Episode 31: The Uber - Didi Chuxing Merger with Brad Stone, author of The Upstarts & The Everything Store

Acquired

Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal

Venturecapital, Ma, Investing, Acquisitions, Startups, Vc, Investment, Business, Technology

4.8 • 2.9K Ratings

🗓️ 1 March 2017

⏱️ 74 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Topics covered include:

The global surge in 2012 of entrepreneurs starting ridesharing companies, nowhere moreso than China
Didi CEO Cheng Wei and investor Wang Gang’s backgrounds at Alibaba, first entrepreneurial effort in Momo, and Momo’s pivot to Didi Dache
The culling of the ridesharing herd in China down to Didi Dache and Kuaidi Dache through brutal competition and involvement of the “big three” Chinese internet companies
Rise of the Chinese messaging apps and associated mobile payments, and their impact on ridesharing
The 2015 merger between Didi and Kuaidi, brokered in part by Russian VC Yuri Milner
Uber’s decision to enter the Chinese market, and early success with investment and support from Baidu
The first meeting between Uber CEO Travis Kalanick and Cheng Wei in 2015—which does not go well
Subsequent “scorched earth” competition between Didi and Uber throughout 2015-16
Negotiating an armistice: Uber’s agreement to sell its Chinese operations to Didi in late 2016
End of the war, or just the beginning? January 2017: Didi invests $100M in Brazilian Uber competitor 99
Sustainable growth, and building moats versus scorching earth

Sponsors:
Vanta: https://bit.ly/acquiredvanta

Statsig: bit.ly/statsigacquired
Modern Treasury: https://bit.ly/acquiredmoderntreasury

Followups:

Stay tuned for real-time coverage of the Snap IPO coming here on Acquired!

The Carve Out:

Ben: Taming the Mammoth on Wait But Why
David: Conversations with Tyler Podcast by Tyler Cowen, co-author of the Marginal Revolution blog
Brad: Yuval Noah Harari (author of Sapiens)’s new book, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

Transcript

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0:00.0	Any other way that we could phrase that would be great.
0:02.0	Yeah.
0:03.0	You guys want attention for this podcast, but not. Welcome to episode 31 of acquired, the podcast where we talk about technology acquisitions and IPOs.
0:24.0	I'm Ben Gilbert.
0:25.0	I'm David Rosenthal.
0:26.2	And we are your hosts.
0:28.7	We have another guest episode today, and we are very, very, very excited to welcome Brad Stone. David will
0:36.0	will tell you about Brad before we dive in but I wanted to do a little bit of
0:40.5	administrative stuff before. All right, listeners, our sponsor is one of our favorite companies, Vanta, and we have something very new
0:48.6	from them to share.
0:50.1	Of course, you know Vanta enables companies to generate more revenue by getting their compliance
0:54.6	certifications.
0:55.6	That's SAC 2, ISO 2701.
0:58.6	But the thing that we want to share now is, Vanta has grown to become the best security compliance platform as you hit
1:05.6	hyper growth and scale into a larger enterprise.
1:09.6	It's kind of wild when we first started working with Vanta and met Christina. My gosh, I've had like a couple hundred customers, maybe.
1:16.6	Now they've got 5,000, some of the largest companies out there, it's awesome.
1:21.0	Yeah, and they offer a tremendous amount of customization now for more
1:24.7	complex security needs. So if you're a larger company and in the past you showed
1:28.7	Vanta to your compliance department you might have heard something like oh well we've
1:32.0	already got a compliance process in place and
1:34.2	we can't integrate this new thing. But now even if you already have a sock to Vanta makes
	...

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