Brad Stone: prediction

Transcript context

…Yeah. So they come in swinging into the market with Baidu as a partner, get 30% market share, and Travis goes in over and he meets with Cheng, he meets with the newly merged Didi. And Travis, he sort of walks into the meeting, he thinks Uber is international, Didi’s not at this point. Uber is, Travis is convinced the better product, the better technology, they had Baidu maps which had the best maps in China. He essentially offers to acquire Didi. He frames it as an investment. He wants to invest in Didi but he wants a 40% stake. And this is really, to my mind at least, seems like he’s trying to say like, “Hey, I’m just going to take you guys out on the cheap.” And Cheng and Didi reject this offer. Brad, you learned a lot about this meeting. What happened there? Well, I think Travis kind of met his match. One of the things that happens at this meeting is Cheng Wei stands up and on a whiteboard kind of charts Uber’s growth since 2010, then with another fever line charts Didi’s growth since 2012, and the lines intersect and he projects that Didi will be larger than Uber primarily because the market in China is so much larger. There’s all sorts of funny little maneuverings here at this meeting and one of the Uber executives were wondering whether the food that they had been served at the meeting was deliberately bad as a kind of strategic maneuver. But it was and I think it was actually just a bad lunch. You loyal taste taster. It’s like the Middle Ages here.…

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