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

by Brad Stone

the third idea, originally dubbed Zimride Instant, caught the imagination of everyone there. Wherever drivers were going, they could use the company’s apps to pick up passengers, not just between cities but inside them. The notion was discussed at a Zimride board meeting at the company’s offices at 568 Brannan Street. Board members wanted to know: Was this even legal? Kristin Sverchek, a partner at the law firm Silicon Legal Strategy and Zimride’s outside counsel at the time (she would join the company a few months later) could have stopped the whole thing. She didn’t, pointing out that taxi regulations had been crafted decades before smartphones and internet ratings systems were invented. “I was personally always of the philosophy that the great companies, the PayPals of the world, don’t get scared by regulation,” she told me. “I never wanted to be the kind of lawyer that just said no.” Engineers started working on the system, which was renamed Lyft, after a suggestion from a design intern named Harrison Bowden. Lyft would have the same primary ingredients as Sidecar—a suggested but voluntary donation, driver and passenger ratings, the background check—and it followed Sidecar into public tests in San Francisco by three months. It could have easily been dismissed as an uninspired follower but instead was greeted as a novelty, primarily because Zimmer and Green had thought carefully about a new set of rituals needed to turn a ride with a stranger into a comfortable and safe...

Lyft orgins