Andrew Milgram
๐ค SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
So I think the city has an ongoing and vested interest in regulating the system.
The method of that regulation is the medallion.
I also think, look, there is a true moral imperative to the city persisting around the medallion system.
By far, we're large participants in this space, but the largest set of owners in the space continue to be individuals that own medallions.
So the city, and we can talk a little bit about this, we cut an unbelievably forward-looking deal with New York City to protect individual operators.
City has essentially invested a huge amount of money in protecting those drivers and their livelihood and the capital that they've put into the system.
If you were to completely displace that capital, it would obviate all the work and investment that the city has done.
I don't think the city has a real interest in doing that.
And while autonomous will probably someday displace the driver,
and therefore displace their earnings power, you can swap that earnings power for the ability to contribute capital.
So the medallion becomes a capital asset that they contribute into the system, and they can cut an individual economic relationship with whatever autonomous operator is in the system at that time.
So we do think about risk-adjusted returns.
The companies and assets that we invest in, they're distressed.
I always say to our investors, we don't have the benefit of opening up the paper and saying, well, I think this Google thing's got legs.
Let's put some capital in it.
We're looking at problems.
The problems that we end up chasing as investors are problems we think we can solve.
We think that there are structural fixes.
We think there are operational fixes.
But importantly, there are fixes that we think we can tackle.