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 Rachel's on the line, and she immediately says, you know, we need to hire Attorney General Holder, which was Obama's attorney general who had recently stepped down. It was at a big law firm. We need to hire an attorney general holder to do an independent investigation of workplace culture. And I looked at him and I was like, it's a trap. He was in a conversation, so he didn't hear me.
And it went over his head, but he agreed to it. I was the beginning of the end because you're basically giving up a lot. You're becoming very vulnerable in that situation.
Well, you know, if someone has a nefarious strategy to get rid of you and you agree to a independent investigation by the Attorney General of America, you're vulnerable. They're going through every single thing and it can turn it into something that it's not. And so things can be manipulated and all of that.
six months later the report's supposed to come out and that week travis tragically lost his mother in a boating accident uh mother and father were in a boating accident and she passed away and he was in the hospital his father was also like close to death and in the middle of that tragedy benchmark girly decided to go after travis So they delayed the release of the report.
And the report, by the way, didn't find anything wrong that Travis did or I did. There was nothing in there about him directly. And the recommendation was to go hire a Sheryl Sandberg, like a chief operating officer. So Travis was actually in Chicago the week that he lost his mother and recruiting a chief operating officer. you know, dealing with the tragedy and trying to take care of his company.
And Matt Kohler and Peter Fenton show up at his hotel room, surprise him with a letter with five early investors basically saying, you need to step down to CEO.
you know, lowercase, first round capital, Menlo, obviously Benchmark. And they basically said, look, if you don't resign, we're going to release this letter publicly to the press, et cetera. And so Travis was kind of, you know, in the room for hours and hours trying to decide what to do. And he ultimately agreed to step down, which I highly regret because... Did he have a choice?
I now look at like how Sam Altman handled his coup d'etat over a weekend and how he galvanized the employee base. He learned some lessons about what's happened in the past to Steve Jobs, to Travis. He was able to find his way back when he thought he was gone, right? Could Travis have pushed back and said, release the letter?
I think he was in a very tragic week in his life where he's lost his mother and I've just lost my mother. So I understand the grief that you're going through, especially in a tragedy like a boat accident. And so he was very vulnerable and they pounced, which is just unbecoming. Like it's not the type of behavior any VC or investor should do. And they took advantage of that fact and it worked.
They got him to step down. And then what happened, which got me directly engaged in the battle and what I call the Uber war, about in early August, they then sued in Delaware courts after they had already gotten rid of Travis. They then sued to get rid of him and his two board seats that he had gotten that he hadn't appointed yet. So three board seats.
So they wanted, you know, effectively board control and they sued to get rid of him. So I hired Quinn Emanuel. John Quinn, who's like the fiercest litigator in the world, in the corporate world. And I countersued Benchmark and flew to Delaware, landed, went to this little courthouse.
And it made me fall in love with the American justice system because this entire corporate legal system is held up by this tiny little town, little courthouse. And as I go in the courthouse, We make our arguments and the judge finds with us and rejects Benchmark's attempt to get rid of the three board seats. I remember calling Travis and being like, Hey, we won.
Your three board seats are protected, like appoint them now. He ended up appointing Ursula from Xerox former CEO Merrill Lynch to the board and then I found out through our investigation two weeks later after I won this case there was a firm called fusion GPS which is the firm famously that did the Russian dossier against Trump a fake Russian dossier and
basically a political operative type firm, former journalists, basically the weaponized arm of the DNC. So they did the Russian dossier against Trump to basically make him lose to Hillary and then cause all kinds of trouble during the first term. Really immoral people.
And so we found out in an investigation that two weeks after I won the case, founding partner of Fusion GPS was sitting at a cafe in DC with a reporter from Fast Company with a memory stick and a fake police report from London about me. They gave it to the reporter.
The reporter, we found out, you know, filed lawsuits to do discovery, a law called 1782 that allows if you have a British case, you can actually sue in federal courts in the U.S. It's a treaty from 1782.
it allows you to do discovery in federal courts in the u.s for a case in the uk so i hired the top expert on 1782s and won against fast company and we got discovery on the emails and there were multiple emails from the london police telling the reporter this is not our report and he still reported it and it basically threw my life into a tailspin and so also
Well, accusing me of something awful that I never did and that, you know, I was innocent of. And they fabricated a police report in order to get reporters to do it. And once the first one did it, every other publication did it. And then when we countered with a letter from the London police saying, this is not our report. Basically, I quelled that at the time.
And then they had continued with like five anonymous accusations. And this is in the middle of the Me Too movement, right? Directly in the middle of it. This is like October, November of 2017. So I basically realized, like, if I don't either take a leave of absence or step down, they're just going to keep attacking until that happens.
And so they were trying to stop me from, because I had organized a shareholder group with people like Ron Burkle, who had brought into Uber along with Ashton and Guy. They had a fund called A-Grade. Adam Lieber, who is a top music agent, and other investors to basically countersue and fight what was going on.
Showing 81–100 of 179 · page 5 of 9
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