Acquired / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
25 published records
01 / belief
“Not to say that Uber doesn’t have that because they have local offices and very smart general managers but I think there’s a reason that Uber hasn’t run the table yet.”
02 / belief
“I mean, Uber I think has to hope that we move into a different capital environment and all these companies like Lyft, but also like Juno, this New York startup that’s giving its drivers equity that all that stuff starts to look very unsustainable in an environment where companies have to go public and they have to show profit.”
03 / belief
“I think that’s right and I think that the big moment for this industry, so Kuaidi and Didi start to emerge by virtue of the investment of Tencent and Alibaba.”
04 / belief
“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.”
05 / commitment
“Go read The Upstarts, it’s fantastic. And thanks so much to Brad for joining us and thanks to our sponsor for this episode, Silicon Valley Bank, and we will see you for the next one.”
06 / belief
“The founders started out wanting classy rides around San Francisco. So you kind of have to pick where you start and so Uber now is sort of focusing on the driver community and has a lot of work to do I think to quell some of the dissatisfaction particularly among full-time drivers and when we get into these cars and talk to our drivers, we know that dissatisfaction is there.”
07 / belief
“I think the other thing that happened and the reason why this was a smart deal probably for both companies is, it became very clear over the last two years that this market was about to undergo a major pivot into driverless car technology and so it really doesn’t make a lot of sense to go waging a war and spending a battle for a market that is going to be changing very quickly.”
08 / belief
“We’re in the beginning of a new cycle on this and there’s lots of… you know, that’s why in tech as well as in politics, that’s why the role of an independent, inquisitive press is so important and the story remains to be told. But I think there is no question that and I suspect even people who work in Uber and if listeners, if you do work at Uber, reach out to us and we’d love to hear your perspectives.”
09 / belief
“Didi does something that I suspect even Travis and Uber, as Machiavellian as they are in the US, couldn’t even imagine and see it coming.”
10 / belief
“Brad, I think you pointed out in your book that it was roughly the American equivalent of 100k that he put into Didi as his little Angel investment.”
11 / belief
“I think that I’m not totally sure this is a tech theme that apples to every other company but we’re certainly seeing in other companies too where as everyone is either a disciple of Bezos or let’s just call it a disciple of boldness, we’re really seeing a lot of this churn in the wake and I think as a lot of these mega unicorns get ready to start going public, that’s going to be a major issue for them.”
12 / belief
“A big one that I really want to talk about is company culture and its impact on business trajectory. I think that Uber is one that has been a win-at-all-cost company.”
13 / commitment
“David and I are going to be recording an episode on the 3rd in the morning and then hopefully producing that and getting it out over the weekend on the 4th.”
14 / belief
“I think we’re going to look at Uber here and say was this – usually we look at the M&A event and say was this a good use of funds, was this impactful and multiplicative in the future to bring this company in.”
15 / uncertainty
“We don’t know exactly when Uber hit a $1 billion valuation but they did their series B on 300 million in December 2011 and their series C in August 2013 on 3.”
16 / evaluation
“One thing I learned from your book, Brad, is how fast or how recent Uber is to this sort of area of self-driving cars because they really weren’t tipped off to it until Travis got in one of the self-driving Google cars when he went to meet with Larry Page or Eric Schmidt.”
17 / prediction
“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.”
18 / evaluation
“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.”
19 / evaluation
“Of course, it’s very fashionable to say you’re looking into it. It’s unclear to me now whether Didi has made the progress of, say, Uber which is testing cars now in Pittsburgh and a few other cities.”
20 / evaluation
“One of the things that happened was Uber when they launched, the integration was very poor in China because they were using Google Maps and we all know Google is pretty much blocked in China, so the integration was poor.”
21 / evaluation
“There’s a lot of maneuverings here behind the scenes. But I think that to their credit, the Didi executives and at this point, Jean Luo, an executive from Goldman Sachs, she’s either advising Didi at this time or has joined really as Cheng Wei’s partner.”
22 / evaluation
“By the summer of 2016, Didi is starting to pull away and whether that’s because Chinese regulators are subtly tilting the field towards them or because of its capital or just better execution, hard to say, but Didi claims by summer of 2016 that they have 85% market share so they’ve won back another 15% that Uber had taken and they’re operating in 400 cities in China versus Uber which was only 100.”
23 / evaluation
“From an investor view as opposed to a kind of internal company view, and that’s what this story of both Uber and Didi really highlights for me is the difference between building a moat and scorching the earth. And these are companies, all of them in ridesharing really, I mean, I think Lyft has gotten dragged into it too and probably all the other companies around the world, like they've taken this scorched earth approach and they’ve gotten huge probably, and I don’t know but I would suspect that just in terms of net revenue to the company, Uber is probably larger than Airbnb at this point and Didi perhaps as well.”
24 / prediction
“An armistice may be signed but I predict that we will see more Uber and Didi going head to head throughout the world in years to come.”
25 / evaluation
“That’s a little rough too. So you know, I think I’m going to go A- for Uber because there might have been a lot more interesting things they could have done with that capital over those years, and I’m going to go with B- for Didi.”