Uber for X
description: a shorthand for describing startups that aim to emulate the business model of the ride-sharing company Uber in other industries.
117 results
Hustle and Gig: Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy
by Alexandrea J. Ravenelle · 12 Mar 2019 · 349pp · 98,309 words
2014, the average idle time fell by 42% and average hourly partner earnings increased by 33%.”47 Drivers were split on the rate changes for Uber. For instance, Gerald, a fifty-nine-year-old African American man who began driving for Uber in 2012, saw an immediate drop in his income: “When
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their identities would be hidden, one Uber driver emailed me after an interview to reiterate the importance of not mentioning him by name. He explained, “Uber for me is a feeling like ‘when you get really drunk and regret whatever you did last night.’ That’s exactly it. I really don’t
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snapped a photo of Fido’s filthy business and someone in a Prius would come by and collect it for you.”2 Hailed as the “Uber for dog poop,” the service promised potential workers the same perks as many other sharing economy services: “Work on your terms. Scoop when you want, earn
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declined to support their company because they weren’t classifying workers as independent contractors. “There was this whole trend at the time because of Uber. ‘Uber for anything . . .’ It was like heroin for VC [venture capitalists]. . . . [T]hey were all going on to Uber’s model, where you put a lot of
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’s Unicorn.” Slate, October 27. ———. 2016a. “The Dirty Secret of Airbnb Is That It’s Really, Really White.” Quartz, June 23. ———. 2016b. “There Is an Uber for Blood.” Quartz, April 1. ———. 2017. “New York State Just Dealt Another Blow to Uber’s Business Model.” Quartz, June 13. Guerrero, Maria. 2016. “Seattle Uber
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. Apartments Are Listed on Airbnb.” Los Angeles Times, December 17. Potts, Monica. 2015. “The Post-ownership Society.” Washington Monthly, June–August. Price, Emily. 2016. “This ‘Uber for Dog Poop’ App Is Definitely Fake—Sorry, Sharing Economy Enthusiasts.” Fast Company, July 29. PricewaterhouseCoopers. 2015. The Sharing Economy. Consumer Intelligence Series. PricewaterhouseCoopers. April. www
Humans as a Service: The Promise and Perils of Work in the Gig Economy
by Jeremias Prassl · 7 May 2018 · 491pp · 77,650 words
of manipulating supply by forcing workers constantly to compete against each other for the next task goes a long way towards achieving low wage levels. Uber, for example, has been reported to contact drivers with promises of ‘high demand’ and ‘big weekends’ in particular * * * 60 Lost in the Crowd cities or location
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time through increased labour-market participation for traditionally excluded groups, from immigrant workers to homebound carers. This can make a real and markedly positive difference. Uber, for * * * 78 The Innovation Paradox example, has long been hailed for its creation of new job opportunities in France’s banlieues, the Paris suburbs suffering from
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misclassification; when employers fail to pay National Insurance and pension contributions, taxpayers lose out too. In France, social security administrators URSSAF and ACOSS are pursuing Uber for several million euros’ worth of contributions that the platform has refused to pay, insisting that its drivers are but independent contractors.15 Regulators around the
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&emc=rss&_r=3, archived at https://perma.cc/3VC9-HRG8 65. Ibid. 66. Casey Newton, ‘TaskRabbit is blowing up its business and becoming the Uber for everything’, The Verge (17 June 2014), http://www.theverge.com/2014/6/17/ 5816254/taskrabbit-blows-up-its-auction-house-to-offer-services-on-demand
Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber
by Mike Isaac · 2 Sep 2019 · 444pp · 127,259 words
a thoughtful conversation about changing taxi regulations. This is about one company thinking it is above the law.” Novick and Hales had tried to tell Uber for months that the company couldn’t just roll into town and set up shop just because it was ready to do so. The taxi union
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the urban fabric of a city, and how strong personalities can have an outsized effect on shaping the way a startup operates. I began covering Uber for the New York Times in 2014. Those were Uber’s glory days, when Kalanick’s cunning and street-fighting sensibilities helped to outwit competitors, seal
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model as innovative and disruptive, something akin to “Airbnb for cars.” Ironically, in just a few years startups would begin to describe themselves as the “Uber for x.” “Choose your car, driver and price and get exactly what you pay for,” as one TechCrunch article by Arrington said. “Help break the back
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’s so woven into the political machinery and fabric that a lot of people owe him favors.” But this was window dressing. Kalanick had designed Uber for battle. If government decided to push back in any individual city, Kalanick quickly weaponized his users against City Hall. Uber would blast emails out
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pushed headlong into the market illegally, much to the consternation of the local Public Utility Commission. The city would levy a $12-million fine on Uber for its 120,000 violations of the transit code. (The company settled the matter for $3.5 million.) By then it didn’t matter. Uber was
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the idea that Uber was misogynistic, a company that didn’t care about women, and offered a service that wasn’t safe. American press skewered Uber for the incident, which reinforced every negative stereotype that people held about Uber. The Indian response was much more severe. Indian officials, sensing public outrage, immediately
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thought would be a fair deal. But they had vastly different ideas of what fairness entailed. Lyft’s founders wanted a 10 percent stake in Uber for selling their company. Kalanick and Michael wanted something closer to 8 percent. As the sides worked toward a compromise—apparently one that did not include
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. Kalanick didn’t just attack Lyft’s userbase, he went after their best personnel. Travis VanderZanden was an entrepreneur who sold his startup, Cherry—the “Uber for carwashes”—to Lyft in 2013. VanderZanden was a “hustler,” which Kalanick admired. In just a year, VanderZanden had risen to be Lyft’s chief operating
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Valley had led the country off a cliff, and Big Tech was profiting from the strife. Travis Kalanick had spent the past two years steeling Uber for a Clinton presidency. He spun up teams of lobbyists in every market that mattered. He wanted them ready to deal with an incoming administration that
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, Fowler had had enough. Disgusted with Uber, she negotiated a job offer from another tech company. A few months after the jacket incident, she left Uber for good. It was raining on that Sunday morning in early 2017, just two months after Fowler had left Uber, when she decided to go public
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new startup, Otto, in May of 2016, four months after leaving Google. Then, in August, just three months later, he sold the new company to Uber for over $600 million. Page was immediately alarmed; the company was already embroiled in arbitration with Levandowski, suing him months ago for allegedly using Google’s
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that all companies engage in. It was called market research. Buying intelligence from third-party firms to gain an edge was normal. Anyone who criticized Uber for running a slick spy unit should have seen things before Sullivan had arrived, when Uber’s systems were in utter disarray, every employee had access
What's Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy
by Tom Slee · 18 Nov 2015 · 265pp · 69,310 words
end the era of poorly paid cab drivers any time soon. If the pay is really so poor, why do so many people drive for Uber? For those who have a car, driving for Uber is a way of converting that capital into cash; some underestimate the costs involved with full-time
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individual hitchhiker remained very low.23 When an Indian woman sued Uber in India after being raped by her driver, the city of Delhi banned Uber for failing to carry out adequate driver checks. Terrible things happen to people in hotel rooms and taxis too, but there is a mechanism to hold
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Reregulation: The Paradox of Market Failure.” University of Denver College of Law, Transportation Law Journal 24, no. 1 (1996): 73–120. DePillis, Lydia. “At the Uber for Home Cleaning, Workers Pay a Price for Convenience,” September 10, 2014. http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/storyline/wp/2014/09/10/at-the
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-uber-for-home-cleaning-workers-pay-a-price-for-convenience/. D’Onfro, Jillian. “Uber CEO Founded The Company Because He Wanted To Be A ‘Baller In San
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-a. Watters, Audrey. “The MOOC Revolution That Wasn’t.” The Kernel, August 23, 2015. http://kernelmag.dailydot.com/issue-sections/headline-story/14046/mooc-revolution-uber-for-education/. Weise, Karen. “This Is How Uber Takes Over a City.” Bloomberg Business, June 23, 2015. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-06-23
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with Amazon Home Services.” 8 Wohlsen, “Google Pours Millions Into New Tech Gold Rush: Housecleaning.” 9 Jordan, “Unpacking the Grocery Stack.” 10 DePillis, “At the Uber for Home Cleaning, Workers Pay a Price for Convenience.” 11 Geron, “Startup Homejoy Works With Public Sector To Find Home Cleaners.” 12 Roose, “Does Silicon Valley
The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World
by Brad Stone · 30 Jan 2017 · 373pp · 112,822 words
clash with city regulators likely changed the course of this tale. Garrett Camp had been trying to get his friend Travis Kalanick more involved with Uber for almost two years. From the mad sprint on the morning of Barack Obama’s inauguration to their adventures at South by Southwest in Austin, the
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a little wind at his back. It often felt like he thought he had an obligation to the entrepreneurs’ society of the world to play Uber for all that it was worth.” Kalanick, the combative CEO who had something to prove in the wake of his past business failures, and Gurley, the
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hand, among other infractions. Then they impounded his car for the Martin Luther King Day long weekend. Standing in front of the press, Linton slammed Uber for unleashing regulatory havoc in the city. “What they’re trying to do is be both a taxi and a limousine,” he said. “Under the way
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Wall Street desperate to capitalize on the success of the upstarts and the Chinese ridesharing giant Didi raising its own enormous war chest to challenge Uber for global supremacy, the two companies together would raise more than $15 billion. They would be worth close to $100 billion before offering a single share
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’s most persuasive evangelists. Here was a group that loved the company and what it stood for, demonstrating a kind of loyalty and passion that Uber, for example, would never see from its drivers. Among the hosts I met that week were Tanny Por, a so-called superhost who rents out a
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, where thirty drivers were convicted of operating an illegal taxi service, forcing the company to suspend UberPop there;10 in Spain, where a judge banned Uber for a year, charging it with “unfair competition,” and ordered Spanish internet providers to block access to the Uber app within the country; this came after
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month in the New York area. The ads featured a series of African American and Latino Uber drivers talking to an off-camera interviewer, crediting Uber for giving them work and levying some indirect charges against the yellow-taxi industry and the mayor. “People have access to an Uber in places where
Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work
by Sarah Kessler · 11 Jun 2018 · 246pp · 68,392 words
too slow for Silicon Valley. If SXSW was the high school prom of the startup world, TechCrunch was its cheerleader. The tech blog trumpeted each “Uber for X” app’s arrival with headlines such as: POSTMATES AIMS TO BE THE UBER OF PACKAGES—AND MORE WOULD YOU USE AN
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OF PRIVATE JETS, RELEASES ITS IPHONE APP SO I FLEW IN AN “UBER FOR TINY PLANES” MEET STAT, THE STARTUP THAT WANTS TO BE UBER FOR MEDICAL TRANSPORT Startups made Uber for food. Uber for alcohol. Uber for cleaning. Uber for courier services. Uber for massages. Uber for grocery shopping. Uber for car washes. Even Uber for weed. Uber itself hinted that it would take its business model far beyond
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business model worked for calling cars, it could work for any other service, too. By the end of 2013, 13 startups that described themselves as “Uber for” something had raised venture capital, according to TechCrunch’s funding database. And by 2014, New York Magazine would count an astounding number of
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“Uber for X” startups—14 separate companies—in the laundry category alone. Eventually the true independence of the micro-entrepreneurs these businesses relied upon would be challenged
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” would attract attention to the ways in which the rest of the economy was unprepared for the future of work. But at the height of “Uber for X,” few people in the startup world batted an eye. As the then-CEO of the odd job–marketplace TaskRabbit put it, the gig economy
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APPLY,” in all caps. After drivers signed up, the company would deduct their weekly car payments directly from their Uber earnings.5 In New York, Uber for years referred drivers to dealers who offered similar subprime loans (the company has since shut down Xchange Leasing and ended its subprime car leasing program
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that giving a thing like food only temporarily met physical needs, but with work came dignity and a path out of poverty. Since 2008, before Uber for everything, the non-profit had been making work contracts with tech companies like Getty Images, Google, and eBay. Those clients would have probably outsourced tasks
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Silicon Valley, that it would serve as a conduit for opportunities that had otherwise left his small town, and others like it, behind. CHAPTER 4 UBER FOR X Travis Kalanick joined his first startup more than ten years before co-founding Uber, dropping out of the University of California, Los Angeles, to
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track jackets and T-shirts—each branded with a white “Q” that matched the water bottles—and hoped for the best. In Silicon Valley, other “Uber for X” entrepreneurs were solving the service portion of their businesses in a similar way. Though some hired subcontractors, like Managed by Q, and some hired
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had been founded more than a decade prior, in 1999 and 2003. (Those websites had combined to form Upwork in 2013.) But the proliferation of “Uber for X” demonstrated how new technology could be used to manage workers as well as coordinate work among them. Even traditional websites like Upwork soon began
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this type of work: Clients hand over assignments to workers, who complete them without any guidance from Upwork. But with the arrival of Uber and “Uber for X” startups, an inherent conflict emerged. On one hand, these companies wanted to develop a reputation for providing great service, so that customers would begin
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’s an open schedule, so you can work when you want.” Carol responded with a question. “Do you know Uber?” she asked. “We’re like Uber for the home.” She started another video, this one in which the featured cleaner had a British accent. “Being an independent contractor, for me, it just
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about “Tito C.” or “Ranu T.” and others telling horror stories about theft, sporadic quality, and annoyance at different cleaners showing up every time. Many “Uber for X” companies had, like Handy and Managed by Q, taken on services that were more complex than Uber’s job of getting customers from point
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of Q” had the potential to “revolutionize many industries that operate underneath.”4 Many investors were, like Belsky at the time, still enamored with the “Uber for X” strategy, and to keep them interested, Managed by Q would need to justify its decision to invest in jobs instead. It planned to compare
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the reasons that Dan and Saman had argued—training, motivation, and consistency of service—and also for the sake of avoiding lawsuits, switching from an “Uber for X” model to one that relied on employees had become a new trend in the gig economy. Instacart, a startup that delivers groceries and once
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by Q was still far from profitable, and the journey was not getting any easier. PART IV BACKLASH CHAPTER 10 THE MEDIUM IS THE MOVEMENT “Uber for X” startups quickly became synonymous with the on-demand economy. Thanks to Uber’s business model, city dwellers who were merely wealthy, and not disgustingly
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Uber to pay him to drop his organizing efforts. There were plenty of driver-led efforts to protest fare cuts that hadn’t involved asking Uber for a payment, though it’s hard to identify one that got much traction. In the course of my time with Abe I also started talking
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as an effective lever for change. Dynamo at that point looked more like a ghost town than the future of labor organizing.26 CHAPTER 11 UBER FOR POLITICS Politicians noticed the gig economy and its promise to shape the future of work sometime around 2015. That September, I met Mark Warner, the
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more meaningful than most of the startups he’d been exposed to, which worked on new ways to serve online ads or advertised themselves as Uber for delivering pet supplies. “We don’t know very much about anything outside of Earth; space has the biggest mysteries of life,” Curtis said, before admitting
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People Earn What They Earn and What You Can Do Now to Make More. Cambridge University Press, 2012. 5 Uber Newsroom. New Survey: Drivers Choose Uber for Its Flexibility and Convenience. December 7, 2015. https://newsroom.uber.com/driver-partner-survey/. 6 Quoted in Hatton, Erin. The Rise of the Permanent Temp
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Survey of Crowdworkers. International Labour Office. 2016. 3 The IBO Gary worked for declined to comment on this. CHAPTER 7 1 DePillis, Lydia. At the Uber for Home Cleaning, Workers Pay a Price for Convenience. Washington Post. September 10, 2014. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/storyline/wp/2014/09/10/at-the
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-uber-for-home-cleaning-workers-pay-a-price-for-convenience/?utm_term=.9e26416360e0. 2 Khaleeli, Homa. The Truth about Working for Deliveroo, Uber, and the On-Demand
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-lyft-drivers-pay-exclusive/exclusive-lyft-drivers-if-employees-owed-millions-more-court-documents-idUSKCN0WM0NO?feedType=RSS&feedName=technologyNews. 4 Chayka, Kyle. It’s Like Uber for Janitors, with One Huge Difference. Bloomberg. October 9, 2015. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2015-10-09/it-s-like
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-uber-for-janitors-with-one-big-difference%0A. 5 Kessler, Sarah. Why a New Generation of Uber for X Businesses Rejected the Uber for X Model. Fast Company. March 29, 2016. https://www.fastcompany.com/3058299/why-a-new-generation
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UberX unions and valuation worker benefits worker earnings worker equity packages worker expenses Xchange Leasing See also Campbell, Harry; Husein, Mamdooh; Kalanick, Travis; Leadum, Mario “Uber for X” model “Uberization” of work UN International Labour Office unemployment unemployment benefits unicorns (high-valuation startups) Unionen (Swedish white-collar trade union) unions. See labor
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The End of the Job 1 A Very Old New Idea 2 No Shifts. No Boss. No Limits. 3 The Best of Bad Options 4 Uber for X PART II Sunshine, Rainbows, and Unicorns 5 Like an ATM in Your Pocket 6 Uber Freedom PART III Fine Print 7 A Competing Story
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8 Don’t Call Us 9 The Good Jobs Strategy PART IV Backlash 10 The Medium Is the Movement 11 Uber for Politics PART V The Future of Work 12 Pivot 13 A Very Serious Issue Epilogue Acknowledgments Notes Index About the Author Copyright GIGGED. Copyright © 2018
Wild Ride: Inside Uber's Quest for World Domination
by Adam Lashinsky · 31 Mar 2017 · 190pp · 62,941 words
maverick reputation quickly gave way to the perception of a company that considered itself above the law. Drivers traveled a relatively short path from loving Uber for the cash it put in their pockets to complaining that Uber was paying them less and denying them the full benefits of employment. (Nearly 400
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AT&T account in their history. We had a few hundred thousand phones at some point.” Holidays would prove to be significant inflection points for Uber, for both good and ill, during that first year of operations. Rob Hayes, the seed-round investor from First Round Capital, had a bird’s-eye
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businesses to do in their industries what Uber had done in transportation. “People were calling and telling us their ideas for ‘Uber for everything,’” says Droege. Nothing was off-limits: Uber for dry cleaning, Uber for house painting, and so on. Droege listened, and he also embarked on a months-long study of what specific projects
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practices of a public company, without having a publicly traded stock.” A peek at those numbers reveals why investors were so keen to invest in Uber. For example, in late 2015, when Uber raised money at a valuation of $62.5 billion, its annualized gross bookings were about $13.5 billion, according
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view. There’s definitely good things about it. But there’s this whole laundry list of challenges. Like, have you ever tried to e-mail Uber for help? They don’t know what they’re doing.” What started as a writing project became a business built on filling in the holes of
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as the #DeleteUber storm abated, the allegations of ignored complaints of sexual harassment from a female engineer became the next social-media storm to engulf Uber. For all the controversies and its constant stay in the spotlight, then, Uber is like nothing that came before it. At just a few years of
Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work
by Alex Rosenblat · 22 Oct 2018 · 343pp · 91,080 words
have some knowledge of it or experiences with it. I have also spoken with or interviewed some taxi drivers, especially in cities that are “pre-Uber.” For years, I have also kept up with many online forums for Uber drivers. Toward the end of 2017, the forums I followed had about three
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exploiting us. This may already trouble users of consumer platforms like Google or Facebook, but the stakes are higher when workers rely on platforms like Uber for their livelihoods. These parallels also demonstrate that even if Uber were to disappear tomorrow, it would leave behind a legacy of important shifts that will
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that every new company, from domestic cleaning platforms like Handy to the multi-industry temping platform Fiverr, wanted to idolatrously claim their service as the “Uber for X.”33 Many of these imitators went belly-up, including Prim, for on-demand laundry services; HomeJoy, a home-cleaning marketplace; Tutorspree, for tutoring; and
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from Atlanta or Karen in New Orleans, I conducted a phone interview with Mike, an Uber driver in Savannah, Georgia. He’d been driving for Uber for two to three months when we spoke. When I asked him if he thought driving for Uber was like being an entrepreneur, he paused before
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a fundamental disconnect between what’s optimal for Uber and what’s best for its drivers. This kind of economics debacle isn’t unique to Uber: for example, Egypt was able to improve its growth and overall macroeconomic performance in the years right before the 2011 revolution, yet official figures indicated that
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practices from Silicon Valley and applies them to an employment context. To understand how extractive practices have been woven into Uber’s system requires leaving Uber for a moment in order to look at all the ways that other supposedly neutral systems can affect our lives in decidedly unneutral ways. HOW PLATFORM
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or what we’re willing to pay as customers. How information is represented to us is a source of great tension in technology culture beyond Uber. For example, we implicitly expect GPS navigation systems like Google Maps to have full and accurate maps, and we trust these services to produce accurate route
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system. One driver posted a remark in a forum in the summer of 2015 about a passenger he had picked up who cursed and bashed Uber for doubling the cost of her ride through surge pricing, which was 2.1 times more than the base price. He wrote, “At the time I
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because of her justifiably scathing critiques.43 And during the legal proceedings of a suit launched by Waymo (Alphabet’s self-driving car unit) against Uber for allegedly stealing proprietary trade secrets about self-driving cars, a former Uber employee accused Uber of massive corporate espionage.44 Uber has a history of
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consumers, labor advocates, and business school professors. Sociologists nodded somberly at their precarity, while slacktivists (or clicktivists) online lobbed a steady stream of criticisms at Uber for practices that some perceive as exploitative. For a brief time, the fate of drivers was of unusually deep concern to Uber’s users and stakeholders
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drivers often treat them interchangeably, to the point where some get confused in describing their Uber or Lyft experiences. A driver might be frustrated at Uber for not respecting a rule set by Lyft, for example, but for the most part this ambiguity centers on issues of pay, safety, and policies. For
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7, 2016, https://medium.com/tow-center/the-end-of-the-news-as-we-know-it-how-facebook-swallowed-journalism-60344fa50962. 15. Amy Webb, “The ‘Uber for X’ Fad Will Pass Because Only Uber Is Uber,” Wired, December 9, 2016, www.wired.com/2016/12/uber-x-fad-will-pass-uber-uber
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Uber, like Airbnb, or preceded Uber, like TaskRabbit, are overshadowed by Uber’s prominence as the face of the sharing economy. For discussion of the “Uber for X” phenomenon, see Nathan Heller, “Is the Gig Economy Working?” New Yorker, May 15, 2017, www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/05/15/is-the-gig
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-economy-working. 34. Juggernaut, “11 Uber for X Startups That Failed— Are You Making the Same Mistakes?” April 28, 2015, http://nextjuggernaut.com/blog/11-uber-for-x-startups-that-failed-are-you-making-the-same-mistakes/. 35. Aaron Smith, “Gig Work, Online
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Transportation Network Company Activity,” June 2017, www.sfcta.org/sites/default/files/content/Planning/TNCs/TNCs_Today_112917.pdf. 5. Jessica, “New Survey: Drivers Choose Uber for Its Flexibility and Convenience,” Uber Newsroom, December 7, 2015, https://newsroom.uber.com/driver-partner-survey/. 6. Lyft, “Explore,” February 14, 2018, www.lyft.com
The Gig Economy: A Critical Introduction
by Jamie Woodcock and Mark Graham · 17 Jan 2020 · 207pp · 59,298 words
of workers on demand to those who need them. In a world where people are talking about ‘Uber’ as a verb: ‘the Uber for dog walking’, ‘the Uber for doctors’, and even ‘the Uber for drugs’, it is important to understand both the histories and futures of this emerging – and increasingly normalized – model of work. The
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kinds of work. There are now attempts the world over to introduce the gig economy model into almost every conceivable sector; to create the next Uber for X. As platforms expand into ever more sectors of the economy, we do not yet know which jobs will and will not become Uberized. However
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gig economy are misclassified as self-employed: a strategy that clearly offers more benefits to platforms than it does to workers. In the case of Uber, for example, this was supported by the employment judge in the workers’ rights tribunal who stated: ‘The notion that Uber in London is a mosaic of
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drivers across the world.4 It holds so much brand recognition that the company is regularly used as a synonym for new platform ideas: the ‘Uber for X’ (Srnicek, 2017: 37), or even becoming a verb: to Uberize, meaning ‘to change the market for a service by introducing a different way of
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booked through Uber, he could only say it was ‘my customer, but I don’t know the name, or the address, but I’ll ask Uber for it’. Uber refused to provide details for reasons relating to data privacy. Uber then refused to release the information without a court order. What this
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. However, the high-profile nature of transport and delivery platforms, particularly Uber and Deliveroo, means that they often dominate discussions around the gig economy. The ‘Uber for X’ shorthand gives a good sense of how that model has come to dominate this kind of work. However, despite Uber (and Deliveroo) becoming the
Whistleblower: My Journey to Silicon Valley and Fight for Justice at Uber
by Susan Fowler · 18 Feb 2020 · 205pp · 71,872 words
published its own damning account of Uber’s culture. The day after that, Waymo, a subsidiary of Google that was developing self-driving cars, sued Uber for patent infringement and trade secret theft. Less than a week later, a video leaked of Travis Kalanick berating an Uber driver. And that was only
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a long time and had been trying to quietly change it from the inside. Waymo, a Google subsidiary that was developing self-driving cars, sued Uber for patent infringement and trade secret theft, and a video leaked of Travis Kalanick berating an Uber driver. There was something validating about all the stories
Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation
by Paris Marx · 4 Jul 2022 · 295pp · 81,861 words
Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century
by W. David Marx · 18 Nov 2025 · 642pp · 142,332 words
The Long History of the Future: Why Tomorrow's Technology Still Isn't Here
by Nicole Kobie · 3 Jul 2024 · 348pp · 119,358 words
Work in the Future The Automation Revolution-Palgrave MacMillan (2019)
by Robert Skidelsky Nan Craig · 15 Mar 2020
Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World
by Meredith Broussard · 19 Apr 2018 · 245pp · 83,272 words
Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It
by Azeem Azhar · 6 Sep 2021 · 447pp · 111,991 words
Virtual Competition
by Ariel Ezrachi and Maurice E. Stucke · 30 Nov 2016
Matchmakers: The New Economics of Multisided Platforms
by David S. Evans and Richard Schmalensee · 23 May 2016 · 383pp · 81,118 words
The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future
by Sebastian Mallaby · 1 Feb 2022 · 935pp · 197,338 words
Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups
by Ali Tamaseb · 14 Sep 2021 · 251pp · 80,831 words
Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork
by Reeves Wiedeman · 19 Oct 2020 · 303pp · 100,516 words
How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age
by Andrew Keen · 1 Mar 2018 · 308pp · 85,880 words
What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing
by Ed Finn · 10 Mar 2017 · 285pp · 86,853 words
Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World
by Clive Thompson · 26 Mar 2019 · 499pp · 144,278 words
Street Smart: The Rise of Cities and the Fall of Cars
by Samuel I. Schwartz · 17 Aug 2015 · 340pp · 92,904 words
Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us
by Dan Lyons · 22 Oct 2018 · 252pp · 78,780 words
Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future
by Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson · 26 Jun 2017 · 472pp · 117,093 words
Terms of Service: Social Media and the Price of Constant Connection
by Jacob Silverman · 17 Mar 2015 · 527pp · 147,690 words
The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work Does Not Pay
by Guy Standing · 13 Jul 2016 · 443pp · 98,113 words
The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Will Create the Future
by Vivek Wadhwa and Alex Salkever · 2 Apr 2017 · 181pp · 52,147 words
The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future
by Kevin Kelly · 6 Jun 2016 · 371pp · 108,317 words
The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism
by Arun Sundararajan · 12 May 2016 · 375pp · 88,306 words
Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain
by James Bloodworth · 1 Mar 2018 · 256pp · 79,075 words
Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies
by Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh · 14 Apr 2018 · 286pp · 87,401 words
Platform Capitalism
by Nick Srnicek · 22 Dec 2016 · 116pp · 31,356 words
Who Needs the Fed?: What Taylor Swift, Uber, and Robots Tell Us About Money, Credit, and Why We Should Abolish America's Central Bank
by John Tamny · 30 Apr 2016 · 268pp · 74,724 words
Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley
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