Saudi sovereign-wealth fund backs Travis Kalanick’s new startup
wsj.com
wsj.com
After looking over their website it looks like a real estate company providing kitchen space, WeWork for chefs.
I posted this link several weeks ago, so perhaps the "not-com" bubble" is not bursting? https://www.theatlantic.com/article/600232/
I do think this idea is actually pretty good. However I don't see a way this will gather the necessary hockey stick growth for typical startup gains that garners this much investment.
But, I've been wrong plenty of times before...
Basically, any company that has great prospects is going to be able to get money from other funds with a lot less baggage. In addition, founders who take that money likely have ethical issues and will happily screw the investors (see WeWork CEO).
[1] https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/8/20/20825937/doordash-tippi...
And Kalanick is just the person to make that happen.
As a bonus it won't abuse the underemployed nor will it fuck travellers, homeowners and destroy cities by messing with their housing market.
I believe this is partially beacause investor's don't have very strong priors about what works and are happy to delegate that decision to someone with a track record. Incidentally, this model also explains why VCs tend to herd around the same investments - it's notorious how, once you get one VC interested, they all suddenly become interested.
His goal is to make money, not make the world a better place. This goes for every company, some just stay in sheeps clothing longer than others depending on how much power they have.
Fuck that. That's not the world I live in. It may go for many companies, even most. But to really believe this is (nearly) universal, you must be in a bubble I want no part of.
He's getting $400M direct from Saudi's.
Saudi's are still supported heavily by the US government - new arm sales going for their war on Yemen etc.
The people who have had their lives ruined are folks reporting on Saudi's (killed and chopped up) and folks who are taking positions that don't align with Saudi's (ie, twitter posters where Twitter made it very easy for employees to sell that data to Saudi's).
At some point politically someone is going to connect some dots around the saudi's. The US went after Saddam (had a multi-ethnic country) and dumped on the Kurds (also better about protecting minority rights) in favor of islamic militants in Syria.
The value in being ethical is currently at risk. Voters are the ones who need to learn some lessons.
Its something YOU CHOOSE as a way of life
Personally, I think he is a good person and amazing enterprenuer. Yes, I've seen that can driver video and legions of article how Uber is losing money. I think people don't understand the herculean task of disrupting this entire space of 100 year old business backed by government sponsored monopolies and their extremely rich benefiting donors. This guy comes out of nowhere with nothing and puts up a fight in 700 cities across the world and wins. I believe if he was allowed to continue leading he would have disrupted entire logistics space and Uber would be bigger than Amazon. Unfortunately VCs and their media darlings don't want to wait for another decade and wants to milk the cow until it dies off.
he wasn't scaling as fast as the business since 2015 or so and refused to trust responsible lieutenants to run the company more reasonably. He would walk the engineering floor getting his nose in things and making changes which caused outages and regressions on New Year's Eve (our biggest day for the next six months) and no one including the CTO had the guts or ability to put him in his place. IMO he should have got rid of Jeff Holden and been head of product himself, which I think is the role he wanted to be in and the role he would be most impactful in. Holden certainly wasn't interested in the Uber product of 2015 as much as he cared about the Uber product of 2035. Playing CEO again with CK seems like a waste of money if they expect another Uber. I don't really care since it's the Saudi royal family's money being wasted though.
I don't know or care enough about him to comment on his personal ethics or whether he was the only person in his position who could have had his level of impact as you are probably implying. All I saw was him and the rest of the leadership team doing whatever they could to meet growth metrics while the day to day in engineering was awful and unsustainable and using the same things you say, as excuses to not do better.
I also don't think the business would be in any better position today if he was CEO than what Dara has done. Uber was never a 120bn$ company. It could be/have been but I don't think that Dara is any more responsible for the downfall than Travis or the board or the media darlings. The battleground cities Uber is fighting to maintain service (NY license cap, LADOT MDS standard) in are fighting back from Travis's bully behavior in those 700 cities, not Dara's. This is the natural next stage of fighting these regulations and monoplies and IMO Travis would struggle at least as much as Dara in this new battleground.
While a few whales will end up taking and stashing the money away in overseas accounts, lots of it will go for bills to legitimate business and probably mostly to employee salaries.
So at least we get that money distributed among the populace a little bit.
Restaurant/Food business is brutal.
Also, is this really any different than the Food Hall concept?
But honestly I would go the other way - I would target the prosumer segment - create some nice spaces with a dinner table that serious hobbyists can rent by the let's say 3 hours slot, since they don't have real estate (and power) in their homes.
50 square meters that are filled with everything from wok to latest modernist toys.
Would you say you liked it better then compared to now?
The entire 'or else' scope in the episode was a shout out to softbank. Same with russ hanneman being a shoutout to mark cuban.
How long until the ex WeWork CEO gets funding for his next startup?
Not something I'd want myself or my company to be associated with. As usual, I suppose it shows what's really important to these people. $$$
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/06/15/rape-victim-files-new-lawsui...
Pulling a medical file as part of the fact check was a gross violation of privacy however.
Saudi Arabia just like United States engages in lot of state sponsored violence against all sort of innocent people. HN itself has hundreds of stories where USA harassed and threatned in some cases killed journalists and other innocent individuals. They would have killed Snowden if they could.
None of that should matter to those who take federal funding for whatever other reasons.
The way I see it, it it better for Saudi Money to go into scammy tech startups than another widow maker jet from Lockheed Martin.
Since Travis left, Uber has stopped innovating. Dara was a safe bet but perhaps too safe. Uber is about as exciting as Expedia now.
I am not surprised that Travis is having another huge success. Hopefully, he has learned a lot from his experience at Uber.