Brad Stone: evaluation

Transcript context

…To pick up the story there, I think what’s striking reading the book and hearing about the early days of the ridesharing competition in China is it makes… you know, the Uber and Lyft fight that we think is so ugly and distasteful here in the States, it makes it look like kids in the sandbox, right? These 30 companies were just brutal to each other and in particular, they all started raising large amounts of money and then being willing to go deeply, deeply gross margin negative by paying drivers a lot more for each ride than the riders were paying the companies. So it kind of becomes that their laying siege to each other’s businesses in a way. You know, this is war. And one of the tools, one of the ways that they start raising money is from the large, the big 3 internet companies in China, and Didi Dache is actually the second one. They raised money from Tencent. But before that, their competitor Kuaidi raises money from Alibaba which of course is Cheng Wei and Wang Gang’s former employer. So Brad, you talked to all these guys. Like what was going on? Right. I think when Kuaidi went and raised money from Alibaba, it was definitely a blow to the Didi guys because that’s their alma mater and Alibaba obviously the e-commerce giant in China. So I think that there was a moment of almost panic that Alibaba had placed its bet. It was on Kuaidi. As a result, Wang Gang, the investor and Cheng Wai’s mentor, his next call was to Tencent. As it happened then, it was probably difficult to see in 2012 but Tencent has this social network/messaging platform called WeChat. And which was of course QQ before that on desktop. This was like, you know, sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good, right?…

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