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

by Brad Stone

On January 11, 2012, at 10:35 a.m., a short, cryptic message from a rider-advocacy group called DC Taxi Watch quoted the top taxi official in the U.S. capital. Chairman Linton: @uber DC is operating illegally, it read. The Tweet was sent from inside the drab, postwar DC Taxicab Commission headquarters in Anacostia. The city’s taxi drivers had packed a normally sleepy hearing to make their voices heard. Uber’s town-car drivers, they argued, had been illegally operating for the past two months. Ron Linton was inclined to agree. Appointed only six months before by Mayor Vincent C. Gray to head the taxicab commission, Linton was in his early eighties. He was an avuncular policy planner and longtime reserve officer in the city police department who wore a stern disposition and an obvious toupee. Like his counterpart Christiane Hayashi in San Francisco, he fashioned himself an agent of change and was determined to modernize the capital’s pitifully antiquated taxis, which ignored minority neighborhoods and didn’t accept credit cards. They didn’t even have dome lights or a uniform color to distinguish them from other cars. But Linton was hell-bent on doing it from inside the industry and preserving the jobs of the region’s eighty-five hundred licensed drivers. Uber is “operating illegally, and we plan to take steps against them,” Linton assured the boisterous drivers at the meeting.2 Uber’s DC general manager, Rachel Holt, was just settling into her new office when she saw the Twe...