By the fall of 2010, San Francisco was starting to notice Uber. The service was exceedingly viral; a user stepped out of a town car and walked into a bar, and suddenly his or her friends wanted to know everything about it. Limo and town-car drivers were also intrigued. They started showing up in the Uber office, one by one. Conrad Whelan recalls watching Graves give a driver the pitch and train him to use the app. Afterward, the driver laughed. “Oh, you guys are going to make a lot of money.” That’s when Whelan canceled his vague plans to return to scientific research.
