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

by Brad Stone

Kalanick instructed Kochman to ignore New York’s Taxi and Limousine Commission and its rules, reasoning that its regulations, under the guise of consumer safety, were really there to protect entrenched taxi interests. Kochman didn’t necessarily disagree but he had successfully solicited approval from the Ithaca city council to operate MESS Express. He had a history of productive encounters with regulators. So he disregarded Kalanick’s orders and set up a meeting with a TLC deputy. “I wasn’t going to bust my ass to launch something the city was going to shut down immediately,” he says. Kalanick was furious when he heard about the meeting. “He was absolutely livid and said it was insubordinate,” Kochman remembers. After his fury passed, Kalanick flew to New York and they visited TLC headquarters together. The meeting—Uber’s first of many with the TLC—went fine. Stressing that Uber cars were not hailed or even electronically hailed like taxis, the pair emphasized that Uber cars fit the legal definition of livery cars and were prearranged; it just so happened that the prearrangement occurred five minutes ahead of time instead of sixty. The deputy commissioner Ashwini Chhabra, who would join Uber as head of policy planning three years later, initially asked Uber only to customize the app to display a driver’s permit number and base affiliation.