Shervin Pishevar
speaker
179 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Shervin Pishevar’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I believe if Travis and Emil had stayed at Uber, Uber would be a trillion dollar company by now. This is the greatest value destruction that's happened since firing Steve Jobs at Apple. Travis, his true vision for Uber was to replace car ownership. And it was at that moment I realized, oh, the TAM is trillions. What do you think makes him so good? Really exceptional intelligence.
You talk about 10x engineers. These are like 1,000x humans. We are actually full steam ahead, but things start to go wrong. Yeah, what went wrong was we had the wrong venture capitalists on the board. Unfortunately, in my opinion, it was Bill Gurley at Benchmark. We found out in our investigation that he hired some private investigators, had weekly meetings about how do we get rid of Travis.
That week, when Travis tragically lost his mother in a boating accident, Benchmark, Gurley decide to go after Travis. I haven't told many of these stories, but basically,
Thank you, Harry.
Absolutely. Thank you. My mom passed away last Wednesday. We're going to have her funeral in a few days. And she was the most incredible human I've ever met. She was a teacher for 14 years in Iran. When we escaped the revolution and came to America, she started all over again. We came with $35 and then we had to escape. We started with nothing. And my dad drove a taxi while getting his PhD.
My mom was a maid and worked two jobs, a cafeteria worker and a maid. I used to go clean rooms with her. So it was the kind of classic American dream story. And she took computer programming classes at a college in Maryland while I was a kid. And so she, and she would take me to her classes.
So I, and this was like when they had the paper with the holes in it, you punch the holes and that, that was how they coded in the eighties. And so I, I got to kind of see that. And then I saw the Apple and, And I begged for an Apple. My mom and dad worked overtime for three months to afford it. Back then it was like $3,000, which was a lot in 1985, 86.
And they bought me my first Apple IIc and I did my first coat on it. And that changed my life. And then later, She secretly put on her credit card a laptop when I was at Berkeley and I didn't have enough money to get a laptop and she put it on her credit card and I always said that she was my angel, my first angel investor, my first believer.
But she really taught me how to dream in color and I'm finding this process of grieving profound in that I see her now in ways that I couldn't see her when she was alive.
Absolutely. It was a great journey. I started my first company called WebOS senior year of college. And that's when my mom bought me the laptop. And I was working a night job as a security guard to make enough money to start my company. So I had the little LG laptop with a dial-up connection that I was using. While I was in the security job all night working on the startup as well.
And at WebOS, I started recruiting really young talent. And at the time, the greatest developers on the internet were really young. They were like 15-year-olds like Anthony Castellana, who's the founder of Squarespace.
there was this kind of realization that i had an eye for talent and then that led later led to meeting travis many years later and getting that sense of like oh this travis is different how did you meet travis take me to that meeting i met him because uh cheryl sandberg actually was a mentor of mine I was building Facebook apps and iPhone games for one of my first companies, SGN.
Cheryl read an essay that I wrote about entrepreneurship and reached out to me on her own and was like, hey, could you do lunch? And she had just joined Facebook. And she wanted advice about the app store and what percentage they should charge. And I shared that Apple charges 30%. You could probably charge 30%, which is what they ended up doing. And so we would meet once a quarter.
And she was a great mentor. And then I was selling SGN and she told me, Shervin, you should go on a venture. You'll be disruptive. And I was like, I just didn't think I had a seat at the table. But she sent an email to like five top VCs the next day without telling me.
I haven't seen the email, but I heard it's really great because I started getting recruited and I had an offer from Kleiner Perkins and an offer from Menlo. And I ended up going with Menlo. That really was the beginning of my venture career. I had been an angel investor before that and been, you know, Invested in Facebook and other companies. But when I started at Menlo, I hit the ground running.
And in my first 90 days, I closed Uber, Warby Parker, Tumblr, and Machine Zone. It was a really fast start. On the whiteboard, I had a list of companies at the time. This is 2011, June 2011, when I started at Menlo. And Uber was the top of the list. Airbnb was on the list. Square was on the list.
And this was a particularly amazing time in Silicon Valley because these companies were just starting out. No one had heard of them. And so I was in lowercase as a seed investor and Naval Ravikant had introduced me to Travis over email. I went and used Uber for the first time. And this is when it was like hundreds of cars in San Francisco and him and Garrett Camp had started the company.
And then as a former son of a taxi driver in D.C., I knew a little bit about the taxi market. So full circle that actually helped me win the deal. And I chased Travis and even before Menlo for a year, I was trying to meet him and he was difficult to get to. And so I asked Matt Kohler, who was a longtime friend. And so Matt promised to say something to him, but you know, I waited for that.
But meanwhile, I decided, you know what? And this goes to one of my mantras, which is, you know, the answer is always no until you ask. And so I basically bombarded Travis with references. So I had like Drew Houston, who was a dear friend, Sheryl Sandberg, Julius Januszowski, all telling him you need to meet with Shervin.
And finally, Travis said, you know, he's publicly said this, that he met with me because he had no choice. He had so many people. Telling him you need to meet him. So Matt called me in August of 2011, six months after Benchmark did their Series A with Uber. And he said, hey, we just had our board meeting. We're going to raise the Series B. Can you meet with Travis tomorrow?
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