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
And so one thing I did, just a little history on venture capital, VCs did not like SPVs back then. So I was really the first one to push SPVs hard. So I ended up doing, we ended up doing $200 million of SPVs for Uber on top of these other investments. And then we also brought our LPs into Co-Invest. TPG was one of our LPs at Chirpa. So we brought them in into Uber and they put like 83 million.
And then Google didn't want to share. They want the whole $250 million allocation. And Travis didn't want more dilution. And so my solution to that was what's called Waverly Loans, which no one had used in 30 years. But I used Waverly Loans to structure my secondary purchase of shares from an early founder when Travis let me become an advisor and investor directly when I left Menlo.
Basically, the way Waverly loans work, it's like a tax-free loan to a founder, and you exchange it for shares later, and you retire the preferred shares that you're replacing with common shares. So it's basically a swap. So I popularized that. And then the TPG solution was I introduced them to Waverly Loans.
And we did the largest Waverly Loan in history, which was $83 million, and bought Garrett Camp's shares for TPG for that amount. He sold out fully. No, no. He held on to a lot. Yeah, he's a multibillionaire.
But I mean, you know, I think TPG on that $83 million made close to $2 billion.
Take me to that. So we're looking at global expansion, and you want to expand to 800 markets and dominate the world. And at the time, the world was up for grabs, and no one was better at what we were doing than Uber. So the idea was, okay, we've raised this round with Google. That was a Series C. But we wanted to do a much bigger round and a much higher valuation.
And so Emil kicked off that fundraising. And this is where the partnership really took hold. And they would line up the investors outside so they all saw each other. In the hallway. Genius. And then they would have a tight deadline. Like we're raising this much. We're going to expect term sheets by Friday. So it was a very efficient process.
That series D, like a year after the series C, which Google and TPG did, that was at $3 billion. This was at $17 billion. And we started off at $10 billion. So Emil was able to negotiate from like 10, 11 billion valuation to 17 because there was so much competition for the deal. And so like Kleiner Perkins came in, Mudvarani led that deal. I think they put 100 million in at that round.
And then the SoftBank raise and the much bigger raises. And so ultimately we had billions of dollars to be able to expand around the world. And that led to the market share that Uber has today.
No, it was what was required. You know, this is atoms and bits like you need cars and people and labor and millions of them. right, around the world. And you need to be able to subsidize it to get the market share going. I mean, I remember I went to most of the city launches around the world and we came up with like a whole playbook, including getting celebrities to come in.
In my round, I brought most of Hollywood into Uber. Guy O'Seary likes to joke that, you know, I've made more people in the music industry money on Uber than they have in the music industry. But I brought Scooter Braun, Troy Carter, Ari Emanuel and WME, Sophia Bush, Olivia Munn, all invested in that Series B at 33 cents.
So they helped us because when we went around the world and we wanted to launch, it helped to have a celebrity be rider zero or rider one. So I brought Edward Norton into Uber. And so I remember for the LA launch,
we were like okay we're gonna have rider zero was was uh travis's parents his mom and dad and then rider one i was i was having dinner with edward and he was like i'm going surfing this weekend and i was like would you mind taking an uber suv with your surfboard to the beach and be rider one and he was like absolutely uh and so he was our rider one and we we did a blog post about that and then
And we replicated that playbook all over the world. So in India, we would launch with a Bollywood actor or a cricket player.
Because this is like the dream story to date. Yeah. The business did not fray. The business was executing at the highest levels of excellence.
So what went wrong was we had the wrong venture capitalists on the board. And that was unfortunately, in my opinion, I was Bill Gurley at Benchmark. And, you know, I haven't told many of these stories. I've kind of waited until we found out exactly all the things that happened. But basically, Gurley was pressuring Travis and Uber to go public as soon as possible, pushing for that incessantly.
Did a blog post that didn't name Uber, but was like talking about that they would be these companies need to go public. At one point, Travis stopped responding to Gurley because he was being annoying. And so Gurley is like a six foot 10 Texan guy who's used to getting his way and being listened to and so on. So when Travis stopped responding to him,
We found out in our investigation that he hired some private investigators, had weekly meetings about how do we get rid of Travis starting in January of 2017. And then when the Susan Fowler blog post happened about a month later. Remind everyone, what was the Susan Fowler blog post? It was an engineer that had a bad experience with kind of a middle manager, her engineering background.
middle manager who basically harassed her. And so she wrote a blog post about it. I remember that day vividly because Travis and I were in Malibu. Every summer we rented a Malibu house with some good friends of ours. So we had this kind of, I call it the last innocent weekend in Silicon Valley. So we had this great weekend, laughing and relaxing after working really hard.
I'd just flown in from China. And the blog post happened, and Emil walked in and was like, hey guys, you should take a look at this. It's got 3,000 likes. So we read it, and then Rachel Whetstone called, who was a political operative. Gurley had advised Travis to hire, and it turned out there were two political operatives from Google that were hired, and Rachel was one of them.
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