David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…Of course, very unlikely he had heard of Airbnb because these companies were started within three months of each other. Of course, Airbnb at this time was very far from anything luxury. Brian, Nathan, and Joe, were not hanging out with the crowd that Garrett and Travis were running in. That is for sure. Okay, let's say a little bit more about Travis. Travis is a guy who, right before he officially became the CEO of Uber, he gave a talk on YouTube that we'll link to, and actually a couple of listeners sent to us, which was really great. He introduced himself in the talk, as he says, I like to think of myself as the wolf in Pulp Fiction. He is an interesting, interesting character. I would say, after having now done many, many hours of research on Travis, I think that is a very accurate characterization. He has all of the good and bad qualities of the wolf in Pulp Fiction. If you haven't seen Pulp Fiction, it's an amazing movie. I would assume most listeners have. But go see it and you'll know what we're talking about. Travis grew up in LA, hence the LA connections for Uber. He was born in 1976 in a suburb in the San Fernando Valley outside of LA. His father, Don, had served in the army and was a civil engineer for the city of Los Angeles. Some maybe DNA in the family of thinking about city infrastructure. His mother, Bonnie, sold ads for the newspaper, the Los Angeles Daily News. Travis was super smart. This is something that comes through that I think has gotten lost in the story of Uber and Travis over the last two years. He is incredibly smart and very much a human, as we will see, and very fallible, but very smart. The lore is, when he was growing up, in middle school, he got extremely good grades. He was top of his class and everything. In middle school, he was bullied because of that. Apparently, he made a decision one day in middle school to stand up to the bullies that he wasn't going to take it anymore. The way he was going to deal with the bullies is he was going to become hyper aggressive and give it right back to them. That is how things go. He also was naturally quite athletic. He played football in high school, he ended up running track. He was an excellent track runner. In high school, he essentially turned himself into a jock, but he didn't stop studying either and turn off his brain. While he was still in high school, when he took the SATs, he got a 1580 on the SATs, he aced the math section. He got an 800 on math and a 780 on verbal. I can't imagine, this also says something about the guy that we know these numbers.…

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