Uber - Startup Decks

Business Type :

Transportation

Funding round :

Seed

Funding Price :

$45 billion

The Uber cofounder Garrett Camp cashed out roughly $13 million of his massive stake in the company this week, according to regulatory filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

The sale of 8,462,352 shares was worth $13,538,023, the filing shows, and will still leave the entrepreneur with a roughly 4.75% stake in the company. Camp also sits on the board, and he remains the largest individual shareholder after Japan’s SoftBank and the venture-capital firm Benchmark, according to Bloomberg data.

Travis Kalanick, the Uber cofounder who was ousted as CEO, began selling some of his stake as well last week, on a much grander scale. Kalanick, who’s working to build a “virtual restaurant,” or delivery-only kitchen business, sold $711 million worth of shares.

The sales by Camp and Kalanick came after the expiration of Uber’s “lockup period,” a set amount of time that’s common in initial public offerings in which insiders are not allowed to sell their shares in the company. When Uber’s period expired last week, heavy selling sent the stock down some 9% to record lows.

And as Uber fights to turn its first profit in the face of that falling stock price, the company looks very little as it did 10 years ago when Camp self-financed some of the company’s first rounds. “UberCab” wasn’t always a network of more than 2 million drivers providing rides at the tap of a button in 165 countries.

Instead, in those days of August 2008, the dream of a “next generation car service” was merely a slideshow presentation on Camp’s computer.

Business Insider has covered the original pitch deck before, when Camp first published it on Medium in 2017, but we felt it deserved a fresh look in light of a the company’s underwhelming May initial public offering, the launch of its freight business, an aggressive push into food delivery, flying cars, autonomous vehicles, and more.

Here’s how the founders envisioned Uber 10 years ago:

The Startup Deck Slides

The first slide is a time capsule from 2008. Yes, that's a BlackBerry.

Garrett Camp via Medium

Ten years ago, hailing a cab was a very different affair.

While Camp highlighted "dead-time" with cabs, a 2018 report by Schaller Consulting found that for-hire vehicles drove an average of 2.1 miles without passengers between fares. Also, most New York cabs are now Toyota Camrys, which the city estimates to have an environmental rating of 25 miles per gallon.

Uber has decimated the value of taxi medallions.

After the expansion of Uber in New York, the value of taxi medallions — limited amounts of which are sold at auction by the city — plummeted by nearly 75%. The industry largely blamed ride-hailing companies like Uber and Lyft, but a New York Times investigation found that the value of medalions had been inflated in a bubble reminiscent of the 2008 housing crisis.

Camp said Uber would be the "NetJets of car services."

This, in a nutshell, was — and still is — Uber's value proposition. NetJets, a company that allows you to buy fractional ownership in a private jet — has been owned by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway since 1998.

Uber originally wanted to screen its customers.

Today, anyone with a credit or debit card and a smartphone can instantly be connected with a driver. GPS and photos make finding your driver much easier — something that hasn't changed today.

It's not just luxury Mercedes sedans these days, either.

Garrett Camp via Medium

Uber would be "Profitable by design."

Uber has yet to turn a profit. In its most recent self-reported quarterly financials, the company said its growth had slowed while losses were continuing to increase.

A car could be summoned using GPS or texting.

GPS is obviously still a main tenet of the app. SMS summoning, on the other hand, seems to have gone by the wayside.