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

by Brad Stone

“We tried to unwind decades of fixed pricing in personal transportation in one night,” he said. “There was a little angst around it.”

You think?

At the time, Kalanick seemed convinced surge pricing was a tool only for special occasions. “I don’t think that the constantly changing car price is necessarily where we want to go,” he told the New York Times. “But on Halloween and New Year’s, it’s here to stay.”10 Then one of his own colleagues helped to change his mind. Michael Pao was a recent Harvard Business School graduate who had overcome Kalanick’s allergy to hiring MBAs and caught on with Ryan Graves’s operations team.

a.m. On Friday and Saturday nights, their drunken clientele staggered onto the street in unison. Cabdrivers wanted nothing to do with this ritual and would promptly head home at that hour to keep their lives free of drama and their backseats free of vomit. Uber drivers, naturally, were exhibiting the same behavior. After thinking it over and fretting he would never be able to grow Uber’s business in Boston if he couldn’t solve the challenge of closing time, Pao started running experiments. For a week he held fares steady for passengers but increased payments to drivers at night. In response, more drivers held their noses and stuck around for closing hours. It turned out drivers were in fact highly elastic and motivated by fare increases. Pao then spent a second week confirming the thesis by breaking Boston’s Uber drivers into two groups. Some saw surging rates at night while others did not. Again, drivers with higher fares during peak times stayed in the system longer and completed more trips.

Surge pricing works

we only implement dynamic pricing, or surge pricing, if it will increase the number of rides that happen. When prices go up, more drivers come out. When more drivers come out, more rides happen. That means less people are stranded and more people have an option.” That, of course, was only part of the story. Uber was addressing the chronic shortage of cars during spikes in demands by tailoring the service to people who could afford to pay extra. There was a kind of cruel economics at play, and riders would continue to have visceral resistance to the idea that the same ride could cost more at different times. Observers would connect the tactic with Kalanick’s Twitter avatar—at that point, the cover of one of Ayn Rand’s manifestos, The Fountainhead. “It’s less of a political statement,” Kalanick told the Washington Post reporter who asked about it in 2012. “It’s just personally one of my favorite books. I’m a fan of architecture.” But Kalanick’s stubborn defense of surge pricing impressed at least one observer. “Travis is a real entrepreneur,” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos told board member Bill Gurley after a surge fracas, according to Gurley. “Most CEOs would have caved.”

competitors. As Andreessen Horowitz realized the magnitude of its mistake, it would lead one of the earliest fund-raising rounds in Lyft. Uber’s deal with Pishevar would also lead, indirectly, to the collapse of one of Kalanick’s closest friendships.

Pishevar worked his vaunted network and enlisted the support of big-name Hollywood stars and Silicon Valley celebrities. Uber’s new investors included the actors Sophia Bush, Olivia Munn, Edward Norton, Ashton Kutcher, and Jared Leto; the performers Jay Z, Jay Brown, and Britney Spears, along with her former manager Adam Leber; the talent agency William Morris; and the music manager Troy Carter. From high tech, he helped bring in Jeff Bezos and Google CEO Eric Schmidt. All these luminaries put in between $50,000 and $350,000 each. By 2016, their stakes had grown twenty times.

Uber big shot investors

Though Travis Kalanick and his colleagues had come to distrust taxi ordinances as schemes designed to protect incumbents and their shoddy levels of service from new competition, they examined local laws closely and were flexible when required. Uber was by and large a law-abider, not a law-bender. Over the next two years, and for surprising reasons, that changed. In 2012, the company would come face to face with steely regulators, an international rival with aggressive expansion plans, and, unlikeliest of all, possible disruption from two other Silicon Valley upstarts that were ready to discard taxi laws altogether.

On January 11, 2012, at 10:35 a.m., a short, cryptic message from a rider-advocacy group called DC Taxi Watch quoted the top taxi official in the U.S. capital. Chairman Linton: @uber DC is operating illegally, it read. The Tweet was sent from inside the drab, postwar DC Taxicab Commission headquarters in Anacostia. The city’s taxi drivers had packed a normally sleepy hearing to make their voices heard. Uber’s town-car drivers, they argued, had been illegally operating for the past two months. Ron Linton was inclined to agree. Appointed only six months before by Mayor Vincent C. Gray to head the taxicab commission, Linton was in his early eighties. He was an avuncular policy planner and longtime reserve officer in the city police department who wore a stern disposition and an obvious toupee. Like his counterpart Christiane Hayashi in San Francisco, he fashioned himself an agent of change and was determined to modernize the capital’s pitifully antiquated taxis, which ignored minority neighborhoods and didn’t accept credit cards. They didn’t even have dome lights or a uniform color to distinguish them from other cars. But Linton was hell-bent on doing it from inside the industry and preserving the jobs of the region’s eighty-five hundred licensed drivers. Uber is “operating illegally, and we plan to take steps against them,” Linton assured the boisterous drivers at the meeting.2 Uber’s DC general manager, Rachel Holt, was just settling into her new office when she saw the Twe...

there was a third classification in the bylaws, under section 1299.1 in the District of Columbia Municipal Regulations, which seemingly contradicted the other two rules by stipulating that sedans carrying six passengers or fewer could charge on the basis of time and mileage.3 Uber’s approach clearly qualified.

Perhaps aware of the regulatory swamp that he had wandered into, he then referred the matter to the city’s attorney general, Irvin B. Nathan, and asked him to evaluate Uber’s legal status. That spring Holt met with Nathan and his staff, and officials speculated that the entirety of Section 1299.1, the provision that seemingly gave Uber protection, was nothing more than a typographical error. Uber could keep operating for the time being, but its battle in DC had only just begun.

Over the next few days, there was heated debate inside the company about putting traditional taxis on the system. Uber would have to accommodate their metered fares and stringent licensing requirements and cede most of the commission to the driver to replace the tip and service fees, cutting deeply into its standard 20 percent margin. Many Uber employees and execs opposed the move. “We did this high-end thing, this ‘everyone’s private driver’ experience,” says early engineer Ryan McKillen. “We wanted it to stay high end and make it amazing. Doing taxi just felt like so the opposite.” Kalanick eventually put an abrupt end to the discussion with a pointed insight about why Uber was successful in the first place. “I’m going to literally flip this table if anyone says one more time they are worried about destroying the brand,” he said in a meeting, according to Penn. “The luxury of Uber is about time and convenience. It’s not about the car.”

What the luxury of Uber is

Uber rolled out its taxi service on April 18, 2012. Because Kalanick was still nervous about the reception, he framed Uber Taxi as coming from a wing of the still-tiny startup, an entirely fictitious department that he dubbed Uber Garage.9 “Google has Google X, and we have the Uber Garage,”

The second was a fleet of four-door hybrids, an option that would cost the rider less than the original Uber offering. The name of the service, UberX, was simply the best the company could come up with. “It was a placeholder. We called it UberX because we couldn’t figure out a name for it,” says Uber’s product chief at the time, Mina Radhakrishnan, who adds that Uber Green and Uber Eco were briefly considered and rejected. Now, an important clarification: Unlike Lyft and Sidecar, the so-called ridesharing companies that were at that very moment making their debuts in San Francisco, the original UberX accommodated only professional drivers who held taxi licenses. Kalanick envisioned a fleet of black Toyota Priuses to be driven by the same types of licensed chauffeurs who were behind the wheels of other Uber vehicles.

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.

The regulations, added to a broader transportation bill, would give Uber legal sanction to operate. But they also added a price floor, which required Uber to charge several times the rate of a taxicab. Claude Bailey, accustomed to such compromises but not, perhaps, to Kalanick’s brand of fiery idealism, indicated a willingness to accept the deal. Cheh then set a city council vote for July 10 and promised that the provisions were only temporary and would be revisited in the next year. “I tried to explain to them that the provision was nothing more than a placeholder. What I needed was room to maneuver,” she says. What happened next would mold the political tactics of Uber, and many of the tech startups that sought to emulate it, for years to come. In San Francisco, Kalanick had never fully agreed to a minimum fare. Now, recognizing the approaching competition from companies like Hailo and realizing that services like UberX would require aggressive price cuts, he decided he wanted to fight—to the consternation of his own lobbyists, who had already agreed to Cheh’s deal. Then Kalanick started hurling rhetorical hand grenades, labeling Cheh’s proposal a “price fixing scheme” on Twitter and accusing the councilwoman of “doing everything to protect the taxi industry.”15 But Uber was going to need more than Tweets to sway the DC city council. First, colleagues remember, Kalanick sought the backing of the DC tech community and tried to enlist the support of the online-deals compan...

“You wanted to make sure that there was a minimum fare on our services so that only rich people could use Uber, not people of middle income,” Kalanick told her. Cheh pointed out that the proposed and discarded price floor was meant as a way to ensure a peaceful transition to a more permanent arrangement. “I know that you like to cast this as some sort of fight,” she said. “Do you understand that? I’m not in a fight with you.” “When you tell us how to do business, and you tell us we can’t charge lower fares, offer a high-quality service at the best possible price, you are fighting with us,” Kalanick replied. “You still want to fight!” Cheh said in exasperation. The conversation turned to surge pricing. “I am curious about whether that is somehow a kind of gouging,” she said. “If there’s more demand, why should the rider have to pay more money?”

he pissed almost everyone off,” she told me. And yet. By December, with Uber spreading like wildfire through the capital, and knowing that its users were ready and willing to defend the service, Cheh and her colleagues saw the writing on the wall. On December 4, the Public Vehicle-for-Hire Innovation Amendment Act defined without ambiguity a new class of sedans that could be dispatched via a smartphone app and could charge by time and distance. It passed the Washington, DC, city council unanimously, garnering even Jim Graham’s vote, without debate.18 “The real issue is how receptive the government is to the progress of the people,” Kalanick told me a few years later. “It’s not about the city council or the government, it’s actually about how the incumbent industry is persuading them, let’s say, to do what I would consider the wrong thing.” Ultimately, he added, “DC was very receptive. But it took them time to see it and feel it.” Uber had flexed its political muscles for the first time, and won. A new tactic was then added to the playbook: when traditional advocacy failed, Uber could mobilize its user base and direct their passion toward elected officials. Uber was not the first company to employ this tactic, but it quickly became among the best at it. In its ensuing first wave of political battles—in places like Cambridge, Massachusetts, Philadelphia, and Chicago—Uber would enlist the support of its customers and, usually, win. Kalanick had broken every rule in the advoca...

Uber Political Strategy

It had started with something in the air—an obvious idea, perhaps, to those who were carefully studying the Uber phenomenon and were able to see its logical conclusion. The idea appealed to both risk takers willing to ignore decades of strict transportation law and idealists who believed that the idea was so powerful and necessary that policy makers would simply have no choice but to bend the laws to accommodate it. The idea was this: Until that point, Uber allowed only licensed chauffeurs and taxi drivers to use its system. But what if you opened the service to anyone with a car and allowed him to pick up passengers looking for a ride via a smartphone app? You could fill empty seats in cars, reduce the chronic congestion on America’s highways, and allow drivers to make money on the side. It could be carpooling on a mass scale—a digital manifestation of organized programs like 511.org in California or the Sluglines in DC, where drivers stopped in designated lots to pick up passengers so they could access the HOV lanes. A decade earlier, this might have been called something like mobile hitchhiking. But its originators, carefully trying to fit the idea within the legal protections that state law afforded to casual carpooling, devised a more innocuous term: ridesharing. Internet-enabled ridesharing already existed, amorphously and unremarkably, well before it became a massive moneymaking opportunity. Ridesharing was a popular standalone category on Craigslist in many cities ...

Ridesharing origins

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

In the Zimride founders’ view, Uber and Lyft were entirely different. “We didn’t think of them as similar to us,” Zimmer told me. “Our vision has always been every car, every driver, and never ‘everyone’s private driver.’ We didn’t want to be a better taxi; we wanted to replace car ownership.”

Lyft wants to replace car ownership

Kalanick then announced his broader intentions to compete nationally with the ridesharing companies with a seminal white paper, posted to the Uber website and grandiosely titled “Principled Innovation: Addressing the Regulatory Ambiguity Around Ridesharing Apps.”

“People don’t like to talk about the fact that this competition will kill our taxi industry,” railed one of the first speakers, Christiane Hayashi, head of the San Francisco MTA and Uber’s first regulatory foe, to applause from the gathered cabbies. “But when this unregulated and illegal competition has devastated the landscape, no one will be left to provide universally accessible door to door transportation services to our residents. Should they be regulated as taxicabs? Yes!” Hayashi had previously taken two Lyft rides, paid nothing of the suggested donation, and then marveled that Lyft drivers would no longer pick her up. When she asked John Zimmer why over breakfast one morning, he looked up her ride history on his phone and noted that she hadn’t paid anything. Hayashi was outraged by what she viewed as a privacy violation. With limited success, Marzia Zafar tried to keep the proceedings moving and civilized. The ridesharing companies testified, one after the other, often over the jeers and taunts of the assembled taxi drivers. After the debacle in DC, Uber’s lawyers kept Kalanick far from the proceedings; instead, Ilya Abyzov, general manager of the business in San Francisco, took the podium and insisted that Uber was only a software company. “Our offices have programmers, not drivers,” he said. “Uber is agnostic about ridesharing. Whatever the decision is, we will follow it.” When Zafar opened the session to questions, an immigrant driver stood up and cut through Ub...

People around the world wanted these new transportation options, and according to Travis’s Law, their fervor could provide the political cover to fuel a rapid expansion. If the taxi lobby and their political surrogates didn’t want to let the future unfold, well, he had seen that movie before, with the music industry during his file-sharing days. There was no point trying to negotiate with them. To maintain Uber’s position in the vanguard of upstarts changing transportation, Kalanick, already aggressive and determined, was going to have to be even more aggressive and determined—and even, perhaps, a little bit ruthless.

The subpoena and accompanying blizzard of media coverage sent shudders through the ranks of Airbnb users in New York City. Journalist Seth Porges had been renting out a spare bedroom in his two-story duplex in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, since 2010, before Williamsburg was fashionable. At the time his apartment was so geographically inconvenient he had to pitch its proximity to the L Train just so he could fulfill a “bizarre fantasy of being an innkeeper in the countryside and meeting all these amazing characters as they saunter into town.” Two years later, when he was laid off from the men’s magazine Maxim, his Airbnb earnings let him pursue passion projects instead of taking another full-time job, and he found himself becoming a fervent defender and evangelist for the site. “Airbnb allowed me to be deliberate about my life choices and to think through them and take the risks,” he told me. Charging guests around a hundred dollars a night covered his monthly mortgage and more, eventually allowing him to put in another bathroom next to the guest bedroom. Thanks to Airbnb, he was now living in New York City for free.

The upstarts Uber and Airbnb, frequently named in tandem by sharing-economy proponents and critics, were the defendants in a global trial during this time of uninhibited growth. The issues being litigated were critical: Did the benefits of their dominance outweigh the well-publicized drawbacks? What was their true impact on cities? Were they good for society or bad? Facing these questions, Travis Kalanick and Brian Chesky, both shedding the baggage of their pasts, would have to rise to meet the future with credible testimony on behalf of their companies.

So one evening in August 2013, Kalanick checked into a suite at the Four Seasons Hotel in East Palo Alto, paid for by Google, and woke up the next morning for a ten o’clock meeting with the most powerful man in Silicon Valley. Krane had orchestrated an experience that would blow Kalanick’s mind. When Uber’s CEO came down to the lobby, a prototype driverless car from the Google X lab idled in front of the hotel, waiting to ferry him to Mountain View. Sitting in the front seat was a Google engineer who could answer all his questions. It was Kalanick’s first ride in a self-driving car on real roads. At the Google campus, Kalanick met with Page, Google senior lawyer David Drummond, and Krane’s boss at GV at the time, Bill Maris. Page assured Kalanick that the companies could work together to develop Google Maps, which Uber relied on for navigation in its apps, but he didn’t say much or stay very long. The more important legacy that day was Kalanick’s developing awareness of the technology that might radically change Uber’s business. “The minute your car becomes real, I can take the dude out of the front seat,” Kalanick told Krane excitedly after the meeting. “I call that margin expansion.” In Kalanick’s estimation, payments to drivers were contra-revenue—a deduction from the top line. The inevitable future of robot cars was going to be awfully good for his business, he surmised.

Uber and Google work together on robot cars

in the fall of 2013, he recognized that Uber’s future was brighter than he had originally believed. While Uber Black remained one and a half times more expensive than a traditional yellow taxi, UberX was, on average, 25 percent less expensive and was starting to dominate the emerging rideshare wars. Lyft and Sidecar had introduced ridesharing, but when Uber started aggressively rolling out the service, first in the United States in 2013 and then in Europe in 2014, the two rivals struggled to keep up. Uber had a more established brand and more money in the bank as well as upscale product lines, like Uber Black and Uber SUV, whose profits could be used to subsidize UberX rides and offer financial incentives to new drivers. Uber was growing 20 percent each month and, thanks to UberX, had gone from nonexistent to ubiquitous nearly overnight in San Francisco, Los Angeles, DC, and Boston.

Power of ridesharing

a second move helped to spark demand and was just as controversial. In early 2014, hoping to improve business during the annual winter slowdown, when people curtailed their nights out, Kalanick cut UberX fares by up to 30 percent in U.S. markets like Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, and Seattle.7 The theory was that if prices went down, customers would use the service more and bypass rental cars, public buses, and subways. With more passengers, drivers would spend less time idling between rides, replacing the lost income from the fare cuts by completing more rides. While the plan made sense, subsequent fare cuts would create unrest among drivers, and Uber would eventually have to reverse them in cities where lower prices didn’t spark higher demand. But it also accelerated the growth of UberX and, perhaps just as important, forced the less highly capitalized Lyft to introduce its own fare and commission cuts.8 Uber had discovered what startup gurus like to call the virtuous circle, the links between various parts of its business. Lower prices led to more customers and more frequent usage, which led to a larger supply of cars and busier drivers, which enabled Uber to further cut prices and put more pressure on competitors.

Uber cutting fares to undercut transit

In May, speaking at the Code Conference, Kalanick had even more trouble elevating his tone to a level befitting a high-profile CEO. I was in the audience that year when he attacked incumbent cab companies so forcefully that it made the taxi fleets look sympathetic. Uber, he said, was engaged in a political campaign where “the candidate is Uber and the opponent is an asshole named Taxi. Nobody likes him, he’s not a nice character, but he’s so woven into the political machinery and fabric that a lot of people owe him favors.” He went on to say Uber would have to “bring out the truth about how dark and dangerous and evil the taxi side is.” When asked about driverless cars, he said that he was excited for the technology because it could bring prices down, but he didn’t express concern about unemployment for drivers. “The reason Uber could be expensive is because you’re not just paying for the car, you’re paying for the other dude in the car,” Kalanick said. As for the tens of thousands of drivers who relied on his company to support their families, he shrugged. “This is the way of the world,” he said, “and the world isn’t always great. We all have to find ways to change.” Kalanick was being himself—blunt and unaware of, or perhaps indifferent to, how his comments might be perceived by Uber’s own key constituencies.

Kalanick was at his charismatic best, pitching investors a compelling vision of Uber’s future. “If you can make it economical for people to get out of their cars or sell their cars and turn transportation into a service, it’s a pretty big deal,” he told me after the round closed.

What public transportation should be doing

In late October, journalist Sarah Lacy of the technology blog PandoDaily wrote an essay excoriating Uber, in part for a ridiculous promotional campaign out of its office in Lyon, France, that offered to pair riders with attractive female drivers who appeared to be affiliated with an escort service.38 “Who said women don’t know how to drive?” read Uber’s advertisement; around the post were pictures of scantily clad women.39 When contacted by the press about the promotion, Uber quickly canceled it and pulled the post from its local Lyon blog. But Lacy, never one to shy away from bombastic pronouncements, declared that she was deleting the Uber app from her phone and accused Uber of having a corporate culture of sexism that endangered female drivers and passengers. “I don’t know how many more signals we need that the company simply doesn’t respect us or prioritize our safety,” she wrote.40 Inside Uber, Lacy’s post went over badly. The Lyon promotion had been an embarrassing mistake by a local office but the company prided itself on extending opportunities to women to become drivers and ensuring that, as passengers, women could order cars safely and not have to wait on dark street corners at night hoping to hail a passing cab. Lacy’s post, on top of all the mounting criticism that year, rankled.

a shrine to an idea—that Airbnb could bring people together, erase their differences, and, in the earnest spirit of so many Silicon Valley satires, make the world a better place.

On the afternoon of June 3, 2015, Uber invited local journalists to its Market Street headquarters in San Francisco to mark a momentous occasion: the fifth anniversary of the company opening its app to drivers and riders.

Then Travis Kalanick took the podium, looking nervous and emotional, with his parents sitting in the first row. Over the next twenty minutes, speaking awkwardly from a teleprompter, he acknowledged the aggressiveness that had made Uber such a polarizing company over the last half a decade. “I realize that I can come off as a somewhat fierce advocate for Uber,” he said. “I also realize that some have used a different a-word to describe me.” Kalanick then made a political case for the company that he had never before so artfully articulated. Uber, he said, brings new transportation options to low-income neighborhoods that aren’t served well by yellow taxis. It creates flexible jobs for the unemployed, for immigrants, and for students looking to finance their education. By combining riders in the same car via the carpooling service UberPool, the company was further lowering the price of for-hire vehicles and potentially taking cars off the road and reducing CO2 emissions. “That’s what we believe is the real game changer and those are the things we’ll be working on in years to come,” he said. The scripted event attempted to showcase a more introspective and optimistic Kalanick. It bore the fingerprints of Uber’s increasingly professional communications team led by David Plouffe, who would soon be replaced by Rachel Whetstone, the former head of communications and public policy at Google. But the message had another target besides the journalists in attendance—regulators and le...

Uber drivers had continued to plead their cases against the company, and in Seattle they had even won the right to form a union. Was Uber treating its drivers fairly? Kalanick equivocated a little. He had abandoned the pretense that driver earnings went up when Uber’s fares went down and settled for contending that they remained steady. But he still genuinely seemed to think of drivers as Uber’s customers. “I’d say the bottom line is that we have to show by all measures that [driver] earnings are stable,” he said. Uber “needs to find ways to take stress and anxiety out of the work that is possible on the platform.”

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

It was his fate to inscribe yet another set of lessons into the annals of the upstarts: Relationships matter. Ethical decision-making matters. Ignoring the established order can be a virtue—until suddenly it’s not. And presenting yourself to the world with a little bit of humility can pay off amply in the long run.

Mike Isaac, “Inside Travis Kalanick’s Resignation as Uber’s CEO,” New York Times, June 21, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/21/technology/uber-travis-kalanick-final-hours.html.