20VC: Shervin Pishevar on The Epic Uber War and What Really Happened in the Firing of Travis Kalanick | Raising $15BN to Win China | Why The Traditional Venture Capital Model is Dead | The Future of Quantum and How We Will Cure All Diseases in 10 Years

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Twenty Minute VC (20VC) Episode Featuring Shervin Pishevar

Episode Title:
Shervin Pishevar on The Epic Uber War and What Really Happened in the Firing of Travis Kalanick | Raising $15BN to Win China | Why The Traditional Venture Capital Model is Dead | The Future of Quantum and How We Will Cure All Diseases in 10 Years

Release Date: January 13, 2025
Host: Harry Stebbings
Guest: Shervin Pishevar, Serial Entrepreneur and Investor

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1. Introduction and Personal Reflections

[00:00] Shervin Pishevar:
Shervin begins by expressing his belief that Uber could have grown into a trillion-dollar company had Travis Kalanick and Emil Michael remained with the company. He compares Kalanick's firing to significant historical corporate upheavals, including Steve Jobs' departure from Apple.

[05:03] Shervin Pishevar:
Shervin shares a heartfelt tribute to his late mother, highlighting her influence on his technological journey. He recounts her perseverance as an immigrant and her role in igniting his passion for computer programming, drawing parallels to his own career trajectory.

2. The Uber Investment Journey

[08:09] Shervin Pishevar:
Shervin details how he met Travis Kalanick through mutual connections and his strategic maneuvers to secure an investment deal with Uber. His persistence led him to fly to Dublin, where he finalized the investment, resulting in substantial returns as Uber's valuation skyrocketed.

Notable Quote:
"The answer is always no until you ask." – Shervin Pishevar [08:09]

[16:07] Shervin Pishevar:
He reflects on his time as Travis's strategic advisor and board member, praising Kalanick's brilliance and entrepreneurial spirit. Shervin highlights the exceptional intelligence of founders like Travis and Elon Musk, whom he regards as "1000x humans."

Notable Quote:
"These are like thousandx humans." – Shervin Pishevar [00:22]

3. Navigating Challenges and the Uber War

[30:45] Shervin Pishevar:
Shervin recounts the internal conflicts at Uber, particularly the detrimental influence of Benchmark's Bill Gurley. He reveals how Gurley's efforts to pressure Travis into stepping down culminated in a strategic coup during a period of personal tragedy for Kalanick.

[32:10] Shervin Pishevar:
He explains the fallout from the Susan Fowler blog post, detailing how Benchmark orchestrated efforts to undermine Travis by leveraging political operatives and legal maneuvers.

Notable Quote:
"This is the greatest value destruction that's happened since firing Steve Jobs at Apple." – Shervin Pishevar [00:00]

4. The Aftermath and Legal Battles

[35:10] Shervin Pishevar:
Shervin discusses the subsequent legal battles against Benchmark, highlighting his victory in Delaware courts which protected Uber's board seats. He delves into the malicious tactics employed by Fusion GPS to defame him, leading to extensive legal proceedings.

[43:44] Shervin Pishevar:
He vehemently criticizes Benchmark's actions, stating there was no justification for their aggressive stance against Travis and himself, emphasizing the long-term value lost due to their interference.

5. Reflections on Venture Capital and Industry Evolution

[49:07] Shervin Pishevar:
Shervin laments the decline of the traditional venture capital model, attributing it to the influx of private equity and mega funds that have disrupted the meritocratic and collaborative culture of early Silicon Valley.

Notable Quote:
"The venture capital that we grew up with and that we looked up to, that model is gone." – Shervin Pishevar [51:10]

6. Future of Technology and Venture Capital

[56:28] Shervin Pishevar:
Looking ahead, Shervin is optimistic about the merging of quantum computing and AI, predicting breakthroughs that will revolutionize medicine and other industries. He envisions significant advancements that could lead to curing all diseases within a decade.

Notable Quote:
"With quantum computing, we’ll be able to solve problems that would take billions of years to solve in hours and days." – Shervin Pishevar [57:37]

7. Quick Fire Questions

• Biggest Change of Mind:
  Shervin expresses newfound joy and purpose from becoming a grandfather, stating it has unlocked unparalleled levels of love and motivation to improve the world.

• Best Fund Investment:
  He cites Chris Sacca's Lowercase fund as his most successful investment, turning a small check into millions.

• Most Overhyped Fund:
  Shervin criticizes Benchmark, particularly Bill Gurley, for their detrimental actions during the Uber conflict.

• Biggest Miss:
  He regrets not investing in Snapchat and Pinterest during their seed rounds, attributing the losses to missed opportunities and failed communication.

8. Concluding Thoughts and Final Insights

[68:46] Shervin Pishevar:
He acknowledges that his extreme loyalty has been both a strength and a source of personal pain. Shervin emphasizes the importance of authentic relationships with founders and the need for venture capital to evolve towards more inclusive and democratized models.

Notable Quote:
"I’m extremely loyal. That loyalty has served me well, but it's also caused me a lot of pain." – Shervin Pishevar [68:46]

[69:24] Shervin Pishevar:
In his final remarks, Shervin urges future investors and entrepreneurs to maintain resilience and build genuine partnerships with visionary founders to create transformative, trillion-dollar companies.

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Key Takeaways

1. Impact of Leadership Decisions:
   Shervin underscores how pivotal leadership decisions, particularly the ousting of visionary founders like Travis Kalanick, can drastically alter a company's trajectory and potential.

2. Venture Capital Evolution:
   The traditional venture capital model is evolving due to the rise of private equity and mega funds, leading to challenges in maintaining meritocratic and collaborative investment cultures.

3. Technological Optimism:
   Shervin is bullish on the convergence of quantum computing and AI, anticipating revolutionary advancements that could address some of humanity's most pressing issues, including curing all diseases within the next decade.

4. Importance of Loyalty and Relationships:
   His experiences highlight the dual-edged nature of loyalty in business—fostering strong relationships with founders can lead to substantial success but may also result in personal and professional conflicts.

5. Lessons from the Uber Conflict:
   The Uber saga serves as a cautionary tale about the destructive potential of misaligned investor-founder relationships and the importance of safeguarding leadership vision against external pressures.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps

• "I believe if Travis and Emil had stayed at Uber, Uber would be a trillion dollar company by now." – Shervin Pishevar [00:00]

• "These are like thousandx humans." – Shervin Pishevar [00:22]

• "The answer is always no until you ask." – Shervin Pishevar [08:09]

• "This is the greatest value destruction that's happened since firing Steve Jobs at Apple." – Shervin Pishevar [00:00]

• "The venture capital that we grew up with and that we looked up to, that model is gone." – Shervin Pishevar [51:10]

• "With quantum computing, we’ll be able to solve problems that would take billions of years to solve in hours and days." – Shervin Pishevar [57:37]

• "I’m extremely loyal. That loyalty has served me well, but it's also caused me a lot of pain." – Shervin Pishevar [68:46]

---

Conclusion:
Shervin Pishevar's episode on The Twenty Minute VC provides a deep dive into the complexities of venture capital, the pivotal moments in Uber's history, and the future of technology and investment. His candid reflections offer valuable lessons for investors and entrepreneurs alike, emphasizing the importance of loyalty, strategic decision-making, and adaptability in a rapidly evolving landscape.

Transcript

[Shervin Pishevar]

I believe if Travis and Emil had stayed at Uber, Uber would be a trillion dollar company by now. This is the greatest value destruction that's happened since firing Steve Jobs at Apple. Travis, his true vision for Uber was to replace car ownership and it was at that moment I realized, oh, the TAM is trillions.

[Harry Stebbings]

What do you think makes him so good?

[Shervin Pishevar]

Really exceptional intelligence. You talk about 10x engineers, these are like thousandx humans.

[Harry Stebbings]

We are actually full steam ahead. But things start to go wrong.

[Shervin Pishevar]

Yeah, what went wrong was we had the wrong venture capitalists on the board. Unfortunately, in my opinion, I was Bill Gurley at Benchmark. We found out in our investigation that he hired some private investigators, had weekly meetings about how do we get rid of Travis. That week, when Travis tragically lost his mother in a boating accident, Benchmark Gurley decided to go after Travis. I haven't told many of these stories.

[Travis Kalanick]

But basically this is twentvc with me, Harry Stebbings. And what a show we have in store for you today. This guest lost their mother a week before this recording. He then got on a flight from the US To London. Just for this episode, I'm thrilled to welcome Shervin Pishevar, serial entrepreneur and investor. Shervin is famed for leading Uber's Series B when he was at Menlo, alongside leading Warby Parker's Series A and investing in Tumblr, all in just 18 months at Menlo. Following that stint at Menlo, Shervin co found Sherpa Capital and today Shervin is averaging over 73x on his investments. Now, as an angel investor, Shervin also made over 100 investments in the likes of Dollar Shave Club, Postmates, Facebook and more. But before we dive in today, it can be difficult to build a team that's aligned on everything from values to workflow. But that's exactly what Coda was made to do. Coda is an all in one collaborative workspace that started as a napkin sketch. Now, just five years since launching in beta, Coda help 50,000 teams all over the world get on the same page. With Coda, you get the flexibility of docs, the structure of spreadsheets, the power of applications, and the intelligence of AI, all built for your organization. Coda's seamless workspace facilitates deeper collaboration and quicker creativity, giving you more time to build. And whether you're a startup looking to organize the chaos while staying nimble, or an enterprise team looking for better team alignment, Coda matches your working style. To try it for yourself, go to coda.today and get six months free of the team plan for startups. That's Codacoda iO20VC to get started for free and get six free months of the team plan. Now that your team is aligned and collaborating, let's tackle those messy expense reports. You know, those receipts that seem to multiply like rabbits in your wallet. The endless email chains asking can you approve this? And don't even get me started on a month end panic when you realize you have to reconcile it. Pleo offers smart company cards, physical, virtual and vendor specific so teams can buy what they need while finance stays in control. Automate your expense reports, process invoices seamlessly and manage reimbursements effortlessly all in one platform. With integrations to tools like Xero, QuickBooks and Netsuite, Pleo fits right into your workflow, saving time and giving you full visibility over every entity, payment and subscription. Join over 37,000 companies already using Pleo to streamline their finances. Try Pleo today. It's like magic, but with fewer rabbits. Find out [e-mail] 20VC and don't forget to revolutionize how your team works together. Rome, A Company of Tomorrow runs at hyperspeed with quick drop in meetings. A Company of Tomorrow is globally distributed and fully digitized. A Company of Tomorrow instantly connects human and AI workers. A Company of Tomorrow is in a Rome virtual office. See a visualization of your whole company. The live presence, the drop in meetings, the AI summaries, the chats. It's an incredible view to see. Rome is a breakthrough workplace experience loved by over 500 companies of tomorrow. For a fraction of the cost of Zoom and Slack. Visit Roam. That's or AM for an instant demo of Roam Today. Nobody knows what the future holds, but I do know this. It's going to be built in a Roam virtual office. Hopefully by you. That's Romero. AM for an instant demo.

[Harry Stebbings]

You have now arrived at your destination. Shavin. Dude, I'm so excited for this. I've wanted to make this one happen for a while.

[Travis Kalanick]

So thank you so much for joining me.

[Shervin Pishevar]

Thank you, Harry. It's exciting to be here.

[Travis Kalanick]

Now, I would love to start with.

[Harry Stebbings]

A little bit of context. I'm actually going to start if it's okay with your mother. I'm so sorry for her passing, but I know she was also incredibly impactful to you getting into technology and so talk to me a little bit about her being impactful in getting into technology as a starting point.

[Shervin Pishevar]

Absolutely. Thank you. My mom passed away last Wednesday. We're going to have her funeral in a few Days. And she was the most incredible human I've ever met. She was a teacher for 14 years in Iran. When we escaped the revolution and came to America, she started all over again. We came with $35 and then we had to escape. We started with nothing. And my dad drove a taxi while getting his PhD. My mom was a maid and worked two jobs as a cafeteria worker and a maid. I used to go clean rooms with her. So it was the kind of classic American dream story. And she took computer programming classes at a college in Maryland while I was a kid and she would take me to her classes. And this was like when they had the paper with the holes in it, you punch the holes. And that was how they coded in the 80s. And so I got to kind of see that. And then I saw the Apple and I begged for an Apple. My mom and dad worked overtime for three months to afford it. Back then it was like $3,000, which was a lot in 1985, 86. And they bought me my first Apple IIC and I did my first code on it and that changed my life. And then later she secretly put on her credit card a laptop when I was at Berkeley and I didn't have enough money to get a laptop and she put it on her credit card. And I always that she was my first angel investor, my first believer. But she really taught me how to dream in color. And I'm finding this process of grieving profound in that I see her now in ways that I couldn't see her when she was alive.

[Harry Stebbings]

I think mothers are the most important people. I wouldn't be anywhere without my mother. I walk two marathons a weekend with her and it's kind of the same space in my week. She's also expensive, she loves Chanel. So there's downsides to everything, right? Listen, dude, I want to go to the Uber story and I want to go to your time at Man Layer. How did that come to be?

[Shervin Pishevar]

Absolutely, it was a great journey. I started my first company called WebOS Senior Year of college and that's when my mom bought me the laptop. And I was working a night job as a security guard to make enough money to start my company. So I had the, the little LG laptop with a dial up connection that I was while I was in the security job all night working on the startup as well. And at WebOS I started recruiting really young talent. And at the time, the greatest developers on the Internet were really young. They were like 15 year olds like Anthony Casalina, who's the Founder of Squarespace. There was this kind of realization that I had an eye for talent. And then that later led to meeting Travis many years later and getting that of like, oh, this Travis is different.

[Harry Stebbings]

How did you meet Travis? Take me to that meeting.

[Shervin Pishevar]

I met him because Sheryl Sandberg actually was a mentor of mine. I was building Facebook apps and iPhone games for one of my first companies, sgn. Sheryl read an essay that I wrote about entrepreneurship and reached out to me on her own and was like, hey, could you do lunch? And she had just joined Facebook and she wanted advice about the App Store and what percentage they should charge. And I shared that Apple charges 30%. You could probably charge 30%, which is what they ended up doing. And so we would meet once a quarter. And she was a great mentor. And then I was selling SGN and she told me, shervin, you should go on the venture. You'll be disruptive. And I was like, I just didn't think I had a seat at the table. But she sent an email to five top VCs the next day without telling me. I haven't seen the email, but I heard it's really great because I started getting recruited and I had an offer from Kleiner Perkins, I had an offer from Menlo, and I ended up going with Menlo. That really was the beginning of my venture career. I had been an angel investor before that and been invested in Facebook and other companies. But when I started at Menlo, I hit the ground running. And in my first 90 days, I closed Uber, Warby, Parker, Tumblr and Machine Zone. It was a really fast start. On the whiteboard, I had a list of companies at the time. This is 2011, June 2011. When I started started at Menlo, and Uber was at top of the list. Airbnb was on the list, Square was on the list. And this was a particularly amazing time in Silicon Valley because these companies were just starting out. No one had heard of them. And so I was in lowercase as a seed investor. And Naval Ravikant had introduced me to Travis over email. I went and used Uber for the first time. And this is when it was like hundreds of cars in San Francisco, and him and Gary Camp had started the company. And then as a former son of a taxi driver in dc, I knew a little bit about the taxi market. So full circle. That actually helped me win the deal. And I chased Travis and even before Menlo, for a year, I was trying to meet him, and he was difficult to get to. And so I asked Matt Kohler who was a longtime friend. And so Matt and promised to say something to him, but I waited for that. But meanwhile, I decided, you know what? This goes to one of my mantras, which is the answer is always no until you ask. And so I basically bombarded Travis with references. So I had Drew Houston, who was a dear friend, Sheryl, Sandberg, Julius, Janice, all telling him, you need to meet with Shervin. And finally, Travis said he's publicly said this, that he met with me because he had no choice. He had so many people telling him, you need to meet him. So Matt called me In August of 2011, six months after benchmark did their Series A with Uber, and said, hey, we just had our board meeting. We're going to raise the Series B. Can you meet with Travis tomorrow? 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 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 I was like, you know what, Congratulations. I totally understand. But if anything happens in diligence, just know I'm 100,000% 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 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. And I text him the term sheet and he didn't answer. And I was waiting for an hour. I'm like, oh, no, it's the worst. Is he shopping it? So I text him again. It 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 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 once in a lifetime investment, 20 to 7 billion, 26.5 million turned into like 6.7 billion at today's prices.

[Harry Stebbings]

You do this deal as part of Manlo, correct?

[Shervin Pishevar]

Yeah.

[Harry Stebbings]

How long were you at Manlo for?

[Shervin Pishevar]

18 months. And then I became an advisor for a year.

[Harry Stebbings]

You get where I'm going with this?

[Shervin Pishevar]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it was a good ending, though.

[Harry Stebbings]

It was a good ending.

[Shervin Pishevar]

Yeah. So I basically worked out an advisory agreement. Because of what I had done, they agreed to give me increase carry deal by deal. So instead of 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 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 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 bankrupt.

[Harry Stebbings]

What price was this?

[Shervin Pishevar]

Uber? Yeah, it was 33 cents a share, effectively based on today's prices. So it would be 33 cents a share. So I had my direct exposure and I had my carry deal by deal. So that worked out. Thank God.

[Harry Stebbings]

Thank God. I was Suddenly shit scared. $1.4 billion of carry was just like, nope, no bad luck. Okay, so we're now like right hand man, strategic advisor. Take me to that time.

[Shervin Pishevar]

It was one of the greatest experiences of my life. Watching an entrepreneur of Travis quality and being able to work with him very closely.

[Harry Stebbings]

What do you think makes him so good with Travis?

[Shervin Pishevar]

I immediately was like, he's extremely brilliant. And one story I like to say is I'm close to Yuri Milner. He's been a great mentor. I met him when he first did the Facebook deal, and that's how I actually met Daniel and Shaq, through Yuri. 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 to 33 cents.

[Harry Stebbings]

What sort of price?

[Shervin Pishevar]

290 million valuation. Yeah. Yuri and Travis 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 hobby of giving Travis really hard math problems. So he gives him this math problem just verbally as we're sitting there at this Oscar party. And Travis famously paces around all the time. There was a track at the office at Uber with his 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 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. 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 become friends with Elon. And later I did Hyperloop 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 thousand X founders and investing in the future Travis's or the future Elon's, or invested in Airbnb and got to see Brian early on.

[Harry Stebbings]

There's a lot of suggestions that Uber culture was bluntly, incredibly hard driving, incredibly ruthless, and pretty tough to be in.

[Shervin Pishevar]

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.

[Harry Stebbings]

Where were you not fierce enough? Where do you look back now to those times and you're like, we should have been fiercer.

[Shervin Pishevar]

Lyft. We could have been way fiercer on Lyft earlier. In what way? It was the one time I saw Travis hesitate. So what happened was Lyft was Zimride, and I had passed on Zimride. And then they saw Uber launch with black cars, and so they launched effectively. What became UberX 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. Like, they didn't have approval from the San Francisco Taxi Commission. So Travis basically, for six months, was telling the taxi commission, the city government, hey, these guys are illegal. Why are you allowing it, et cetera, instead of launching it as well, which was 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, you know, 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 Lyfts to Gavra intel for Travis and talking to 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.

[Harry Stebbings]

Why were you two fierce?

[Shervin Pishevar]

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. And it ultimately comes to.

[Harry Stebbings]

Can we unpack it? Just first with Emil. You mentioned Emil's name there, and I just want to kind of do it stage by stage a little bit. Amil obviously had a big role to play, and I hear you were part of recruiting him.

[Shervin Pishevar]

Yeah. So Travis came to me and was like, hey, I need to recruit, you know, 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 Emil, 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 Clout 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 Travis didn't like titles. So he said, tell him he can be president of myself on the business card. So I called Emile, and I was like, travis says he can be president of yourself on the business card.

[Harry Stebbings]

How kind of you to relay the direct invitation.

[Shervin Pishevar]

Yeah. Directly. 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. But look, in the past, I had experienced 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 Emil, I would never say that to him because he's one of the smartest people on the planet. But I had said it, and it worked. And he told me for six months, Uber was going like this, and Clout was doing okay, but not an Uber. And he was like, damn, it. Failed the IQ test. And so later that year, I organized a trip. I had introduced David Bonnerman and Coulter to Travis, and we were working on the Series C, so Google 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 if they're on the board, 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 states. Do you want to come with us? And they had, there are 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 Colter, and I go to the bathroom, and Emile 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.

[Harry Stebbings]

You mentioned Baidu China there. I just want to take them in turn. Was that a good joint venture? Was China good for Uber?

[Shervin Pishevar]

Look, it costs a lot of money to compete with Didi and the other companies. 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 in China. And so we were really one of the first to be able to launch, launch a consumer Internet product that was an American invention inside of China. So that was remarkable. I thought it was worth, given the size of the market, 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.

[Harry Stebbings]

And this was when you were doing Sherpa?

[Shervin Pishevar]

Yeah.

[Harry Stebbings]

How big was Sherpa?

[Shervin Pishevar]

Sherpa. Our first fund was small, like 153 million. Second one was like 175. And then the third one, we. Yeah.

[Harry Stebbings]

So to put 50 in, you're like, yeah.

[Shervin Pishevar]

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 svs 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 Sherpa. 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 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 that'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 TBG for that amount.

[Harry Stebbings]

He sold out fully?

[Shervin Pishevar]

No, no, he held on to a lot. Yeah, he's a multibillionaire.

[Harry Stebbings]

I don't know Garrett, but my heart.

[Travis Kalanick]

Just sang for him.

[Shervin Pishevar]

But I mean, I think TPG on that 83 million made close to 2 billion.

[Harry Stebbings]

And so we have now Emil onboard. You mentioned the $15 billion raise. Take me to that.

[Shervin Pishevar]

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. So Emil was able to negotiate from 10, 11 billion valuation to 17 because there was so much competition for the deal. And so Kleiner Perkins came in mood. Rouhani 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.

[Harry Stebbings]

Can I ask, was that a necessary evil? And what I mean by that is that much money that early, was it required to achieve what Uber achieved? Or in reflection, was it a little bit too much, too soon?

[Shervin Pishevar]

No, it was what was required. This is atoms and bits. You need cars and people and labor and millions of them around the world, and you need to be able to subsidize it to get the market share going. I remember I went to most of the city launches around the world, and we came up with a whole playbook, including getting celebrities to come in. In my round, I brought most of Hollywood into Uber. Guy Osiri likes to joke that 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 0 or Rider 1. So I had brought Edward Norton into Uber. And so I remember for the LA launch, we were like, okay, we're gonna have Rider 0 was Travis's parents, his mom and dad. And then Rider 1, 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 1? And he was like, absolutely. And so he was our Rider one. And we did a blog post about that. And then we replicated that playbook all over the world. So in India, we would launch with a Bollywood player actor or a cricket player. Snow.

[Harry Stebbings]

I absolutely love that. So we have this continuous meteoric growth. We've got the $15 billion now. It's just going through the roof. Where do things start to fray? Because this is like the dream story to date.

[Shervin Pishevar]

Yeah, the business did not fray. The business was executing at the highest levels of excellence.

[Harry Stebbings]

So the business is not fraying. We are actually full steam ahead. But things start to go wrong.

[Shervin Pishevar]

So what went wrong was we had the wrong venture capitalists on the board. And that was unfortunately, in my opinion, that 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 talking about that these companies need to go public. At one point, Travis stopped responding to Gurley because he was being annoying. And so Gurley is a 6 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.

[Harry Stebbings]

Remind everyone, what was the Susan Fowler blog post?

[Shervin Pishevar]

It was an engineer that had a bad experience with kind of a middle manager, her engineering 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 had 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. So Rachel's on the line and she immediately says, 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 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.

[Harry Stebbings]

Just why are you becoming vulnerable? Because you're opening up.

[Shervin Pishevar]

Well, 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. 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 Gurley 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, or there was nothing in there about him directly. And the recommendation was like to. 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, 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.

[Harry Stebbings]

Who are the early investors?

[Shervin Pishevar]

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 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 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.

[Harry Stebbings]

Could Travis have pushed back instead release the letter?

[Shervin Pishevar]

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. It's not 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 in 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 effectively board control, and they sued to get rid of them. 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 the entire corporate legal system is held up by this tiny little town, little courthouse. And so 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 of 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, the fake Russian dossier. 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 an investigation that two weeks after I won the case, founding partner of Fusion GPS was sitting at a cafe in D.C. 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. I 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 US for a case in the UK. So I hired the top expert on 1,782s 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 how so? Well, accusing me of something awful that I never, 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 MeToo movement, directly in the middle of it. This is like October, November of 2017. So I basically realized 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. I was meeting with Rajeev Misra about buying Benchmark stake. Cause I was publicly going on CNBC and saying, hey, we'll buy Benchmark stake. If you don't want out of the company, let's get you out.

[Harry Stebbings]

Why was that not an option? People want liquidity. We see this more and more with secondaries and late stage secondaries today. Why do we not just say to benchmark, hey Bill, you want liquidity, I get it, I'm an investor, I get it. You want liquidity, we'll buy you out.

[Travis Kalanick]

At a great price.

[Harry Stebbings]

Why was that not an option?

[Shervin Pishevar]

The Softbank conversations, ironically, Travis and Emil started those conversations. The ultimate $12 billion investment from SoftBank Vision Fund. They started that whole negotiation. Then Travis Scott got removed from Uber 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 Khusrashai, 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 what would you have done if you had stayed at Uber? And he specifically went to. 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.

[Harry Stebbings]

I always like to see both sides that and girly does still scare the shit out of me at 6 foot 10 and a Texan.

[Travis Kalanick]

Listen, he does.

[Harry Stebbings]

And you know, I have respect better for him as an investor. Is there a justification for it? I try and put on my investor hat and I think now, well, if we haven't returned cash to investors in a long time, I need liquidity. If investors are pressuring me to put liquidity back in the pot. Is there any justification?

[Shervin Pishevar]

No, absolutely not. It's absolutely. The answer is no. And the reason is Benchmark invested in March 2011 is so Benchmark invested in March 2011, I believe it was a $50 million pre money valuation. 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, like give him four more years. If you had just waited four more years, this would be a trillion dollar company. And when you look at that and the impact it would have had on the world, there's no justification for it.

[Harry Stebbings]

Do you think Google, TPG and other investors should have been more active as a counterbalance to the letter that was handed to Travis?

[Shervin Pishevar]

The perfect storm was that Google at that point saw Travis and Uber and the self driving initiative that Travis is doing as a threat. But look at what they ultimately did to Anthony Levandowski, 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 gonna 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 the letter. I don't think anyone knew the extent to which Gurley had executed this strategy of hiring people, private investigators.

[Harry Stebbings]

Was it an unfortunate time in terms of just the coincidence of timing between the terrible situation of mother dying and bluntly, the situation, or was it a deliberate coinciding?

[Shervin Pishevar]

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 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 losses.

[Harry Stebbings]

How much money you spent on this investigation?

[Shervin Pishevar]

I 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 the legal fees and doing the 1,782s. We filed four 1,782s. 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 to.

[Harry Stebbings]

What do you expect it to say?

[Shervin Pishevar]

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 for me. Talking about do you think it's going to come out in my case? There's definitely more to come out. Once we find out who hired Fusion gps then careers are going to fall.

[Harry Stebbings]

Do you think there is a lot more outside of this case?

[Shervin Pishevar]

Oh yeah. And there's a history of VCs who have done this type of thing. And in Benchmark's case they did it against Naval, they hired private investigators. Naval Ravikant, he had a company called E Groups and he got thrown out of it. A very similar playbook. And so that's happened multiple times at Benchmark and it's happened in other funds and it just needs to stop. Also the political operatives who came into Silicon Valley post Uber and Facebook. It attracted them like flies and they started to apply for.

[Harry Stebbings]

With me. A brilliant thing. You said it was the 2017 onwards was a drunken period of VC.

[Shervin Pishevar]

Yeah, yeah, 2017, the period from 2005 to 2015 was incredible. That's when most of these great companies, whether it was SpaceX or Tesla or, or Facebook or Uber were founded. And there was a culture of meritocracy and everyone was helping each other and open minded and you'd meet at cafes. It was a beautiful era in Silicon Valley. Then what happened is when people realized, oh my God, these people are going to become billionaires and there's billions of dollars to be made. You had the carpetbaggers, you had the political operatives, you had the consultants, you had all these people started to, to come in. And then the other thing that happened, and I blame myself a little bit because bringing TPG into Uber and the Series C kicked off the whole wave of private equity coming downstream into venture Series C B A Like, you know, when you looked at what happened from 2017 to 2021, 22 in the drunken period, mega funds come in, spread billions of dollars at massive valuations that didn't make any rational sense. Wework as an example, $18 billion went into that company and I passed on that company. That was ironically another benchmark company. I passed on that company because I remember the dot com crash and all the office buildings being cleared up and I was like, I don't get this business model. You don't own it and you could be removed pretty quickly from your customers. So I didn't see strength in that business model. But companies with bad business models were getting $18 billion in cash. That's crazy. That's not classic venture capital.

[Harry Stebbings]

Doug Leone said on the show that we've gone from a high margin boutique business to a low margin commoditized industry. He said there's no way of putting that genie back in the model venture.

[Shervin Pishevar]

Capital as it is today, especially with private equity coming downstream and what we've seen with the drunken era, venture capital is dead. The venture capital that we grew up with and that we looked up to, that model is gone.

[Harry Stebbings]

So why is that model gone?

[Shervin Pishevar]

The rate at which companies can be accelerated has grown to the point that you can execute on a business plan. In many cases we're seeing more and more founders actually self fund or be able to generate enough success to be able to to build the company. You see more and more opting out of venture capital. The other trend, especially with crypto, is that you have these kind of defi and alternative financing mechanisms that are evolving to a point where I think you can actually tokenize venture capital. I think you can democratize venture capital and allow non accredited investors to begin investing in the future. And I think we have a moral obligation to open up venture when I buy early, I mean early stage angel investing in the facebooks and the SpaceXs of the future. But let mom and pops be able to invest small checks be able to invest. So I think in the Trump administration we'll see changes in that direction of opening it up. That model I think is going to change.

[Harry Stebbings]

You're an LP in many funds and we were chatting outside before this and you were like, there's just no cash coming back from the last vintage. How do you think about that? Have we seen the death of liquidity?

[Shervin Pishevar]

Liquidity has been a major problem and especially during the four years of Biden and it just coincided with really bad policies and a dearth of M and a lack of IPOs. I think that's going to change in the next four years. I think I was an early person to come out and support Trump and I co hosted David Sacks's fundraiser with chamal back in June 6 and publicly endorse Trump. And most of my generation, my cohort, people like Elon or David Marcus or Sean from Sequoia, Emile, Michael, all of these guys and gals are in Palm beach doing 17 hour days. It's the best and the brightest of converged and it's very similar. Silicon Valley goes to Washington and so I'm very excited because you look at David Sacks now, the AI and crypto czar for the President. Elon is running DOGE with Vivek. You have some of the brightest minds in the world about to revolutionize the way government works and make it way more efficient. I wrote a proposal about privatizing many aspects of government, including the U.S. postal Service, which is a big money loser, is not using MONO technology to compete with FedEx and UPS and DHL and so on. And we could do a lot better. Amtrak. Amtrak should be privatized and turned into hyperloop and high speed rail. We can do really great things. And there should be also moonshots for AI for I do a lot in quantum computing. I've done it for a long time. I believe AI and quantum are going to merge and that's going to accelerate the future. So I think the market's waking up, especially after Willow and what Google announced. This has been my thesis for over 10 years. There's another company called Psiquantum that came out of Cambridge Bridge here in the uk.

[Harry Stebbings]

What do you think we should do with tariffs? I'm getting more and more intrigued by Chinese cars and Chinese car subsidies and I just find I'm a massive believer in Adam Smith's Invisible Hand. I was always like, we should let them sell. This is ridiculous at that it costs. And then I saw how much they're subsidized and I'm like, this is an egregiously unfair playing field.

[Shervin Pishevar]

I mean they're basically state owned enterprises, right. So the Chinese government is subsidizing them. And so that's a major threat to our ability to be competitive. But even with tariffs, the Chinese electric car companies have gotten to the point that their cars are like $15,000 and they're good cars. So even if you add 100% tariff, you're still talking about $30,000, still affordable to a lot of people. So they're still going to be able to compete because their prices are so low. And so that's something that we need to think through because America has to build its own manufacturing capabilities, especially in the semiconductor space. So you saw masa announcing the $100 billion investment in AI in American economy and companies.

[Harry Stebbings]

What did you make of that?

[Shervin Pishevar]

Masa and Saudi? One of the things he talked about is he did his calculations and the numbers for me make a lot of sense. Basically you need to spend trillions, single digit trillions and then you're going to get 9 trillion of annual value coming out of it.

[Harry Stebbings]

I saw this. He said you spend 9 trillion in capex and that will result in 9 trillion in annual gains. Yeah, I thought my word, he's very precise. Nine, not eight or ten, nine.

[Shervin Pishevar]

Right. But the scale of what's happening, everything has gotten bigger. And more consequential. I think the next 25 years is going to eclipse everything we've seen in our lifetime. And we're about to go through civilizational change in the next 20 years. So a fund like yours and a fund like mine has a really lucky timing.

[Harry Stebbings]

Are we lucky or are we too small?

[Shervin Pishevar]

People like you, Harry, and others who have great instincts about people and about companies and trends are always going to succeed. They're going to get in that deal even if they lose it to a bigger vc like I did in the Uber case. Your resilience and your grit matters. So if you can build authentic relationships with the great founders of the next 20 years, you'll be their partners in building these amazing trillion dollar companies. I think we're lucky. I think we went through a drunken period because the business models weren't actually correct. But now you're dealing with AI, quantum computing. You're going to have basically the power, the mind of God in terms of computing power. As you saw with Willow. I've said for a long time, the reason I'm doing quantum computing is with quantum computing, what I see coming down the pike, we'll be able to solve problems that would take billions of years to solve. We'll be able to solve them in hours and days.

[Harry Stebbings]

What is that? I'm so naive. And is that solving cancer? Is that solving climate change?

[Shervin Pishevar]

Yes. Where I think things are going to go is that quantum and AI, even at the chipset level, are going to merge. And then that's going to revolutionize all aspects of our lives. We'll find cures to every known disease known to mankind within, I would say, the next 10 years. So one of the things I started saying before Brian Johnson, who's a dear friend, I said to my friends is like, don't die, don't jump out of planes, don't ski, don't die in the next 20 years because we're going to reach a point of longevity where you'll be able to help live a healthy life for 150 plus years.

[Harry Stebbings]

Do you really think so?

[Shervin Pishevar]

Yeah, absolutely. The level of advancement that we're about to experience is like a Cambrian explosion of superintelligence and superintelligence.

[Harry Stebbings]

So you don't buy the negativity around the plateauing of LLMs, the plateauing of data availability, compute energy.

[Shervin Pishevar]

I know too much. I've seen some of these technologies that other people haven't seen, seen that are coming down the pike. I've seen technologies that are going to get us to A million qubits. Like Google's at like 100 qubits. Even with Willow, you're talking about a million qubits. That's the mind of God. And so you'll be able to solve problems that would take billions of years to solve in hours and days. And so being able to say, hey, we can basically find a cure for all diseases known to mankind and people are just going to die from accidents and not. Not disease. I didn't have to lose my mother. So many of our loved ones that we lose to old age, like, they can live healthier, longer lives and stay with us.

[Harry Stebbings]

Fucking love Brian.

[Shervin Pishevar]

He's amazing.

[Harry Stebbings]

What a dude. Listen, I want to do a very special round where basically we actually ask questions submitted by friends.

[Shervin Pishevar]

Okay.

[Harry Stebbings]

You can choose if you don't want to answer it, of course you can.

[Shervin Pishevar]

Yeah, yeah.

[Harry Stebbings]

But you have to donate to a charity of your choice. Okay, so what do you want to donate if you don't want to answer it? Between one and $5,000. Number one, how much money did you make from Uber?

[Shervin Pishevar]

I think ultimately it was a couple hundred million. Yeah.

[Harry Stebbings]

Who do you think in the Silicon Valley is one of the worst CEOs, but who's had the best outcomes?

[Shervin Pishevar]

Steve Ballmer. The decade that he was CEO of Microsoft, Microsoft was completely just flat. And he's now richer than Bill Gates. Right. So he ultimately won. They did a great job in hiring Satya because Satya's been, I think, the greatest CEO. One of the greatest CEOs of our lifetimes.

[Harry Stebbings]

I want to do a quick fire. So the quick fire is actually, I say, a short statement. You give me your immediate thoughts. What have you changed your mind on in the last year?

[Shervin Pishevar]

It's a great question. Before my granddaughter was born, Aurora, I didn't fully understand what being a grandparent was. I have to tell you, it's like 10 times more powerful than having a kid. Changed my mind now in this sense that I actually think the whole point of life is to become a grandparent. It unlocks a level of love that you've never experienced in your life. I'm totally obsessed with my granddaughter. I see her every day. I moved across the street from her. She's the light of my life and I live for her. She's given me a massive boost in energy and drive to make the world a better place for her and her generation. And so I just didn't realize what being a grandparent was until I became one. And I became one at 48. So I was a young grandpa a YG. And it's the most important thing that's ever happened to me.

[Harry Stebbings]

What's the single best fund investment that you've made?

[Shervin Pishevar]

I would say it would be lowercase. Chris Sacca's fund. I put a little check in there and got 4 million out. 25,000 turned into 4 million. So it was a legendary fund. I think it was like 10 million and returned like 1.5 billion or something. That goes in the record books.

[Harry Stebbings]

How did you get into SpaceX?

[Shervin Pishevar]

So, couple ways. One, Elon and I were friends and then another friend of mine, Justin Fisher Wolfson, who was on the board of sgn, Sean Parker was the Founders Fund representative who led the deal. But Justin was the one that would come to the board meetings and we became really close friends. And when Yuri did that deal, I went to Justin's house and actually named 137. That night I looked over as we were talking about him starting a fund and I was like, what is that number block on your table? And it said 137. And he was like, oh, that's my, my grandfather's number seat on the Wall street on the exchange. And he bought it after coming to America from Russia. He was a Russian Jew who came with nothing, created success. And I was like, well that's the name of your fund, 137. And he was like, you're right. So anyways, he helped bring SpaceX to Founders Fund. He was like a junior partner or associate along with Alex Jacobson who's this co founder of 137. And so they advocated for SpaceX investment and then they did a bunch of secondary when they started 137. So they've done really well. And so he had some available back in 2014 at like a $6 billion valuation. We put some money in at that valuation. So I think SpaceX will be a. A $10 trillion company. It's just getting started.

[Harry Stebbings]

What do you think is your most outlandish belief? SpaceX as being a $10 trillion company is quite a bold statement. Saying there will be many more trillion dollar companies is quite a bold statement saying that you think that we'll get to a stage in 20 years where we won't die. Any others? You got any more for me?

[Shervin Pishevar]

Yeah. I helped start the network State movement with biology and Joe Lonsdale. I had lunch with Joe like 2012 and I said, hey, what if we started new cities that had sovereignty, new city states and tokenize it and have ownership become citizenship, become ownership. We started hosting new City salons and Balaji came to it. And then Balaji wrote Network States, the book. And then we had the first two Network State summits. That movement led to another mantra of mine, which is great founders should try to start new industries, not just companies should start a completely new industry. Like Hyperloop was a new industry. And in this case, network states and new cities is a new industry. And there's now hundreds of startups starting new nations. Praxis is another one of them that I'm involved in. That's one of the largest network states and they're looking at a million acres of land in different places in the world and that have been helping them with. But we're going to basically see new nation states, new countries be started in our lifetimes and you're going to see a lot of people opt into those new nations. So I think that's one of my probably more controversial. The world map 200 years ago looks very different than it does today, and it's going to look very different in 200 years. Nations are not supposed to be permanent, they're supposed to evolve.

[Harry Stebbings]

What was your biggest miss?

[Shervin Pishevar]

I had the opportunity to invest in Snapchat in the seed round and I had the opportunity to invest in Pinterest in the seed round.

[Harry Stebbings]

Why did you not do both?

[Shervin Pishevar]

So I brought Snapchat to Menlo, Evan and I hit it off. I really believed in it. I was on it in the first 30 days because my kids were on it. And so they showed it to me and I was chasing it and Evan and I hit it off. Unfortunately, Menlo passed on that round and then the next round as well. And then Pinterest I looked at when I was angel investing. So that was my own, fully my fault. And one lesson I learned there is I did the meeting with Ben because I met him through Jack Abraham. And I had funded Jack when he was 22 in his company Milo. And then he introduced me because he invested in the seed round of Pinterest. I was like, you should take a look at this. And at the time I was talking about social commerce being the next big wave. So it fit perfectly. But I did it as a call instead of an in person meeting. So the one time I didn't get on the plane, the presentation over the phone wasn't the same than it would have been if we had met in person. So I passed on it. The presentation just didn't hit it for me. But if I had met Ben, I would have gotten a sense of his brilliance. But over the Phone. He just didn't present well. At the time. This was like 2000, I don't know, 10 or 11.

[Harry Stebbings]

You can only invest in one fund. Which fund do you invest in?

[Shervin Pishevar]

Honestly, the one I'm really excited about is 1789 that my friend Omid Malik started. Donald Trump Jr. Just joined as a partner there. They're going to kill it. I think they're going to do some amazing things. Their thesis early on was to invest in companies that are all pro America, anti woke, and that thesis has worked really well. And I think they're in a really amazing position to invest in really incredible companies. So I really believe in them. 1789.

[Harry Stebbings]

What fun do you think is most overhyped benchmark? Do you ever speak to Gurley?

[Shervin Pishevar]

No. No. And these were friends of mine, like Matt Kohler was a dear friend and was at his 30th birthday party, his 40th birthday party, right before all this happened. So we've lost dear friendships that were meaningful friendships in our lives because of that battle. The Uber wars is something that should be studied in order to learn lessons about what to do right and what to avoid the types of mistakes that make.

[Harry Stebbings]

If you had the Uber wars again, is there anything you'd do differently?

[Shervin Pishevar]

The strategy of publicly and legally battling was the only strategy that I saw as an effective counter to what was happening at the time. What I wish I had done or had the wisdom to know to do was what Sam and his allies did in getting the employees at OpenAI to back Sam and say, if he doesn't come back, we're gonna leave.

[Harry Stebbings]

That was very powerful.

[Shervin Pishevar]

It was very powerful. And if we had done that at Uber. Cause Travis was beloved. So it was Emil. They were beloved by the team. And so they were smart enough that they turned a few key people like Ryan Graves against Travis and they began collaborating.

[Harry Stebbings]

Do you blame him?

[Shervin Pishevar]

Again, he was another dear friend. So it's tragic, almost Shakespearean, like the friendships that were broken up over this. And so there was a lot of love there. But I don't speak to him anymore. I don't think others do either. But Travis hired him from a tweet when he was 28 years old at IBM, made him a billionaire. And Travis was super loyal to him. Unfortunately, Ryan, for whatever reason, went to the other side. That was heartbreaking.

[Harry Stebbings]

Final one for you. What trait are you slightly ashamed of that has contributed a lot to your success?

[Shervin Pishevar]

I'm extremely loyal. That loyalty has served me well, but it's also caused me a lot of pain. In my life. And in some ways my successes have also come from being loyal people, knowing that I wouldn't do anything like what happened to Travis to a founder. So the same thing that has caused a lot of pain because I fought for people and I've taken the bullets and the missiles is also the reason I'm here. And I do have the reputation that I have with great founders.

[Harry Stebbings]

Listen Shervin, I've so enjoyed doing this. Thank you so much for getting on the plane. Of course, as the motto always says, this has been fantastic and you've been thank you.

[Shervin Pishevar]

And I hope you get on the plane and come to Miami and visit us, me and Emile sometime.

[Travis Kalanick]

I mean, what a show that was. And if you want to watch that episode, which I really recommend, it was an incredible one, filmed live in the studio. You can watch it on YouTube by searching for 20VC. That's 20VC on YouTube. But before we leave you today, it can be difficult to build a team that's aligned on everything from values to workflow. But that's exactly what Coda was made to do. Coda is an all in one collaborative workspace that started as a napkin sketch. Now, just five years since launching in beta, Coda has helped 50,000 teams all over the world get on the same page. With Coda, you get the flexibility of docs, the structure of spreadsheets, the power of applications, and the intelligence of AI, all built for your organization. Coda's seamless workspace facilities, deeper collaboration and quicker creativity, giving you more time to build. And whether you're a startup looking to organize the chaos while staying nimble, or an enterprise team looking for better team alignment, Coda matches your working style. To try it for yourself, go to CODA io20VC today and get six months free of the team plan. For startups, that's Coda C o D AIO 20 VC to get started started for free and get 6 free months of the team Plan now that your team is aligned and collaborating, let's tackle those messy expense reports. You know, those receipts that seem to multiply like rabbits in your wallet. The endless email chains asking can you approve this? And don't even get me started on the month end panic when you realize you have to reconcile it all. Well, Pleo offers smart company cards, physical, virtual and vendor specific so teams can buy what they need while finance stays in control. Automate your expense reports, process invoices seamlessly, and manage reimbursements effortlessly all in one platform with integrations to tools like Xero, QuickBooks and Netsuite Pleo fits right into your workflow, saving time and giving you full visibility over every entity, payment and subscription. Join over 37,000 companies already using Pleo to streamline their finances. Trust. Try Pleo today. It's like magic, but with fewer rabbits. Find out [e-mail] 20VC and don't forget to revolutionize how your team works together. Rome A Company of Tomorrow runs at hyperspeed with quick drop in meetings. A Company of Tomorrow is globally distributed and fully digitized. A Company of Tomorrow instantly connects human and AI workers. A Company of Tomorrow is in Rome Virtual Office See a visualization of your whole company. The live presence, the drop in meetings, the AI summaries, the chats. It's an incredible view to see. ROAM is a breakthrough workplace experience loved by over 500 companies of tomorrow. For a fraction of the cost of zoom and slack, visit Roam, that's or AM for an instant demo of Rome Today. Nobody knows what the future holds, but I do know this. It's going to be built in a Roam Virtual Office, hopefully by you. That's Romero AM for an instant demo. As always, I so appreciate all your support for the show. Really, it means the world to me. And we have another Incredible episode of 20 VC coming on Wednesday.