Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Robinhood, Citadel, and all that. They definitely were because at the same time, the Internet is so early. We're in early, mosaic Netscape days, 1992–1993. But David and Jeff, given their backgrounds, and David, having done his PhD at Stanford, know all these people that are starting the Internet. And even Bezos himself. When he was (I think) in college, he had used the Internet when it was fully just command-prompt based and there was no GUI. It was just the very basic protocols, a Unix command terminal, and maybe Telnet was around at that point. There was no World Wide Web. David and Jeff get really excited about this, and David reassigns Jeff as one of the most senior people in the firm. The two of them are going to work together to come up with business plans that they're going to start Internet opportunities within D. E. Shaw. I think the first one that they do is an online retail brokerage for financial trading like E-Trade. It was a competitor to E-Trade. I don't know for sure, but I'm wondering if that may be the third market business that Jeff was working on that might have transformed into this because it makes so much more sense over the Internet.…

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