David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…When you say early unregulated email marketing, do you mean he was a spammer? I mean he was a spammer. The CAN-SPAM Act was not passed until 2003, it turns out. At which point then, I think sophomore at Harvard, Nate closed his consultancy business for reasons that have never been discussed. Before that, he made about $1 million and put himself through Harvard and much more. It’s pretty amazing. In other words, not only is he a Harvard-trained computer scientist who knows how to code, develop, and can stand up internet products all on his own, he also knows how to market online. It is a pretty potent combination here. They were smart to rope him back in. They jam in on these ideas. They’re thinking about the roommate thing, turns out roommates.com already exists. A couple of months go by, it's January 2008. They're out of other ideas. Joe and Brian decided, maybe we’ll dust off this AirBed and Breakfast thing, give it another go. They pitch it to Nate. They actually hadn’t pitched Nate until January on working with them on this. It was just this side project thing. This was attempt number two at starting Airbnb?…

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