Venture Capital legends Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley gave great insights about Tesla robotaxi and Uber ridesharing on the BG2 pod. Brad Gerstner founded the $10 billion Altimeter Capital fund. Bill is a general partner at Benchmark, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm in San Francisco, California. Gurley has led investments in and holds board seats on Brighter, DogVacay, Good Eggs, GrubHub, HackerOne, Linden Lab, LiveOps, Nextdoor, OpenTable, Sailthru, Scale Computing, Stitch Fix, Vessel, and Zillow. Gurley reportedly had a close relationship with Uber CEO Travis Kalanick. He was Uber’s most engaged board member and the closest thing Mr. Kalanick had to a consigliere. He left the Uber board in 2017.
The analysis of Tesla robotaxi network was last week. This was before many elements of Tesla robotaxi network were basically confirmed last night on the Tesla earnings call.
There were some in the Tesla shareholder community who expected Tesla to shift to only making robotaxi. This prediction never made any sense for the economic reasons cited by Brad and Bill.
Tesla needs to allow Tesla owners to be part of an open ridehailing network. This rolls out the service faster with lower cost and with more cars. It also lowers the risk for Tesla to put in robotaxi where there is proven demand.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
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I think were getting way ahead of our selves here. Tesla’s “Robotaxi” may be a lot farther off given their current financial “stress”. Their “app” is logical, since if your cars can’t drive themselves, find someone who can.
What financial stress? .. they have a positive cash flow, 25 Billion in cash and very very little debt about 500 million, so they can loan cash with zero problem, so again WHAT FINACIAL STRESS?
This misses the point that it has been Tesla’s announced plan for many years, since the first public plans for FSD robotaxis to release an app for Tesla Network that would let people call rides from Teslas that their owners let operate in the system to ride share. Now that Tesla is confident that Robotaxi level FSD is near it’s very much been expected for YEARS that Tesla would announce this.