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 don't agree with that. I think Uber's culture was excellent. They were achieving greatness. They were making history. It was the fastest growing company in history. And you can't get there without being fierce. You can't get there without working extremely hard. You can't get there without having really intelligent people coming together to be part of one team. Where were you not fierce enough?
when you look back now to those times and you're like we should have been fiercer lift uh we could have been way fiercer on lift earlier um it was the one time i saw travis hesitate so what happened was lift was you know zim ride and i had passed on zim ride and then they saw uber launch with black cars and so they launched effectively what became uber x later we were
already working on launching UberX, but they beat us to it and they launched with Lyft with the pink mustaches and people's cars and they were illegal. They didn't have approval from the San Francisco Taxi Commission. So Travis basically for six months was like telling the Taxi Commission, the city,
like, hey, these guys are illegal, why are you allowing it, et cetera, instead of launching it as well, which was like the first and last time he ever made that mistake. And in that six months is when Lyft took off and they ultimately ended up with about 30% market share. They never expanded globally. It's funny, Andreessen having lost the Uber deal, they ended up doing the Lyft deal.
And we had Travis and Emil, they were close to acquiring it, acquiring Lyft, but they wanted too much ownership. So that luckily didn't work out. But Lyft was... I remember taking the first hundred lifts to grab and gather Intel for Travis and talking to the drivers and, you know, you sit in the front and you do the fist bump and all of that stuff.
So they were onto something and they beat us to the punch by six months. And that cost 30% of the US market at the time.
I was involved in the beginnings of Uber China. There's a good story about me getting TPG and Bonnerman in there, and I can tell that story. It ultimately comes to... Can we unpack it just first with Emil? Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, so try... Travis came to me and was like, hey, I need to recruit a number two. And this guy, Emile Michael, everyone speaks really highly of him. Can you help me recruit him? So Travis and I basically divided and conquered, and we both worked on getting Emile. And we were really close to getting him.
And in one of the calls, he said, listen, I have these other offers, and they have titles like President of Cloud or President of Jawbone.
you know he wanted a president title or chief operating officer and so i called travis and i was like hey emil is interested he wants a title he's been offered this title and and travis didn't like titles so he said tell him uh he can be president of myself on the business card So I called Emile and I was like, you know, Travis says you can be president of yourself on the business card.
And- Oh, how kind of you to relay the direct information. Yeah, directly. You did not varnish that one. Yeah, I did not. And Emile took the president of clout position. I called Travis and I was like, hey, he took this other position. You know, look, in the past I'd experienced like losing someone and then getting them later. And if they're special enough, you'd want to get them later anyways.
So I said, look, I think I know what to say to him to kind of plant the seed for later. He was like, what are you going to say? And I was like, this was an IQ test and you failed it. And now that I know him, I would never say that to him because he's one of the smartest people on the planet. but I'd said it and it worked.
And he told me like, you know, for six months, the Uber was like going like this and clot was, you know, uh, doing okay, but not, not an Uber. And he was like, damn it, failed the IQ test. And so later, uh, that year I organized a trip. Uh, I had introduced David Bonnerman and, and Coulter to Travis and we were working on the series C. So Google, uh,
was leading the round and i said to travis look we should get bonnerman on the board and get tbg as a counterweight to google because it's like if they're on the board you need you need a counter and then two bonnerman could call any leader in the world and he just passed away last week and so we had breakfast they hit it off And then they invited us to go to the Oscars with them.
So we got on the plane, flew to the Oscars, and then they were like, we're going to Asia, five countries in six days. Do you want to come with us? And they had their two planes. And Travis was like, sure. So we got on the plane. We got on the plane again, the mantra. We did five countries in six days. I think it was the first time that Travis was in China.
And then we introduced him to the CEO of Baidu. And that led to the joint venture that led to Uber China. So that was where it began. And then on that trip, we go to Hong Kong. We're at this restaurant and it's Bonderman, me, Travis, Coulter. And I go to the bathroom and Emil is at the stall next to me. And I'm like, Emil, what are you doing here? And he was like, I'm here for a wedding.
And I was like, we're all here, Travis. And he came over and that was it. We closed him that night and he became chief business officer and the rest is history. He architected the $15 billion raise. He had a massive impact on the trajectory of Uber and he became Travis's right-hand sparring partner in building Uber.
Look, it costs a lot of money to compete with Didi and the other companies. And essentially, these companies in China are favorite. It was remarkable that we got permission to launch, first of all, as a US company, because like Google, Facebook, they never were able to launch Uber.
And so we were really one of the first to be able to launch a consumer internet product that was an American invention inside of China. So that that was remarkable. I thought it was worth given the size of the market to as part of our global expansion to be present. And to also mitigate the risk by having a joint venture partner that is as strong as Baidu.
Our fund, we put 50 million into the beginning of Uber China and then later put another 50 million into Didi when they merged. And this was when you were doing Sherpa? Yeah. How big was Sherpa? Sherpa, our first fund was small, like 153 million. Second one was like 175. And then the third one we- Yeah. So to put 50 in, you're like- Yeah.
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