Michael Keaton and ‘the Dream Team’

As the saying goes, “there is no ‘I’ in team”, and the basic underpinning of that statement is universally true, but there is a ‘me’. The importance of the ‘me’ factor in building a team is possibly the single most important element of a successful enterprise. Cabcorner LLC is an enterprise built on the foundation of a great team with a deep and wide variety of specialized skills — and to that end, the team is not defined by any single individual, however, the composition of that team does owe its identity to a single person, Jonathan McKinney, and therein lies the me factor of teams.

“As knowledge is acquired it must be organized and put into use, for a definite purpose, through practical plans. Knowledge has no value except that which can be gained from its application toward some worthy end.”

- Napoleon Hill

One person alone will always face an impossibly difficult task of possessing and mastering all the skills necessary to create a notable operation. The acquisition of knowledge does not need to be shouldered by a single person. In fact, it is best collected and shared among a group of people.

For McKinney, it all began with a call one evening to Jesse Sommer, concerning the nature of web based services and how one might go about establishing one. It wasn’t long before Sommer was acting in the capacity as a strategist for McKinney in his quest to expand his idea into a real business. Shortly after locating a young web developer, based on Sommer’s recommendation, McKinney had the right tools to transform his idea into a functioning and demonstrable concept. Lou Carpino, a long time friend and media specialist, was soon brought into the operation as a media and sales advisor. With the expansion of the team came greater capabilities and thus a need to better understand how enterprises are formed as they move beyond the conceptual stages, and Ajay Rajani, a fellow college buddy of both Sommer and McKinney who is himself a web start-up entrepreneur, was called upon to consult the team. Rajani’s addition brought about the opportunity for McKinney to meet Alison Crisci, a young and very capable PR person who was able to get the major media ball rolling almost immediately. With this media exposure came more opportunities for McKinney to make his argument in the court of popular opinion. The fruits of this exposure brought about opportunities to meet with the former Commissioner of the TLC, Mathew Daus, to bring him on as a key advisor as well as presenting McKinney with enough fire power to make a bid for, and ultimately succeed in, acquiring a major industry competitor while simultaneously bringing the founder of that company, Laurent Kretz, onto his team as a strategist. The acquisition also required particular legal expertise which was ultimately satisfied with the inclusion of Matthew J. Russotti Esq., who is not only a long time friend of McKinney’s, dating all the way back to their grade school days, he too is a graduate of Wesleyan University, which is where Sommer, Rajani and McKinney all went for their undergraduate studies. As with many successful ventures, luck and instinct tend to play a pivotal role at some point in the development of the operation, and in Cabcorner’s case, that luck came in the form of finding a great developer who is willing, able and capable of taking the Cabcorner platform to new levels of sophistication. Stumbling upon Varun Bihani and his very capable team was a stroke of luck and Craigslist serendipity. Rounding out the team is Eric Goldwyn, another long time friend of McKinney’s who is currently pursuing his Doctorate in Urban Transportation at Columbia University and currently serves as their industry advisor.

Teams require an axis around which they are to orbit. The best universally capable teams were born out of a single axis and together the best of them will aim to compete among the stars. In some cases, the mere suggestion of a team is what allows one and all to realize their the dreams.