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
So I went to Uber's first official office. and met with him at this table that he later gifted to me as our deal table and signed it. And we hit it off. We met for like two and a half, three hours, realized there was a lot of connection and I was in the chase for the deal. And then I got a call from Travis and he was like, hey, homie, he called me homie at the time.
I really wanted to do this deal with you, but I have to go with this other firm. And I didn't know which firm it was. It turned out to be Andreessen Horowitz. And my reaction was as a founder first, not as an investor. And it was like, you know what? Congratulations. I totally understand. But if anything happens in diligence, just know I'm 100000% behind you. And so you have a strong backup.
So negotiate with strength. And I'm really glad I said that because A few weeks later, I was in Africa giving a keynote for Obama's Entrepreneurship Summit. I was in Algeria, and I got an unknown call, which I never answer. But something told me I need to answer this call. I answered the call. It was Travis. And he was like, hey, homie, remember what you said two weeks ago? Is that still true?
And I said, abso-fucking-lutely, it's true. He was like, can you meet me in Dublin, Ireland tomorrow? And I was like, absolutely. And so I got on the plane and that led to my other mantra, which is always get on the plane. And that's made all the difference. It's just, you know, make the effort, show up, meet with the founder in person, break bread.
So I flew to Dublin and we walked the streets, the cobblestone streets of Dublin, had a pint. And it was there that he told me his true vision for Uber, which he kept close to his chest at the time, which was to replace car ownership. And it was at that moment I realized, oh, the TAM is trillions.
It's not all my competitors were doing their models based on taxi companies and black car companies and not realizing, no, no, no, you're turning every car into an iPhone. You're creating a network machine. on wheels and that leads to a platform. It leads to a two-sided marketplace. And so I ran to my hotel and I wrote a term sheet at 290 million. I text him the term sheet and he didn't answer.
And I was like waiting for an hour. I'm like, oh no. I saw worse. You know, is he shopping it? So I text him again. I was like 300 million. And for the first, and I think the last time and only time that I've ever seen Travis not negotiate, he was like, no, 290 is fine. And I was like, ran straight to his hotel room.
And I have a picture I'll send it to you of us at the door signing the term sheet for 20 million at the time. Later, I got another six and a half million through secondary for Menlo. So that investment at today's prices is worth almost $7 billion. It was one of those, you know, once-in-a-lifetime investments. 20 to 7 billion. 26.5 million turned into like 6.7 billion at today's prices.
You do this deal as part of Manlo, correct? Yeah. How long were you at Manlo for? 18 months, and then I became an advisor for a year.
get where i'm going with this yeah yeah no it was a good ending though it was a good ending yeah so i basically worked out an advisory agreement because of what i had done they agreed to give me increased carry deal by deal so instead of the you know getting carry in the fund
i asked for carry in every deal that i did because i had a lot of faith in the deals that i did and that turned out to be great so i got more carry than i would have gotten in the fund by agreeing to do deal by deal carry so that was a huge thing and then travis also because i was very involved with uber i was on the board
you know and he was making me a strategic advisor after i left menlo to start sherpa and so before i started sherpa he allowed me to buy secondary shares from another early person so i i sold all my facebook shares that had gone public at like 53 bucks 58 bucks a share and i put it all i bet it all everything i had i put it all into uber so if uber didn't work out i would have been you know what price was this
uber yeah it was 33 cents a share effectively uh based on today's prices so it would be 33 cents a share so i had my direct exposure and i had my my carry deal by deal so that that worked out i thank god thank god yeah i was suddenly scared 1.4 billion dollars of carry was just like nope no good bad luck yeah okay so we're now like right hand man strategic advisor
take me to that time then it was one of the greatest experiences of my life you know watching an entrepreneur of travis's quality and being able to work with him very closely what do you think makes him so good with travis i immediately was like he's
extremely brilliant and one story i like to say is i'm close to yuri melner he's been a great mentor uh i met him when he first did the the facebook deal and that's how i actually met daniel and shaq through yuri uh we went on a meeting and trip together and yuri i brought yuri into uber so i brought a bunch of people into uber i could tell you that story at the same 33 cents what sort of price
290 million valuation. Yeah. Yuri and Travis were, it became close. We were at this Oscars party that I think CAA was doing and Yuri, Travis and I were there. And then Yuri, who was a mathematician and physicist, had this, you know, hobby of giving Travis really hard math problems. So he like gives them this math problem just verbally as we're sitting there at this Oscar party.
And Travis famously like paces around all the time like we were at. There was a track at the office at Uber with his like path that he would walk back and forth. He would think by walking. And so he's like walking back and forth, figuring out this problem. And a lot of my friends in the magnet school, they would see, they were the types that could see numbers.
I could see him looking up and calculating. And he came back in like two or three minutes and he was like, da, da, da, da, da. He said the equation. Yuri was like, almost. And he was like, oh, he ran off and walked around and then came back two minutes later and had the right answer all in his head. But it's that kind of brilliance.
I've been lucky to have invested in SpaceX and, you know, become friends with Elon. And later I did Hyperloop and And I got to witness what an exceptional and brilliant mind can do. And these are people that are like, it's not even 10X, you talk about 10X engineers, these are like 1000X humans. And so I've learned over time that it's worth waiting for the 1000X founders.
And investing in the future Travis's or the future Elon's or, you know, invested in Airbnb and got to see Brian early on.
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