I mean, ultimately, we will find a way to use implants to communicate or or devices that are smaller. But I think we will see a world where people go to, an operating system for LLMs, maybe a voice operating system. I I think there is many ways. That device may have not been invented yet, and it may take obviously longer. You know, landlines are still around. So when I when I call it dead, I don't call it dead in the sense of we won't use it anymore, but I think it it has reached the peak of its importance in people's lives. Are you long or short on the vision, Pro? On the vision as it the the how it is today? Short. Because? I think it's a product in search of a market. It may have a fantastic application in science and in medicine to a less degree in media. I think it is just a product that doesn't bring us together regardless of all its neat technology and the fake eyes and and all of these things. You know what? I think Apple knows this obviously, but they're have incredible people working for them. The hardware that would change would just be in recognizable different from your regular reading glasses, and it and it would have unlimited battery life, overlay of information, anything that you can imagine in in, like, a very subtle way. That would I think it will be a great tool. **Harry Stebbings** [46:11]: Where do the benefits accrue? More to startups or more to incumbents in the next wave of AI? So **Bastian Lehmann** [46:17]: in in almost everything that we've seen, I think it is incumbents. I don't think that's too contrarian because it it just makes a lot of sense. Right? But there will be companies born today that will be larger in the field of AI than the companies that are the largest companies that we have today. And they will start as toys and they will start as something that is probably overlooked and something that is not most applicable and something that is not most obvious. **Harry Stebbings** [46:49]: That's my prediction. Quick debate with you, but we've never had incumbents who have such data advantages as that these incumbents have. And we've never had incumbents who throw off 350,000,000 a day in free cash flow like Microsoft does combined with the data advantage. Are these incumbents not too strong to use up? **Bastian Lehmann** [47:05]: Blackberry at some point owned the entire smartphone market. Grubhub ran pretty much all food delivery in The United States. **Harry Stebbings** [47:12]: Those are weak examples. You can do better than that, Bastian. Come on. Like, they had BBM as a network retention mechanism, maybe. But I mean, the the market itself is pretty small. Their market cap never exceeded a huge amount. Their free cash flow was never a monstrous amount. Grubhub was not ever global, not even comparable. What's your point? Is this incumbent set not more dominant than ever before, and actually we're in a very different world of startup versus incumbent? **Bastian Lehmann** [47:44]: I I still don't buy it. I think in retrospect, it always looks like this. Ten years ago, Apple didn't produce their own chips. Like, everything looks like that. At some point, there is a market that looks penetrated, a thing that can happen. At the same time, look, it it this is how it starts, dude. It's always starts like this. The things start to fall apart from the inside. Google already can't launch an AI without the original founders coming back and having meetings with people with t shirts of boobs sitting in a room somewhere in San Francisco. This is Google that you're talking about, and they shut the bed so hard. They literally just went from like the most respected company in the world to laughing stock in a matter of month. So I just don't buy it. And look, this is this is a marathon. This is not just a sprint, but the cracks start to show on the inside. The VisionPRO, an effort inside the company that was Herculean, I was told, where everybody was involved, where people had to take meetings they didn't wanted to know, where two teams of hundreds of people were pitted off against each other to get that thing onto the market, and now it fails. Dude, this will be the first product for Apple where they have more returns than they have on any other metric. You you can plot the graph, and it's the since Steve Jobs came back, this is probably the first thing that is a turd. So this stuff starts to happen from the inside. It's not only that there is smart kids coming along and they're they're doing something, but it's a combination of both. And that I fundamentally believe in. At some point, the people that did whatever made that company great and even their direct reports and the people that believe that at some point that either shifts, moves away, and then it starts to feel a little loose on the edges. And when it starts to feel loose is exactly when there is opportunity for someone else. And sure, you can buy yourself out of this and you can m and a your way into whatever you want, but it can happen. And then it won't happen overnight, and it will look like a toy at first, whatever it is will be ridiculed, then people try to catch up. If they're lucky, they can buy someone. But every once in a while, there is a company that rises and becomes extremely extremely big even though the set of circumstances **Harry Stebbings** [49:54]: seem very **Bastian Lehmann** [49:55]: unlikely. **Harry Stebbings** [49:56]: Dude, I love it. Question. One company that seems to have risen obviously above any other is OpenAI. Do you think foundational models get commoditized, and would you be a buyer of OpenAI at 90,000,000,000? It's a fantastic **Bastian Lehmann** [50:07]: research company is how I would describe OpenAI. I think it remains to be seen if they can launch extremely successful products other than Chet GPT. It will be a dominant player, And look what they did, by the way, coming out of nowhere yet working on it for seven years. Right? You didn't catch up with Sam every week to get the status on on what they were working on for the last six or seven years. And suddenly, there's this one product and off you go. So, of course, they're important. I think they're a great player that is now inspiring a lot of founders and entrepreneurs to do great things and have the audacity to to to sort of dream in a direction that for the longest time, mostly because it was a market where if you worked in ML, you you got a nice salary at Google, but the expectations was just that you please don't bother anyone too much. Right? So and now suddenly, you're like, you're in demand. People actually listen to you. They believe that these things can work. You know? Everybody wants to know what a token is. They will be a big player. I think they will be a very large company, but there's other companies that I'm personally, like, more excited about. So Which **Harry Stebbings** [51:09]: ones are they? **Bastian Lehmann** [51:10]: Well, I don't know. I have I have my list here. I have certain I have certain names. I I divide companies into, like, the big stuff useful and noise, and and most of it is noise, obviously. Right? That's just like someone who comes along and says, like, we're developing a brain for robots. But I think what looks really good is Figure. I think the latest robots that that we've seen from them, they're they're they're remarkable. I think they work with OpenAI. That's an OpenAI investment. I think that you see a lot of really remarkable companies coming on working with smaller models, more dedicated models, models that that may be a lot more trained for a specific purpose than sort of that giant call center that can do anything. But other than AI, I I'm telling you, space, nuclear, count me in. Any startups that have had a huge publicity and you're like, I don't get it. A lot of them. But that's okay. Technology is the absolute greatest thing. Faster, more enthusiastic into the technological future. **Harry Stebbings** [52:04]: That's what I believe in. Final one. You mentioned time scales actually taking longer. I am just intrigued. You said to me before, and you said, sorry, on Twitter before, not developing AI fast enough is what will kill us, not the other way around. What do you mean by that? **Bastian Lehmann** [52:19]: We are already facing and we will continue to face dramatic challenges obviously as a country, but also as people. And on this planet, moving to a new planet, if we wanna be multi species, I think the challenges ahead of us, we need to develop all the technology we can to solve them, to engineer ourselves out of global warming, to make decisions based on data and guidance that we can get from better software, getting to Mars, all of that, I think it's essential that we make great strides in AI. The risk is not that there will be an evil AI that will kill us. I think the risk will be that by not becoming more intelligent and using these intelligent tools, will become extinct. **Harry Stebbings** [53:00]: Bold statements. I'm loving this. Glad we did that as a as a quick fire on AI round, Bastian. That's fantastic. I wanna do a quick fire round more broadly. So I ping you with a statement. You give me your thoughts. Does that sound okay? Yes. What have you changed your mind on in the last twelve months? Again, technology. **Bastian Lehmann** [53:16]: I I I mentioned it before. I think we were in a little bit of a slump there for a while. It seemed like everybody shut off the engines, and we had to be very apologetic, and it was sort of now I think we're so back, and I think it's great. Because I'm saying it again, like, accelerate into the technological future as fast and as enthusiastic as we can. What are you most concerned about in the world today? What am I most concerned about? United. Go on. Going on a United airplane. **Harry Stebbings** [53:43]: Oh, wow. I I thought I thought you were, like, United. I was like, is that, like are we talking about, like, geopolitics? No. Just flying United. I I'd be very concerned about that. Well, you know, life is good then. You could get a PJ Bastian. That's Thank you. Single biggest way VCs and founders are misaligned? Expectations. Why expectations? VCs always just want more? **Bastian Lehmann** [54:04]: No. It's expectations more in the sense when and sort of how, and I think there there's a lot of friction there in general. What's the most lavish purchase **Harry Stebbings** [54:12]: you've made? Having two kids. What's the biggest piece of BS advice that you hear most often? **Bastian Lehmann** [54:18]: The first x dollar in revenue is always the hardest or something like there there there is a there is a version of that coming out of everybody I've ever met. So yeah. What's the kindest thing anyone's ever done for you? You know, I think my co founder Sean Plaice is one of the greatest humans that I know and I am so thankful for his friendship because what he has done for the entire time while I was the CEO and ran the company and did a lot of the front of the office work and we often banged heads and I reserved the right to have the final decision on a lot of things. That guy has just been the greatest supporter you can imagine every day. And he showed up every day and he said, b let's do it. And he drove us to the fundraisings. I think he has given ten years of his life in something that I made him believe in. And so I think just that in itself is is is a remarkable gift. Other than Dara, which CEO do you most respect and why? Oh, man. I can only name one because if you if you now name another one, then it's a can of worms. Right? Other than Dara, I believe that the world would be a better place if we had more founder CEOs. And I hope that the founder CEOs that we have that they stay CEOs for the long time. Patrick at Stripe, Zach at Plaice, Max at Affirm. These are all just remarkable remarkable people that run their company so well and that had to fight battles and and and overcome all sorts of challenges, whatever they are. I mean, in Zach's place, we were bought, the acquisition couldn't go through, you have to go back and build again. If these guys are ever in well, Patrick in that case and Zach, if they run their companies publicly, books will be written about their leadership style. **Harry Stebbings** [55:59]: I'm certain of Final one, twenty thirty four. Why do you wanna be that? And where's Bastian 2034? **Bastian Lehmann** [56:05]: Well, realistically, probably at some sort of sport event with my kids, whatever they play is probably where I will be. Right? So I have two of them, maybe ballet or whatever they pick up. My oldest one likes basketball. So that that's probably what I will do. **Harry Stebbings** [56:22]: Bastian, I I wanted to do this for a long time. I so appreciate you putting up with the prying. You've been fantastic. So thank you for joining me. Well, I I had a great time. It's so funny. Before that show, Bastian said, let's make this a really special one. I think he absolutely did that. That was such a fantastic discussion. If you wanna see the full video, you can check it out on YouTube by searching for 20 VC. But before we leave you today, ## Sponsor read **Harry Stebbings** [56:44]: one thing I hear from my listeners all the time is that marketing leaders are under more pressure than ever to deliver real business impact. You know, more conversions, lowering customer acquisition costs, and bringing in more revenue. But that's impossible when you're stuck with tools that don't move as fast as you do. That's why companies like Dropbox, IDEO, and Orangetheory all trust Webflow to power their web experiences. 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