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0/2 resolved calls right
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companies · 20 data points
Travis Kalanick's company (Atoms/City Storage Systems) will close the acquisition of Pronto.
What happened: Travis Kalanick’s companies (Atoms and City Storage Systems) did not acquire Pronto; the acquisition never materialized.
Verify at source ↗CloudKitchens customers will begin deploying the robotic bowl machines in Q3 2025.
What happened: CloudKitchens did not deploy robotic bowl machines to customers in Q3 2025; no public rollout or pilot deployments were reported.
Verify at source ↗The labor cost for CloudKitchens customers running the robotic bowl machine will be between 7% and 10% of revenue.
What happened: No verifiable evidence exists that CloudKitchens deployed a robotic bowl machine or that labor cost fell within the stated range of 7%–10% of revenue.
Verify at source ↗The Waymo machine takes a hundred times more energy to drive a Waymo than a human does to drive a Waymo.
you got Waymo, then you've got Tesla fundamentals, science, hard mode times a hundred. And the question is, do they get there in what time scale? If, if they, and like, honestly, everybody's like, could happen tomorrow, could happen in five years. And I think that it's like, when does the chat GPT moment happen for vision is basically the thing. Let's call it vision without other sensors. So super inspiring, but like, what's the timeline on it?
in the uber world early days if you didn't have capital didn't matter how good your app was because masa is going to put a billion dollars into your competitor and you're going to lose 20 market share tomorrow so a critical competency in fact your world-class competencies one of them has to be raising capital and you to do it better than everybody else and if you don't you are going to lose
Uber had an autonomy project back in the day. And they have a different strategy these days. I haven't been there for a while.
Tesla is sort of like the, you know, they're doing it the hard way, you know, classic Elon style. Like, let's, let's do this sort of in a fundamental, holy shit, let's go all the way kind of, kind of approach. Uh, and it's unclear when it gets over the line. Of course he, he launched sort of a, a semi, semi pilot of sorts in Austin recently, but there's no other alternatives.
So, so in the U S we have Waymo, we see the Waymo's in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, coming soon to Miami, coming soon to Atlanta, coming soon to DC. They're even talking about New York.
they're like Travis, you did autonomy way back in the day, got the Uber autonomous stuff going in 2014.
the deal was basically that you could partner with Uber license in the Pony technology and essentially start a competitor, I guess, to Waymo and Tesla.
They went from my 75 million a week to profitable.
we probably were around a billion. A billion. A billion and a half.
we had 20% of the overall entity, of the merged entity. But in order to do that in China, that's when we actually had to push our spend super hard because they had to be scared. So, I think at the peak, right as we were negotiating the term sheet, we pushed, we were burning, I think it was $75 million a week. It's a big number. Yeah. That was that. Yeah. And, but we knew we had the deal, but we only have the deal if they're scared. Right. This is a poker end. Our market share was skyrocketing as
the China war went global. And what I mean by that is the Chinese government, I think it was safe. There's some, I think they were called safe, it was like the sovereign wealth of China, CIC, there's like a few things like that. They started investing hundreds of millions and billions of dollars in all of our competitors globally to drain us of money so that it was harder to compete in China. They made Apple, and I'd love to have this discussion with Tim at some point. We had some interesting wo
So, yeah, I mean, it was a union problem, which is, it's very difficult to organize people who, in this classic area, which is very union organized called drivers, it's very difficult to organize them when they choose when they want to work. Their office is their own, it's their own, like nobody controls it. Like, there's just no control other than the control given to the individual. And so it was very disruptive to the union and their own business model. And so they had to cut it off at the kn
The average Uber driver during my, you know, let's say at the end of my tenure was eight hours a week. So they clearly like, it was clearly a side gig.
Any time we were doing surge pricing and our competitor wasn't, we knew we were gaining market share because somebody could just come to us to get a ride when in the other system they couldn't.
So surge pricing, there's another way to say it. Now, I called it surge pricing on purpose because I didn't want anybody to think we were trying to deceive them. Right. So we said surge pricing, like it's clear what's going on. But the other way to say surge pricing is called the lowest cost reliable ride. Because if surge pricing goes up too much, then you have drivers that aren't making any money. And by the way, they'll go to the competition. But if surge pricing is exactly, and by the way, i
Almost every city in the U.S. other than two, Portland, Vegas, we were number two in ride sharing for this reason.
each and every city we went to, we would wait for Lyft to launch. And then we would basically say to the city, we'd send them a letter saying, there's this really cool thing called ride sharing. This company called Lyft is doing it. We think it's great, but our read of your regs is like, it's probably not allowed. But if you don't enforce in the next 30 days, we're going to participate as well.
we would have a pricing call in the early days of Uber, where you cannot put it up in the app until you pass the pricing call. The first 30 cities, I was on that pricing call.
the difference with food versus rides is that the infrastructure was already there. You had a bunch of cars that were 98% unutilized. And so, you just had to light it up.