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

by Brad Stone

Uber’s growing popularity and plans to roll out UberX were about to provoke another five months of bare-knuckle political brawls. After ineffectual discussions between Uber execs and Washington’s attorney general, the issue of Uber’s regulatory status fell into the lap of the DC city councilwoman Mary Cheh, the chairperson of the Committee on Transportation and the Environment. Cheh, sixty-two, was a graduate of Harvard Law and a Democrat who had struggled for years to drag anachronistic DC cabs into the modern age. “Even while Uber was coming around, I was in process of trying to reform the taxicab industry which was in the twentieth, maybe the nineteenth, century,” she says. She was also a pragmatist who sought peaceful compromise between many of the powerful local taxi interests in what was turning into a radioactive topic. That spring she sent a letter to Ron Linton and the DC Taxicab Commission, asking them to stop towing Uber cars, and then started working toward a compromise among all the parties who were increasingly incensed by Uber’s success. What was needed, she reasoned, was an unambiguous clarification of Uber’s legal status that cut through the contradicting regulations and allowed it to operate in the city.