Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…They are. Yeah. They’ve been trying to hire some folks and they've got a team and they’ve got some partners. I think Baidu is also exploring it in China and as is everyone now. Of course, it’s very fashionable to say you’re looking into it. It’s unclear to me now whether Didi has made the progress of, say, Uber which is testing cars now in Pittsburgh and a few other cities. One thing I learned from your book, Brad, is how fast or how recent Uber is to this sort of area of self-driving cars because they really weren’t tipped off to it until Travis got in one of the self-driving Google cars when he went to meet with Larry Page or Eric Schmidt. That’s right, it was Larry Page. But even then, remember he – my times are messed up but I think that’s 2013 – even then he believes Google will be Uber’s partner in that effort and it was only at the Recode Conference in late 2014 where Sergey Brin is talking about in a little bit of a dismissive way toward Uber and Travis had gotten wind that Sergey was going to have a talk and maybe announce its own sort of Uber competitor that I think Travis starts to realize that Google is not a partner in self-driving cars but a competitor, and that is when he begins to invest very seriously in self-driving cars.…

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