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Basti Lehmann

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73
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2024-04-08
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2024-04-08
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  1. “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's probably what I will do.”

    2024-04-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Oh man, I can only name one,'cause 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, Zack at Plate, Max at a firm. These are all just remarkable remarkable people that run their companies so well and that had to fight battles 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, and well, Patrick in that case and Zach, if they run their companies publicly, books will be written about their leadership style. I'm certain of that.”

    2024-04-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “You know, I think my co founder Chan Place 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 rent the company and did a lot of the front of the office work, and we often banged hats 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 a remarkable gift.”

    2024-04-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “The first X dollar in revenue is always the hardest or something like that. There is a version of that coming out of everybody I've ever met. So yeah.”

    2024-04-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Again, technology. 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”

    2024-04-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “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 want to 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”

    2024-04-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “A lot of them, but that's okay. Technology is the absolute greatest thing. Faster, more enthusiastic into the technological future. That's what I believe in.”

    2024-04-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Well, I don't know if I have my list here. I have certain names. I divide companies into the big stuff, useful, and noise. And most of it is noise, obviously, right? That's just 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 we've seen from them, they're remarkable. I think they work with OpenAI. That's an open AI investment. I think that you see a lot of really remarkable companies coming out working with smaller models, more dedicated models. models 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'm telling you space nuclear count me in”

    2024-04-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “They will be a big player. I think they will be a very large company, but there's other companies that I'm personally more excited about.”

    2024-04-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “It's a fantastic research company, is how I would describe OpenAI. I think it remains to be seen if they can launch extremely successful products other than ChatGPT, 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 what they were working on for the last six or seven years. And suddenly there's 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 sort of dream in a direction that for the longer time, mostly because it was a market where if you worked in ML, you got a nice salary at Google, but the expectations was just that, please don't bother anyone too much, right? 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 toe.”

    2024-04-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “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 get 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 seem very unlikely.”

    2024-04-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Everybody was involved where people had to take meetings they didn't want to know where two teams of hundreds of people were pitted off against each other to get that thing onto the market and know it fails Dear, this will be the first product for Apple where they have more returns than they have on any other metric. You can plot the graph and it's 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 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 believed 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&A your way into whatever you want.”

    2024-04-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “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. Everything looks like that. At some point, there is a market that looks penetrated, a thing that can't happen. At the same time, look, this is how it starts, dude. It 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 bad 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 a marathon. This is not just a sprint. But the cracks start to show on the inside. The vision pro, an effort inside the company that was Herculean, I was told.”

    2024-04-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Blackberry at some point owned the entire smartphone market, grub hub ran pretty much all food delivery in the United States, and”

    2024-04-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “So in almost everything that we've seen, I think it is incumbents. I don't think that's too contrarian because 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. That's my prediction.”

    2024-04-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “On the vision as it is, how it is today, short. 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 all of these things. You know what? I think Apple knows this, obviously, but there have incredible people working for them. The hardware that would change would just be unrecognizable different from your regular reading glasses and it would have unlimited battery life, overlay of information, anything that you can imagine in like a very subtle way. That would, I think, would be a great tool.”

    2024-04-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “I mean, ultimately, we will find a way to use implants to communicate 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 think there are many ways. That device may have not been invented yet, and it may take obviously longer. Lendlines are still around. So 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 has reached the peak of its importance in people's lives.”

    2024-04-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “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 want to tinker with the technology.”

    2024-04-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Over the last couple of weeks, if 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 had to pay per minute and you had to pay per use and the thing came back and then Apple came and the 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.”

    2024-04-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “No, actually not. For two reasons. First of all, you want the inference to happen as close as 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. 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.”

    2024-04-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “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 doing that very specific work. And that computer is not a computer with a screen. It won't be a computer that you sort of even necessarily interact with, but 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.”

    2024-04-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “I think there were three sort of areas that I wrote down, I think personal AI is another one. Yeah, great. I think that obviously AI or machine learning has opened this great new paradigm and way of thinking and honestly 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 computers are very expensive. And obviously there's even on the compute that's available a 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 an opportunity for a new computer.”

    2024-04-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “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 set 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”

    2024-04-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “I was not really good at first at running board meetings. I grew up running this company. And I don't mean like in the sense of from a young buck to like a teenager, but I think as a businessman, when I started the company versus 11 years later, I grew up as a person and I obviously honed my skills. 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 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 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”

    2024-04-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “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.”

    2024-04-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “A little jaded here, but one is allowed 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 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 whenever we see is trying to understand your business to the extent of also another business at the same time.”

    2024-04-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “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. That's mostly what it is.”

    2024-04-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “little you can do to actually move the needle other than writing the check, and then in the best case you stay out of the way, and that's why they believe that bort seeds 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 do not believe that Mark loses a sleepless night over what I'm working on. 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 Singaman is also one of the most intelligent people I know. And I think he's right. I think value add is a great marketing tool that VCs have discovered that if they”

    2024-04-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Well, first of all, I think that statement 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 Singaman and we both lived in Noy Valley at the time. And I was curious. I'm like, hey, how is it being a VC? 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, I'm like, why do you think that? He's like, well, you care too much. Like you're an operator. You want to 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 obviously believe in this. Very deeply. We just saw this, obviously, with keys leaving there and being somewhere else. The belief is that there is very”

    2024-04-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “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 where the opportunities lie. And there is the majority of all people are just echo chambers of whatever that is and there is a great desire in most VCs that I know to not bump around the edges too much and just do that thing and just you know follow that path whatever is the creed of the moment and whatever you want to discuss in regards to that like it's rough to be a little different and try to convince people”

    2024-04-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “to celebrate with our two thousand employees at a party in a room and have a blast. There 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 being in the office for eighteen hours most days, including the weekends. It was very strange.”

    2024-04-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “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, there 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, nine months. So we had to hit our quarterly goals. We did not want it 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 very separate businesses. It's very anti-climatic, 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”

    2024-04-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “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 we had to answer that. And then 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 they take custody, you get access to it, and then there's a clawback. In our case it was, 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. But yeah, at some point your bank calls you and says, like, yeah, we got your shares. Do you want to see your bank account? I guess that's what they ask you, him.”

    2024-04-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “I think we as a company enough have 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.”

    2024-04-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “Well, that is 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 the mountain for 10 years, right? And at any moment, there was not a moment in time when we were convinced that we've made it. But we had the ultimate energy because we felt that this is what 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 desire to do something.”

    2024-04-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “You can do it that way, and I'm sure there are people that are like that. Who do I know who is extremely smart and would run a company like this Patrick and John Collison? I think they're like the perfect example. I'm sure they have a metric. I admire them and we're very fortunate to call them friends. The most important thing to realize is that it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. We tend to take everything way too seriously. Like, oh, if I fail, 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 really doesn't matter. There is no right or wrong way. There is nobody who knows the master plan. And it really does not matter.”

    2024-04-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “It's a great question. It's a 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. We're not sure where that is yet.”

    2024-04-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “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 Mark and I often talk about is if you run a company, you want to test a set of hypotheses. That's your job as a CEO, right? And you want to run down that list. And if you find that some of them work, you sort of want to increase the velocity 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 the 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 move to a different space. And that would be no problem and not for the team, not for myself, and I don't think for anybody who invested. The idea is that we'll figure something out.”

    2024-04-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “Yeah, I still am, 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 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. We will see.”

    2024-04-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “We didn't negotiate on the terms much. We just discussed what we believe to be reasonable for Cold Start Series A at a price that is not too high. And that's it, really.”

    2024-04-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “He pink me actually because a friend told him that I was working on something and he called me and I said I don't even know if that idea is good. And he said, do you want to do it again? And I said, yes. It's like, well, then I'm sure you figure something out. That was the extent of the fundraising.”

    2024-04-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  42. “If you rent a company for ten years you have met people that you maybe always wish you would have worked with. And for me personally, Margandriesen was 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 reach out and I think there was a mutual feeling from his side he was excited to work with me as well.”

    2024-04-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  43. “If your 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 want to 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”

    2024-04-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  44. “While 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 was just enjoying that. But if your mind keeps wandering 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 working on ideas and 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.”

    2024-04-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  45. “So, first of all, 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, 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 memo that they're shutting Postmates down, I think 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.”

    2024-04-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  46. “Expectations very well, and for none 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, ah, Dara, you know, at some point maybe, you know Travis comes back and this is the whole apple thing, you know, we love these stories 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 moment in time that they could mention that Uber has not exceeded 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 dollars salary. How can he have done this? You know, the here's a CEO that knows how to run a business.”

    2024-04-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  47. “So, first of all, I 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 I 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 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 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 has maneuvered legislation, any sort of cultural issues in the company.”

    2024-04-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  48. “I think Brian Singerman was excited to the extent and he said you did it, Basty. I really think he said that exact same sentence and that was sort of the end of the excitement. And I mean, meant a great deal coming from him.”

    2024-04-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  49. “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 out with a number 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 prize on paper to a three billion and maybe living with certain uncertainty.”

    2024-04-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  50. “Obviously, that was the prize 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 around $31 when the deal finally closed and we got approval. It was at $53, I believe, or $55. The money returned to shareholders was almost $5 billion. And I have sold almost none of my shares. So I'm still rooting for Uber.”

    2024-04-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source