Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…It’s interesting too. I mean it’s just like that market still has so far to go to play out like do you actually have to make the whole car yourself? Could you make kits to put into cars that lots of people are trying to do? Can you just be a pure software platform? I think if I’m the car companies right now and realizing that there’s going to be this driverless future, I think you have to make the bet that people aren’t going to want to buy your cars en masse, but people might want to subscribe to your fleet and it would be like a Mercedes based Uber, like a self-driving Mercedes based Uber and the question is would people rather subscribe to an individual auto manufacturer’s fleet or the things you can do for lock-in there, or would people rather subscribe to a more generic fleet going on Uber. In terms of thinking about themes we’ve talked about on this show a lot, in terms of Ben Thompson’s aggregation theory and owning the customer and the user experience, is Waze, is Google Maps, is that the user experience for driving now and then the cars at the backend. I don’t know. Maybe we should also spend a minute, I think it would be because this is just pure speculation as well as the next topic. But what if Facebook had bought these guys? Like what does the world look like now? Facebook has basically no play in transportation.…

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