Eric_Newcomer

I wrote the story and would love if you would subscribe to Newcomer. A little additional context on the round from the story:

"The funding round is one of the largest venture rounds in a private technology startup ever. OpenAI’s Microsoft deal, if it ends up totaling $10 billion, would be larger, but it’s a different sort of animal. This Stripe round is humongous by any standard.

The money is going toward helping early Stripe employees exercise their restricted stock units before they expire and then toward organizing a tender offer for employees to sell shares.

While the tax bill has been estimated to total about $3.5 billion, much of the excess money will be used to allow employees to sell their Stripe shares.

The funding round is not intended for Stripe’s corporate coffers."

I get into the debate around the appropriate valuation later in the story.

“I personally have a lot of challenges with Travis. And I think there are a lot of examples of where he could have been a much better manager,” Sacca says, prefacing an unexpected defense of the Uber co-founder. “But I also think him being tarred and feathered for life is ridiculous. He didn’t commit any biblical crimes. The guy was just guilty of being a bro-y asshole,” Sacca says.

...

“If you go all the way back to that first New Year’s where they turned on surge pricing. Everyone is bitching and moaning about it on Twitter, right? Twitter blew up. And the next day, we had a call,” Sacca remembers.

“And Travis had been out giving press interviews basically — the theme was ‘users need to suck it up.’ You know, ‘get over it.’ He’d say, ‘It’s a feature that’s here to stay.’”

“We knew it was here to stay. It made sense,” Sacca says. “That was one of the core innovations of Uber: It was a fluid market for driver supply and rider demand.”

“Well, what happened was, we were like, Travis, you can’t talk like that. You can’t say that,” Sacca says. “And then he would show us the data.”

After the surge pricing announcement, Sacca remembers Kalanick telling him, “Look at this Twitter user who’s yelling about it and saying they’re done. The next day, they use Uber again. Fuck them.”

"Andreessen Horowitz’s rivals snark that the firm is chasing management fees — those lofty payouts firms receive just for taking people’s money. I hear that the Crypto Fund plans to charge a 2.5% management fee for most of the first decade of the fund. On a $2 billion fund, that could mean $50 million a year in fees alone. Andreessen Horowitz would see plenty of upside too with 25% carry until the fund doubles and then 30% carry after that. The firm wouldn’t take carry if it loses money. (I hear those terms are pretty standard for Andreessen Horowitz funds.)"

From the story. How Adam Draper finally decided to invest $25K in Coinbase's seed round:

“I was on the toilet, where all the greatest epiphanies are had, and I was skimming a magazine that had been next to my toilet,” Draper recalls. “It was Economist magazine. There was an article — it was talking about the bubble bursting of bitcoin.” The October 2011 article began, “BITCOIN, briefly the world's favorite cryptocurrency, is in trouble.”

But Draper came to a very different conclusion, reading the months-old piece that had been gathering dust in his bathroom. “It was honestly a pretty good article,” Draper says. “They thought it was over.” But now many months later, Bitcoin was still going. He thought to himself, “Somebody wants this thing to exist, this Bitcoin thing.”

“I called Brian. I don't think I was still on the toilet — I don't think he cared as much about me being on the toilet. I was like, ‘I’m in.’”

Sequoia, which led DoorDash's Series A, had to invest $217 million all told to maintain a 15.3% stake in the food delivery company