The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World

by Brad Stone

It had started with something in the air—an obvious idea, perhaps, to those who were carefully studying the Uber phenomenon and were able to see its logical conclusion. The idea appealed to both risk takers willing to ignore decades of strict transportation law and idealists who believed that the idea was so powerful and necessary that policy makers would simply have no choice but to bend the laws to accommodate it. The idea was this: Until that point, Uber allowed only licensed chauffeurs and taxi drivers to use its system. But what if you opened the service to anyone with a car and allowed him to pick up passengers looking for a ride via a smartphone app? You could fill empty seats in cars, reduce the chronic congestion on America’s highways, and allow drivers to make money on the side. It could be carpooling on a mass scale—a digital manifestation of organized programs like 511.org in California or the Sluglines in DC, where drivers stopped in designated lots to pick up passengers so they could access the HOV lanes. A decade earlier, this might have been called something like mobile hitchhiking. But its originators, carefully trying to fit the idea within the legal protections that state law afforded to casual carpooling, devised a more innocuous term: ridesharing. Internet-enabled ridesharing already existed, amorphously and unremarkably, well before it became a massive moneymaking opportunity. Ridesharing was a popular standalone category on Craigslist in many cities ...

Ridesharing origins