David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…What they’re really doing is applied machine learning. To me, this is a company that their core competency is the collecting and synthesizing of all of the training data and building a pipeline out of that so that they can appropriately hook into all of the systems of someone else that makes the car and make the car self-driving. It’s so fascinating to me that as this market gets so much attention so quickly and it’s so clear that this thing is going to happen that by pointing your technology in the right direction and really starting to get market traction with the makers of these cars, like if this company was a machine learning company, they would have sold for a fifteenth of what they sold for. It’s interesting. I think we might have unexpectedly on the episode touched on a really, really deep theme in technology which is this vertical versus horizontal idea. Ever since we talked about it a couple of minutes ago, I can’t stop thinking about it and thinking about Intel acquiring Mobileye and like okay, yeah, we’re now going to sell this horizontal platform to all the car companies to enable them to compete in the autonomous market. Contrast that with a Tesla which actually used to use Mobileye components, ended their relationship, took it in-house as vertically integrating, taking an Apple-like approach. Very interesting to see how this plays out. Rewind 20 years ago. Tesla is Apple. They’re vertically integrating. They’re selling a high-end premium consumer product that’s priced and experienced in a premium way. They capture a lot of value and the rest of the value is captured by an ecosystem that is based on Intel, that are basically component makers. It’s like history repeats itself.…

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