David Rosenthal: recommendation

Transcript context

…It really shows how much power is on the supply side and how little power is on the demand side, where even with user interface innovation like that, they're still meeting the needs of the supply side, which is you've been waiting a long time, you deserve a fair. You deserve fair. Yup, absolutely. Nonetheless, like I said, this was like a drop of water in the desert. Consumers loved it. Concur ended up investing in the company. It's still based in Virginia. It quickly expands to 25 cities around the country. The next year in 2009, a certain venture capitalist who is going to come to play a very large role in this story had been thinking for quite a while about the taxi in the transportation space. He had invested in some other companies that had taken a marketplace approach to disrupting things like restaurant reservations and reviews online. He'd been thinking about this time might be right for an online marketplace for taxis. It was, of course, Bill Gurley at Benchmark. Bill heard about Taxi Magic and Tom. Tom, of course, was a known entrepreneur. Bill flies out to Virginia from Silicon Valley, and he says, this is what I'm looking for. I want to invest in your company. I want Benchmark to lead your Series A. Concur had invested a little bit of money before. I'm going to invest $8 million at a $32 million valuation for the company. He says, but I think we need to think about expanding out of that taxi market and into the black car market, bring them on as well because all the things I was describing about the taxi market are limiting, and you might be able to solve that in the black car market. We can just have a new version of the product, we can keep Taxi Magic. Let's create a new version of the product also called Limo Magic. You can see how if you're the founder of a company, and you have a pretty dead set vision of exactly how you think you're going to run your playbook, how this could be a little jarring.…

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