David Rosenthal: prediction

Transcript context

…It's one of the best ways to order an actual taxi. It is. Unfortunately for them, that is not the big market anymore. Okay, so who are Ryan and Travis? People probably know who Travis is, but what is going on here? Let's come back to the black car industry. Okay, it seems obvious. We've just told you this whole history. So many people, so many entrepreneurs, so many venture capitalists, had been wanting to disrupt and innovate in transportation. Everybody knew this was broken. This was obvious. Why hadn't people looked at the black car industry before? Way less regulation in many states including California. It was regulated at the state level, not at the city level. If you think you did have to deal with regulation, it was a far easier path. What were the barriers? It seems like way lower barriers to entry. Here's why. Because every time somebody did try to go innovate in the black car industry, this is what would happen. People might know about a company named SeamlessWeb. There was a young corporate lawyer in New York in the late 90s named Jason Finger. This will also come back. He was, like many people in banks and law firms in New York in those days, would eat dinner every night in the office while he was working. The ordering system for ordering food and having food delivery delivered was nuts. He came up with this idea of how to organize and deliver food in cities, started SeamlessWeb. It became huge. I used it every night when I was in banking in New York. It eventually merged with GrubHub. It's now part of GrubHub, one of the largest food delivery services in the US. While he was a couple of years into working on Seamless, he thought, the other thing that lawyers and bankers do in New York is they ordered black cars. When there was this opportunity to use the Internet to make meal delivery much better, I could do the same thing with all the black cars that people use, so he actually started working on it. His idea was that there was going to be Seamless. The meal delivery product was going to become Seamless Meals, and then he was also going to build Seamless Wheels. He talked to a couple of black car companies, he get some supply on board, he is talking to banks and law firms about using them. One day he comes into work, and there's a voicemail on his phone in the morning. David, I'll stop you here for a moment and say, gosh, food delivery and ride coordinating on a platform, that sounds like a really good idea to combine those two.…

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