More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
After a grueling trudge towards the exit, Kalanick was finally able to take a breath.
Angie You,
“There are forces all around you when you run a company, . . . ready to take you out,” Kalanick said. “The [CEOs] that survive are the ones that are supposed to be there.”
But during the panic, leaders focused mostly on Wall Street, and not Big Tech.
There were three important ingredients that fueled
First,
Second,
But the third
John Doerr,
Doerr made an early investment in Netscape, a company that eventually became the world’s first consumer internet browser.
Doerr knew opportunity when it was in front of him. He tried to seize it.
He knew his friend’s mind would be impossible to change once he had made it up, and Apple’s approach to software development had rigorously avoided Gates’s “come one, come all” approach with Windows third-party apps.
Top developers in the early weeks of the App Store were seeing anywhere from five thousand to ten thousand dollars in income from app downloads every single day.
“the appification of the economy,”
Garrett Camp.
Friends knew him as an obstinate colleague—quick-tempered when challenged directly—and often unwilling to change his mind when convinced he was right.
Camp was relaxing at his new luxury apartment in South Park—just yards away from where the idea for Twitter was first conceived, and where Instagram’s early offices were located—when he decided to watch a movie.
The phone, a boxy, silver Ericsson antiquated by later standards (it still had a numerical push-button keypad!) displayed a GPS-based map on its tiny screen.
Still, Kalanick’s landing was respectable enough, earning him enough money to stop working and spend time cruising around San Francisco, judging startup events and hopping to parties thrown by early-stage investment funds.
In one of his favorite movies, Pulp Fiction, Kalanick was captivated by one character, played by Harvey Keitel.
“My people think of me as a funding shepherd,”
VCs, in Kalanick’s mind, weren’t in the game for the right reasons. They weren’t there to change the world like he was, or even to alter it slightly. Venture capitalists cared about one thing: the bottom line.
And then there was Camp, who wouldn’t stop talking about his idea for UberCab. He chattered incessantly to Kalanick about its possibilities.
Building a startup is very, very hard. To create actual software, a founder must first convince engineers to take a pay cut in exchange for company stock, then do the same with marketers, salespeople, and the rest of a lean staff.
A founder needs to be able to wear any number of hats, from human resources one day to conference speaker and PR manager the next.
Having a good idea is important. Executing on that idea is paramount.
On January 5, 2010, Kalanick posted: “Looking 4 entrepreneurial product mgr/biz-dev killer 4 a location based service. . pre-launch, BIG equity, big peeps involved--ANY TIPS??” he tweeted.
“I’m not a businessman. I’m a business, man.”
Graves was a charmer and a hard worker, but those qualities only went so far. Investors were interested in the idea, but didn’t think Graves had what it took to make it big.
Kalanick didn’t care about his salary; he already had a taste of wealth after selling Red Swoosh. What he wanted was power.
The tactic worked. New UberCab drivers flooded the market in San Francisco as the handful of early employees began to promote the app to anyone who would listen.
For instance, often when people called for a traditional taxi, they didn’t know whether it’d be there in a matter of minutes or if it wouldn’t show up at all. When a user ordered an UberCab, she could watch the car’s journey, pixel by pixel, across the map on the screen of their iPhone.
One of the most important parts of the UberCab experience was paying for the ride.
Within months, Kalanick and Camp’s startup was the talk of Silicon Valley.
In each new city, Geidt established a team to continue operations after she moved on. Communications managers handled marketing, messaging, and drumming up rider and driver interest.
Graves was scared. “What are we supposed to do here?” he said aloud, reading his name on a piece of paper that said he could be going to jail.
UberCab was now known as “Uber,” and it was staying open for business.
Not only was the company growing fast, but it was perfect for the iPhone, the device that was changing the world.
Throughout his career Gurley had been enamored with what he called “marketplaces,” a category of business that neither made new products nor sold others, but merely matched the desires of one side of a market with the products of the other side, and took a cut as the middleman.
Other firms would use Gurley’s reports to decide whether to buy and sell millions of dollars in equities.
Frank Quattrone,
“Environments like this tend to sort out the true entrepreneurs from the pretenders,”
The other reason a firm wants to invest early is simple: the earlier you invest in a company, the greater share of equity the firm gets for a smaller amount of money.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the co-founders of Google, cemented and institutionalized this practice. In a cramped garage in 1998, Page and Brin founded a search engine to perform a task that sounded bonkers; “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It was the exact type of moonshot thinking venture capitalists encouraged.
“There’s been so much corruption and so much cronyism in the taxi industry and so much regulatory capture that if you ask for permission upfront for something that’s already legal, you’ll never get it,”
Everyone was responsible for “owning” their position. Empowering his workers, Kalanick believed, was better than trying to micromanage every city.
In many ways, Kalanick’s approach was brilliant. A local employee in Miami would be better prepared to fit Uber to their own city than, say, a new hire from San Francisco who knew nothing about the people and institutions that make up a locale.
Kalanick was growing nervous. Across town at Uber’s headquarters, he had heard about Zimride’s plans, and he had heard whispers about Sunil Paul’s escapades, too.
and launch a new service called Lyft;
Lyft
