20VC: Shervin Pishevar on The Epic Uber War and What Really Happened in the Firing of Travis Kalanick | Raising $15BN to Win China | Why The Traditional Venture Capital Model is Dead | The Future of Quantum and How We Will Cure All Diseases in 10 Years

Shervin Pishevar is a serial entrepreneur and investor. Shervin is famed for leading Uber’s Series B at Menlo alongside leading Warby Parker’s Series A and investing in Tumblr, all in just 18 months at Menlo. Following Menlo, Shervin co-founded Sherpa Capital and today Shervin is averaging over 73x on his investments. As an angel investor, Shervin made over 100 investments in the likes of Dollar Shave Club, Postmates, Facebook and more. In Today’s Episode with Shervin Pishevar: 08:09 Meeting Travis Kalanick: The Start of a Game-Changing Partnership 11:08 The Uber Series B: Securing a Billion-Dollar Deal 12:49 The Rise of Uber: Global Expansion and Strategic Moves 19:01 The Lyft Rivalry: Missed Opportunities and Lessons Learned 20:57 Recruiting Emil Michael: Building a Strong Leadership Team 24:29 Uber China: The Challenges and Triumphs 27:19 The $15 Billion Raise: Fueling Uber's Global Dominance 30:57 The Beginning of the End: Betrayal by Benchmark 35:33 Sam Altman's Coup and Lessons from the Past 36:22 The Uber War: Legal Battles and Boardroom Drama 37:36 Fusion GPS and Fabricated Reports 39:43 The Me Too Movement and Its Impact 40:51 The SoftBank Investment and Leadership Changes 41:29 The Downfall of Uber's Visionaries 51:09 The Future of Venture Capital 57:01 Quantum Computing and AI: The Next Frontier

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I believe if Travis and Emil had stayed at Uber, Uber would be a trillion dollar company by now. This is the greatest value destruction that's happened since firing Steve Jobs at Apple.

• 0:12Speaker 00

  Travis, his true vision for Uber was to replace car ownership. And it was at that moment I realized, oh, the TAM is trillions. What do you think makes him so good? Really exceptional intelligence. You talk about 10x engineers, these are like 1000x humans. We are actually full steam ahead, but things start to go wrong. Yeah, what went wrong was we had the wrong venture capitalists on the board. Unfortunately, in my opinion, that was Bill Gurley at Benchmark. We found out in our investigation that he hired some private investigators, had weekly meetings about how do we get rid of Travis? That week, when Travis tragically lost his mother in a boating accident, Benchmark Gurley decided to go after Travis.

• 0:57Speaker 00

  I haven't told many of these stories, but basically...

• 1:02Harry Stebbings?

  This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings. And what a show we have in store for you today. This guest lost their mother a week before this recording. He then got on a flight from the US to London just for this episode. I'm thrilled to welcome Shervin Pishevar, serial entrepreneur and investor. Shervin is famed for leading Uber's Series B when he was at Menlo, alongside leading Warby Parker's Series A and investing in Tumblr, all in just 18 months at Menlo. Following that stint at Menlo, Shervin co-founded Sherpa Capital. And today, Shervin is averaging over 73x on his investments. Now, as an angel investor, Shervin also made over 100 investments in the likes of Dollar Shave Club, Postmates, Facebook and more.

• 1:45Harry Stebbings?

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• 2:28Harry Stebbings?

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• 3:12Harry Stebbings?

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• 3:55Harry Stebbings?

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• 4:40Harry Stebbings?

  Shavin dude, I'm so excited for this. I've wanted to make this one happen for a while. So thank you so much for joining me.

• 4:45Speaker 00

  Thank you, Harry. It's exciting to be here.

• 4:48Harry Stebbings?

  Now, I would love to start with a little bit of context. You're, I'm actually gonna start if it's okay with your mother. Um, I'm so sorry for her passing, but I know she was also incredibly impactful to you getting into technology. And so talk to me a little bit about her being impactful and getting into technology as a starting point.

• 5:03Speaker 00

  Absolutely. Thank you. My mom passed away last Wednesday. We're gonna have her funeral in a few days. And she was the most incredible human I've ever met. Uh, she was a teacher for 14 years in Iran. When we escaped the revolution and came to America, she started all over again. We came with thirty five dollars. Um, and then, uh, we had to escape. We started with nothing. Uh, and my dad drove a taxi while getting his PhD. My mom was a maid and worked two jobs, a cafeteria worker and a maid. I used to go clean rooms with her. Uh, so this is the kind of classic, uh, American dream story.

• 5:45Speaker 00

  And she took computer programming classes at the, 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 kind of see that. And then I saw, uh, the Apple and I begged for an Apple. My mom and dad worked overtime for three months to afford it. Back then it was like three thousand dollars, which is a lot in nineteen eighty five, eighty six. And they bought me my first Apple two C and I did my first code on it. Uh, and that changed my life. And then later she secretly put on her credit card a laptop.

• 6:30Speaker 00

  I was at Berkeley and I didn't have enough money to 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.

• 6:54Harry Stebbings?

  I think mothers are the most important people. I wouldn't be anywhere without my mother. I walk two marathons a weekend with her and it's kind of the sane space in my week. She's also expansive. She loves Chanel.

• 7:07Harry Stebbings?

  So there's downsides to everything, right? Listen dude, I want to go to the Uber story and I want to go to your time at Manlo. How did that come to be?

• 7:17Speaker 00

  Absolutely. 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 make enough money to start my company. So I had the little LG laptop with a dial-up connection. It was while I was on the security job all night, working on the startup as well. And at WebOS, I started recruiting really young talent. And at the time, the greatest developers on the internet were really young. They were like 15-year-olds, like Anthony Castellano, who's the founder of Squarespace. There was this kind of realization that I had an eye for talent.

• 8:01Speaker 00

  And then that later led to meeting Travis many years later and getting that sense of like, oh, this Travis is different.

• 8:09Harry Stebbings?

  How did you meet Travis? Take me to that meeting.

• 8:11Speaker 00

  I met him because Sheryl Sandberg actually was 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 is your charge? And then I shared that, you know, Apple charges 30%, you could probably charge 30%, which is what they end up. Of 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, Sherwin, you should go into venture. You'll be disruptive.

• 8:50Speaker 00

  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'd 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 90 days, I, I closed Uber, Warby Parker, Tumblr and Machine Zone. It was a really fast start.

• 9:31Speaker 00

  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 a 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 Ravikant 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 as a former son of a taxi driver in DC,

• 10:12Speaker 00

  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 Kohler, who was 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? And 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.

• 10:50Speaker 00

  Like Drew Houston, who was a dear friend, Sheryl Sandberg, Julius Janoschowski, all telling him, you need to meet with Sherwin. And finally Travis said, you know, 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 of 2011, six months after Benchmark did their Series A with Uber. And he 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.

• 11:30Speaker 00

  And we hit it off. 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 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 hundred thousand percent behind you. And so you have a strong backup. So negotiate with strength.

• 12:09Speaker 00

  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. And I was in Algeria and 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, absolutely, it's true. And 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.

• 12:52Speaker 00

  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 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, you're turning the, 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,

• 13:34Speaker 00

  uh, 290 million. I text him the term sheet and he didn't answer. And I was like waiting for an hour. I'm like, oh no, I saw worse. It's, you know, is he shopping it? So I, I text him again. It was like 300 million. 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, 290 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 million at the time, later I got another six and a half million through secondary for Menlo. So that investment at today's prices is worth almost $7 billion.

• 14:18Speaker 00

  It was one of those, you know, once in a lifetime investments. 20 to 7. 26 and a half million turned into like 6.7 billion at today's prices. You do this deal as part of Menlo, correct? Yeah. How long were you at Menlo for? 18 months and then I became an advisor for a year. You get where I'm going with this? Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it 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.

• 15:00Speaker 00

  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 advisor 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 sold all my Facebook shares that had gone public at like fifty three bucks, fifty eight bucks 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.

• 15:39Harry Stebbings?

  What price was this?

• 15:40Speaker 00

  Uber?

• 15:41Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah.

• 15:41Speaker 00

  It was thirty three cents a share effectively, based on today's prices. So it would be thirty three cents a share. So I had my direct exposure and I had my my carry deal by deal. So that that worked out. I thank God.

• 15:54Harry Stebbings?

  Thank God. I was suddenly shit scared. One point four billion dollars of carry was just like, nope, no, bad luck.

• 16:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:01Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, so we're now like right hand man, strategic advisor. Take me to that time then.

• 16:07Speaker 00

  It was one of the greatest experiences of my life, you know, watching an entrepreneur of Travis's quality and being able to work with him very closely.

• 16:18Harry Stebbings?

  What do you think makes him so good?

• 16:20Speaker 00

  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 Milner. 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 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 thirty three cents.

• 16:47Harry Stebbings?

  Thirty three cents, like what sort of price?

• 16:49Speaker 00

  Two hundred ninety million 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 was a mathematician and physicist, had this 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

• 17:31Speaker 00

  mega 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, he said, said the equation. Yuri was like, almost. And he was like, oh, 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 got to witness what an exceptional and brilliant mind can do. And these are people that are like, it's not even

• 18:12Speaker 00

  10x. You talk about 10x engineers. These are like 1000x humans. And so I've learned over time that it's, it's worth waiting for the 1000x founders and investing in the future Travis's or the future Elons or, you know, I invested in Airbnb and got to see Brian early on.

• 18:30Harry Stebbings?

  That there's a lot of suggestions that the Uber culture was bluntly incredibly hard driving, incredibly ruthless and pretty tough to be in.

• 18:38Speaker 00

  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.

• 18:59Harry Stebbings?

  Where were you not fierce enough? When you look back now to those times and you're like, we should have been fiercer.

• 19:05Speaker 00

  Lyft. We could have been way fiercer on Lyft earlier.

• 19:10Speaker 00

  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 Uber X later. We were already working on launching Uber X. 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. They didn't have approval from the San Francisco Taxi Commission. So Travis, basically for six months, was like telling the Taxi Commission, the city government, like, you know, hey, these guys are illegal, like, you know, why are you allowing it, et cetera,

• 19:52Speaker 00

  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 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 hundred lifts to gather intel for Travis and talking to the drivers and, you know, you sit in the front, you do the fist bump and all of that stuff. So they were on to something and they beat us to the punch by six months.

• 20:37Speaker 00

  And that cost 30% of the US market at the time.

• 20:39Harry Stebbings?

  Why were you too fierce?

• 20:41Speaker 00

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

• 20:51Harry Stebbings?

  Can we unpack it just first with Emil?

• 20:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 20:54Harry Stebbings?

  Emil's name there and I just wanted to kind of do it stage by stage a little bit. Emil obviously had a big role to play and I hear you were part of recruiting him.

• 21:01Speaker 00

  Yeah. So Travis came to me and was like, hey, I need to recruit, you know, a number two. And this guy Emil 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. And in one of the calls, he said, listen, I have these other offers and they have titles like president of Cloud 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, Emile is interested. He wants a title. He's been offered this title and Travis didn't like titles.

• 21:42Speaker 00

  So he said, tell him he can be president of myself on the business card. So I called Emile and I was like, you know, Travis says you can be president of yourself on the business card and Oh, how kind of you to relay the direct information. Yeah, direct. You did not punish that one. Yeah, I did not. And Emile took the president of Cloud position. I called Travis and I was like, hey, he took this other position. You know, look, in the past, I'd experienced like losing someone and then getting them later. And if they're special enough, you'd want to get them later anyways. So I said, look, I think I know what to say to him to kind of plant the seed for later. He was like, what are you going to say? And I was like, this was an IQ test and you failed it.

• 22:24Speaker 00

  And now that I know Emile, 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 Cloud 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 Colter 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 TBG as a counterweight to Google. Cause it's like, if they're on the board, you need, you need a counter.

• 23:07Speaker 00

  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 days. Do you want to 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 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.

• 23:48Speaker 00

  We're at this restaurant and it's Bonderman, 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 billion dollar raise. He had a massive impact on the trajectory of Uber and he became Travis's right hand sparring partner in building, building Uber.

• 24:26Harry Stebbings?

  You mentioned Baidu China there. I just want to take them in turn. Was that a good joint venture? Was China good for Uber?

• 24:32Speaker 00

  Look, it costs a lot of money to compete with DD and the other companies. And essentially, these companies in China are favorite. 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.

• 25:13Speaker 00

  Our fund, we put 50 million into the beginning of Uber China and then later put another 50 million into DD when they merged.

• 25:21Harry Stebbings?

  And this was when you were doing Sherpa?

• 25:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:23Harry Stebbings?

  How big was Sherpa?

• 25:24Speaker 00

  Sherpa, our first fund was small, like 153 million. Second one was like 175 and then the third one, we.

• 25:31Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah. So to put 50 in, you're like.

• 25:33Speaker 00

  Yeah. And so one thing I did, just a little history on venture capital. VCs did not like SPVs back then. So I was really. The first one to push SPVs hard. So I ended up doing, we ended up doing $200 million 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 Chirpa. So we brought them in, into Uber and they put like 83 million. And then Google didn't want to share. They want the, the whole 250 million dollar, you know, allocation. And Travis didn't want more dilution. And so my solution to that was what's called waiverly loans,

• 26:18Speaker 00

  which no one had used in 30 years, but I used waiverly loans to structure my secondary purchase of shares from an early founder when Travis let me become an advisor and, and investor directly when I left Menlo. Basically, the way waiverly 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 waiverly loans and we did the largest waiverly loan in history, which is 83 million and bought Kara Camp's shares for TPG for that amount.

• 27:01Harry Stebbings?

  He sold out fully?

• 27:03Speaker 00

  No, no, he's, he held on a lot to a lot. Yeah, he's a multi-billioner.

• 27:07Harry Stebbings?

  I don't know, Garrett, but my heart just sang for him.

• 27:11Speaker 00

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

• 27:16Harry Stebbings?

  And so we have now Emil onboard. You mentioned the 15 billion dollar raise.

• 27:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:22Harry Stebbings?

  Take me to that.

• 27:23Speaker 00

  So we're looking at global expansion and you want to 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.

• 28:08Speaker 00

  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 three billion. This was at 17 billion and we started off at 10. So Emil was able to negotiate from like 10, 11 billion valuation to 17 because there was so much competition for the deal. And so like Kleiner Perkins came in, Mood Rohani led that deal. I think they put a hundred million 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 Uber has today.

• 28:48Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask, was that a necessary evil? And what I mean by that is that much money that early, was it required to achieve what Uber achieved? Or in reflection, was it a little bit too much too soon?

• 29:00Speaker 00

  No, 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 O'Shea likes to joke that, you know, I've made more people in the music industry money on Uber than they have in the music industry. But I brought Scooter Braun, Troy Carter. Ari Emanuel and WME, Sophia Bush, Olivia Munn, all invested in that in that

• 29:45Speaker 00

  Series B at 33 cents. 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, 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's 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 did a blog post about that. And then we replicated that playbook all over

• 30:26Speaker 00

  the world. So in India, we would launch with a Bollywood player, actor, or a cricket player. So

• 30:33Harry Stebbings?

  I absolutely love that. So we have this continuous meteoric growth. We've got the $15 billion now. It's just going through the roof.

• 30:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:41Harry Stebbings?

  Where do things start to fray? Because this is like the dream story to date.

• 30:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, the business did not fray. The business was executing at the highest levels of excellence.

• 30:51Harry Stebbings?

  So the business is not fraying. We are actually full steam ahead, but things start to go wrong.

• 30:57Speaker 00

  So what went wrong was we had the wrong venture capitalists on the board. And that was unfortunately, in my opinion, that was Bill Bill Gurley at Benchmark. And, you know, I haven't told many of these stories. I've kind of 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 Gurley because he was, you know, being

• 31:39Speaker 00

  annoying. And so Gurley is like a six foot 10 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 of 2017. And then when the Susan Fowler blog post happened about a month later. Remind everyone what was the Susan Fowler blog? It was an engineer that had a bad experience with a kind of a middle manager, her engineering middle manager who basically harassed her. And so she wrote a blog post about it.

• 32:23Speaker 00

  I remember that day vividly because Travis and I were in Malibu. You know, every summer we rented a Malibu house with some good friends of ours. So we had this kind of, I call it the last innocent weekend in Silicon Valley. So we had this great weekend, laughing and relaxing after working really hard, just flown in from China. And the blog post happened and Emile 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 Whitstone called, who was a political operative, girl he had advised Travis to hire.

• 33:04Speaker 00

  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 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 and 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 basically giving up a lot. You're becoming very vulnerable in that situation. Just why are you becoming vulnerable? Because you're opening up.

• 33:45Speaker 00

  Well, if, you know, if, if someone has a nefarious strategy to get rid of you and you agreed 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. Uh, mother and father, uh, 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 decide to go after Travis. So they

• 34:30Speaker 00

  delayed the release of the report and the report, by the way, didn't find anything wrong that, you know, 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 Kohler 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. Who are the AIA masters?

• 35:10Speaker 00

  You know, lowercase, first round capital, Menlo, obviously Benchmark. And they basically said, look, if you don't resign, we're going to release this letter publicly to the press, et cetera. 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?

• 35:53Speaker 00

  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 and what I call the Uber war. About in early August, they then sued in Delaware courts.

• 36:34Speaker 00

  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, is 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 courthouse. And as I go in the courthouse, we make our arguments and the judge fines with us and rejects Benchmark's

• 37:19Speaker 00

  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 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 journalists, basically the weaponized arm of the DNC.

• 38:00Speaker 00

  So they did the Russian dossier against Trump to basically make him lose to Hillary and then cause all kinds of trouble during the first term. Really immoral people. And so we found out in an investigation that two weeks after I won the case, founding partner of Fusion GPS was sitting at 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, filed lawsuits to do discovery, a law called 1782 that allows if you have a British case, you can actually sue in federal courts in the US. It's a treaty from 1782.

• 38:42Speaker 00

  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 1782s and won against Fast Company. And we got discovery on 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 do it.

• 39:25Speaker 00

  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 I 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 2017. So I basically realized like, if I, if I don't ever take a leave of absence or step down, they're just going to keep attacking until that happens. And so they were trying to stop me from, because I had organized a shareholder group

• 40:06Speaker 00

  with people like Ron Barkle, who had brought into Uber along with Ashton and Guy, they had a fund called A-Grade. Adam Lieber, who is a top music agent and other investors took basically countersue and fight what was going on. I was meeting with Rajiv Misra about like buying Benchmark stake because I was 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.

• 40:35Harry Stebbings?

  Why was that not an option? People want liquidity. We see this more and more with secondaries and late-stage secondaries today. Why do we not just say to Benchmark, hey, Bill, you want liquidity? I get it. I'm an investor. I get it. You want liquidity? We'll buy you out at a great price. Why was that not an option?

• 40:51Speaker 00

  So the SoftBank conversations, ironically, Travis and Emil started those conversations. The ultimate $12 billion investment from SoftBank Vision Fund, they started that whole negotiation. Then Travis got removed from Uber 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.

• 41:31Speaker 00

  They brought in Dara Khosrowshahi, who's a dear friend. So I call Dara the great stabilizer. He has taken Uber to 175 billion 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 of 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 the great things that are happening in AI and the paper that came out in 2017, we were on top of that. We were

• 42:13Speaker 00

  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,

• 42:55Speaker 00

  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 hundred billion dollars to give to their LPs at this point. If they had just not done this.

• 43:19Harry Stebbings?

  I always like to see both sides. That and Gurley does still scare the shit out of me at six foot 10 in the taxi. Listen, he does. And, and I, you know, I have respect for him as an investor. Is there a justification for it? I try and put on my investor hat and I think now, well, if we haven't returned cash to investors in a long time, I need liquidity. If investors are pressuring me to put liquidity back in the pot. Is there any justification?

• 43:44Speaker 00

  No, absolutely not. It's, it's absolutely, the answer is no. And the reason is Benchmark invested in March 2011 is, so Benchmark invested in March 2011. I believe it was a $50 million pre-money valuation. They put 10 million 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 10 years to get to liquidity. So it wasn't in the zone or the window where you'd be like 10 years, 12 years, we don't have liquidity, etc. It's like, give him four more years. If you had just waited four more years, this would be a trillion dollar company.

• 44:29Speaker 00

  And when you look at that and the impact it would have had on the world, there's no justification for it.

• 44:34Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think Google, TPG and other investors should have been more active as a counterbalance to the letter that was handed to Travis?

• 44:45Speaker 00

  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 recruited Anthony, acquired his company, Auto, which was the self-driving semi-trucks. They went after him. 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 for Uber or for Travis. So they were gonna stay out of it.

• 45:25Speaker 00

  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 the letter. I don't think anyone knew the extent to which Gurley had executed this strategy of hiring people, private investigators.

• 45:48Harry Stebbings?

  Was it an unfortunate time in terms of just the coincidence of timing between the terrible situation of mother dying and the bluntly the situation? Or was it a deliberate coinciding?

• 46:00Speaker 00

  I mean, I think they took advantage of an accident, for sure. It was an architected strategy, starting, like I said, January of 2017 to get rid of him. I believe that it was one of the worst venture decisions ever and value destruction happened for everyone involved. And one, venture is too secretive of an industry. And that's one of the things 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, we're kind of in the sixth, seventh year and the lawsuit.

• 46:39Harry Stebbings?

  How much have you spent on this investigation?

• 46:40Speaker 00

  I hired the top investors 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. So you can, you can't peerst the veil. So the story of how this firm figured out 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

• 47:22Speaker 00

  it did hurt my reputation at, at the time. And so I had to kind of go through a pretty difficult experience. And it was worth it to me to spend millions of dollars on a legal fees and doing the 1782s. We filed seven, four 1782s. The latest one is against Fusion GPS and the judge found with us last year and is going to 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.

• 47:54Harry Stebbings?

  What do you expect it to say?

• 47:56Speaker 00

  I can't say publicly who I think hired Fusion GPS, but that, that may be for 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.

• 48:19Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think there is a lot more to come out?

• 48:21Speaker 00

  In my case, there's definitely more to come out. Once we find out who, who hired Fusion GPS, then careers are going to fall.

• 48:29Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think there is a lot more outside of this case?

• 48:31Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. 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 Ravikant, he had a company called eGroups 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.

• 49:06Harry Stebbings?

  You called this before with me, a brilliant thing. You said it was the 2017 one, which was a drunken period of VC.

• 49:13Speaker 00

  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 Tesla or Facebook or Uber 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 going to 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 come in. And then the other thing that happened, and I blame myself a little bit,

• 49:58Speaker 00

  because bringing TPG into Uber and the Series C kicked off the whole wave of private equity coming downstream into venture. Series C, B, A, like, you know, when you looked at, you know, what happened from 2017 to 2021, 22, 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 example, 18 billion dollars 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 it.

• 50:41Speaker 00

  You could be removed pretty quickly from your customers. So I didn't see strength in that business model. But companies with bad business models were getting eighteen billion dollars in cash. That's crazy. That's not classic venture capital.

• 50:58Harry Stebbings?

  Doug Leoni said on the show that we've gone from a high margin boutique business to a low margin commoditized industry. He said, there's no way of putting that genie back in the bottle.

• 51:09Speaker 00

  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.

• 51:23Harry Stebbings?

  So why is that model gone?

• 51:25Speaker 00

  The rate at which companies can be accelerated has grown 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 be able to generate enough success to be able to build a 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 non-accredited investors to begin investing in the future. And I think we have a moral obligation to open up venture.

• 52:10Speaker 00

  And what I mean by early, I mean early-stage angel investing in the Facebooks and the SpaceXs of the future. But 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.

• 52:31Harry Stebbings?

  You're an LP in many funds and we were chatting outside before this and you were like, there's just no cash coming back from the lost vintage. How do you think about that? Have we seen the death of liquidity?

• 52:41Speaker 00

  Liquidity has been a major problem, and especially during 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 going to change in the next four years.

• 52:57Harry Stebbings?

  You do?

• 52:57Speaker 00

  I think I was an early person to come out and support Trump, and I co-hosted David Sacks' fundraiser with Chamoff back in June 6 and publicly endorsed Trump. And most of my, my generation, my cohort, people like Elon or David Marcus or Sean from Sequoia, Emile Michael, like all of these guys and gals are in Palm Beach doing like 17-hour days. You know, it's like the, the best and the brightest have converged. And also it's very similar to like Silicon Valley goes to Washington, you know? And so I'm very excited because, you know, you look at David Sacks as now the AI, you know, and crypto czar for the president. Elon is running Doge with Vivek.

• 53:41Speaker 00

  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, 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, have done it for a long time, believe AI and quantum are going to merge and that's going to accelerate the future.

• 54:23Speaker 00

  So I think the market's waking up, especially after Willow and what Google announced. This has been my thesis for over 10 years. There's another company called SciQuantum that came out of Cambridge here in the UK.

• 54:34Harry Stebbings?

  What do you think we should do with tariffs? I'm, I'm getting more and more intrigued by Chinese cars and Chinese car subsidies. And I just find, I'm, I'm a massive believer in Adam Smith's invisible hand. I was always like, we should let them sell. This is ridiculous, that, that a cost. And then I saw how much they're subsidized and I'm like, this is an egregiously unfair playing field.

• 54:51Speaker 00

  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 100% tariff, you're still talking about $30,000, still affordable to a lot of people. So they're still going to 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 Masa announcing the $100 billion investment in AI in American economy and companies.

• 55:36Harry Stebbings?

  What did you make of that?

• 55:37Speaker 00

  Masa in Saudi, one of the things he talked about is 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 going to get nine trillion of annual value coming out of it.

• 55:55Harry Stebbings?

  I saw this, he said you can spend nine trillion in CapEx and that will result in nine trillion in annual gains.

• 56:00Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 56:01Harry Stebbings?

  And I thought, my word, he's very precise, nine, not eight or 10, nine.

• 56:05Speaker 00

  Right, but you know, the scale of what's happening, everything has gotten bigger and more consequential. I think the next 25 years is going to eclipse everything we've seen in our lifetime. And we're about to go through civilizational change in the next 20 years. So, you know, a fund like yours and a fund like mine has a really lucky timing.

• 56:28Harry Stebbings?

  Are we lucky or are we too small?

• 56:30Speaker 00

  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 20 years, you'll be their partners in building these amazing trillion-dollar companies. I think we're lucky. Lucky. I think we went through 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,

• 57:12Speaker 00

  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.

• 57:30Harry Stebbings?

  Like, what is that? Is that like, I'm so naive and is that like solving cancer? Is that like solving climate change with?

• 57:37Speaker 00

  Yes. And so, you know, where I think things are going to 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 10 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 20 years because we're going to reach a point of longevity where you'll be able to help, live a healthy life for 150 plus years.

• 58:14Harry Stebbings?

  Do you really think so?

• 58:15Speaker 00

  Yeah, absolutely. The level of advancement that we're about to experience is like a Cambrian explosion of superintelligence and superintelligence.

• 58:26Harry Stebbings?

  You don't buy the negativity around the plateauing of LLMs, plateauing of data availability, compute, energy?

• 58:34Speaker 00

  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 going to get us to a million qubits, like Google's at like 100 qubits, even with, with Willow. You're talking about a million qubits? That's, 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 be able to say, hey, we can basically find a cure for all diseases known to mankind. And, and people are just going to die from accidents and not, not disease. I didn't have to lose my mother. So many of our loved ones. We lose to to old age like they can live healthier, longer lives and and and stay with us.

• 59:17Harry Stebbings?

  Fucking love Brian.

• 59:19Speaker 00

  He's amazing.

• 59:20Harry Stebbings?

  What a dude. Uh, listen, I want to do a very special round where basically we actually ask questions submitted by friends.

• 59:27Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 59:28Harry Stebbings?

  You can choose. If you don't want to answer it, of course you can.

• 59:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 59:31Harry Stebbings?

  But you have to donate to a charity of your choice.

• 59:34Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 59:34Harry Stebbings?

  So what so do you do you want to donate if if you don't want to answer it between one and five thousand dollars? Number one, how much money did you make from Uber?

• 59:43Speaker 00

  I think ultimately it was a couple hundred million. Yeah.

• 59:48Harry Stebbings?

  Who do you think in the Silicon Valley is one of the worst CEOs, but who's had the best outcomes?

• 59:54Speaker 00

  Steve Ballmer.

• 59:57Speaker 00

  You know, the decade that he was CEO of Microsoft, Microsoft was completely just flat. And uh, he's now richer than Bill Gates, right? So you ultimately won, you know, they they did a great job in hiring Satya. Because Satya's been, I think, the greatest, greatest CEO, uh, one of the greatest CEOs of our lifetimes.

• 1:00:16Harry Stebbings?

  I want to do a quick fire. So the quick fire is is actually I say a short statement. You give me your immediate thoughts. What have you changed your mind on in the last year?

• 1:00:23Speaker 00

  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 ten 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

• 1:01:05Speaker 00

  what being a grandparent was until I became one and, you know, I became one at forty eight, so as a young grandpa. A Y G and it's um, it's the most important thing that's ever happened to me.

• 1:01:15Harry Stebbings?

  What's the single best fund investment that you've made?

• 1:01:19Speaker 00

  I would say it would be lowercase, Chris Sacca's fund. I put a little check in there and got four million out, like 25,000 turned into four million. So it was, it was a legendary fund. I think it was like 10 million and returned like 1.5 billion or something. That goes in the record books.

• 1:01:38Harry Stebbings?

  How did you get into SpaceX?

• 1:01:40Speaker 00

  So a couple, couple ways. One, Elon and I were friends and then another friend of mine, Justin Fisher-Wilson, 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 and actually named 137 that night. I looked over as we were talking about, you know, him starting a fund. And I was like, what is that number block on your table? And it said 137. And he was like, oh, that's my, my grandfather's number seat on the Wall Street on the exchange. And he bought it after coming to America from Russia.

• 1:02:24Speaker 00

  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, a junior partner, associate, along with Alex Jacobson, who's this co-founder of, of 137. And so they advocated for SpaceX, SpaceX investment. And then they did a bunch of secondary when they started 137. So they've done really well. And so he had some available back in 2014 at like a $6 billion valuation. We put some, some money in at that valuation. So I, I think, I think SpaceX will be a $10 trillion company.

• 1:03:09Speaker 00

  It's just getting started.

• 1:03:11Harry Stebbings?

  What do you think is your most outlandish belief? SpaceX as being a $10 trillion company is quite a bold statement. Saying there will be many more trillion dollar companies is quite a bold statement. Saying that you think that we'll get to a stage in 20 years where we won't die. Any others?

• 1:03:26Speaker 00

  You got any more for me? Yeah, I helped start the network state movement with Balaji and Joe Lonsdale. I had lunch with Joe like 2012 and 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 and then Balaji wrote Network States, the book. And then we had the first two Network State summits. That movement led to another mantra of mine, which is great founders should try to start new industries, not just companies.

• 1:04:05Speaker 00

  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 going to basically see new nation-states, new countries be started in our lifetimes. And you're going to see a lot of people opt into those new nations. So I think that's, that's one of my probably more controversial.

• 1:04:42Speaker 00

  The world map 200 years ago looks very different than it does today and it's going to look very different in 200 years. Nations are not supposed to be permanent. They're supposed to evolve.

• 1:04:51Harry Stebbings?

  What was your biggest miss?

• 1:04:53Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:05:01Harry Stebbings?

  Why did you not do both?

• 1:05:03Speaker 00

  So I brought Snapchat to Menlo. Evan and I hit it off. I really believed that. I was on it in the first 30 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. And 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. I was like, you should take a look at this.

• 1:05:41Speaker 00

  And at the time I 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. And this was like 2010 or 11.

• 1:06:12Harry Stebbings?

  You can only invest in one fund. Which fund do you invest in?

• 1:06:15Speaker 00

  Honestly, the one I'm really excited about is 1789 that my friend Omid Malik started. Donald Trump Jr. 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 worked really well. And I think they're in a really amazing position to invest in really incredible companies. So I really believe in them. 1789.

• 1:06:45Harry Stebbings?

  What fund do you think is most overhyped?

• 1:06:49Speaker 00

  Benchmark.

• 1:06:49Harry Stebbings?

  Do you ever speak to Gurley?

• 1:06:51Speaker 00

  No, no. And these were, these were friends of mine. Like Matt Koller was a dear friend. And, you know, and was at his 30th birthday party, his 40th 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.

• 1:07:18Harry Stebbings?

  If you had the Uber wars again, is there anything you'd do differently?

• 1:07:21Speaker 00

  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 back Sam and say, if he doesn't come back, we're gonna leave.

• 1:07:47Harry Stebbings?

  That was very powerful.

• 1:07:48Speaker 00

  It was very powerful. And if we had done that at Uber, because Travis was beloved, so was Emile. They were beloved by, by the team. And so, you know, they were smart enough that they turned a few key people like Ryan Gray. Against Travis and they began collaborating.

• 1:08:06Harry Stebbings?

  Do you blame him?

• 1:08:08Speaker 00

  Again, he was another dear friend. So it's tragic, almost Shakespearean, like the friendships that were broken up 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, um, 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.

• 1:08:40Harry Stebbings?

  Final one for you. What trait are you slightly ashamed of? But has contributed a lot to your success.

• 1:08:46Speaker 00

  I'm extremely loyal. That loyalty 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've 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.

• 1:09:15Harry Stebbings?

  Listen, Shavin, I've so enjoyed doing this. Thank you so much for getting on the plane.

• 1:09:19Speaker 00

  Of course.

• 1:09:20Harry Stebbings?

  As the motto always says, this has been fantastic and you've been a star.

• 1:09:24Speaker 00

  Thank you. And I hope you get on the plane and come to Miami and visit us, me and Emil sometime.

• 1:09:31Harry Stebbings?

  I mean, what a show that was. And if you want to watch that episode, which I really recommend, it was an incredible one filmed live in the studio. You can watch it on YouTube by searching for 20 VC. That's two zero VC on YouTube. But before we leave you today, it can be difficult to build a team that's aligned on everything from values to workflow. But that's exactly what Coda was made to do. Coda is an all-in-one collaborative workspace that started as a napkin sketch. Now, just five years since launching in beta, Coda has helped 50,000 teams all over the world get on the same page. With Coda, you get the flexibility of docs, the structure of spreadsheets, the power of applications and the intelligent. Of AI, all built for your organisation.

• 1:10:15Harry Stebbings?

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• 1:11:00Harry Stebbings?

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• 1:11:44Harry Stebbings?

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• 1:12:35Harry Stebbings?

  As always, I so appreciate all your support for the show. Really, it means the world to me. And we have another incredible episode of 20 VC coming on Wednesday.