David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…You mean in terms of the lead? I think two things, New York-based, but also think about that. They are still basically a real estate company. If you are Goldman Sachs, if you’re Jefferies, if you’re JP Morgan, you have giant real estate investments, you have whole teams that are dedicated. Some sort of app or some sort of machine learning something-something, they’ve got to put a lot of faith that the founder knows what they’re doing but this, they felt they knew what they were doing. This is them. This is real estate that’s on their block. That’s actually true. I believe by 2014, WeWork had become the single largest lessor of new available commercial square footage in New York City. Think about all of the real estate investment and property developers in New York. WeWork was the largest so of course, they were attracting attention of these folks. It goes back to what you said earlier. Remember also what they are investing in. An app company can disappear just like that. There is a scandal or it doesn’t work, there is no product market fit. Worst thing that happens here is you end up with a shell company that’s got, as you said, all the commercial real estate in New York City. That’s the worst case scenario. That’s pretty safe as venture capital investment.…

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