Brad Jacobs

How do we make technology our friend, not our enemy?

I'll give you one very graphic example of something I thought was a trend, and I wrongly thought it was a trend, and I ended up losing a lot of money on it.

Back in, I want to say around 1999 or so, there was this Transportation Equity Act for the 21st century.

It was called T21.

And the idea was to repair all the bridges and the tunnels and the roads and all the decaying infrastructure across the United States.

And the government was going to spend $600 billion to do that.

And I thought that was a trend.

I said, wow, I got to get on this trend.

We're going to see a lot of... By the way, $600 billion back in 1999 was a lot of money.

Today, I don't know how many headlines it would even get.

It's not trillions.

But back then, it was the equivalent of today, $200,000.

And I said, we need to get in this game.

And I went out and I bought a lot of barricade companies and cone rentals and striping and all those things that are orange on the highway of doing reconstruction, bridges and tunnels.

And I said, I'm going to be like the big equipment rental guy, this burgeoning trend of the government refixing all the roads around the country, the infrastructure.

And of course, as governments often do, they didn't spend the $600 billion.

They spent a much smaller fraction of it.

And it didn't go to companies like United Rentals for the large part.

So it just didn't work.

I ended up getting out of the business because it turned out to be a lousy business.