Emil Michael, Fmr Uber CBO: Ridesharing and Picking VCs

Welcome to World of DaaS, a show for data enthusiasts. I'm your host, Oren Hoffman, CEO of SafeGraph and GP of Flex Capital. For more conversations, videos, and transcripts, visit safegraph.com/podcast. Hello, fellow data nerds. My guest today is Emil Michael. Emil was the Chief Business Officer at Uber during its hyperscale period from 2013 to 2017. He's currently the CEO of DPCM Capital, and he's also a strategic advisor to a number of amazing companies including Codecademy, GroupMe, Taser. Emil, welcome to World of DaaS.

Thanks for having me, Oren. It's been a long time. Good to see you again. Thanks for having me on.

Yeah, great to see you as well. Now, there's a narrative out there that something went wrong with tech IPOs in the last few years, and the best companies were kind of slow to IPO or still haven't. And even strong companies like Instacart ended up going public at lower valuations. What do you make of that narrative?

So In the zero interest rate environment that we went through, which ended in early '22, late '21, investors or VCs were complaining, well, these companies weren't going public by choice because they could get money in the private markets. And that was true. They were like, well, why would I build in public when I could build in private and I don't have to worry about sort of the quarterly analyst expectation thing? It changed so abruptly that companies then couldn't go public just because the markets were closed. The world didn't want to hear about these companies and didn't, certainly didn't want to give them the multiples they had when they were private. So then you had this break, and then Instacart and a few others started to come out. And I think as the multiples have come back, as you look at the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ, and they've all come back, you'll start to see IPOs that were backlogged for the last few years come forward. Now think Canva, think Revolut, Stripe. Stripe. These companies that have real revenue.

Really great companies.

Yeah, great companies. They'll start to go public because they're also getting to the end of their 10-year life cycle on options.

Okay. Yeah. So they have no choice. They have to go, right? I guess you can kind of convert them to RSUs. Like, there's ways around it, right?

Yes, but there's big tax bills associated. So in this last round, Stripe had to raise— a lot of the money they raised went to pay the government taxes on the RSUs. So it's not uncomplicated to deal with it. It can be dealt with, but I think you're going to see a lot of IPOs second half of the year.

Okay. Interesting.

Reddit maybe too.

I think that'd be great for the world if we started to see more of these companies out there though. I mean, if I ran a company, the last thing I want to do is run a public company. It's annoying and you're constantly getting sued by some random guy who's got like $50 of stock. It doesn't seem like the best thing. I would just try to stay private for as long as possible. What are like the big advantages of going public?

So the big advantages of going public are, one, your employees and your investors will stop annoying you because at some point they want liquidity too. They've done enough work and for a long enough time. That is something that's a real thing that founders have to deal with. The second thing is when it comes to acquisitions, if your company's going to grow by acquisition, either because geographically or you want to buy something that's an adjacent product, It's much easier to do with a public market currency because then you have access to the capital markets and overnight you could generate cash or overnight you could issue stock. If you've been in private-to-private deals, they're really hard because there's no market price for them.

And there's a marketing thing too. Going public is like a huge marketing event for a company as well. You trust the company more in a way once it's public.

Yeah, I trust it. But I will say this, and there's so many investors out there who talk about go public, go public, go public. And it's not always the right time if you don't have product-market fit. Look at all these real estate tech companies that went public that are now really suffering due to what's happening in the macro environment, and they're kind of stuck, and employees aren't happy. They're watching the ticker every day. So there are some downsides to it that are real also.

It's nice when you have a little bit more predictable revenue too, right?

Sure.

Now, Uber just closed out a pretty amazing year. The stock was up like 120% in 2023. Can you unpack it a bit? What's going on with the company right now from your perspective?

I'd say the best thing that's happened at the company in the last year and a half or so is that they've proven that they're the world leader in ridesharing and that ridesharing can deliver profits. So what was unclear before was, are they going to stay the leader? Can Lyft or anyone else in these other regions get more market share consistently over time. And they've proven no, they can hold their own. And there is a network effect to being the largest player in rideshare in any one market. That's been proven. And number 2, that you can make money on it. And to Dara's credit, they had made money on it. So now you have a money printing machine on ridesharing, and that's where I think most of the gains have come from. Uber Eats, while it grew, it's still second to DoorDash. It's ahead in a few European markets, and maybe Mexico. But if you look at the market cap of Deliveroo and some of these other companies, I don't think that adds that much to the Uber story in the last year and a half, especially post-pandemic slowdown for food delivery.

In US ridesharing market, I think Uber has like, let's say, roughly 75% and Lyft has 25%. Do you think those types of things, it just makes sense that there's a duopoly because it's such high startup costs and stuff? And do you think we'll maintain a duopoly for a very long time, or Yeah, I think so.

The thesis that Travis and I had about rideshare was that it's winner take most, and the reason is there's a network effect. So the more cars Uber has in a city, the shorter the wait times for riders, the more time per hour that a driver's got a fare in the car, so they're making more money. And that network effect works. Now, that being said, there's always room for a number 2, even from a brand standpoint. People like the Lyft brand. better, or it serves one neighborhood better or whatever. But most of the profits are going to go to the big players. So the profits aren't going to be split 75-25, probably going to be 90 to 10 or 95 to 5.

Or 110 to negative 10 or something, right?

Something. But I do think it's extremely hard for a third player to get in there now because of the liquidity. You have to pay users to know that it exists and try it, a new brand. And that's a lot of money, like a free ride, $20, $30. And in a zero-interest rate environment, we could afford that because we raised money every couple weeks if we wanted to. And then getting drivers, you have to go recruit drivers. Now recruiting drivers is easier now than it was back in the day before there were sort of— everyone had smartphones, but it's still very expensive to get critical mass in any city for a new entrant.

In the food delivery world in China, where food delivery is super developed, you've got 2 major players. How do you see those things shaking out?

I think you have a similar dynamic there.

From a restaurant standpoint, adding a 5th food delivery place, it's no burden. It's actually pretty easy. It's pretty automated to sign up, so you might as well sign up. At least on the supply side, it's easy to get more restaurants, right?

Yes, just like it's as easy for a driver to download another app for ridesharing, right? So it has that similar dynamic. Now Especially if there's a middleware layer that takes the Uber Eats feed, the DoorDash feed, the Caviar feed. And so you as a restaurant, I could have 20 iPads, I don't care. It all comes down to one sort of thing. So you're right about that. But on the consumer side, it's just another consumer product. You gotta market to a ton of people and hope they adopt it and remember to use it. And remember, DoorDash's loyalty program, DashPass, is extremely effective, and so is Uber One's. So they're trying to lock in their consumers to be loyal to them and to get benefits from that. So A new entrant would have to break through that consumer sort of relationship that those companies have.

Now, you've been incredibly candid about Uber's relationship with Benchmark and how their actions around firing and suing the founder Travis Kalanick affected the trajectory of the company. What does an alternative vision of Uber look like?

We're seeing it with OpenAI today, right? They're getting sued by the New York Times. They're getting regulated by all these different government entities. And it's scary, and you're an investor and you worry about what happens. I invested in this company and all these other companies are raising money to compete with us. So the fear that gripped Benchmark, and particularly Bill Gurley at that time, had they played through it and said, well, this is just what disruptive companies go through, I think what you have seen is Uber would've been certainly far ahead of DoorDash. We were already ahead of DoorDash market share-wise. By a long shot in 2017, and Uber's lost that lead. We would've had Instacart in our sights as the next vertical. And if you think about how much people spend on transportation, on hot food delivery, and then on groceries, the share of wallet would've been enormous. And you could've done something with payments because you had such a large share of wallet where you started to pull people away from their credit cards, and had maybe an Uber payment system that sort of touched not only the verticals we were doing, but other businesses that were on demand as well.

So essentially, you could imagine Uber being more like in that Magnificent 7 category.

I mean, no doubt it would've been $300, $400 billion to, you know, 2 to 3x where it is today, for sure.

Interesting. Now, you've also been outspoken to Benchmark, not, not only just with Uber, but just you've cited things like Nextdoor, Stitch Fix, other examples. Like, unpack that a bit for us.

I think that one of the things that gets talked about a lot amongst founders and people who start companies and grow them is your relationship with your early venture capitalists who end up owning a big stake. And if the companies hit hypergrowth, well, they have a lot of paper gains in your company and they handle it different ways. The best handle it With sort of a long-term perspective on your success, a long-term perspective on their firm's reputation, attracting the next founder and wanting to really shoot for the moon. There's another set of investors who say they look at, wow, I invested $33 million in Uber. It's worth $10 billion. My 30% carry-in, that's $3 billion. You divide that by 5 partners, that's $600 million each. Well, let me take that off the table at all costs. to protect that versus making that $600 million per partner, $1.2 billion. So there's a fear element, and which is a reasonable fear to have. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's sort of loss aversion, right? It's an economic term. It's like, I don't want to lose that. That's a lot of money. So when you look at what John Doerr did back in the first internet wave, he still holds his Google and Amazon stock.

He got distribution in the shares and he hasn't sold it.

Yeah.

Holy, good for him.

Wow. Yeah. Good for him.

That's amazing.

Eric Schmidt, all these people who Believed in the vision. And the venture capitalists— Vinod Khosla does the same thing, Mike Moritz does the same thing. Some of the best venture capitalists, in my view, they're in it for the long, long, long term, and they don't have the loss aversion fear that Benchmark has demonstrated to have in a bunch of different scenarios.

Let's say you're in a fund that had Uber, you got the $600 million gain or whatever you got there. Why would you have the loss aversion in the next company in that fund? You would seem like you would then let the other ones ride once you get the $600 million, right? $600 million is enough to pay for enough private jets for a while, right?

That's why I think it's a character. There are some ego elements too, right? If you— I remember Gurley told me that he thought Nextdoor should be worth $50 billion. Today it's worth $600 million and it's got $500 million of cash on the balance sheet. Whoa, whoa, whoa.

Hold on. Unpack. Nextdoor has $500 million in cash on the balance sheet and it's worth only $600 million. So the whole company's worth $100 million.

Yes.

I had no idea. Wow. Okay. That's a weird public company actually.

Yeah. Look at the ticker, KIND, K-I-N-D. They, and they have big network effects. They just haven't figured out how to monetize it. Their cost structure's expensive and had some issues with how commuter members are commuting. Well, my point was you were like, okay, so you made $600 million on Uber. Why are you not letting it ride on Nextdoor with the founder who invented the thing? It's because They look at each of them separately, and if your basis is, I'm loss-averse and I think these things should be worth more than they are, well, let me just pop the founder and see what the next guy or gal can do. It's a sickness.

Well, I mean, if things aren't going well, then that kind of makes sense. It makes more sense, at least, right, when things aren't going well?

Yeah, but Nextdoor was worth $3 or $4 billion when that happened.

Yeah, yeah. Okay, got it. So maybe it didn't work. It's always hard to know what the other history Is that's out there. There are some founders that do get tired, and sometimes they don't always realize it. And so it's an all-consuming thing, and sometimes they do need to take a break or step back. That's not always good for the company. Like when Bill Gates stepped back, it wasn't necessarily good for Microsoft that he stepped back, but it might have been good for him personally to step back too, right?

If you look at the FAANG companies, Bezos stepped back after 30 years, uh, you know, a long time. Steve Jobs obviously didn't intentionally step back. Reed Hastings is still at Netflix. So if your company's winning, it tends to give you energy. But yes, you're right.

Yeah, that's true. If you imagine the CEO of Nvidia, he's just amazing. He's kind of willed this company to success. Maybe at this point it doesn't matter. They're just such a great company, like another person could run it. But certainly you would imagine the stock would take a pretty big hit if he stepped down.

Yeah, but yes, I know Eric Wu from Opendoor. He's moving on to the next thing. He built a multibillion-dollar company. I think when it happens naturally and you've groomed successors, I think Tim Cook has obviously been a successful successor to Steve Jobs, so it can be done. Yeah.

And he's done an incredible job. Now that you're advising many founders and when they're raising money and they're picking VCs, like what advice do you give them?

So there's 2 different pieces to that. There's advice to how do you raise money in this environment?

Let's say they have multiple offers and they're all roughly equal, like they have a choice between the types of venture capitalists.

Well, I'd say this, that the venture capitalist themselves as a person or as a firm matter less in the later rounds because in the later rounds, as you get growth investors, they're much more ROI-oriented. They may or may not want a board seat, but the governance of the company has been sort of set more or less, and they're adding on. So it matters a lot early on. It matters a lot. And some entrepreneurs think VCs are going to help more than they are. The reality is VCs, they'll all promote what they can do to help, and they often do in some ways, but that help is very short-term, right? They're like, oh, we can help you recruit. We can help you introduce you to some potential enterprise customers. There's 3 or 4 things they can do and then they do them and that's it. So I tell them not to overvalue that. I tell them to overvalue the person who is going to be sitting in your boardroom who may not be able to help you sort of like in your operations by giving you advice or whatever, but is going to be a partner with you in thinking through the strategy of the business in the future, is not going to stab you in the front or the back, but they'll have an honest conversation. Maybe they'll say, hey, you look tired. Are you enjoying this job anymore? They're going to be a partner you can trust.

There was a cool 34-year-old VC. Like, how would you know that?

You better do your reference checking. Entrepreneurs don't do enough reference checking. Entrepreneurs tend to be a little overly focused on the valuation and check size and the reputation of the firm, where they should be looking at the reputation of the partner first, the firm second, and reference checks third. Valuation, of course, matters, but it's a combo of those things. And there's so much money out there now. It used to be that you went to Kleiner, Sequoia, or Benchmark. There's a lot more options nowadays. So the reputational value of those 3 being so far above everyone else has changed. Coastal Ventures is doing fantastic. You know, Elad Gil— there's so many great venture capitalists. There's a lot more options nowadays.

In this world where we have higher interest rates and stuff like that, It's potentially harder to raise money, harder to hyperscale. How does that change the types of businesses we'll see?

It's a lot harder to build a marketplace business because marketplaces tend to have to be subsidized on both sides. Like you have to get drivers in, in our case, or, and riders in the other case. And it's very expensive.

And that's true even probably for B2B marketplaces, you think?

Yeah, because any marketplace doesn't exist without liquidity. Liquidity means there's enough buyers and sellers at any time so the marketplace works. You go there to transact, even in a B2B marketplace. To attract enough on both sides at the same time, you have to do unnatural things to get them there at the same time.

In building the marketplace, is the demand more important or the supply more important in the early days?

Typically supply's the most important because by definition, If you look at Airbnb, there's a whole set of consumers who want to stay in places when they travel, right?

You know, that's a market that exists, right?

That market exists. You may have to convince them to move their preference from a hotel to a home, but that's a lot easier than to convince someone to rent out a bedroom in their own home, right?

Take pictures of everything and do all that stuff. Okay.

Yeah, food delivery is maybe a little different because they were used to delivering food. They had Grubhub, they may have their own delivery guy. Now you go into them and say, hey, we'll bring the delivery guy, we'll just wire you money every month, all you got to do is cook. That's a pretty good proposition.

Yeah, that's probably pretty easy. That makes sense. When you and I met, we met in 2012, you're the CEO of Clout, I was one of the investors, and I just love Clout. I love the idea, I love the team. What would a Clout in 2024 look like?

So I was COO, Joe Fernandez was CEO, and the idea still matters today, Oren. The core of that idea was to make a measurement system so you knew who to listen to about what subject and who was credible. This person had a 90-something on this topic because they were credible on this topic. Imagine if social media had evolved where you looked at your Twitter, your X feed, and you knew who was credible versus who wasn't on a particular topic.

Yeah, that would be so awesome.

It'd be so awesome. And I think Elon will actually get us there somewhere. I read the other day that he was thinking of saying, I'm going to put the number of community notes a tweeter has had on their profile. So you know how many times sort of they've been dinged for not being accurate, but the world still needs that. The problem with Klout is we didn't know how to make money with it. We were like saying to brands, hey, this person has a great Klout score in potato chips. You should want to sponsor them to promote your potato chips. It just wasn't a big enough idea to really make money, but the product itself, the world needs it. Just, I'm not sure how to make money from it.

But that's true of a lot of great things. We need the product, but it's not always clear how you profit from that thing. Now that we're entering this more AI era, how do you think the tech landscape is going to change?

You know, I've been through a lot of cycles, right? So I try to think, okay, how is this the same as the few disruptive cycles we've had? smartphone and App Store, internet and just web generally in the early 2000s, social media in between. I feel like my current opinion is that the gains of AI are going to inure to the big tech companies. And I consider OpenAI a big tech company now. Them, DeepMind, maybe Anthropic are really going to be the centers of this tech and are going to be Where all the gains are. And startups are going to move around outside of them and make applications for customer service or all kinds of things where it's so obvious how AI can do a better job than what's done today. And is it going to be disruptive to old world white collar industries? Of course. So then where do the gains go? The gains go to the software. Who owns the software or the apps? It's probably the bigger tech companies. And hopefully startups find a way to add value around these LLMs and algorithms. So that there's a new ecosystem of startups. OpenAI started an app store the other day. Let's see in a few months what turns out of that that could build a moat off that.

If you're like an outsourced customer service company and you have call center people overseas and you work for a Marriott or something or whatever, certainly a lot of those questions could be answered with AI. I kind of wonder who benefits. Is it Marriott who benefits? Is it the open source company benefits because they can replace their people with AI? Is it some new tech company who benefits? Who gets the benefit there?

Well, certainly Marriott would only do it if it were cheaper and better for its customers. Yeah, right. So let's say they get some benefit.

So they get benefit for sure.

Yeah, for sure. The disrupted Indian call center agent does not get benefits. They lose an opportunity. Hopefully they find some other opportunity, but that's a clear trade right there. Is there a middleman or woman who builds the infrastructure that allows Fidelity in their call center or Marriott in their call center to use their own data without getting sucked into the LLM to like be very tailored in how they answer. Yeah, maybe there's a software provider that sits there. And then there's the OpenAI, DeepMinds, Anthropocentric world who you need their combination of compute tech, LLM, and machine learning. To supplement that. So those are the 3 winners. I just hope there's that middle winner. There are these companies that could sit in the middle and do something specific for Marriott, and it's not just all drawn into the vortex.

One of the things I think about you is I think of you as like a master recruiter and very good at talent spotting, especially very young people, people in their early 20s, and talent spotting. Those are people who don't really have a lot in their background, So there's something about whether it's the interview or something in their background that you've been able to spot. Like, you don't have to tell me your deepest secrets here, but what are some of the secret ways, either like positives or potentially the negatives of weeding out people that you look for with these younger talented people?

Yeah, it's one of my favorite things to do. And frankly, one of the things I'm most proud of, Oren, is the teams I've built. And I'll tell you, there's 2 things I did. One, I was relentless on meeting people and interviewing them. Even when I didn't have enough roles, I did 3 interviews a day, every workday, 5 days a week for 4 years when I was at Uber. So that's 15 interviews a week. That's, call it 750 interviews a year times 4. That means I interviewed 3,000 people in 4 years and my team was 300. So I got some pattern recognition. I did my 10,000 hours of how to do this. And The concepts I'm looking for, for people are, can they walk the line between humility and confidence? Everyone wants to work with confident people, but people who are humble, not arrogant, so they're humble enough to get better. That line, you can find that in a lot of people because that's who they are.

Is there certain questions that bring it out or certain things in their background or?

Yeah, obviously you have to try to get through sort of the platitudinal questions to find this out. Often it's, tell me about How you got a project done that was really impactful for your company that your boss said no to at first. So to have the confidence to push through a no. And then tell me when you really messed up and how you dealt with it, right? Whether in your personal life, your professional. And those are just kind of questions to see, like, can they go when they're confident about something and can they learn and how quickly they learn, how they learn, how they grapple with failure, right? The second thing which is as important, is self-awareness. Are they aware of what they're good at, what they're not good at, what they want to get good at? And I could take any self-aware person and make them better by definition. And so the platitudinal question that everyone's asked is like, what are your greatest weaknesses? I work too hard, I'm too dedicated, blah, blah, blah. Right? So that's a pretty red flag when I hear that at first. Sometimes I give people a second chance. It's like, okay, hold on. I want an actual— when you looked at your past performance review from your last employer, what was their number one thing that they wrote was a fault of yours? Right? And then it's never— your boss is never going to write you work too hard. So I'm trying to get underneath what their actual— and the faster I get them there and the more honest, the more I know they're self-aware. And then the third thing is beyond self-awareness and beyond sort of walking this line between confidence and humility. Do they have a hunger? And you could have a hunger at any age. Do they have a hunger for— it could be the product, it could be the people, but it could be just broad learning. But I don't want someone who wants a job if you're at a startup, because those things aren't jobs. Those things are missions. At some point you have job seekers.

How do you suss that out? You just tell 'em like, well, this is going to be crazy. Just tell 'em upfront.

No, no, no. I tell my, you know, Why are you here? There's 15 other companies you could join. Why this one?

Yeah. Okay. Try to really understand like why they are passionate about it. Okay.

Why? Again, you get the answers like, you're a fast-growing company, you're going to change the world. You're like, okay, but why do you find this interesting relative to 3 other things that I point out I'm really interested in? And look, these aren't easy, but I've done these so many times that body language matters. I do the first 30 minutes to say this person isn't right. And then what's remaining, I spend 2 hours deciding it is right. So in that 2 hours is where I kind of wind and find what these people are made of. The team I built, man, it was one of the proudest things I've done. They're doing such great things now. It was the happiest team at Uber. Like, you know, we had all these culture sort of boogeymen about them. Not this team. This team was highly motivated, happy, and really reminiscent now about the work they did. On my team there.

One of the things with these questions is they're hard questions and they're kind of hard to come up with answers right off the cuff. If you haven't thought about ahead of time, my greatest big weaknesses or something like that, it would take me some time to think about it first and really kind of dwell on it. Could you just give that interview in written form to someone and say, hey, come back to me in 5 days? You have to do it live.

You got to do it live. You know why? Because if I'm sitting there in front of you or I'm on a Zoom with you and I'm saying, well, We all have— I'm doing the mock interview now. We all have things we're not good at. And I only want people on my team who kind of know what they're good at and what they're trying to get better at, because then I can help them. And then frankly, I'll tell you what I'm not good at and you could help me. So you tell me, Arun, what are the things you're working on the hardest right now in your life and your career to get better at? If you can't come up with an answer to that, an honest answer, that's like honest, because I want honesty. If you said, you know what, I'm not a good product person. I'm a great deal person, and I know to get a better deal, I better be a pro. But I want honesty, and that honesty is very, very attractive.

If we're taking like the ultimate hire, a founder hiring for a number 2, should that founder be looking for someone who complements their strengths or somebody who can make up for their weaknesses? Because we've seen success in both and failures in both, right?

Right, right, right, right. It's so funny from the outside. I'll just use Uber as an example. People assumed I complemented Travis's strengths. That was the assumption. We were sort of of the same mind. Let's go for broke, win at all costs. I don't know.

We had similar values, let's say, right?

Similar values, let's say. Actually, while we did have overlap, we were quite different in our skills. And I think he recognized that. He was hiring for someone who was complementary. to his skills, which meant I added things that he didn't like to do or wasn't good at, as opposed to reinforcing the things that he was good at. That was sort of a little bit of the untold story. I mean, I went to law school as a lawyer. I was way more cautious. I'm much more of a people person and wanted to be out there recruiting and meeting people. And he was much more wanting to be with the engineers and the product folks. And so we just had different things and it worked really well. Hopefully we could have continued doing it, but That was some magic that we had that allowed us to do what we did in 4 years.

Okay, interesting. Obviously we've seen 20, 30 years of startups now. How has the tenure of founders changed over time?

It seems to have gotten lower, and I wonder sometimes if there's sort of a couple knock-on things that are happening. One, longer to IPO, and Because of that, there's been these secondary liquidity things that have happened for founders and for some employees, which was never the case in the early 2000s. You just couldn't take money off the table.

Even when we sold LiveRamp in 2014, if I had done a significant secondary, I probably wouldn't have sold. So if someone just said, hey, here's a bunch of money, you know, you could take care of your kids and stuff like that, I probably would've kept going.

Yeah. So it's the introduction of the ability to get liquidity both in the secondary thing has changed the dynamic quite a bit. It either makes someone like you saying, well, I don't want to sell, I could keep going now. Or the opposite is like, I've gotten some liquidity. Oh yeah.

Then I'm going to go on my yacht and not worry about the company or something like that.

I'll hire a president and they'll become CEO and I'll do this. But it's definitely changed the dynamics. I will say this, I never took a dime out of Telme Networks, my first company. I never took a dime out of Uber. Just because I was from that old school and I was like, I just lived below my means. I wasn't married at the time, so I could live on a mattress and—

Yeah, it's, that's nice.

Right. But I would say had I been in a situation that was different, I might've been like, hey, I gotta take some money off the table here. And I don't know what that would've done to my psychology.

Yeah, I guess it could be good or it could be bad. Like, I remember I had just had my second kid when we got the offer. As you know, you just had your second kid. So as you know, right after you have your second kid, you're like, oh, I gotta supply, I have to help them. I gotta think about their future and stuff like that. But yeah, if I was single, I probably wouldn't have sold either, right? There's probably a lot of reasons that could have happened there. Yeah, that's really interesting. Okay, a couple closing questions. What is a conspiracy theory that you believe?

Conspiracy theory that I believe? I believe— that's a so interesting question. You should have sent me that in writing so I could respond to you, right?

I did, by the way.

Yeah, I didn't know Highlighted, I guess. I do believe that sadly higher education has been infiltrated by non-capitalist ideology, which I deeply worry about because I think it takes away from a marketplace of ideas. And I went to Harvard and it was the best thing that ever happened to me to be exposed to so many different ideas and then not get shouted down. And it was just truly like a place of debate. And I feel like college kids today, especially in the elite institutions, are not getting that same rigor that was available decades ago. And that was intentional by the faculties and the administrators and the admissions officers and so on.

Why do you think it has happened and persists? You have donors that are important, you have other kind of stakeholders that are important. The general person is not Anti-capitalist or something in America, right?

I think institutional capture is a real thing, whether it's the media. And you could say, okay, you have one part of the media is institutionally captured by one party, one philosophy, and the rest of it's the other. But lots of institutions have been captured kind of unknowingly. It's just sort of happened. And we look back and you're like, what the hell happened? How did we get here? And I think we've had that moment in the last few months for higher education. Where you're like, what happened? How did we get here? And I think it's because of the tactics used by some of these folks to shout people down. When I was there at Harvard, you had a professorship that was called 75-25 political affiliation. I just saw a survey now, it's 98 to 2. So if the professors are teaching students that way, where are you hearing the other side? Where?

Right. And even within the 98, it's probably moved to, you know, a lot more anti-capitalist or something, right?

Yeah, yeah. I believe, and I'm not going to get too philosophical on you, but capitalism and democracy are tied together because you don't have capitalism, well then you have to smush people's choices down, right? But in any case, I think that conspiracy theory, you could call it, is something I now believe even more than I did before the last few months.

What was the experience like? You kind of played in a movie or miniseries or something like that. by actors. How did that experience— at least it was a really good-looking actor.

It was cool in that he was good-looking and younger. I think the character came off as a little more subservient than, you know me, and he did some stuff I didn't do at the end, which made me seem like not a good person. But it was pretty interesting. I wish the producers had talked to us, but they were worried about slander and libel, so they didn't want to talk to us. So this was the Bill Gurley, Mike Isaac story. It wasn't the Travis Kalanick, Emil Michael story. So consequently, 50,000 people saw the finale. So it wasn't interesting. People didn't watch it because it wasn't multidimensional.

I watched it and I was much more intimate. I knew all the players. Even just if you made it just fiction, it could have been a better story.

Yeah, I mean, they missed the whole China piece. These meetings with Tim Cook and E.Q., I was in there with Travis. They were way more interesting than that. The me and Larry Page and David Drummond and Travis meetings were like fascinating. There was so much cooler stuff that happened and it was multidimensional. And Travis wasn't a chest-beating person like they made it out to be. I mean, I think the truth was more interesting and because it wasn't truth, they just should have made it fiction. It would've been more interesting, right? Pure fiction as opposed to somewhere in the middle.

All right, last question we ask all of our guests: what conventional wisdom or advice do you think is bad advice?

Oh man, this is an easy one. This whole management philosophy of all you have to do is hire great people and then leave them alone to do their work is total fiction. The best leaders I know hire great people and help them get better at doing their work by being in the details.

They're essentially kind of micromanaging in a way, right?

Yeah. Yes.

Yeah.

They're micromanagers until they don't have to be, but that's just not how it works. I mean, could you imagine just saying, look, I have this idea for Uber Eats, just go do it. What? You don't know. You're the inventor. You're sitting in the room, you're drawing the boxes and figuring out how this works. You're in the details and you're looking at the data to see what's happening and what's not working. That's what the real winners have done. Every CEO I've met, whether it's Brian Chesky or The Stripe guys, they're in the details. That doesn't mean they don't empower their people, but they're never far away from the details.

Yeah, it's interesting because that advice is kind of coming from the venture capitalist perspective. The venture capitalist is, in some ways, they're betting on somebody, they're giving them a bunch of money, and then they're off. Maybe give them some high-level advice and they're off. They're precisely not in the details at all. They don't know really what's going on, and they're hoping it works out. And in many cases it does.

Yeah, but I'm not talking about that relationship. The venture capital founder relationship is the way you describe it. I'm talking about the founder relationship to their team.

Right, right. But I'm saying like the person who gives that advice often is the venture capitalist, right? Because they come from that perspective. Yeah, this has been amazing. We've had a great conversation. It's been awesome. Thank you, Emil Michael, for joining us on World of DaaS. By the way, I follow you @EmilMichael on Twitter. I encourage our listeners to engage with you there. This has been a ton of fun.

It's been so much fun. Thanks for having me on, Arun.

Awesome. All right. This is great. Thank you. This is really great. Thanks for listening. If you enjoyed the show, consider rating this podcast and leaving a review. For more World of DaaS, and DaaS is D-A-A-S, you can subscribe on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or anywhere you get your podcasts, and also check out YouTube for videos. You can find me at Twitter @auren, that's A-U-R-E-N, Auren, and we'd love to hear from you. World of DaaS is brought to you by SafeGraph. SafeGraph is geospatial data for physical places. Check it out at safegraph.com. And by Flex Capital. Flex Capital invests in data companies like those we talk about at World of DaaS. Check it out at flexcapital.com.