Wild ride Inside Uber's quest for world domination

DURING THE WEEK of Barack Obama's inauguration in January 2009, three young would-be entrepreneurs - Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia and Nathan Blecharczyk - crashed on air mattresses in unfurnished rooms they had rented in a rundown house in Washington. They spent some of their days at a Metro station handing out fliers that urged strangers to offer rooms for rent, and in the evenings they fielded angry email complaints from a woman who had rented space in the basement. Despite the difficulties they faced that week, the huge demand for accommodations from people who had flocked to the inauguration convinced the group that the business they were hoping to create, which they called AirBed & Breakfast, would succeed if they persisted. Also in town for the festivities were two other hustling San Francisco startup jockeys, Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp. They had used a website to find more comfort- able accommodations, but on Inauguration Day they couldn't get a cab and had to sprint miles in the wicked cold to get to the mall on time. Camp had been trying to convince Kalanick to join him in a startup that would allow people to summon a car with the push of a button on an iPhone. The cab problems they had in Washington, which were similar to what they experienced in Paris a few months earlier, helped persuade him that the company, then called UberCab, had potential. At certain moments in history, a confluence of technological and social advances creates the opportunity for a new field of innovation. That was happening at the beginning of 2009. A few months earlier, a reluctant Steve Jobs had been persuaded by his colleagues to allow other companies to develop apps for the iPhone. That happened just as Google Maps and GPS and other tools were enabling more wondrous mobile-based services. In addition, cloud services such as Amazon's allowed startups to store and process large amounts of data without building their own infrastructure. The explosive growth of Facebook had encouraged people to create trusted identities and share things online. And as the 2008 financial crisis receded, the overcaffeinated venture capitalists of Silicon Valley became frenzied in the pursuit of new potential unicorns. The result was the blossoming of a type of economic activity with many kludgy labels - the "sharing" or "gig" or "on-demand" economy - that do not quite capture its disruptive and transformative nature. What companies such as Airbnb and Uber have done in the past decade is take the peer-to-peer sharing of digital content that flourished online, through sites like Napster and YouTtibe and Facebook, and apply it to our physical world, including cars and rooms and scores of other goods, tasks and services. Three new fast-paced narrative books written by seasoned business journalists (all of whom I have known since my days in the magazine world) detail the personal, financial and social aspects of the rise of these companies. "Wild Ride," by Adam Lashinsky, executive editor of Fortune, is a crisp and lively look at both the good and bad aspects of the rise of Uber and its C.E.O., Kalanick. His Fortune colleague Leigh Gallagher has similarly produced a colorful account of Airbnb and its C.E.O., Brian Chesky, "The Airbnb Story." And Brad Stone of Bloomberg News has intertwined the two tales in "The Upstarts," a richly researched and highly readable narrative that provides additional layers of insight by weaving in contrasting stories of competing companies that failed. In addition to these narratives, which are generally celebratory, it is also useful to read a darker counterpoint, Jonathan Taplin's "Move Fast and Break Things," which argues that the radical libertarian ideology and monopolistic greed of many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs helped to decimate the livelihood of musicians and is now undermining the communal idealism of the early internet. "The original mission of the internet," he writes, "was hijacked by a small group of right-wing radicals to whom the ideas of democracy and decentralization were anathema." As happens on all of history's uncharted frontiers, the pioneers of the sharing economy have displayed an energizing mix of idealism and recklessness. Airbnb's founders came from a background of arts and design, rather than coding and engineering, which offered, contrary to the preaching of STEM education apostles, an advantage in a new economy built on connecting humans to other humans. As a child, Chesky used to visit the Norman Rockwell Museum near his home and spent hours sketching. "On a family trip to Florence one year," Gallagher reports, "he stood in front of the statue of David for eight hours, meticulously drawing it." Gebbia studied the violin, played jazz piano and originally planned to be a painter. They met at the Rhode Island School of Design, and they started their company when a big design conference came to San Francisco and there was a shortage of hotel rooms. Both managed sports teams while at R.I.S.D., and their tale illustrates the importance of team formation in innovation. Each brought different skills to their collaboration : Chesky evolved into a manager and chief executive, and Gebbia focused on product design. To complete the team, they brought in Gebbia's friend Blecharczyk, a computer science geek from Harvard who had started a software company when he was an undergraduate. "No one of us alone could have done this," Gebbia said. "Two of us alone couldn't have done this. But the combination of what Nate brings, what Brian brings, what I bring, put that together, and I think that's how we've persevered through all the challenges." That perseverance - indeed an insane persistence - was another component of their success. Having come up with a wacky marketing idea of repackaging breakfast cereal during the 2008 conventions in boxes featuring Obama or John McCain, they lived on the leftover cereal during the subsequent lean year of struggling to keep the company going. They used their scarce resources to fly to New York on weekends to watch how the early adopters were using Airbnb and offering to photograph for free the apartments that were listed on their site. In the case of Uber, both co-founders were already somewhat successful serial entrepreneurs. The idea for an on-demand car service originated with Camp, but Kalanick shaped it. He was a maestro of collaborative brainstorming. Like Steve Jobs, he firmly believed that collaboration happened best when people got together in the flesh, and he turned his San Francisco apartment into a gathering place he called the Jam Pad. "It was a kind of entrepreneurial safe house, a place where likeminded obsessives could gather in front of a whiteboard and debate the intricacies of building internet companies," Stone writes. At first neither he nor Camp wanted to run Uber, so they set out to add a manager to their team. Kalanick sent out a tweet, "looking 4 entrepreneurial product mgr." A 27-year-old midlevel product manager for General Electric in Chicago sent back the most lucrative Twitter reply in history: "email me :) graves.ryan@gmail.com." Graves was hired, and the stock he got is now worth more than $1.5 billion. Collaboration, however, can only go so far. It is also necessary to have an intense, driven leader with the visionary brilliance and obstinacy of a Steve Jobs. After finally signing up full-time as C.E.O. in 2010 and edging Ryan Graves down a notch, Kalanick became that. Kalanick focused on beating back regulators, from San Francisco to Paris, who insisted that if Uber cars were going to function like taxis they had to adhere to the rules and licensing requirements that cabbies faced. He fought with a righteousness mixed with self-interest that caused most city officials to think of him as arrogant (or another word that begins with "a"). It was a classic case of technological disruption where there is merit to both sides: It was unfair to medallion taxi owners to allow a competitor that did not have to play by the same rules, and yet for years city officials had become so beholden to and intimidated by the taxi industry that the medallion and licensing system had become a way to protect the interests of the owners rather than of passengers. With his scorched-earth approach to rules, Kalanick not only won battles for Uber but also for a techno-libertarianism that was contemptuous of most government attempts to regulate disruptive innovation. "Uber's lawyers and lobbyists, who had begged him, unsuccessfully, to seek compromise and testify with humility, began to whisper in reverent tones about a new political dictate that contravened all their old assumptions. Travis's Law," Stone writes. "It went something like this: Our product is so superior to the status quo that if we give people the opportunity to see it or try it, in any place in the world where government has to be at least somewhat responsive to the people, they will demand it and defend its right to exist." He was right. ONLY ONCE did Kalanick show caution. In 2012, Uber was still using only professional drivers, mainly in town cars. A competitor started a service named Lyft that allowed drivers to use their personal cars, sometimes festooned with a playful pink mustache. Kalanick, uncharacteristically, argued to regulators that this should be illegal. But when he saw Lyft gaining traction, he reversed himself and responded with a ride-sharing service called UberX that quickly became dominant. A good litmus test to determine a person's basic ideological outlook is to ask about Uber's use of surge pricing. To some, it is a sensible way to match supply and demand by encouraging more drivers to come out and some consumers to find other transportation during periods of peak demand. Hotels and airlines use variable pricing all the time. To others it smacked of gouging, especially when there were huge spikes in prices during Superstorm Sandy and a hostage crisis in Sydney. Some of the problems could have been avoided with a bit more sensitivity - Uber would have been wise to kick in its own financial incentives for drivers during a major crisis - but that was not an instinct that came naturally to Kalanick. "Anyone who whined about surge pricing, in his eyes, was too thick to understand the laws of supply and demand," Lashinsky writes. The hard-driving testosterone-fueled culture of Uber eventually caused problems. Earlier this month, the board approved top management changes, which included having Kalanick take an indefinite leave of absence, after an independent investigation found a culture of sexism and disrespect pervaded the company. Chesky has been more sensitive to public concerns, but the complex issues raised by Airbnb are as challenging, especially in places where the service is dominated not by easygoing millennials renting out a spare bedroom but instead by developers who buy up multiple houses and apartments to convert into short-term rentals. That can destroy residential neighborhoods and decimate the supply of affordable housing. To his credit, Chesky has tried to deal with these issues as well as the problem of racial discrimination that had infected the service. I watched in admiration earlier this year as Airbnb and my hometown, New Orleans, painstakingly negotiated a complex agreement, with enforcement and taxing mechanisms, specifying the number of days per year each type of place could be rented on Airbnb, with distinctions made by neighborhood and by whether a place was owner-occupied. The benefits that Airbnb and Uber pioneered go beyond convenience. They allow people to make human connections in an era that has become much more institutionalized in the decades since family-run bed-and-breakfasts began being replaced by standardized hotel chains. Stepping into someone's personal car or apartment forges a bond of trust and, in Gallagher's words, "yields a little vote of confidence in our fellow humanity." A disconnected society becomes slightly more connected, not just digitally but also physically. Stone saw this firsthand while covering Chesky on a visit to Paris in November 2015 when the terrorist attack that killed 130 people occurred. "I Ubered home that night to my Airbnb, near the Cathédrale Notre Dame de Paris," he writes. "Once back, I received a frantic phone call from my worried host, Ivan, whom I had never met in person (he was out of town and had left me the keys) but who wanted to make sure I was O.K. The next morning, he emailed: T was relieved to hear you yesterday on the phone. I hope you are well today despite the critical times in Paris.' He invited me to stay for as long as necessary until the travel situation in the city returned to normal." Uber and Airbnb, as embodied by their young billionaire leaders, represent, to their supporters, a radical expansion of freedom and a liberating empowerment of individuals to supply services as they please, without government interference. They have provided workers with added flexibility and sources of income, and they have created a new economy based on trust and earned reputations. Consumers rate their drivers and hosts, and they in turn rate us. When it works well it encourages all involved to be a bit nicer and restores the bonds of trust that have been fraying in our society. But as Stone points out, "Uber and Airbnb have also come to represent, at least to some, the overweening hubris of the techno-elite. Critics blame them for everything from destroying the basic rules of employment, exacerbating traffic and ruining peaceful neighborhoods to bringing unrestrained capitalism into liberal cities." On a deeper level, this new economy is disrupting not only old industries but also the entire concept of work. Instead of having "a job," a growing number of people will, by desire or necessity, support themselves by juggling on-demand gigs. That presents an issue that goes well beyond the need for new regulations; it will require whole new ways to think about pensions, health care, benefits, sick leave, disability and retirement savings. What these books show is that societies must find ways to absorb these economic transformations, because it is futile to resist them. Peer-to-peer technology may be disruptive, and its effects can be messy. But it has an inexorable tendency to empower people to find - and produce - new offerings that improve our lives by reinforcing the most basic rule of entrepreneurship, which is to make something that people really want. ? WALTER ISAACSON, the host of the podcast Trailblazers, is the author of "The Innovators" and biographies of Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs. His biography of Leonardo da Vinci will be published in October. Societies must find ways to absorb these economic transformations. It is futile to resist them.

Lashinsky (assistant managing editor, Fortune; Inside Apple) takes readers inside the world of Uber and its enigmatic CEO, -Travis Kalanick. Drawn from extensive research including interviews with Kalanick and others involved in the company, the author presents a vivid account of the story of Uber. The company came about when Kalanick and his friend Garrett Camp could not catch a cab during a blizzard in 2008. The idea was "if only there were a way to turn one's phone into a taxi dispatcher." Uber's first prototype called UberCab was created by Camp along with Oscar Salazar and Conrad Whelan, with Kalanick as "chief incubator" and adviser. Kalanick became CEO in 2010, with the company ultimately changing its name to Uber. It grew to be worth $69 billion, and along the way, Kalanick has faced government regulators and turned the taxi industry upside down. Uber continues to explore new ventures, including working toward adding self-driving cars (facing competition with Google, Tesla, Lyft, and General Motors). VERDICT An insightful and highly recommended account of Uber, this book should attract a wide audience. Would-be entrepreneurs as well as business and technology students and faculty will appreciate this inspirational story.-Lucy Heckman, St. John's Univ. Lib., Queens, NY © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Chapter 1 A Wild Ride Through China Travis Kalanick sits in the back of a chauffeur-driven black Mercedes making its way through the traffic-clogged streets of Beijing. It is the dead of summer in 2016, and the sky above the Chinese capital is thick with pollution, the air muggy and still. As CEO of Uber, the world's most valuable start-up, Kalanick has been visiting China about every three months for three years now. All the travel from his home base in San Francisco is part of a money-draining and quixotic gambit to replicate the global success of Uber's disruptive ride-hailing service in the world's most populous country. Kalanick has spent the previous three days in Tianjin, a megacity on the Yellow Sea, two hours southeast of Beijing. There he was a cochair of the World Economic Forum's (WEF) New Champions meeting, the so-called summer Davos. Weeks shy of his fortieth birthday, Kalanick was the toast of Tianjin, where he enjoyed the considerable fringe benefits of his newfound worldwide prominence. The California start-up he runs has been around a mere six years, yet at the off-season international gabfest he scored an audience with the second most powerful government official in China, Premier Li Keqiang. Kalanick appeared on WEF panels moderated by Western and Chinese broadcasters, gamely attempted to flip a traditional pancake over an intimate dinner with the managers responsible for Uber's local operations in Tianjin, and huddled with his entrepreneurial peers. Among them was Lei Jun, founder of the highly valued Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi. Lei's penchant for bold claims and his company's controversial business model of selling ultracheap phones make him as notorious in China as Kalanick is everywhere else. Already, Kalanick's trip is a success, judged at least through the prism of the image-enhancing mentions he has racked up in the Chinese and international press. Li, the Chinese premier and an outspoken promoter of entrepreneurialism in China, called Kalanick a "pioneer." He said this in English, a flattering flourish and tidbit the Uber CEO's China-based minions dutifully fed to the local press. Indeed, Kalanick's every utterance on this trip is making headlines. Asked during a WEF fireside chat if self-driving vehicles would make the human-driven kind obsolete, Kalanick threw off one of his signature and controversial one-liners that combined insouciance, boastfulness, and don't-mess-with-me humor. "You might own a car like maybe some people own a horse," he deadpanned in front of an admiring audience. "You know, you might take a ride on the weekends or something." As he leaves Tianjin and in the privacy of his human-driven vehicle on the road to Beijing, however, his cocky good cheer gives way to prickly tension. In fact, Kalanick has a full-blown crisis on his hands. He joins a conference call with a team of Uber executives in three countries on two continents. A team of communications executives dials in from San Francisco. Others call from Seoul, South Korea. Two executives are in the car with Kalanick, both critical to Uber's Asian ambitions. One is Emil Michael, Uber's chief business officer and the CEO's all-purpose right-hand man, to whom on this very trip Kalanick has delegated the role of engaging in high-stakes and secretive negotiations to sell Uber's China business to its chief rival, Didi Chuxing. The other is Liu Zhen, the head of strategy for Uber China and its best-known Chinese employee. Liu is also a first cousin of Jean Liu, the former Goldman Sachs banker who is president of Didi and whose father founded the computer behemoth Lenovo. The purpose of the call is to discuss whether or not Kalanick should travel as planned early the next day to Seoul for a most unusual appointment. In late 2014 a Korean prosecutor indicted Kalanick, holding him responsible for what the South Korean government deemed to be Uber's illegal taxi service. This service was a version of the company's popular UberX service in the United States, in which amateur drivers use their own cars to serve passengers. Kalanick agreed to appear in court to answer the charges. The plan, worked out by Uber's legal team after protracted negotiations with the Korean prosecutors, is for Kalanick to plead guilty to what is effectively a misdemeanor-and then to be immediately released. From a legal perspective, appearing in the Seoul court is low risk. Prosecutors have assured Uber's lawyers that Kalanick would be given a suspended sentence, making him free to leave Seoul. And that would be fine with the CEO, who is well accustomed at this point to picking fights with regulators and other officials the world over. Since it received its first cease-and-desist letter from the city of San Francisco in 2010, Uber has been clashing with adversaries from Seattle to New York and Paris to Delhi and beyond-often with its pugnacious CEO stirring the pot with inflammatory comments to the media and outrageous tweets. What's more, South Korea wasn't all that important a market for Uber, with restrictive laws preventing the company from operating all but the highest-end limousine version of its service there. Uber's motivation in settling the case, therefore, wasn't so much about commerce as about eliminating a pesky and embarrassing thorn in its CEO's side. As the car snakes its way through snarled Beijing traffic, however, Kalanick becomes increasingly agitated. He's concerned that what ought to be a simple legal proceeding instead has the potential to turn into what he terms a "shit show" on the ground in Korea. Repeatedly, he queries his public-relations and legal advisers about the ramifications of the local media learning that the renegade CEO had alighted in Seoul. The goal was to cause as little ruckus as possible. To achieve that outcome, Uber has chartered a private jet, which stands at the ready at an airfield in Beijing to whisk Kalanick in and out of Korea without the press catching wind of his appearance. And yet someone, likely in the prosecutor's office, has leaked word that Kalanick will appear next day. Kalanick envisions the worst possible scenario for his and Uber's brand: photos of him being handcuffed and paraded through a Korean courtroom, an Asian perp walk at precisely the moment he was working so hard to project an image of leadership in China and the rest of Asia. When it comes to protecting his image, no detail is too small. Kalanick wants to know, for example, how many doors there are in the courtroom-the better to understand effective escape routes. How ironclad is the promise to release him immediately? Would he be able to clear customs quietly in the private-aviation terminal? Opinions fly on the line as executives talk over one another, including the CEO. At one particularly heated moment Kalanick instructs his man on the ground in Seoul, Uber's top business-development executive for Asia, to "stop interrupting me." It will be hours before Kalanick decides to skip the court date and instead instruct his Korean lawyers to request, for the fourth time, an extension. It is a calculated risk. Angering a Korean judge might make Kalanick permanently unwelcome in Korea. And yet the bet pays off, at least in the short term. His failure to appear earns brief mentions in the Korean press and is ignored everywhere else, including in the United States. Months later there is no movement in the case, and there isn't likely to be until Uber decides having a business in Korea is worth the renewed effort. In the meantime, the Uber entourage reaches its Beijing destination, the glittering Shangri-La Hotel. Next to the hotel is a convention center where Kalanick will address a conference hosted by the Chinese Internet company NetEase. Kalanick and his colleagues briefly hole up in a private room to complete their call as a crowd of one thousand overwhelmingly youthful employees of Chinese Internet companies waits in a strobe-lit hall with loudspeakers blaring. Despite Uber's underdog status in China, Kalanick is a rock star to the young, Internet-savvy Chinese audience. Obsessed with all things digital and entrepreneurial, the tech workers know well the story of Uber's global success and its efforts in China. Even though Didi outshines it at home, Uber has carved out a sizable piece of the market, and Kalanick is a boldface name for the audience. The packed ballroom is skeptical but intrigued by Kalanick's maverick reputation and record of persistence. They have no idea how close Uber is to capitulating in China. They also know nothing of how distracted Kalanick is by the prospect of possible arrest in Seoul. The air of excitement in the room is palpable. For Kalanick, however, it's just another speech, followed by an onstage interview with a local broadcaster with impeccable English. As the attendees don headphones for simultaneous translation, the Uber CEO strides onstage in the crisp gray suit and collared white shirt he'd worn that morning to meet the premier of China. He gives an abbreviated version of a talk he'd delivered months earlier at the world-famous TED conference in Vancouver, including a photo of the Los Angeles suburb where he grew up. This iteration of the talk, though, is tailored for the Chinese audience. Newly added is an update on Uber's three-year-old China business, which by now includes service in some sixty cities. In a brief Q&A following his talk, Kalanick is asked if he minds being second place in the Chinese market, given Uber's leading position most everywhere else in the world. He chuckles and gives a nonanswer: "The way I like to think of this is, it's our job to serve drivers and riders better. If we ultimately serve them better we will have most of the customers. And we still have some work to do." Asked directly about first-place Didi, Kalanick deflects: "In an ideal world we are serving those customers better and most of those customers are ours." It's late afternoon and not only is Kalanick spent, he has bigger things on his mind than convincing China's Internet community that Uber can best Didi. The appearance lasts barely twenty minutes, after which the CEO hustles out of the hall and to a nearby hotel to mull his Korean dilemma. By breakfast the next day at the sturdy and sumptuous Rosewood Beijing hotel, the tense pall hanging over Kalanick the day before has lifted completely. Having already decided to skip the Seoul jaunt, Kalanick has moved on. Freshly shaved and dressed in his more typical jeans and a polo shirt, he is rested and relaxed. He professes to be completely over the ordeal and unaffected by it. The back-and-forth with authorities is a necessary dance, he tells me, and he is dutifully executing his steps. In Kalanick's worldview, Uber's entire business model is predicated on challenging obsolete laws meant to protect entrenched interests and frustrate innovation rather than benefit consumers. The whole notion of taxi medallions and fixed pricing, for example, constricts supply and keeps prices high-both negatives for riders. For him, it has become part of the job to fight what he sees as injustice. Where the world sees a provocateur, Kalanick looks in the mirror and sees a truth seeker. Given that he'd been planning on stealthily jetting to Korea on this fine summer morning, Kalanick has a rare open schedule in front of him; he isn't due in his next destination, Hangzhou, until the next day. After polishing off an omelet he plans to sit at his computer and see "what shit I can stir up," he declares. And so, at right that moment, Kalanick begins telling me his life story. For the better part of two years I had been attempting to persuade the reluctant CEO to cooperate with me on a book about Uber. As a writer for Fortune based in San Francisco, I had been covering Silicon Valley's top companies for nearly twenty years and had written a book about Apple in 2012. After fits and starts and discussions about having further discussions, he had finally relented. I was planning to write the book with or without him, and he made a pragmatic decision to have his say rather than remain quiet. Weeks earlier, he had invited me to tag along on this trip to China, given how central the country was to Uber's story. Kalanick and his advisers also correctly foresaw that a trip far from headquarters would afford moments like this, where the harried executive would have time to talk with me. Indeed, once Kalanick got to talking, he didn't let up. We continue the conversation over the course of the next several days in China and then again once we'd both returned home to San Francisco. We talk on a flight-on the plane that was supposed to ferry him to Korea-to the coastal city of Hangzhou, where he'll meet with Uber China's top executives as well as Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba and China's Internet kingpin; in a van shuttling him to a resort hotel on the outskirts of Hangzhou; in mid-July back home, during a three-hour walk through the streets of San Francisco; and during numerous additional formal and informal chats after that. Uber's story isn't strictly synonymous with Travis Kalanick's, but he is its central character. In fact, Uber wasn't initially his idea. Kalanick's involvement with Uber was part time for the entire first year of the company's existence, a time when he was recuperating from his last gig and keeping his options open for his next one. All the same, Kalanick was present nearly at the creation of Uber, and he supplied the critical insight that transformed someone else's idea from merely interesting to undeniably groundbreaking. He has been Uber's iron-fisted, omnipresent CEO from the time it first gained traction and began expanding beyond San Francisco. As a result, Uber has become as identified with Kalanick as Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook are with Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg, respectively. Whether or not Uber becomes as powerful and highly valued as these enduring technology-industry titans, its CEO already has become an object of fascination and, for many repulsion. In the short period that Uber went from an idea to the biggest of the so-called unicorns-privately held start-ups valued at more than $1 billion, once a rarity-Kalanick became world famous for his ruthlessness, lack of empathy, and willingness to flout anybody else's rules. He was a veritable poster boy for the "brogrammer" culture of San Francisco, a male-dominated universe of engineers-turned-entrepreneurs. Older than Gates, Jobs, and Zuckerberg were when they founded their companies, he arrived on the scene already a B-level fixture in San Francisco's post-Internet-bubble start-up community. And while Kalanick had struggled with his previous start-ups, his timing with Uber was impeccable. Just as Microsoft defined the personal computer revolution, Apple wrote the next chapter of digital entertainment, and Facebook created the twenty-first century's most powerful publishing platform, Uber perfectly exemplifies all the attributes of the information-technology industry's next wave. A mobile-first company, if there had been no iPhone there would have been no Uber. Uber expanded globally almost from its beginning, far earlier than would have been possible in an era when packaged software and clunky computers were the norm. It is a leader of the so-called gig economy, cleverly marrying its technology with other people's assets (their cars) as well as their labor, paying them independent-contractor fees but not costlier employee benefits. Such "platform" companies became all the rage as Uber rose to prominence. Airbnb didn't need to own homes to make a profit renting them. Thumbtack and TaskRabbit are just two companies that matched people looking for project-based work with customers-without having to make any hires themselves. Excerpted from Wild Ride: Inside Uber's Quest for World Domination by Adam Lashinsky All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.