#617 | Uber's Troubled Future Can It Survive (w/Len Sherman)

I mean, we, we know that, you know, the model, I mean, if you're, if you're going back to the 2009 era before they were really even like out of, you know, just California, I mean.

Just San Francisco

back

then.

Yeah.

I mean, you know, I mean, like we, you know, Torsten, Bradshare professor, you know, I know Torsten well.

And like, he was actually, there were people who were even paid to, to, to literally like recruit you.

Then it became a referral fee of $1.50 or whatever the heck they were giving you at the time.

But I mean, they wanted overpopulation.

I've always said, you can't do an app and compete with these without oversaturating it by 500% to begin with.

And then you have to have customers too.

So it's almost, I mean, it almost becomes an impossibility to fight with them.

Well, I would say that given the way they went about it, it was an impossibility and it is exactly what allowed them to scale into the dominant player

in,

you know, I don't know how many countries now, over 100 countries and 15,000 cities.

And they did it because, well, first of all, they're extraordinarily great executors.

Just in terms of running a business and scaling a business, there's no one better.

And that was true 15 years ago versus Lyft, and it's true to this day, I believe.

But the other thing that Travis Kellogg was phenomenal at, that should be given full credit for, is he was a phenomenal fundraiser.

And he just hoovered up more money than anyone else so he could go into more cities faster or offer bigger rider promotional you know and you know bonuses to enroll in the program no one could match because no one had the money he he had so you know the rest is history that's why they rule the world now it's great i mean if you take out the womanizer part of him i'm not interested in that

Right.

I mean, I'm saying, like, was everything about him so business bad, though?

Really? Business-wise? Absolutely not.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I was always