Ben Gilbert: uncertainty

Transcript context

…But this is what it had come to. Honestly, this is the end of the days of founder friendly, and I think that's a good thing. It's great to be friendly to founders, but there's certain behavior that just cannot be tolerated. Benchmark sues Travis for fraud and breach of fiduciary duty. The way that that all plays out is in negotiations over who is going to replace him as CEO. Travis realizes he doesn't have the support to come in as CEO, but he thinks he can bring somebody in who's going to be supportive of him and his interest in the company as the CEO, and he still has several seats on the board. His choice is Jeff Immelt, who until recently was CEO of GE. Benchmark's choice is Meg Whitman, who was CEO of eBay, one of their best investments, and that has played a big role in this story. There is a dark horse candidate, though. I know Meg Whitman at least tweeted like, I don't know what you guys are talking about, I'm not taking this job. They both independently confirmed to the press, no, I will not be the CEO of Uber. Everyone's scratching their heads like, well, who's it going to be? Who is going to be the CEO? It is amazing that this does not come out, does not get reported until the announcement is made on Sunday, August 27th, 2017, who the new CEO of Uber is, and it is Dara Khosrowshahi. He had been the CEO of Expedia since 2005, really has an incredible story and an incredible choice to come out of all of this, and lead the company through what was probably the most public mess of a venture-backed startup to play out in the press, probably ever. Dara's story, like we said, is incredible. He was born initially in Iran. His family was a wealthy Iranian family in the pharmaceutical industry. In the late 70s, though, during the Iranian Revolution, the company got nationalized. They had to escape persecution. They moved. They emigrate to the US with nothing. They restart everything as a whole family. He grew up in the suburbs of New York. When he's 13, in 1982, his father has to go back to Iran to care for his grandfather. He didn't see his father again for six years. Incredible. Despite all this, he excels in school, he ends up going to Brown. He then does banking after school at Allen & Company, his brother also worked at Allen & Company and now an MD at Allen & Company. He joins IAC after Allen & Company. He becomes the CEO of IAC, of course Barry Diller's media and internet holding company. In 2001, IAC buys Expedia with a lot of Dara's work on that. Dara, a couple of years later, becomes the CEO of Expedia. He is the anti Travis. He is a super outspoken critic of Trump and the immigration policies that Trump was putting in place, obviously, because of his family history, and also because that's the right thing. The board tasked him with basically three things to come in and do three easy tasks. (1) Fix the culture at Uber. (2) Stem the losses that we've been suffering in these wars all around the world and focus on core markets. (3) Take the company public and get this done. This is August 2017. I think unquestionably, he has done about as good a job as you can imagine with part one, fixing the culture. I think there are still, of course, problems and things to be solved, but he comes in, and pretty immediately, he revises the core values of the company. He settles the Google lawsuit. He retains employees. He makes great hires. Again, there's still more work to be done. But certainly, compared to the trajectory that Uber and Uber's culture was on, an unquestionable turnaround. Also, on point three of taking the company public, they just went public today, but that really starts in January 2018, he orchestrates a deal. There's all this fighting on the board, with Travis, and everybody. He orchestrates a deal with Softbank to come in. Softbank leading along with Dragon Air, Sequoia, and DiDi itself, they do an almost $9 billion transaction with Uber, same size as the IPO that just happened last night and this morning.…

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