Truthbomb dropped by Emil Michael. He says forgiving Benchmark and others would be like letting the Wuhan Institute of Virology slide back into a good reputation because the new senior manager of pandemic causation has made more friends than his predecessor. And so this got me thinking, and I'm probably going to have to put on the steel helmet for this one because this is wading into dangerous territory, defending Benchmark. But my question is, how close are we to actually being able to forgive Benchmark? When is the right time? It's been a decade. Obviously, the drama between Benchmark and Travis Kalanick was awful. I think everyone's against what happened.
But the question is, what is a venture firm? It is its partnership. If the partnership turns over at some point, is it a new team? Do you get a second shot? Can you actually change the reputation? And so believe me, I get the Benchmark criticism. Like Travis is truly a generational entrepreneur and was on such an amazing run, right? So he was attacked.
Jason from SaaStr was reacting to our interview with Travis, and his take, which I totally agree with, is it's hard to — if Travis had stayed in the role, it's hard to imagine Uber being worth less than something like a trillion dollars today.
Yes. So our friend of the show Owen McCabe over at bin.ai and Intercom said Waymo is superior to Uber in literally every way. This was a year ago, in March 25th, actually to the day a year ago he said this. He said, 'Waymo is superior to Uber in literally every way that matters to consumers. Smoother, safer, more reliable, no chatty, weird, rude drivers, private, quiet. Self-driving car services are going to dominate their human-driver incumbents.' And Owen says, 'TBT,' which I think is throwback to, right? Throwback to when Benchmark pushed Travis out of Uber and canned the self-driving division that he started literally 10 years ago.
And so this is what's so tricky about this, is that you know Uber survived. It's a 150 billion market cap. It's bigger than when Travis was ousted. But getting a 2x over a decade is not what I think people were expecting from Uber under Travis's leadership. And Lyft has fallen to just 5 billion. Like he won the capital war, and Dara's done a great job managing the business. But I feel like a lot of the success of Uber has been built on the foundation that Travis set up. It wasn't a complete reinvention. If anything, they just honed down the core business.
Yeah, that's the thing. The thing that is holding the business back right now, at least from a valuation standpoint, is this big question around self-driving. And Dara has answered this question, you know, thousands of times. Right now the strategy is to invest in self-driving companies, partner with self-driving companies, but Uber not the same as having developed their own internal IP and product starting a decade ago and seeing where that would have been by now is just rough.
Hard to think about. Yeah. And so Uber is valued at 150 today, something like that. Waymo was valued in February of this year at 126 billion. And so yes, Waymo's been working on self-driving longer. But you have to imagine that there's another 50 billion of market cap if you have a serious play.
Would Waymo be valued if Travis was the CEO? Like you would get some type of Travis premium on it. Just the market would be — Totally. Totally. Totally. Yeah. You have this sort of one-of-one entrepreneur seat. 100%.
And just to sort of recap where things stand. I mean, Shervin Pishevar has been on the show as well. We've had like everyone from this saga in the TBPN orbit. Both Travis and Bill Gurley have been on the show. Shervin's been on the show. Emil Michael's been on the show. We've talked to a number of people that have been around this story. And it's a fascinating one. It's one of the most interesting — it was certainly formative in my career because I got to Silicon Valley and this was the first big story that played out, really.
So Shervin said, 'In my opinion, Gurley single-handedly destroyed hundreds of billions in value. Travis and Emil staying in charge of Uber would have led to a Tesla-sized win, 500 billion plus for everyone including Benchmark's LPs. He nuked decades of Benchmark's reputation with founders. The market has spoken and no future Travis-quality founder would ever touch him or his former firm again, especially since three of the partners that approved of the ousting of Travis are still at the firm.' And so my question is, like, how many partners need to be at the firm until we can call this a ship of Theseus?
So for those who are not up to speed on their Greek mythology, in Greek mythology Theseus is the mythical king of the city of Athens. He rescues the children of Athens from King Minos after slaying the Minotaur, which is his mythical beast. And then he escapes onto a ship going to Delos. Each year the Athenians would commemorate this success by taking the ship on a pilgrimage to Delos to honor Apollo. Over time, because they're sailing the ship every year, various of its timbers rotted and were replaced. A question was raised by ancient philosophers: if no pieces of the original ship remained in the current ship, is it still the ship of Theseus?
If it was no longer the same, when had it ceased existing as the original ship? So some people might say 50/50. Some people might say yes, it is the same ship because replacing one board at a time, the ship is the concept, and you can swap everything out 25 times, it's still the same ship. It's a paradox. There is no right answer. It's a philosophical question. But it applies, I think, to Benchmark because back when Kalanick resigned as Uber CEO on June 20th of 2017, after investor pressure that included Benchmark.
On that exact date, Benchmark's equal GP roster was Bill Gurley, Eric Vishria, Matt Cohler, Mitch Lasky, Peter Fenton, and Shervin Pishevar. Today the partnership has changed dramatically. The only two that remain are Peter and Eric. And you have Chetan, Ev Randall, and Jack Altman who are new to the partnership post the Uber scandal. And so it's not a full ship of Theseus, but only 1/3 of the original 2017 partnership remains. And my question for those who remain reluctant to forgive Benchmark is, like, what happens if Peter and Eric retire or leave at some point and the full ship of Theseus is complete?
Right now, 40% of the partnership was there. 33%. Oh, I mean, I guess two out of the five, yeah. So two out of the five because they've added three, but only 1/3 of the original partnership remains. The question is, did Chetan, Everett, and Jack come in and as part of the interview process say, like, you're absolutely — You're absolutely right. I mean, to defend Ev, I mean, he's been on the show, good friends.
Knowing two out of the three — Ev had just graduated from college. Like he was truly not involved in the Uber scandal. And yet, you know, people will visit it upon him. Knowing Everett and Jack, I'm sure during the interview process they were like, you know, the storied firm, I'm excited to join, but we can never do anything like that again.
And so one question that's worth asking is, is the firm that did this and ultimately stained this storied brand and has certainly suffered the consequences, right? They've put up incredible returns since then. But I'm sure they've missed a lot of deals that would have made their returns even better because of that kind of narrative around the firm. And so I would say, you know, Emil Michael and others are upset that they're doing great deals at all.
Yeah. But I think it is — a question I have is, like, are they — if they're in a situation again, right? In the same kind of situation, what decision are they more or less likely to make, right? I would argue they are probably less likely to go against the founder given how this entire situation has played out. I would think so.
Yeah. The only steel man — and this needs the full steel helmet because it's so hard to steel man the Benchmark thing. But the full steel man of the Benchmark thing is really bad. It's really bad to mention, I'm sorry for everyone. I'm sorry. But it's basically that every partner at Benchmark, it's an equal partnership. So every partner was going to make a clean $1 billion. They were all going to be billionaires from this one deal. And it was such a power law that there was no path to becoming a billionaire from the other investments, most likely.
And so you see the endless 24/7 hit piece pile stack up, and you got Mike Isaac, you know, bloodhounded on at the New York Times writing books that turn into movies. Like it's getting rough. It's getting rough. Mike Isaac's at your door. Yeah, Mike Isaac's at the door. The barbarians are at the gate. And you're like, I'm either a billionaire or I'm going back to paltry 10 million, and I can't do that. I can't do that.
And so they freak out and they're like, we got to salvage this thing. We got to just push it out in the public markets. We got to get out of this name. And so they basically just — it's just too nerve-racking. And yeah, it's not a strong steel man. But I think that's a little bit more of what happened than taking a stand on, like, oh, this particular thing that happened was so egregious. It was more just like, okay, wow, all my money, like 99% of my net worth is in this asset, and it's looking like it could be a zero because Lyft is coming from behind. There's a whole bunch of VCs that are piling into that. The narrative is totally flipping. There's a boycott Uber campaign. And everyone's like, what's going on? I got to get out of this. I got to salvage this. And I think that was maybe more of the underpinning than like I'm taking some sort of moral stand on a particular hit piece or something like that.
Anyway, it's rough. But fortunately, you know, ship of Theseus process, maybe it happens. I don't know. Would Dellinger accept that argument? Probably not. Would Emil? Probably not. But they're not making it any easier with the Manis investment either, because there was a world where it was like, okay, yeah, the Uber thing happened a decade ago, the partnership is basically entirely new, and they're focused on — but it's not there yet. It's just not there yet. It's not there yet. The Manis is still there.
I think you can rewrite this in 5 years. Yeah, you made this point that it's too early to call this. But that's directionally given that the firm is still putting up great returns. They've gotten to a bunch of great companies over the last 5 years. I think we are on a path to the Benchmark — well, yeah, Benchmark being the venture ship of Theseus. And VC Brad said, 'Airbnb has no homes, Uber has no cars, and Benchmark has no partners.' Of course, that was an exaggeration. But they did get down to just three partners, which is very, very small for a venture capital firm. Some have dozens of partners. But different strategy, and we will see where it goes. Anyway,
