Author: Brad Stone
Usher in a new trust economy, helping regular folks to negotiate transportation and accommodations in the age of ubiquitous internet access.
Made the classic mistake that all investors make,’ wrote Fred Wilson, a Twitter backer, a few years later. ‘We focused too much on what they were doing at the time
Silicon Valley’s startup scientists have a name for this phase in a company’s gestation; they call it the Trough of Sorrow, when the novelty of a new business idea wears off and the founders are left trying to jump-start an actual business.
Cockroach was Graham’s word for an unkillable startup that could weather any challenge, and it was the highest possible compliment in his startup lexicon.
‘It’s way more than I deserved. It’s more than any human deserves,’ he told me over breakfast at a New York City café in 2015.
They kicked off the process simply by contacting a friend, Naval Ravikant, who had created an e-mail network of SEC-accredited investors called AngelList.
‘Well, Ryan, because the code is written in Spanish. Welcome to Uber.’
Officers flashed badges, and then one of them held up a clipboard with a cease-and-desist letter and a large, glossy head shot of a smiling Ryan Graves.
The internet could do more than connect people with information and one another in a purely digital realm; it could also efficiently move physical things in the real world.
Concur, one of the most popular makers of expense-account software, acquired Outtask.
This was his fatal mistake. If Seamless Wheels suffered from bad timing and Taxi Magic from stubbornness, Cabulous was doomed by civility.
In other words, he would have had to ruthlessly prioritize the best possible outcome for his company, despite his prior personal commitments.
‘Don’t worry about competitors; startups usually die of suicide, not homicide.’
It’s okay to think about things that may not scale, to break away from the mythology of Silicon Valley,’
(The only phone number on the site redirected the caller to the personal cell phone of Joe Gebbia.)
He had coded the entire site himself, using what was then a new open-source programming language called Ruby on Rails.
hosted the site on the nascent Amazon Web Services,
‘Son, no one from the internet is going to pay you a thousand dollars.’
The spam operation earned Blecharczyk close to a million dollars, he says, and paid his college tuition at Harvard University
Earned him a spot on an online blacklist called Register of Known Spam Operators,
In late 2009, a few months after it had graduated from YC, Airbnb appeared to create a mechanism that automatically sent an e-mail to anyone who posted a property for rent on Craigslist, even if that person had specified that he did not want to receive unsolicited messages.
It allowed users to take a streamlined version of their elegant listing on Airbnb and then cross-post it with a single click on Craigslist. ‘Reposting your listing from Airbnb to Craigslist increases your earnings by $500 a month on average,’
Instead it would take a marketing-minded engineer to dissect the product and build an integration this smooth.’
If a user said he liked yoga, for example, he would see an ad from Airbnb on Facebook that announced ‘Rent Your Room to a Yogi!’ If a person liked wine, he’d see ‘Rent Your Room to a Wine Lover!’ and so on.
CrowdFlower, which relegated menial business tasks to independent workers over the internet,
The company was exhibiting an elusive phenomenon called negative churn, in which users who joined the service were more likely to stay with it and gradually increase their frequency of use than they were to leave.
Wimdu, based in Berlin, was founded, funded, and operated by the Samwers, the fearsome trio of German brothers that Brian Chesky had been warned about.
‘The worst thing you can do to a cloner is to let him keep his baby,’
Without staying a full year or collecting any portion of his fifty thousand shares of stock. What he couldn’t have known was this: in just a few years, those shares would be worth more than a hundred million dollars.
Geidt and Graves based the Seattle operation on the three-person structure in New York. The general manager supervised the overall business in the city and was accountable for its growth. He or she needed to be entrepreneurial, scrappy, and aggressive in talks with regulators. An operations manager, usually an analytical type like a management consultant or investment banker, was in charge of signing up drivers and making sure there were cars for every passenger who opened the app. Finally, a community manager, a creative type with marketing chops, worked to stimulate demand among riders.
‘Technology companies used to be all product and engineering, sitting at its headquarters. When you scale up, you just light up another machine. When we scale we have to get more cars on the ground
Uber basically broke New York City into a series of targeted micro-cities. The execs called it ‘the SoHo strategy,’
“This Travis guy, he is really showing us what is possible.”’
Dynamic pricing wasn’t quite right, Kalanick argued, because prices would never fall below the baseline rate. The term surge pricing, he believed, was more accurate, plus it sounded slightly foreboding, which was precisely the point.
Pao then spent a second week confirming the thesis by breaking Boston’s Uber drivers into two groups. Some saw surging rates at night while others did not. Again, drivers with higher fares during peak times stayed in the system longer and completed more trips. Pao now had something that the previous unfocused tests of surge pricing hadn’t yielded – conclusive math. He presented his findings to Kalanick, showing that
‘You don’t need validation from a venture capitalist. You are past that,’ Robertson told him.
Uber was by and large a law-abider, not a law-bender.
Uber was by and large a law-abider, not a law-bender. Over the next two years, and for surprising reasons, that changed.
It was the first step down a path that would become increasingly important that year: mobilizing Uber’s customers to fight on its behalf.
Pishevar, who started the session by having the Uber logo shaved into the hair on the back of his head.
‘The real issue is how receptive the government is to the progress of the people,’ Kalanick
Our product is so superior to the status quo that if we give people the opportunity to see it or try it, in any place in the world where government has to be at least somewhat responsive to the people, they will demand it and defend its right to exist.
To live in San Francisco in the year 2012 was to wonder, with mounting curiosity, why those weird pink carstaches were suddenly everywhere.
Employees at both Airbnb and Uber remember these dinners well. Says one Airbnb exec who was also close to Uber employees: ‘Brian would come back saying, “We have to be tougher!” and Travis would come back saying, “We have to be nicer!”’
Google’s sixty thousand employees whose collective energies and 20 percent free time at work could be deployed to aid the Uber cause.
Companies could work together to develop Google Maps,
Ubiquity of GPS rendered the Knowledge essentially superfluous in an unkind instant.
Relationships matter. Ethical decision-making matters. Ignoring the established order can be a virtue – until suddenly it’s not. And presenting yourself to the world with a little bit of humility can pay off amply in the long run.