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

by Brad Stone

The regulations, added to a broader transportation bill, would give Uber legal sanction to operate. But they also added a price floor, which required Uber to charge several times the rate of a taxicab. Claude Bailey, accustomed to such compromises but not, perhaps, to Kalanick’s brand of fiery idealism, indicated a willingness to accept the deal. Cheh then set a city council vote for July 10 and promised that the provisions were only temporary and would be revisited in the next year. “I tried to explain to them that the provision was nothing more than a placeholder. What I needed was room to maneuver,” she says. What happened next would mold the political tactics of Uber, and many of the tech startups that sought to emulate it, for years to come. In San Francisco, Kalanick had never fully agreed to a minimum fare. Now, recognizing the approaching competition from companies like Hailo and realizing that services like UberX would require aggressive price cuts, he decided he wanted to fight—to the consternation of his own lobbyists, who had already agreed to Cheh’s deal. Then Kalanick started hurling rhetorical hand grenades, labeling Cheh’s proposal a “price fixing scheme” on Twitter and accusing the councilwoman of “doing everything to protect the taxi industry.”15 But Uber was going to need more than Tweets to sway the DC city council. First, colleagues remember, Kalanick sought the backing of the DC tech community and tried to enlist the support of the online-deals compan...