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

by Brad Stone

At the center of this maelstrom are the young, wealthy, charismatic chief executives: Travis Kalanick and Brian Chesky. They represent a new kind of technology CEO, nothing at all like Bill Gates, Larry Page, and Mark Zuckerberg, the awkward, introverted innovators who typified the previous generation of tech leaders. Instead, they are extroverted storytellers, capable of positioning their companies in the context of dramatic progress for humanity and recruiting not only armies of engineers but drivers, hosts, lobbyists, and lawmakers to their cause.

“You can live in a world of your own design,”

Imagine hearing ‘no’ a hundred times a day for six years straight,” he told me years later. “At some point even your friends are like, ‘Dude, you need to do something else.’ To keep going in the face of that can be a lonely existence.”

Around this time, he went out to a nightclub in San Francisco with several friends, including Napster co-founder and Facebook investor Sean Parker.

“Fear is the disease. Hustle is the antidote,”

I’ve never seen an entrepreneur work as hard. He lives, eats and breathes Uber.

drivers received iPhones with the Uber application and were guaranteed a minimum twenty-five to thirty-five dollars an hour.

“After Twitter, he went away, he disappeared off the map and self-reflected. And then he came back as a completely different person.”

“If Airbnb was a body, Nate was the brains, Joe was the heart, and Brian was the balls.”

“transportation as reliable as running water, everywhere and for everyone.”

“You have to get to what I guess I’d call escape velocity. If a rocket takes off, there’s a bumpy ride before you get to orbit, and then there’s a little bit more stillness.

It’s really hard to hate somebody when they are standing right in front of you.”

“Psychological hospitality trumps material hospitality every single time.”

Transportation as reliable as running water, everywhere and for everyone.

And the next night, the lucky Uber employees were treated to a private performance by an Uber investor, the megastar Beyoncé.

Six of Uber’s top ten cities by ride volume were in the country.

In China

Uber agreed to depart China and hand over its operations in the country to Didi; in return it got a 17 percent stake in its Chinese counterpart and a billion dollar investment from Didi; the companies also took observer seats on each other’s boards.