David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. Totally. We’re in the beginning of a new cycle on this and there’s lots of… you know, that’s why in tech as well as in politics, that’s why the role of an independent, inquisitive press is so important and the story remains to be told. But I think there is no question that and I suspect even people who work in Uber and if listeners, if you do work at Uber, reach out to us and we’d love to hear your perspectives. But I think it’s uncontroversial to say, like you said Brad, there are a lot of challenges and chaos there that needs to be solved, that at least seems clear. I think it’s sort of a hopeful sign that Travis last year hired an executive from Target named Jeff Jones to be his right hand. I think his title is president. And one of Jeff’s goals for 2017 was to address the rider community. We all know from being in this industry that two-sided marketplaces are hard and from the very earliest days of eBay, you had sellers complaining or buyers complaining. It’s just hard to balance the two. I mean, Airbnb’s approach is clear, like they are kind of a host-driven community. They started as hosts and they cater to their hosts. Uber is really a rider-driven community. The founders started out wanting classy rides around San Francisco. So you kind of have to pick where you start and so Uber now is sort of focusing on the driver community and has a lot of work to do I think to quell some of the dissatisfaction particularly among full-time drivers and when we get into these cars and talk to our drivers, we know that dissatisfaction is there. And partly, David as you said, because of the sort of relentless lowering of the fares to try to position Uber as an alternative to car ownership.…

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