Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Yup. Both on the capital raising and then on the mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures front. On a normal Acquired episode, I think we would wrap things up here in this already extended extra long episode and say, come back for part two the next time, where we tell everything that all of you know happened after this. Unfortunately, we don't have that luxury because today is the IPO day. We’ve got to get this out. All right, here we go. Extra special. You thought you had enough drama, you didn't have enough drama. What happens next? We fast forward to January of 2017. The annus horribilis for Uber and Travis Kalanick. I think it means it's really bad. I think it's Latin for a terrible year, a horrible year. Everybody knows what happens in 2017 to Uber. I think having told this whole story, the story of Travis's background, and what we were just talking about of this new environment that the company suddenly found, they thought they were going to be the next Google. They thought they were going to be the next eBay or Amazon, but it turned out the dynamics changed. Now they are in this incredibly huge market. All the dynamics changed, and they had to fight all these wars. I can only imagine the toll that that took on the psyche of people at Uber and in particular, on Travis. Just like we've seen with Elon leading up to the episode we did on Tesla and then after that, with everything that's happened with Elon Musk over the last year, that's a lot of weight to carry. I think it's important to keep that in mind as we go through all of these horrible things that are about to happen, and honestly horrible things that Travis either did or was a party to at Uber. At this point, I think we've played the narrative of everyone else has said terrible things about Uber and Travis, and we want to talk about a lot of the amazing things that the company and he did, and a lot of the redeeming qualities. We, by no means want to say that he had a clean slate. Lots of people made really bad decisions and did really bad stuff. I think we should just make sure we're super clear on that. Totally. At the end of the day, everybody's a human, including and especially founders. Humans are capable of being very fallible.…

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