David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, Uber's doing a multifront war. They have to capitalize wars on all these different borders. We should say too, they are maintaining a very strong leverage position in this negotiation. They raised that $260 million on a $3.7 billion post money. They just got a 10x from that previous round, where they were valued at $350 million. Totally, which was 5x, 6x from the Series A. I think people thought about at the time like, oh, wow, if they had gone public, maybe they would have gone in public at a relative market cap like this. I guess this was just a private IPO type thing. It turns out that was far from the end of the capital raising. We'll skip over a lot of this here in the interest of time, but go listen to our Lyft episode. Go listen to way back our DiDi episode that we did with Brad Stone. Brad really was the foremost reporter in talking about the dynamics between Uber and DiDi. The amount of capital that they were raising from sovereign wealth funds, from hedge funds, from huge entities, pumped the valuations of these companies so much over the next couple of years. Uber ends up raising $20 billion in total. Ben, as you alluded to at the top of the show, the valuation peaks at $72 billion on the private markets, but all of this capital is going into fighting these wars. These are the folks that start coming in here. We were talking about this is an era where you would go public. GV made a crazy bet putting an abnormally huge amount of their fund, if not all of the remaining. There's something wild that happens in ventures.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.