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 was meeting with Rajiv Misra about buying Benchmark State because I was publicly going on CNBC and saying, hey, we'll buy Benchmark State. If you don't want out of the company, let's get you out.
so the softbank conversations ironically travis and emil started those conversations the ultimate 12 billion dollar investment from softbank vision fund they started that that whole negotiation then travis got removed from uber and and so did emil at the same time and so they got two of the greatest minds in silicon valley were taken out of the company this is the greatest value destruction that's happened since firing steve jobs at apple
And it was a massive mistake. If you look at Tesla, it's a trillion-dollar company now. I believe if Travis and Emil had stayed at Uber, Uber would be a trillion-dollar company by now. They brought in Dara Khosrowshahi, who's a dear friend. So I call Dara the great stabilizer. He has taken Uber to $175 billion market cap, which is great and profitable. He's done all of those things.
Travis was working on ideas like self-driving and automation. He was in pole position at the time. I saw him speak in Saudi Arabia at the FII a couple months ago, and they asked him, like, what would you have done if you had stayed at Uber? And he specifically went to, like, If you look at all the great things that are happening in AI and the paper that came out in 2017, we were on top of that.
We were working on things. And so he would have been one of the great AI automation entrepreneurs in the world. He would have applied his intelligence to Uber in a way that nobody can. Nobody can do what Elon's doing. Nobody can do what Travis is doing, no matter how great you are. These are like rare, rare Nobel Prize winning, essentially, founders.
And so Uber would have been a trillion dollar company. So in their greed to go after their current winnings of billions of dollars, single digit billions, Benchmark and the other investors made a critical mistake. What could have been what others that are in Tesla or SpaceX, for example, right now, who stuck by an exceptional founder with a strong personality like Elon,
If they had stuck by Travis, we would be experiencing what they're all experiencing, which is imagine if Benchmark had kept their ownership of, let's say, 10%. They would have had $100 billion to give to their LPs at this point if they had just not done this.
No, absolutely not. It's absolutely, the answer is no. And the reason is Benchmark invested in March, 2011. So Benchmark invested in March, 2011. I believe it was a $50 million pre-money. Evaluation, they put 10 million in. So they were sitting on a massive win. They were only in the company for like six years when Gurley went after Travis.
And typically it takes seven to 10 years to get to liquidity. So it wasn't in the zone or the window where you'd be like 10 years, 12 years, we don't have liquidity, et cetera. It's like, give him four more years. If you had just waited four more years, this would be a trillion dollar company. When you look at that and the impact it would have had on the world, there's no justification for it.
The perfect storm was that Google at that point saw Travis and Uber and the self-driving initiative that Travis was doing as a threat. Look at what they ultimately did to Anthony Lewandowski, right? Travis recruited. Anthony acquired his company, Otto, which was the self-driving semi-trucks. They went after him. They tried to put him in jail. He was going to go to jail until he got pardoned.
by Trump in the first administration. And so Google was not in the mood to be trying to do anything favorable at the time for Uber or for Travis. So they were going to stay out of it. Other investors, I was honestly disappointed and shocked that so many were easily manipulated by Gurley and Benchmark, and that they went along with this scheme in the sense that, you know, the letter.
I don't think anyone knew the extent to which Gurley had executed the strategy of hiring people, private investigators.
I mean, I think they took advantage of an accident for sure. It was a architected strategy starting, like I said, January of 2017 to get rid of him. I believe that it was, you know, one of the worst venture decisions ever and value destruction happened for everyone involved. And one venture is too secretive of a industry.
And that's one of the things I believe is as this kind of story comes out of what exactly happened at Uber and more will come out as our investigation kind of completes now or kind of in the sixth, seventh year and the lawsuit.
hired the top investigators in the world to figure this out. The fact that we found out it was Fusion GPS, that somebody hired Fusion GPS to fabricate a police report and go after me, and then the fact that they went to that extent, and usually you never find out about these firms because they're hiding behind multiple layers of law firms, so you can't pierce the veil.
So the story of how this firm figured out is pretty incredible. So I feel very lucky. And my dad, who's 86, made me promise to figure out what happened because people who know me know I was innocent. And it was, in fact, fabricated. And so we had all the proof.
and i put that out there because it did hurt my reputation at the time and so i had to kind of go through a pretty difficult experience and it was worth it to me to spend millions of dollars on a legal fees and doing the 1782s we filed seven four 1782s the latest one is against fusion gps and the judge found with us last year and is going to force fusion gps to say who hired them
And so they appealed it. And now we're waiting for the judge to make the final judgment.
I can't say publicly who I think hired Fusion GPS, but that maybe for a second episode when we get that judgment. Bad actors and bad behavior and VCs who do things against founders that is unjust, that it's too secretive, that people are too afraid to talk about it. And what I hope happens after me talking about it. Do you think there is a lot more to come out?
In my case, there's definitely more to come out. Once we find out who hired Fusion, Fusion GPS, then careers are going to fall.
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