Mudassir Sheikha worked at McKinsey. Then he stopped working at McKinsey. He put fifty grand into an app that summons cars. His co-founder put in another fifty grand. That's a hundred thousand dollars total for anyone keeping track at home.
Seven years pass. Uber writes a check for three point one billion dollars. The return here is thirty-one thousand times the initial investment. Sheikha turned his fifty thousand into roughly one point five billion assuming he kept enough equity to matter. He did not invent teleportation. He did not cure cancer. He made an app that does what taxis do except the cars are slightly cleaner and the drivers rate you like you're the f*cking help.
This is the part where retail traders open Robinhood and start searching for the next Careem. They will find seventeen SPACs with names like "Desert Mobility Acquisition Corp" and convince themselves that putting four hundred dollars into a company with no revenue is basically the same thing Sheikha did. It is not the same thing. Sheikha had McKinsey on his resume and connections in Dubai. You have a Reddit account and a dream.
The lesson here is supposed to be about vision or timing or disruption. The actual lesson is that if you have enough money to lose fifty grand without sweating and you launch a taxi app in a region where Uber hasn't planted a flag yet, sometimes a bigger taxi app will pay you billions to go away. Inspiring stuff.
Uber paid three billion dollars for market share in the Middle East and Pakistan. They could have just lit the money on fire and gotten the same brand awareness, but at least this way they got an app out of it.
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