Ben Gilbert: observation

Transcript context

…I know. This is the backdrop to Uber. Of course, this scares even Travis. He goes up, he behaves, and doesn't talk about Ovitz. This is in an interview Jason Calacanis does with Travis after he starts Uber. Travis is like, oh, yeah, I thought I played it cool. Jason was like, oh, man, you were sweating bullets up there. That happens. The company ends up filing Chapter 11 bankruptcy to get rid of the lawsuit, and then the assets of the company gets sold out of bankruptcy. The company is torched. Here's Travis. He just had this wild experience. The company was completely torched. He walks away, thankfully, with no personal liability, but it's over. What does he do next? He and one of his co-founders from Scour, they go and they say, you know, this technology is pretty interesting as a technology, and this mirror other episodes we've had here on Acquired. What if rather than using it with a front end to enable illegal peer to peer downloads, we take the same technology, and we use it for moving content around on the Internet? Who would want to move content around on the Internet? Maybe it's those guys who just sued us, the movie studios. Online movie distribution isn't there yet, but people are moving content around. There are clips that are being played online. Maybe we can help them with their bandwidth by using peer to peer hosting to enable better bandwidth management for these movie companies. We should, on a technical note, just make a point to folks listening that when you type in a URL right now on the Internet, even though it seems like, okay, cool, it goes to the server where that website is hosted and gets it, in the early days of the Internet, it had to go literally all the way to the one server where the website was hosted. Now, things happen much faster because these things are cached all over the place. They're much closer to you, not really fully developed at this time. Nope. Akamai existed, but was just starting to get going. Travis takes this as great, I'm going to start my next company. He calls it Red Swoosh, and it does this. It's a competitor to Akamai focused specifically on the movie industry. It is also a wild journey. He ends up running it for, I believe, six or seven years, raises a very, very small amount of money, including from Mark Cuban as an angel. Travis ends up not taking a salary for four of those six or seven years that he's running the company. He moves back in with his parents, and he lives at home in LA. Eventually, we mentioned Akamai. Akamai ends up acquiring the company and consolidating it into Akamai for $19 million dollars. Finally, at the end of this, it's now 10 full years that Travis has been on this grind, starting with dropping out at UCLA. He's lived with his parents for a long time. He's had his safety threatened. He's been sued for a quarter of a trillion dollars. And he finally has an exit. I wasn't able to get the exact figure, but several million dollars because he hadn't raised too much money out of that $19 million acquisition.…

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