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

by Brad Stone

A few blocks away, on the seventh floor of a former bank building at 1 South Van Ness Avenue, Christiane Hayashi was planning her next move. As director of Taxis and Accessible Services at the Metropolitan Taxi Agency, Hayashi was the most powerful figure in the city’s highly dysfunctional cab industry. She had worked as a deputy city attorney since graduating from UC Hastings College of the Law and had toiled away in environmental law and Y2K compliance. She was no stranger to San Francisco’s bare-knuckle politics, where rival democratic factions battled incessantly and corruption often bubbled indiscreetly under the surface. A stint in the Department of Elections, where she managed the transition away from punch-card ballots, was particularly grueling. Hayashi and two other lawyers were accused of mismanaging funds and signing false time sheets. A special counsel eventually investigated and cleared her.2 The experience “crushed my spirits for a while,” she says. After she was exonerated, she fled city politics and moved to San Cristóbal de las Casas, in the Mexican state of Chiapas, where for a few months she sang in the house band at a local disco. But performing six nights a week in a building she recalls as a hellacious firetrap couldn’t match a safe desk job and a comfortable government pension. In 2003 she randomly ran into a city supervisor while hiking in the Guatemalan jungle and, soon after, was lured back to the Bay, first representing the SFMTA in the city att...