Podbit · The a16z Show
Uber's 2017 implosion wasn't inevitable. Kalanick says had a16z been on the board, Uber would be a considerably larger and more central company today — likely the leader in food delivery and autonomous vehicles. DoorDash had 5% market share. Uber's autonomy was second only to Waymo. The network was there. It just needed the right governance.
Where this was said
At 12:42 · chapter starts 8:40
After the Series B fell apart, Kalanick and Emil Michael began having periodic dinners with Horowitz and Andreessen — always at an anonymous restaurant near the Uber-Square shared building, always ending with both sides feeling the loss of what couldn't be. The tension was structural: a16z had the Lyft board seat. There was no clean way to combine forces without Kalanick ceding control. Horowitz's Larry Bird and Magic Johnson analogy captures it perfectly — deep mutual respect, perhaps even admiration, bound inside an adversarial structure. Kalanick casually drops that when a16z later invested in Lyft, the valuation was $210M: exactly what Andreessen had offered at that sushi dinner. That symmetry is unmistakable to any entrepreneur.
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