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Shervin Pishevar

lines on the record: 81
first: 2025-01-13
most recent: 2025-01-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“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 fought for people and I've taken the bullets and the missiles is also the reason I'm here. And I do have the reputation I have with great founders.”
2025-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is very powerful. And if we had done that at Uber, because Travis was beloved. So it was a meal. They were beloved by the team. And so, you know, they were smart enough. 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 others do either. But, you know, he, I mean, Travis hired him from a tweet when he was like 28 years old at IBM, made him a billionaire. And Travis was super loyal to him. Unfortunately, Ryan, for whatever reason, went to the other side. That was heartbreaking.”
2025-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The strategy of publicly and legally battling was the only strategy 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 Sam and his allies did in getting the employees at OpenAI to back Sam and say if he doesn't come back, we're going to leave.”
2025-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no. And these were friends of mine. Like Matt Kohler was a dear friend. 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 avoid the types of mistakes.”
2025-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 going to 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.”
2025-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 the sense of his brilliance. But over the phone, he just didn't present well at the time. This was like 20, I don't know, 10 or 11.”
2025-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I brought Snapchat to Menlo. Evan and I hit it off. I really believe 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 was chasing it and Evan and I hit it off. Unfortunately, Menlo passed on that round and then the next round as well. 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 fun to Jack when he was 22 in his company Milo. And then he introduced me because he invested in the seed round of Pinterest was like, you should take a look at this. 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 an 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.”
2025-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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”
2025-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Acres of land in different places in the world and that have 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 one of my probably more controversial. 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.”
2025-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I helped start the network state movement with biology and Joe Lonsdale. I had lunch with Joe like 2012 and I said, hey, what if we started 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 Balji 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. 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 eight.”
2025-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He helped bring SpaceX to Founders Fund. He was like a junior partner associate along with Alex Jacobson. He was his co-founder of 137. And so they advocated for the 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 money on at that valuation. So I think SpaceX will be a $10 trillion company. It's just getting started.”
2025-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So a couple ways. One, Elon and I were friends, and then another friend of mine, Justin Fisher-Wilson, who was on the board 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 Justin's house. I actually named 137 that night. I looked over as we were talking about him starting a fun. And I was like, what is that number block on your table? And it said 137. And he was like, oh, that's my grandfather's number seat on the Wall Street on the exchange. And he bought it after coming to America from Russia, he was the Russian Jew who came with nothing, created success. And I was like, well, that's the name of your fun, 137. He was like, you're right. So anyways, he's amassed a.”
2025-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say it would be lowercase, Chris Saka's fund. I put a little check in there and got $4 million out, like 25,000 turned into $4 million. So it was a legendary fund. I think it was like $10 million in return like $1.5 billion or something that goes into record books.”
2025-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Steve Baumer. You know, the decade that he was CEO of Microsoft, Microsoft was completely just flat. And he's now richer than Bill Gates, right? So he ultimately won. You know, they did a great job in hiring Satya because Satya's been, I think, the greatest CEO, one of the greatest CEOs of our lifetimes.”
2025-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I know too much. Like, 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 Willow. You're talking about a million qubits? That's the mind of God. And so you'll be able to solve problems that would take billions of years to solve in hours and days. And so being able to say, hey, we can basically find a cure for all diseases known to mankind. And people are just going to die from accidents and not disease. I didn't have to lose my mother. So many of our loved ones that we lose to old age, like they can live healthier, longer lives and stay with us.”
2025-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, absolutely. The level of advancement that we're about to experience is like a Cambrian explosion of superintelligence. And superintelligence.”
2025-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. 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 started saying before Brian Johnson is a dear friend to my, I said to my friends, I was 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.”
2025-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. 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, 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 will be able to solve problems that would”
2025-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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”
2025-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Masa and 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.”
2025-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2025-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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&A, lack of IPOs. I think that's going to change in the next four years. I think I was an early person to come out.”
2025-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 going to change.”
2025-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. 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 early. I mean early stage angel investing in the Facebooks and the SpaceX of the future. But let mom and pops be able to invest.”
2025-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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”
2025-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“megafunds come in spread billions of dollars at massive valuations that didn't make any rational sense we work as an example $18 billion went into that company and I pass on that company that was ironically another benchmark company I passed on that company because I remembered 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 and and 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 $18 billion in cash that's crazy that's not Classic venture capital.”
2025-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. 2017, the period from like 2005 to 2015 was incredible. That's when most of these great companies, wherever it was SpaceX or Tesla or Facebook or Uber, were founded. And there was a culture of 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 realize, oh my God, these people are going to become billionaires and there's billions of dollars to be made, you had the carpet baggers. 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 because bringing TPG into Uber and the Series C kicked off the whole wave of private equity coming downstream into venture Series E.”
2025-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah. And there's a history of VCs who have done this type of thing. And in benchmark's case, they did it against Naval. They hired private investigators. And Naval Ravicant, he had a company called eGroups, and he got grown out of it. A very similar playbook. And so that's happened multiple times at Benchmark, and it's happened in other funds. And it just needs to stop. Also, the political operatives who came into Silicon Valley post Uber and Facebook. It attracted them like flies. And they started to apply before.”
2025-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I can't say publicly who I think hired Fusion GPS, but that may be for a second episode when we get that judgment. Bad actors and bad behavior 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 for me talking about coming. In my case, it's definitely more to come out. Once we find out who hired Fusion GPS, then careers are going to fall.”
2025-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fees and doing the 1782s. We filed four 1782s. The latest one is against Fusion GPS, and the judge found with us last year and is going to force FusionGPS to say who hired them. And so they appealed it. And now we're waiting for the judge to make the final judgment.”
2025-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 pierce 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 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 put that out there because it did hurt my reputation 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”
2025-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, you know, 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 or kind of in the sixth, seventh year and the”
2025-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The perfect storm was that Google at that point saw Travis and Uber and the self-driving initiative that Travis was doing as a threat. Look at what they ultimately did to Anthony Lewandowski, right? Did Travis recruited? Anthony acquired his company, Otto, which was the self-driving semitrucks. They went after him. They tried to put him in jail. He was going to 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 going to stay out of it. Other investors, I was honestly disappointed and shocked that”
2025-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, absolutely not. 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 ten 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, et cetera. It's like, give him four more years. If you had just waited four more years, this would be a trillion dollar company. And when you look at that and the impact it would have had on the world, there's no justification for it.”
2025-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Current winnings of billions of dollars single digit billions, benchmark and the other investors made a critical mistake, what could have been what others that are in Tesla or SpaceX, for example, right now, who stuck by an exceptional founder with a strong personality like Elon, if they had stuck by Travis, we would be experiencing what they're all experiencing, which is imagine if benchmarket kept their ownership of, let's say, 10%, they would have had $100 billion to give to their LPs at this point if they had just not done this.”
2025-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's done all of those things. Travis was working on ideas like self-driving and automation. He was in pole position at the time. I saw him speak in Saudi Arabia at the FII a couple months ago. And they asked him, 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 working on things. And so he would have been one of the great AI automation entrepreneurs in the world. He would 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”
2025-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the softbank conversation is ironically, Travis and Emile 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 Emile at the same time. And so they got two of the greatest mines in Silicon Valley were taken out of the company. This is the greatest value destruction that's happened since firing Steve Jobs at Apple. And it was a massive mistake. If you look at Tesla, it's a trillion dollar company now. I believe if Travis and Emil had stayed at Uber, Uber would be a trillion dollar company by now. They brought in Dara Hushai, who's a dear friend. So I call Dara the great stabilizer. He has taken Uber to, you know, $175 billion market cap, which is great and profitable.”
2025-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With people like Ron Berkel, who had brought into Uber along with Ashton and Guy, they had a fun 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 buying benchmark steak because I was, you know, publicly going on CNBC and saying, hey, we'll buy benchmark steak if you don't want out of the company. Let's get you out. Why was that?”
2025-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is the firm famously that did the Russian dossier against Trump, the fake Russian dossier. Basically a political operative type firm, former journalist, basically the weaponized arm of the DNC. Well, accusing me of something awful that I never did and that I was innocent of. And they fabricated a police report in order to get reporters to do it. And once the first one did it, every other publication did it. And then when we countered with a letter from the London police saying this is not our report, basically 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 don't either 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.”
2025-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 the entire corporate legal system is held up by this tiny little town, a little courthouse. And I said I go in the courthouse, we make our arguments, and the judge finds with us and rejects benchmarks attempt to get rid of the three board seats. I remember calling Travis and being like, hey, we won. Your three board seats are protected. Like, appoint them now. He ended up appointing Ursula from Xerox, former CEO of Merrill Lynch to the board. And then I found out through our investigation, two weeks later after I won this case, there was a firm called FusionGPS.”
2025-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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 step down. And then what happened, which got me directly engaged in the battle, in what I call the Uber War. About in early August, they then sued in Delaware courts after they had already gotten rid of Travis. They then sued to get rid of him and his two board seats that he had gotten, that he hadn't appointed yet, so three board seats. So they wanted effectively board control, and they sued to get rid of him. So I hired Quinn Emmanuel, John Quinn, who was like the”
2025-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I now look at 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 at Steve Jobs, to Travis. He was able to find his way back when he thought he was gone, right?”
2025-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Lowercase first round capital Menlow obviously benchmark. And they basically said, look, if you don't resign, we're going to release this letter publicly to depress, et cetera. And so Travis was kind of 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 he had.”
2025-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Directly. And the recommendation was like to go hire a Cheryl 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 to CEO.”
2025-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, if someone has a nefarious strategy to get rid of you and you agree to an independent investigation by the Attorney General of America, you're vulnerable. They're going through every single thing and it can turn it into something that it's not. And so things can be manipulated in all of that. Six months later, the report supposed to come out and that week Travis tragically lost his mother in a boating accident, mother and father were in a boating accident and she passed away and he was in the hospital. His father was also like close to death. And in the middle of that tragedy, benchmark girly decided to go after Travis. So they delayed the release of the report. And the report, by the way, didn't find anything wrong that Travis did or I did or there was nothing, nothing in there about him.”
2025-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. 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.”
2025-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. I remember that day vividly because Travis and I were in Malibu. 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 gray weekend laughing and relaxing after working really hard. I'd just flown in from China. And the blog post happened and Emil walked in and was like, hey guys, like you should take a look at this 3,000 likes. So we read it. And then Rachel Whetstone called, who was a political operative. Curly had advised Travis to hire.”
2025-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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,”
2025-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, what went wrong was we had the wrong venture capitalists on the board, and that was unfortunately, in my opinion, I was 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 that incessantly did a blog post that didn't name Uber but was like talking about these companies need to go public. At one point, you know, Travis stopped responding to Gurley because he was being annoying. And so Gurley is like a six foot 10 Texan guy who's used to getting his way and being listened to and so on. So when Travis stopped, you know, responding to him.”
2025-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I brought Edward Norton into Uber. And so I remember for the LA launch, we were like, okay, we're going to have Rider Zero was Travis' parents, his mom and dad. And then Rider 1, 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 By Rider 1? And he was like, absolutely. And so he was our Rider 1 and we did a blog post about that. And then we replicated that playbook all over the world. So in India, we would launch with a Bollywood player.”
2025-01-13 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source