InboxVudu And The Uber That Got Away

We hear a lot of startup origin stories here at TechCrunch, and sometimes they can blur together. But this one’s a little different.

It’s about Ramesh Haridas, an entrepreneur and angel investor. He’s backed some successful startups, including Rapportive, which was acquired by LinkedIn. What Haridas told me about, however, was the one that got away — namely, Uber.

As you can see in the screenshot below, back in 2010, Haridas was actually corresponding with Ryan Graves. At the time, Graves was running the company then-known as UberCab, and they were scheduling a call to discuss a possible investment. However, when Graves tried to reschedule, Haridas said he totally missed the message, and eventually the round closed without him.

Missing the email was “very costly,” Haridas said. After all, Uber has been valued at $40 billion, and even before the most recent funding and valuation, those early investors reportedly saw a 2,000x return. So Haridas estimated that if he’d put in $25,000, his take would be worth $125 million today.

(I reached out to Uber PR in the off chance they wanted to comment. They did not respond.)

To be sure, there’s no guarantee that the investment would have happened, even if Haridas and Graves had met. Still, Haridas said, “It should at least have been a conscious decision on my part.” And with InboxVudu it would have been.

So what does this missed opportunity have to do with Haridas’ current startup, InboxVudu? Well, the whole point of InboxVudu is to make sure you don’t miss important emails.

I mean, I’ve never gotten an “invest in Uber” email as far as I know, but there are still important messages that I kick myself for missing once I discover them under the piles of spam and random pitches. So InboxVudu analyzes your email account and sends a daily digest of emails that seem to require a response. Then you can either choose to respond or hit the “remove” button. (The company also launched a Chrome extension so that you can keep up in real-time.)

Hey, if he doesn’t want to miss important deals, maybe my soon-to-be-former colleague Ryan Lawler should give it a try.

Featured Image: InboxVudu

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