ubercab Concepts

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber

by Mike Isaac · 2 Sep 2019 · 444pp · 127,259 words

key, who would later go on to found the startup StyleSeat. And then there was Camp, who wouldn’t stop talking about his idea for UberCab. He chattered incessantly to Kalanick about its possibilities. “Did you know taxi medallions can cost, like, a half a million dollars a year?” he’d

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to find fares. There had to be a better way to give people rides. Camp couldn’t leave out the best part. They’d market UberCab to professionals in dense cities—people like themselves—and try to make it feel exclusive, almost like a club. You’ve got to be a

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, Graves was still an aimless twentysomething, one of many trying to hit it big in the startup world. Taking a chance on a gig at UberCab seemed like a cool thing to do. Graves looked like the captain of the football team. He was 6'3" with dirty blond hair, a

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shepherd” machismo. Kalanick appreciated Graves’s audacity, hustle, and energy. Graves was game for anything. Shortly thereafter, the twenty-six-year-old Ryan Graves became UberCab’s first full-time hire. “I’ll be at the ground floor of a startup that has the opportunity to change the world,” Graves posted

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met him, the answer to those questions was no. During the early days under Graves’s CEO tenure, co-founder Camp began tweeting cryptically about UberCab. They hadn’t announced anything about their new venture yet, but the three men teased their “stealth startup,” a commonly used phrase to build allure

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, offering advice and strategy. Hayes and Sacca’s seed investments would one day be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. That first seed round gave UberCab enough runway to build the essentials of a real startup. After working out of Hayes’s office at First Round Capital for months, the

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UberCab team rented desks in a shared workspace and started bringing on early team members. Hayes, Sacca and others agreed: Graves was a great guy, but

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to the CEO role, he insisted on being given a larger ownership stake in the company. It was important, Kalanick believed, that the leader of UberCab have complete say over his company’s path forward, which meant he should hold majority control. Kalanick didn’t care about his salary; he already

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’t keep a straight face. “People are seriously pumped about this change,” Arrington wrote. The first version of UberCab was not an app. Users logged in to a desktop computer browser, navigated to UberCab.com, requested a black car and, in theory, would receive a ride within ten minutes or less for

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the reliability and convenience of on-demand service. Soon enough, the company farmed out development, and contract programmers hacked together a rudimentary version of an UberCab iPhone app. It was buggy and slow, but it worked. Camp, a sucker for luxury, focused on branding. He was fixated on maintaining a fleet

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to Graves, who would Google black car services across San Francisco, show up to their garages, and pitch the bemused fleet staff on driving for UberCab. The company struck an early deal with AT&T, wherein they bought thousands of iPhones in bulk at a discounted price. These they would hand

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out for free to drivers, pre-programmed to run UberCab’s software. The AT&T deal brought Luddite drivers onto the network as quickly as possible. Tens of thousands of dollars in iPhones lined the

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walls of UberCab’s offices, stacked like white bricks. They piled atop one another faster than staff could give them away. Matt Sweeney, an early employee, posed for

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across a pallet of iPhone 4s with his eyes closed, a bed of shrink-wrapped handsets in pristine, minimalist Apple packaging. The tactic worked. New UberCab drivers flooded the market in San Francisco as the handful of early employees began to promote the app to anyone who would listen. The app

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in the App Store rankings, especially after it began receiving glowing initial reviews from the press. TechCrunch, now the company’s favorite industry blog, hailed UberCab’s model as innovative and disruptive, something akin to “Airbnb for cars.” Ironically, in just a few years startups would begin to describe themselves as

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back of the taxi medallion evil empire.” Uber couldn’t have phrased it better itself. Word of mouth spread across San Francisco. Those who tried UberCab swore by it. For everyone who had ever been stranded in Potrero Hill beyond the reach of Muni, or stuck out in the Sunset district

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; for people who got stuck in the city after BART stopped running at midnight—UberCab was exactly the thing San Franciscans had been waiting for. The app pleased its users because Kalanick and Camp had spent a great deal of

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time thinking about user experience, “UX” in tech industry parlance. They believed every part of an UberCab ride, from hailing the driver to exiting the car, should be as easy and enjoyable as possible. A “frictionless” experience, as Kalanick put it, was

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know whether it’d be there in a matter of minutes or if it wouldn’t show up at all. When a user ordered an UberCab, she could watch the car’s journey, pixel by pixel, across the map on the screen of their iPhone. San Francisco’s aging taxicabs were

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grimy, their seats sticky and torn. UberCab’s private black cars would show up spotless, with slick black leather interiors and comfortable air conditioning, replete with wintergreen breath mints and chilled bottles

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of Aquafina. One of the most important parts of the UberCab experience was paying for the ride. Kalanick was insistent that payment was something people shouldn’t even have to think about. With

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UberCab, the ride would simply be charged to a credit card stored on your account. Ending the trip was as simple as opening the door and

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stepping out onto the curb. No tips, no change, no hassles. Soon enough, startup CEOs and venture capitalists started expensing their UberCab rides. Having the Uber app—knowing to order an Uber rather than take your chances with a taxi—became a status symbol

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. UberCab employees printed out dozens of promotional gift cards, handing them out to influential Twitter users and other high-profile members of the Bay Area’s

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it. Within months, Kalanick and Camp’s startup was the talk of Silicon Valley. To prove the company could scale, however, Kalanick needed to replicate UberCab’s success outside the Bay Area. San Francisco felt like kind of a “gimme,” a tech-friendly haven where a sizeable population of young people

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with her life. She had never worked a full-time job outside of the retail industry. The day Geidt applied for an intern position at UberCab, she had been turned down for a barista gig at a Peet’s Coffee shop in downtown Mill Valley, one of the richest parts of

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Northern California per capita—home to many of the people Uber would eventually wish to court for its service. Geidt scored an internship with UberCab before it had a real office or much of a customer base. With no marketable skills and very little idea of what she was doing

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pretty much a no-brainer for the livery company operators, since the cars were just sitting there otherwise,” one early employee said. To kickstart demand, UberCab would dole out incentives to both drivers and riders, a method that proved to be one of the company’s most enduring marketing techniques. Riders

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during the week. And to incentivize customers to return, future fares would be discounted anywhere from 20 to 50 percent, and sometimes given away completely—UberCab footed the bill, paying drivers the difference for those rides. The strategy was pricey, since the company lost money on each subsidized ride. But it

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managers were at the top, and acted as the boss of the individual city. Geidt finally felt like she had found her professional footing. Bringing UberCab into new cities became a routine. She systematized the approach on an internal company Wikipedia-like page, creating a playbook for city launches. Send in

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done in San Francisco in other cities all over the world. As Geidt was perfecting the playbook in the United States, the idea of launching UberCab in foreign countries seemed unimaginable. But before they could even spread outside of California, the group faced an existential crisis. On October 20, 2010, just

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as Uber’s CEO, transportation officials showed up at the offices of the young startup. They hadn’t read TechCrunch and asked to see Graves. UberCab, they said, had been served with a cease and desist order; the company was breaking the law by skirting existing transportation regulations, the San Francisco

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Municipal Transportation Agency said. Every day UberCab was in operation, the company faced fines of up to $5,000 per trip. The potential fines were enough to put the company out of

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business. UberCab was already completing hundreds of trips per day in San Francisco. Moreover, Graves, Kalanick, and other employees faced up to ninety days in jail for

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,” Kalanick repeated. “We’ll drop ‘Cab’ from our name,” he said, something his lawyers claimed gave the company greater legal exposure to false advertising claims. UberCab was now known as “Uber,” and it was staying open for business. Chapter 7 THE TALLEST MAN IN VENTURE CAPITAL Bill Gurley needed to get

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, September 18, 2013, https://www.instagram.com/p/eatIa-juEa/?taken-by=sweenzor. 59 hailed UberCab’s model: Leena Rao, “UberCab Takes the Hassle Out of Booking a Car Service,” TechCrunch, https://techcrunch.com/2010/07/05/ubercab-takes-the-hassle-out-of-booking-a-car-service/. 59 one TechCrunch article by Arrington

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said: Michael Arrington, “What If UberCab Pulls an Airbnb? Taxi Business Could (Finally) Get Some Disruption,” TechCrunch, https://techcrunch.com/2010

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/08/31/what-if-ubercab-pulls-an-airbnb-taxi-business-could-finally-get-some-disruption/. Chapter 7: THE TALLEST MAN IN VENTURE CAPITAL 65 “It’s magic”: GigaOm, “Bill Gurley,

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and, 258 at board meeting to choose Kalanick’s replacement, 321–25 Bonderman and, 278 buys house in San Francisco, 31–32 as CEO of UberCab, 57–58, 60–63 champion’s mindset and, 81–91 charm offensive by, 119–31, 150 company-wide retreats and, 3–4, 7–8 compares

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Valley as epicenter of venture deals, 75 popularity of Uber in, 78, 83 regulators in, 86–87 ride-hailing companies based in, 78 rollout of UberCab in, 59–60, 63 success in, 147 transportation in, 41, 44, 48–49, 59–60, 63, 108–9 Uber offices in, xiii, xiv, xix, 83

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, 84–87 War Room at, 151 winning formula to expansion, 89–90 “X to the x” celebration, 1–8, 242 Uber Advanced Technologies Center, 184 UberCab, 49, 50, 54, 57–60. See also Uber becomes Uber, 63 rollout of, 59–63 Uber Cap Bill, 116, 116n Uber Eats, 338 Uberettos, 3

Wild Ride: Inside Uber's Quest for World Domination

by Adam Lashinsky · 31 Mar 2017 · 190pp · 62,941 words

’s first crisis, the day the previous fall when the city of San Francisco served Uber a cease-and-desist letter. The company, then named UberCab, decided the city had no jurisdiction over it, first because it was merely a technology platform that owned no cars and employed no drivers, and

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. “I like working with people who show up and do the work,” says Anderson. “Travis was an ideal angel.” Compared with what would become of UberCab, one of the companies in which he dabbled during this time, Kalanick’s success rate was modest at best. Some of the companies he advised

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Web. In 2010, Camp was ramping up one of his many ideas, a smartphone app called UberCab that allowed a user to summon a limousine in San Francisco. Kalanick was putting in time with UberCab just as he was with Formspring, which at the time showed far more impressive user growth. In

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going to make money?” reflects Camp. “I told him there’s going to be significant revenue at Uber.” Kalanick says it wasn’t so much UberCab’s potential revenue that made him take the plunge. Instead, he describes the challenge in language that evokes a jigsaw puzzle, a particularly tough one

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to do but that had become part of Camp’s entrepreneurial repertoire: On August 8, 2008, he paid $35 to reserve a Web site, www.ubercab.com. Years later, Uber’s name would represent an overarching strategy of providing transportation services at a massive, global level. For some, the German über

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Hawaii with Evan Williams, cofounder of Twitter, the buzziest new start-up in San Francisco at the time. In the months after Camp reserved his UberCab Web site, in late 2008, he started to circulate his idea among his entrepreneurial social crowd. “It was really just a concept that I was

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to New York, agreed to do some coding for Camp’s prototypes. Salazar in turn recruited some of his friends in Mexico to work on UberCab’s Web site. In San Francisco, one of Camp’s pals was particularly helpful, both for his idea generation and for hosting jam sessions at

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to tromp off to the Eiffel Tower, where they climbed the stairs and rode the elevator to the top and talked more about Camp’s UberCab idea. The conversation became part of the lore of the company’s founding, the moment the two decided to start a company. It is a

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convenient story, particularly for Kalanick, who wasn’t present at the creation of UberCab. Uber’s corporate Web site, in a section labeled “Our Story,” would say that “on a snowy Paris evening in 2008, Travis Kalanick and Garrett

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and pompoms on top, which he had borrowed from his girlfriend at the time.” Back in San Francisco, Camp was beginning to think about his UberCab idea as something that had legs. But the idea took hold slowly. “I have ideas all the time,” he says. “But you’ve got to

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up a bank account with $15,000 to fund the Web site he’d already begun to develop: Ubercab.com. Camp estimates that over its first eighteen months he funneled about $250,000 into UberCab. Because Camp continued to divide his time with StumbleUpon, the process would take most of the year

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of thumbs-up/thumbs-down, I thought that a star rating would probably be better because it would be a little bit higher resolution.” Initially, UberCab existed only on the Web. Its progression to full-fledged iPhone app was a multinational affair. Salazar, Camp’s grad-school buddy from Calgary, already

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first app that would work on Apple’s smartphone platform, called iOS. As things gelled, Camp persuaded Kalanick to take a more active role in UberCab. Kalanick signed on as an adviser, but an active one with a big stake in the fledgling company’s success. “He gave me like ten

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company,” says Kalanick. “I spent a lot of time with the original engineering dudes.” Toward the end of the year Camp was itching to give UberCab a try, but the software wasn’t quite ready. Kalanick hired a software engineering firm called Mob.ly, which later would become the smartphone development

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that kind of sticking with me.” It would prove to be a lucrative observation. Come January 2010, Camp and Kalanick, still dabbling part time on UberCab, were ready to begin testing the service. They also began making plans to launch operations in San Francisco, and they’d need someone to oversee

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: “here’s a tip. Email me :)” Soon after, Camp and Kalanick traveled to New York, along with Yishai Lerner, whose firm, Mob.ly, had redesigned UberCab’s smartphone app. There they met Oscar Salazar, and they arranged for three limo drivers to test the app over the course of a couple

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and his wife, Molly, a kindergarten teacher, made plans to move to San Francisco, where he’d start at UberCab on March 1. Just as Kalanick relied on Twitter to recruit UberCab’s first businessperson, Camp tapped his Canadian software network to identify its first engineer. Conrad Whelan had taken a break

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early part of 2010 to travel across Europe. When he got back he contacted Camp to catch up. Camp asked his vagabond friend to join UberCab. “When I joined the company, you couldn’t actually sign up for the product,” remembers Whelan. “It was just a way to order the car

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-up flows that would take a credit card and make user accounts.” The young company immediately embraced a start-up cliché: the cramped office space. UberCab’s few employees jammed into a conference room lent to them by another start-up, a travel site called Zozi. Ryan McKillen, who knew Graves

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in Spanish. Welcome to Uber.’” (The Spanish code in question was thanks to the Mexican developers Oscar Salazar had hired.) As the engineers beefed up UberCab’s code, Graves began visiting garages in San Francisco to sign up drivers. This task required persistence and patience, particularly when explaining how to use

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Midwesterner with a firm handshake and a broad smile, Graves “looks like he’s in a 1960s cigarette ad,” says Chris Sacca, part of the UberCab advisory crew at the time. “Ryan is a hustle guy. He knows how to walk into a garage full of suspicious Armenian cab drivers and

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: “followers” of Kalanick, Camp, and a few others on Twitter. Compared with a big-company launch, like a new iPhone, for example, the debut of UberCab was low-key. If you weren’t on Twitter you wouldn’t know about it. There was a small group of people in San Francisco

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lifestyle. “There’s nobody that’s got more swagger getting into or out of an Uber than Garrett Camp,” says Kalanick. Within days of launching UberCab, Kalanick, who had taken the title “chief incubator,” and Graves began raising money for the new business. A start-up asking for money needed a

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the livery business was big enough. Bill Gurley at Benchmark Capital had similar reservations. Ram Shriram, who’d made money with Camp on StumbleUpon, felt UberCab didn’t have the right attributes for a technology company. “I told them, ‘I don’t invest in capital-intensive businesses, and I don’t

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to end up with fifteen Lincoln Town Cars in my driveway.’” Numerous investors saw a red flag in Camp and Kalanick’s reluctance to join UberCab full time. And Ryan Graves, three months into his Silicon Valley entrepreneurial career, wasn’t a satisfactory CEO. One investor who saw

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potential was Rob Hayes of First Round Capital. Hayes had been following Camp on Twitter and noticed his periodic references to “UberCab,” though Hayes, a decade older and not a member of the same social scene, had no idea what it was. On June 15, 2010, when

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the new service had been running for just a few weeks, Hayes sent Camp an e-mail titled “UberCab.” The e-mail read, in its entirety: “I’ll bite :-) Can I learn more?” Camp quickly put Hayes together with Graves, who pitched him on

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who had totally given up on taxis that this was going to work here and would likely work in other places.” Other VCs pooh-poohed UberCab because of the limited potential for a limo service. Hayes says he was enthralled not by limos but by how convenient

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UberCab was to use. “I knew that using the existing black-car market as a proxy for how big this could get was wrong. Beyond that

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work. But I knew it was better than what was here today and that it solved a real customer problem.” The entire “seed” round for UberCab’s first investment, led by First Round and also including Chris Sacca’s fund, Lowercase Capital, and a smattering of San Francisco angel investors, was

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. The bet would net the firm billions in return. Money in hand, Kalanick had finally concluded that it was time to go to work for UberCab, which had moved into the offices of First Round Capital, in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood. There was only one job that interested

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friend to the founders, Sacca was well positioned to play go-between in the still highly informal company.) Kalanick also wanted a bigger piece of UberCab than the 10 percent stake Camp had given him originally. He demanded 23 percent, with part of the shares coming from Camp and Graves. Camp

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they were “super pumped” about just about anything. On the day Kalanick became CEO, in October 2010, a man carrying a clipboard showed up at UberCab’s offices looking for Ryan Graves. He brought a cease-and-desist letter from the San Francisco Metro Transit Authority and California Public Utilities Commission

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. “The name UberCab indicates that you are a taxicab company or affiliated with a taxicab company, and as such you are under the jurisdiction of the SFMTA,” it

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been operating in a single city, San Francisco, for four months. For the entire month of September, when Kalanick negotiated his terms for becoming CEO, UberCab transported 427 riders. As it would raise money and expand to a handful of additional cities over the course of the next year, the young

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in the beginning. From left to right: Curtis Chambers, Travis Kalanick, Stefan Schmeisser, Conrad Whelan, Jordan Bonnet, Austin Geidt, Ryan Graves, Ryan McKillen. The early UberCab Web site. Edward Norton was Rider One in Los Angeles in 2012. Ryan Graves and Austin Geidt jamming in Uber’s early days. Shervin Pishevar

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

a cup. “It means great things! It means greatness!” Camp says he contemplated calling this new service ÜberCab or BestCab and finally settled on just UberCab, losing the umlaut. (He registered the domain name UberCab.com in August 2008.) McCloskey loved Camp’s endless examination of new ideas but wasn’t so sure

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coffee, cruising the web, and doing research into the transportation industry and then going out with friends at night. On November 17, 2008, he registered UberCab as an LLC in California. Soon after, hungry for some basic market research, he sent an e-mail to Ferriss asking if the author could

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to New York. During this time, he kept in touch with Camp, and they reunited that December at a delicatessen in lower Manhattan. Camp pitched UberCab to Salazar and asked him to lead development of the prototype. “I have this idea. In San Francisco it’s hard to get a taxi

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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. UberCab was officially in development. And so Camp left for Paris and the LeWeb conference, where he was meeting McCloskey and a close friend and fellow

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mistake inputting their address, the driver wouldn’t be able to find them. The engineers also created the option to request a vehicle through the UberCab website, an idea the company quickly abandoned since few people were surfing the web while they were on the street looking for a cab. The

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for black cars?” Graves was introduced to his first engineer at a bar. Camp had invited another classmate from graduate school, Conrad Whelan, to join UberCab after Whelan told him he was finally ready to leave Calgary. Now that there were two employees, they needed an office. Graves had met the

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Twitter, and Zozi happened to have a small unused windowed conference room in its offices across the street from the iconic Transamerica Pyramid. So the UberCab staff set up shop there, on the second floor, sitting in chairs at a square desk that was wedged against the wall. The company hoped

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for users and drivers to register for the service. Meanwhile, Graves, the CEO, and Kalanick, an adviser now spending about twenty hours a week on UberCab, cold-called and visited San Francisco town-car fleets and pitched the service to the owners. “It was old school dialing for dollars,” Kalanick would

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interesting.” In May, Mob.ly was acquired by Groupon and announced it would shut down its ongoing projects. It was almost disastrous for the fledgling UberCab. Graves had to beg Mob.ly to finish stable versions of the apps for riders and drivers. The company agreed, and in the first week

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of June 2010, UberCab’s apps went live in Apple’s iOS App Store. An idea that had popped into Garrett Camp’s head a year and a half

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reach out to some top investors. A message was sent out to the one hundred and sixty-five investors on AngelList on June 17, 2010. “UberCab is everyone’s private driver,” the e-mail said. “We’re solving the taxi scarcity problem with on demand private cars via iPhone and SMS

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the round with a $600,000 investment. Rob Hayes, a partner at the firm, had backed StumbleUpon and saw Camp Tweeting about UberCab. “I’ll bite—what’s Ubercab?” he e-mailed him. Camp sent Graves to pitch Uber at First Round’s San Francisco offices, and the partners voted unanimously to

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summer so he and Molly could ferry their possessions back across the country. On the drive to San Francisco, he made call after call, pitching UberCab so frequently that Molly could recite the spiel word for word. They happened to pass through Boulder, and Graves stopped to meet Cohen, who liked

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their influential and affluent San Francisco friends, and word began to spread. On July 5, the blog TechCrunch wrote its first story about the app: “UberCab Takes the Hassle Out of Booking a Car Service.” “Of course, convenience has a price,” noted the article’s author, Leena Rao. “You may pay

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was certain she was about to get fired. She had a poorly defined role that at one point required her to hand out flyers for UberCab in downtown San Francisco. Even the trivial act of writing an e-mail would send her scurrying to her older siblings for help and advice

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, when Graves was at a board meeting at First Round Capital with Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp, four government enforcement officers walked into the tiny UberCab office. Two were from the California Public Utilities Commission, which regulated limousines and town cars, and two were from the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency

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people chose to listen and some didn’t. I was part of it, and I accept it. —Thomas DePasquale, founder of Taxi Magic Years before UberCab started ferrying people around cities and AirBed & Breakfast began offering spare couches and bedrooms, a young lawyer named Jason Finger sat down one night at

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far away his car was from the waiting passenger. Taxi Magic expanded quickly to twenty-five cities during 2008, two years before the launch of UberCab in San Francisco. Concur was a major investor and promoted the service to its corporate customers. The app is an “on-demand cab service from

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’ve learned a lot about negotiation since then.” The app debuted on the App Store in the fall of 2009, more than six months before UberCab, and offered some of the elements that would later make Uber special. Unlike Taxi Magic, Cabulous showed the images of cabs on a map, and

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company, despite his prior personal commitments. “I was a Boy Scout. I was going to go with the date that brought me,” he says. When UberCab introduced its black-car service in San Francisco in June 2010, Cabulous was the closest thing it had to a crosstown rival. Tal Flanchraych recalls

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seeing an Uber job posting on Craigslist that spring. It was headlined “UberCab Sr Engineer: ground floor gig at BALLER location startup” and announced that Uber was looking to find engineers to help it build a ground transportation

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Kalanick left quickly. Over the next few months Cabulous warily circled Taxi Magic, drawing up expansion plans and jockeying to sign up taxi fleets. Then UberCab, with its more elegant app and deluxe black-car experience, started gathering momentum, plaudits, and venture capital, and it eventually blew both companies out of

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the water. When he heard that San Francisco officials had served UberCab with that first cease-and-desist notice, adorned with a head shot of Ryan Graves, Wolpert believed it was justified. Regulation had a purpose. Taxi

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cars were regulated more lightly, but by law they had to be summoned in advance, limiting their ability to compete with cabs. Wolpert felt that UberCab blew up that distinction with new technology, allowing riders to electronically summon a town car with little forethought, just as they would hail a yellow

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2010, Hayashi’s phone started ringing off the hook, and it wouldn’t stop for four years. Taxi drivers were incensed; a new app called UberCab allowed rival limo drivers to act like taxis. By law only taxis could pick up passengers who hailed them on the street, and cabs were

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authority. Regulating limos and black cars was the responsibility of the state, not the city. But she saw an opening: this startup was calling itself UberCab and thus seemed to be marketing itself as a taxi company. She talked to the enforcement division at the Public Utilities Commission of California, which

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, but that was an easy compromise. By the time of the cease-and-desist, the founders had already decided to drop the Cab from the UberCab name, and investor Chris Sacca was negotiating with the Universal Music Group, which owned the Uber.com web address, to buy it for a 2

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. (Courtesy of the author) Travis Kalanick from his 1994 Granada Hills High School Yearbook. (Courtesy of the author) An early screenshot in 2010 of the UberCab website. (Courtesy of the author) The early Uber crew: (left to right) Curtis Chambers, Travis Kalanick, Stefan Schmeisser, Conrad Whelan, Jordan Bonnet, Austin Geidt, Ryan

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’s Lucky Horseshoe,” Hi, I’m David G. Cohen, July 14, 2014, http://davidgcohen.com/2014/07/14/the-ponys-lucky-horseshoe/. 8. Leena Rao, “UberCab Takes the Hassle Out of Booking a Car Service,” TechCrunch, July 5, 2010, http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/05

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/ubercab-takes-the-hassle-out-of-booking-a-car-service/. Chapter 3: The Nonstarters 1. Jason Kincaid, “Taxi Magic: Hail a Cab from Your iPhone at

Hustle and Gig: Struggling and Surviving in the Sharing Economy

by Alexandrea J. Ravenelle · 12 Mar 2019 · 349pp · 98,309 words

cab. So they came up with a simple idea—tap a button, get a ride.”75 True to its high-end roots, the first iteration—UberCab—was a black car service that allowed a user to call a car by pressing a button on a smartphone or sending a text. The

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-and-desist letter from the San Francisco Metro Transit Authority and the Public Utilities Commission of California claiming they were operating an unlicensed taxi service, UberCab removed the word cab from its logo and started to operate under the brand name Uber. On its Facebook page, the company commented that it

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4. Kolhatkar, Sheelah. 2016. “Juno Takes on Uber.” New Yorker, October 10. ———. 2017. “Welcoming Our New Robot Overlords.” New Yorker, October 23. Kolodny, Lora. 2010. “UberCab Ordered to Cease and Desist.” TechCrunch, October 24. Kortum, Samuel, and Josh Lerner. 2000. “Assessing the Impact of Venture Capital on Innovation.” Rand Journal of

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by race, 194; value of, 77; worker-client sexual interactions, 132–33; work stigma and, 161. See also drivers; Uber workers UberBLACK, 27, 78, 107 UberCab, 49–50 UberPeople, 72–73, 225n34 uberPOOL, 27, 105–6 UberRUSH, 127–28 UberTaxi service, 77 Uber workers: Baran, 2–3, 6; Bryan, 78–79

The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations

by Daniel Yergin · 14 Sep 2020

together passenger and driver? “At the time,” he would later say, “I was thinking ‘better cab.’” On August 8, 2008, he registered a website, www.ubercab.com. Camp hardly imagined transforming transportation and challenging an entire business and way of life based upon people owning a car. The initial aim was

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far more modest. The first pitch book described “UberCab” as a “Next-Generation Car Service” aimed at improving on cabs. “Digital Hail can now make street hail unnecessary.” Instead, “Mobile app will match client

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& driver.” It would be “members only—respectable clientele” matched up with drivers operating Mercedes and other high-end cars owned by UberCab. The “use cases” ranged from “trips to/from restaurants, bars & shows” to “elderly transport.” The optimistic case was “market leader” and a “billion dollars in

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, “Garage Startup Uses Deep Learning to Teach Cars to Drive,” USA Today, August 30, 2016. Chapter 39: Hailing the Future 1. Interview with Garrett Camp; “UberCab” pitch deck, December 2008. 2. Adam Lashinsky, Wild Ride: Inside Uber’s Quest for World Domination (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2017), pp. 80–81, 91

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cab. “So,” the company’s website explains, “they came up with a simple idea—tap a button, get a ride.” Their original vision (initially called UberCab) focused only on limos. Early growth was steady but slow. When Camp first suggested that Kalanick should run Uber full-time, Kalanick said no because

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A PRAYER? 200 “So,” the company’s website explains: Uber, “[Our Story],” accessed February 5, 2017, https://www.uber.com/our-story. 200 initially called UberCab: Leena Rao, “UberCab Takes the Hassle Out of Booking a Car Service,” TechCrunch, July 5, 2010, https://techcrunch.com/2010/07/05

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/ubercab-takes-the-hassle-out-of-booking-a-car-service. 200 “supercrazy freakin’ small”: Fast Company, “Travis Kalanick, the Fall and Spectacular Rise of the Man

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there was an entrepreneur pitch event going on. A man named Travis Kalanick was in front of an audience of mostly men explaining his company, UberCab, which made a tool that was supposed to help people summon luxury cars with their phones. It would officially launch in San Francisco the next

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year. One of the event’s guests was Lowercase Capital’s Chris Sacca, an early investor in Twitter, who was already putting money in UberCab. Sacca considered himself a good judge of character, and had made a call to invest in Kalanick after inviting him for hours of hot-tubbing

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, 157 Williams at, 14, 46 Zuckerberg’s attempted purchase of, 57 Twttr, 7 Tycho (Scott Hansen), 34 Tyga, 238 U2, 126 Uber, 36, 45, 222 UberCab, 23 Underwood, Teddy, 120–21 “unicorns,” 61 Van Damme, Tim, 51–54, 73 Vanity Fair, 158, 192 #vanlife, 229 venture capitalists, 2–3, 11, 15

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; see also Robinson Meyer, “72 Hours with Facebook Instant Articles,” Atlantic, October 23, 2015. ease of getting a cab…or paying for it Leena Rao, “UberCab Takes the Hassle Out of Booking a Car Service,” TechCrunch , July 5, 2010; Alexia Tsotsis, “Why Use

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UberCab When Calling a Cab Is Cheaper?,” TechCrunch , October 26, 2010; Michael Arrington, “What If UberCab Pulls an Airbnb? Taxi Business Could (Finally) Get Some Disruption,” TechCrunch , August 31, 2010. Fox News decided to enter Bharat

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paying $800 for a black car on New Year’s Eve, he figured there had to be a better way.vi The original plan for UberCab was for an elite members-only service leveraging the GPS-enabled smartphones that affluent consumers started to carry around, allowing them to summon an

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UberCab on demand. “Faster and cheaper than a limo, but nicer and safer than a taxicab” was the pitch, and the membership model and high price

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a Look at Uber’s First Pitch Deck from 2008,” Vox, August 23, 2017, https://www.vox.com/2017/8/23/16189048/uber-pitchdeck-2008-ubercab-travis-kalanick-founder-start-up. 10. Scott Austin, Stephanie Stamm, and Rolfe Winkler, “Uber Jackpot: Inside One of the Greatest Startup Investments of All Time

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operating system for smartphones. The Android operating system for mobile phones relies on the core portion of Linux known as the kernel. 24. Leena Rao, “Ubercab takes the hassle out of booking a car service,” TechCrunch, July 5, 2010, http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/05

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/ubercab-takes-the-hassle-out-of-booking-a-car-service/. 25. Uber Newsroom, “Our Commitment to Safety,” December 17, 2014, http://newsroom.uber.com/2014/12/