David Rosenthal: evaluation

Transcript context

…What is with these people turning down Bill Gurley? What are you doing? I don't know. It was debatable as we go on through the story. For several years, it was probably the best thing and still to this day, the best thing for Bill and Benchmark that all these people did turn them down. They raise a small Angel round. We'll come back to all the history behind this meeting. Eventually, while they're up in San Francisco, they get another call from two guys that want to meet that are also working in the transportation industry, two guys named Ryan Graves and Travis Kalanick, that want to go take them out to lunch, meet with them, understand what their roadmap is, and where they're planning to go with this Cabulous thing. Those three men sit down to lunch, and Ryan says, hey, so are you going to stay in the taxi industry, or are you thinking about the black car industry? Wolpert says, oh, no, no, no, we're going to stay in the taxi industry. We're going to do this with the existing system. We're going to work with the taxi companies. This is a highly regulated industry. This is the only way to go. Ryan and Travis say, thank you very much. They pay for lunch, and they walk out. We'll put a pin in that and come back to it later. The Cabulous would eventually be rebrand as Flywheel. If you see many of the taxis in San Francisco owned by the DeSoto Cab Company, they did a partnership with Flywheel, and they still exist. It is an ordering and dispatch system for taxis. It's one of the best ways to order an actual taxi.…

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