David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…And I certainly don’t mean that founder DNA is a negative side. I think for kind of better or for worse, you’re stuck with it. It’s your personality. The tech theme that I wanted to talk about is I think in many ways just a slightly different perspective on the culture question and the founder DNA. From an investor view as opposed to a kind of internal company view, and that’s what this story of both Uber and Didi really highlights for me is the difference between building a moat and scorching the earth. And these are companies, all of them in ridesharing really, I mean, I think Lyft has gotten dragged into it too and probably all the other companies around the world, like they've taken this scorched earth approach and they’ve gotten huge probably, and I don’t know but I would suspect that just in terms of net revenue to the company, Uber is probably larger than Airbnb at this point and Didi perhaps as well. They’ve gotten big quickly but you have to ask how sustainable is what they’re doing. I think it points along the way, it’s clear through this story that Uber and others thought perhaps capital raising was going to be a sustainable advantage and a moat that they could build; thought that driver density was going to be sustainable. Well, it turns out it’s really easy for drivers to multi-home and they do all the time. I think about that versus as you juxtaposed in the book, Brad, kind of Airbnb and while what they’re doing and what the market they’re attacking looks very similar, I do think they've taken a much smarter approach to building a moat and that’s around focusing on the community things like a host could multi-home but by making reviews and trust and interaction between the community, the kind of focal point of the network, once you have 50 positive reviews on Airbnb, you’re not going to spend much time on, “Oh boy!” because you’re going to get so many more bookings. And that’s I think something that the ridesharing companies haven’t. And I don’t know if it's possible to create something like that or if the dynamics of the market are just such that it’s not something where you can build a moat like that. But an investor makes me think about those dynamics. Yeah. David, it's really interesting to think about how could Uber, Lyft, Didi, how could ridesharing in general be better at building their flywheels for defensibility. I love that point that the network effects are not as strong as an Airbnb or other businesses, at least in a global sense what could they do to bolster that.…

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