Brad Stone: belief

Transcript context

…What it also feels like to an outsider perspective, it feels like these big three Chinese internet companies are willing to sort of more directly exercise their influence in the market there, if that’s the right way to put it, than the internet companies are in the US. I mean, it’s really hard to imagine Google or Facebook sort of giving preferential treatment to… You know, like if Facebook started giving preferential app installs to one ridesharing app over another or one other form of company over another, I can’t imagine that going well. You’re right. That’s a great point. We’ll get to this but not only was Tencent prioritizing Didi on WeChat but when Uber comes into China, it starts blocking Uber from WeChat. So I think that’s a good point. I think that there would be some regulatory or anti-trust scrutiny if Google was to play favorites in the way that Tencent and Alibaba did in China. So Yuri Milner kind of comes in and brokers this piece between Didi and Kuaidi and they know Uber is coming. Didi ends up “winning the battle.” They get 60% of the combined company. Cheng Wei stays on as CEO of the company. I just want to sort of step back for a minute here and talk about this is like two years after these companies were founded. So they go from getting started – inspired by Hailo, not Uber – having this sort of wide playing field and then a bloodbath emerges, the big internet companies get involved, they raise and burn billions of dollars and like 700 days go by. The pace is just blistering.…

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