Emil Michael describes how Uber raised over $15 billion through an auction-like process. He and Travis Kalanick prepared 50-page decks and data rooms, scheduled multiple investor meetings daily, and closed about $1 billion in roughly 8 weeks during favorable market conditions.
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We of course couldn't have a chat with you without, you know, mentioning, you know, fundraising and, you know, not only what your role was like with that, but also journey. So could you maybe just kind of like walk us through from like a high level, you know, what that journey was like?
Yeah. So I've done 3 other companies before Uber and I'd raised money for all of them, but never at the scale that we did at Uber. And I'm a former lawyer. Never practiced law, but went to law school. I took a lot of finance classes when I was at law school because I was like, I don't want to be a lawyer, so I better learn something else while I'm here. I did a lot of business development deals, like partnership deals. So I sort of purposely tried to have as broad a skill set as required. It turns out that raising money really, if you have, and you could learn all these things, like I learned how to accounting on my own. So that I understood how everyone, how VC firms were looking at our accounting. You know, I tried to understand everyone's perspective so that I was pretty functional in knowing how to sell something and what would resonate and what wasn't. And Travis also had a pretty methodical view about how to run a process. And so we together sort of bought, brought together what I thought was sort of a, an auction-like process with some EQ around the edge to make sure that it was an optimal process. We called it the home show. So we would, we literally stress on a presentation for 4 weeks. Like we were really, see, like people are like, oh, you guys, you know, just like waving money in the door. It's like, oh, we put together like 50-page PowerPoint decks, deep data rooms. We're super upfront about our competition, where our weaknesses were. We're like, they're going to find out anyway. So let's not BS anyone. Let's just tell everyone all the stuff. And then we'd schedule 3 investor meetings a day, 3 hours each for 2 weeks, maybe 3 weeks. And we'd just run through them. And then we'd have a week of due diligence. Then we'd ask for term sheets and then we'd select a term sheet. And the composition around and move forward. And sort of in 8 weeks, we'd have $1 billion in the bank. And we told everyone upfront what it was going to look like. And it looked like that at the end. So no one felt that they were burned or not. Now, again, this was a zero interest rate environment. This was also the hottest company in the world. So we were able to do all that. So you don't always have the leverage we had to do that. So that's why Uber's not the perfect example, but I want to at least give you those stories to let you know how we did it there and to great success.
