At the time, Kalanick seemed convinced surge pricing was a tool only for special occasions. “I don’t think that the constantly changing car price is necessarily where we want to go,” he told the New York Times. “But on Halloween and New Year’s, it’s here to stay.”10 Then one of his own colleagues helped to change his mind. Michael Pao was a recent Harvard Business School graduate who had overcome Kalanick’s allergy to hiring MBAs and caught on with Ryan Graves’s operations team.
