David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah. So Waze’s magical insight is that there’s a whole bunch of data being collected on the road by other drivers all the time that can indicate things passively like oh, there’s high traffic there because people are going really slow. Now, Google has been doing that for a long time. They introduced that in 2009 based on data being fed back from Android. But what Waze does is it both plugs you in with a social network based on Facebook or importing your contacts and you can, while you’re driving, report things like red light cameras, like police officers, like traffic accidents and you kind of get a real-time map when you’re driving on the incidents on the road. This is really cool because before Waze, there’s kind of like all of navigation and mapping was this like top-down thing where like TomTom or Garmin, like they had their data set that was canonical. Even Google was collecting it from Android phones, but before that, they were just buying it from these other companies. But the key insight in Waze was like people are driving around with this stuff like they should be sending data back about what’s going on in real time. So, yeah, cool history about how this started. So Waze is actually an Israeli company, and this is our first acquisition that we’re covering out of Israel. It was started in 2006 by five cofounders. I don’t know if I’m saying this right, Ehud Shabtai was the main founder and CTO. He was joined by Amir and Gili Shinar, Uri Levin, and Arie Gillon. And who’d had been given an old GPS system – well, new at the time but now old to our view GPS system – by a friend. You know, those things that, like, my dad still has one of these that are like the portable things like a Garmin type thing. Yeah, like in once a year or something you can download all the new map tiles.…

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