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

by Brad Stone

What is the future of Uber? How much of what is possible have we seen? Kalanick started by declaring that on “logarithmic squared time,” Uber was only halfway to its goals. This was the math geek from Granada Hills High School talking and it sailed over my head. But then he offered this: “The things that people are going to feel are still to come. The kind of impact this is going to have on our cities—ninety-five or ninety-eight percent of it is still yet to happen. What if I said there’s going to be no traffic in any major city in the U.S. in five years?” “That would be a lot to live up to,” I said. “It would be. I think that might happen. We’re just at the beginning. But when you feel that, that’s going to be a big deal.” “This will be because of carpooling services like UberPool and Lyft Line? Or driverless cars?” I asked. A few weeks before, the company had begun testing fourteen Ford Fusions tricked out with autonomous vehicle technology on the streets of Pittsburgh. It had also recently announced a partnership with Volvo to develop driverless-car technology and had acquired Otto, a San Francisco–based startup run by former Google engineers that was working on driverless trucks.34 “All these things that are going to happen, whether it’s human-driven transportation, carpooling, commuting with carpooling, driverless cars,” Kalanick said, “cars are coming off the road. They’re going to be much more efficient and much safer. And they’re going to take up a lot less space. ...

Very deep thoughts here