1/ This is the sad story of how I didn’t invest in $UBER after seeing it prelaunch. Or: why early stage investing is hard. Or: why I’m an investing idiot. Thread
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2/ About 9 years ago, I was out with
@kamalravikant for drinks at the St. Regis in SF. He starts telling me about this magical app that can summon a luxurious chauffeured black car to pick anybody up, and drop them off wherever you want. He called it: Ubercab.1 reply 0 retweets 13 likesShow this thread -
3/ He does a live demo of it, and it was like magic: press a button, and you get a chauffeur. The primary use case at the time seemed to be for rich people to impress their dates. It seemed like a niche market but I was intrigued.
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4/ I had just started angel investing, and got super lucky with my first investment (thanks
@flashsoftteam) and I was on the lookout for new deal flow. So as I was sitting there with Kamal, I install it on my iPhone 3GS to try out the app.1 reply 0 retweets 9 likesShow this thread -
5/ Signup goes smoothly. Then I try to enter my credit card number, and I get “internal server error”. I try a few times, same thing. Well that was enough for me - “these guys are idiots, they won’t even let me pay them.” So right there I wrote them off.
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6/ Fast forward a few months later and I was using Uber daily to commute to work. Fast forward years later, here we are today. Congratulations to everyone at Uber for building an amazing company, and I would like to apologize to my family. FML.
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7/ One of the best pieces of advice I ever got was from
@markpinc of Zynga: “It’s easy to imagine what could go wrong, I like to imagine what happens if everything goes right.” That’s the most important question I now ask myself when evaluating a new investment.8 replies 79 retweets 427 likesShow this thread
One of the best pieces of advice I ever got was also from @markpinc on my first day at Zynga and along the same lines: "Forget about right here right now, imagine everything goes right in your life. What would you want to be doing? Do that now."
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