February 15, 2017
“See?” Camp said to Kalanick as the crowd chanted “O-bam-a! O-bam-a!” and the world waited for the new First Family to take the stage. “We really need this.”
Even back then, Camp was calling this proposed service by a name the world would soon know well: Uber.”
February 15, 2017
“That was eight years ago.
Much has changed since then—the president, for starters. But few changes have been as profound as those that were ushered in by those two groups of entrepreneurs sitting anonymously in the crowd that day.”
February 15, 2017
“Airbnb can be considered the biggest hotel company on the planet, yet it possesses no actual hotel rooms. Uber is among the world’s largest car services, yet it doesn’t employ any professional drivers or own any vehicles (save for a small, experimental fleet of self-driving cars). They are the ultimate twenty-first-century internet businesses, bringing not only new opportunities but new kinds of risks, often poorly understood, to those who provide and utilize their services.”
February 15, 2017
“This idea was not necessarily novel (VRBO, HomeAway, Couchsurfing, and Craigslist did it first), but the elegance of the solution was unrivaled.”
March 6, 2017
“During those eight years, the two companies etched their brands into popular culture. Their names are nouns and occasionally verbs, used by retirees looking to earn extra money, millennials seeking authentic travel experiences, and young people who have no interest in owning expensive assets like cars. Uber has become a staple of rap songs (Drake: “’Bout to call your ass a Uber, I got somewhere to be”) and late-night monologues (Jimmy Kimmel: “About a quarter of Uber drivers are over fifty and many are much older than that. I guess you could think of it like Miss Daisy driving you”).”
March 6, 2017
“Then there was the monumental challenge of obtaining the cooperation of the famously combative Travis Kalanick, known as a contrarian who advocated fiercely for his company’s interests. He did not disappoint. “I came to this meeting out of respect for you and your work,” he said when we met for dinner in March 2015 at the Burritt Room and Tavern in San Francisco’s Mystic Hotel. “But I’m going into it thinking, There’s no way in hell I’m cooperating with a book about Uber right now.”
Kalanick had endured a year of negative press over Uber’s tactics toward rivals, its ambiguous impact on cities, and its tense relationship with drivers. David Plouffe, Obama’s former campaign manager and at the time Kalanick’s chief of media relations, came along for the dinner and wore the bemused smile of someone witnessing a journalist’s suicide mission.”
March 6, 2017
“Surve, a native of Mumbai, India, had used the internet to rent an airbed for eighty dollars a night during the World Design Congress, a biennial conference held by the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design, or ICSID. All the hotels in the city that week were either booked or too expensive for Surve, so he hadn’t expected much. But what he saw in his temporary home was promising. There was a shelf full of design books and a comfortable couch in the living room. He was invited to help himself to cereal and milk in the kitchen in the morning, and there was a small bedroom with an inflated airbed, sheets, and blankets. His hosts were surprisingly thoughtful; Gebbia presented him with a small bag that contained, among other things, the house rules, a Wi-Fi passcode, a city map, and some loose change for the neighborhood homeless population.”
March 6, 2017
“But by far the most surprising thing Surve saw that first afternoon was an image on Gebbia’s laptop—a picture of Amol Surve himself. Gebbia and his roommate and business partner, Brian Chesky, were putting together a presentation about their new home-sharing service for a pecha-kucha (Japanese for “chatter”), an event in which a series of designers present their new product ideas by showing twenty slides apiece and discussing each slide for twenty seconds.”
March 6, 2017
“Chesky would later say that AirBed & Breakfast was a lark and something of a side project at the time, but Surve remembers his new friend vibrating with enthusiasm for the idea on the forty-five-minute drive back to the city. “Amol,” Chesky told him in the car, “we have to put a dent in the universe with this concept.”
March 6, 2017
“From a young age, Chesky gravitated toward drawing, paying frequent visits to the Norman Rockwell Museum, about an hour’s drive from his town. His parents marveled at his ability to sit and draw for long periods, and teachers favorably compared his style to Rockwell’s and made heady predictions about his future. “Your son is going to be famous one day,” one told them.”
March 6, 2017
“After graduation, Chesky spent a few months living at home, then he decamped to Los Angeles, moving in with former classmates in a Hollywood apartment amid the tourists and costumed panhandlers a few blocks from Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. His parents, still doting, bought a Honda Civic from an L.A. dealer and had it delivered to him at the Los Angeles airport.
He was living his college dream. He had a real job, earning forty thousand dollars a year as a designer for the consultant shop 3DID”
March 6, 2017
“When you are a designer at school, especially an industrial designer, you just dream of getting something on the shelf,” Chesky says.”
March 6, 2017
“one day in early September, Chesky woke with his mind made up. Walt Disney himself had taken a huge risk by moving from Kansas City to Hollywood in 1923, and his life had changed. Chesky would take a chance too.
Of course, by moving into Rausch Street, Chesky wasn’t solving the quandary of how to pay the rent. He still didn’t have meaningful employment, and both RISD graduates were, essentially, broke. So a few weeks later, on September 22, 2007, with the World Design Congress coming to San Francisco and the city’s hotels either overbooked or overpriced, Gebbia sent Chesky the e-mail that would change their lives:
Subject: subletter
Brian,
I thought of a way to make a few bucks—turning our place into a designer’s bed and breakfast—offering young designers who come into town a place to crash during the 4 day event, complete with wireless internet, a small desk space, sleeping mat, and breakfast each morning. Ha!—Joe.”
March 6, 2017
“If you want to build a truly great company you have got to ride a really big wave. And you’ve got to be able to look at market waves and technology waves in a different way than other folks and see it happening sooner, know how to position yourself out there, prepare yourself, pick the right surfboard—in other words, bring the right management team in, build the right platform underneath you. Only then can you ride a truly great wave. At the end of the day, without that great wave, even if you are a great entrepreneur, you are not going to build a really great business.8”
March 6, 2017
“There were several in-person meetings, but those fared just as poorly. One investor, a former Google executive, met Chesky and Gebbia at a café in Palo Alto, ordered a smoothie, and began to listen to the pitch. Then he walked out in the middle of it, his drink practically untouched. Gebbia and Chesky were left sitting there, wondering if the investor would return.”
March 6, 2017
“All these investors had concerns about the size of the market, about the absence of any real users, and about the founders themselves, who didn’t resemble the wonky innovators who’d created great Silicon Valley companies, people like Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs. Design students seemed risky; Stanford computer science dropouts were considered a much better bet. And, frankly, the idea itself seemed small. “We made the classic mistake that all investors make,” wrote Fred Wilson, a Twitter backer, a few years later. “We focused too much on what they were doing at the time and not enough on what they could do, would do, and did do”
March 6, 2017
“For Chesky, the money must have been difficult to turn down. He says that at the time, he had never felt more like a failure. Among the co-founders, Blecharczyk had his personal projects, and Gebbia had CritBuns and work as a consultant. Chesky didn’t have anything except his old furniture designs and the fervent belief that a great wave of connectivity and sharing was gathering momentum and that people were ready for this strange brand of internet-facilitated intimacy.”
March 6, 2017
“Silicon Valley’s startup scientists have a name for this phase in a company’s gestation; they call it the Trough of Sorrow, when the novelty of a new business idea wears off and the founders are left trying to jump-start an actual business. Gebbia and Chesky experienced a deep trough that would have swamped most founders. They responded in a characteristic way, digging back into their RISD past and tapping their penchant for reckless, silly creativity.
Talking over their dismal prospects one night in the Rausch Street kitchen during the presidential debates, they started riffing on the idea of making breakfast cereal and offering it to guests. It could be presidential-themed breakfast cereal! One could be called Obama O’s: “The breakfast of change!” And the other Cap’n McCains: “A maverick in every bite!”
March 6, 2017
“The interview at Y Combinator’s offices in Mountain View was practically hostile. “People are actually doing this?” asked Paul Graham, the program’s legendary co-founder, when the three men described the home-sharing concept. “Why? What’s wrong with them?” Graham, then forty-four, later admitted that he didn’t get it. “I wouldn’t want to stay on anyone else’s sofa and I didn’t want anyone to stay on mine,” he says.”
March 6, 2017
“You just won’t die.”16
Cockroach was Graham’s word for an unkillable startup that could weather any challenge, and it was the highest possible compliment in his startup lexicon. A few weeks later, after the founders had learned they had gotten into the program, and after they’d visited Washington, DC, for Barack Obama’s historic inauguration, they arrived at the offices of Y Combinator. Graham was there, speaking with Greg McAdoo, the Sequoia venture capitalist who had delivered that memorable speech about great waves the previous year.”
March 6, 2017
“McAdoo and his partners had identified this kind of true grit as the most important attribute in the founders of their successful portfolio companies, like Google and PayPal.
Scouting for new opportunities despite the gathering economic storm enveloping the world, McAdoo asked Graham: “So, who in this class of startups is the most mentally, emotionally tough?”
“Well, that’s easy,” Paul Graham responded, and he pointed across the room at two designers and an engineer, all hunkered over their laptops. “Hands down, it’s those guys over there.”
March 6, 2017
“Camp was born in Calgary, Canada. His mother was an interior designer and his father had left a career in accounting to train himself as an architect and contractor. The Camps were itinerant back in the 1980s; his father would build a house, his mother would decorate it, and then the family would move in for a few years before selling the house and starting over.
Camp spent his early childhood playing sports, learning the electric guitar, and asking lots of questions. The family didn’t have a television until he was fourteen, but they did see movies. He remembers that after the first Back to the Future, he needled his father ceaselessly about how nuclear fusion worked.
Eventually his curiosity settled on the geeky world of personal computers. An uncle gave the family an early model Macintosh, from the days of floppy disks and point-and-click adventure games, and Camp spent hours with it during the frigid winters, toying with early computer graphics and writing basic programs.
By the time Camp graduated from high school, his parents had nearly perfected their craft with a three-story home that included a comfortable office and a computer room in the basement[…]”
March 6, 2017
“By the time Camp finished his degree in 2005, StumbleUpon was starting to show promise. Camp and Smith met an angel investor that year who convinced them to move to San Francisco and raise capital. They incorporated the company in the United States, and over the next year, the number of users on StumbleUpon grew from five hundred thousand to two million.
With the trauma of the first dot-com bust fading and the scent of opportunity again wafting across Silicon Valley, acquisition offers for StumbleUpon started pouring in. In May 2007, eBay bought StumbleUpon for seventy-five million, turning it into one of the early successes of what became known as Web 2.0, the movement in which companies like Flickr and Facebook mined the social connections among internet users.2 For Camp, it seemed at the time like the highest possible level of success in Silicon Valley, and it was, by any reasonable standard—until the one that he achieved next.
Camp continued to work at eBay after the sale, and he was now young, wealthy, and single, with a taste for getting out of the house more often. This is when he ran headlong into San Francisco’s[…]”
March 6, 2017
“After the eBay acquisition, Garrett Camp splurged on a red Mercedes-Benz C-Class sports car, but the vehicle sat in the garage. He hadn’t driven much in Calgary—his parents hadn’t wanted to pay the extra auto insurance—and in college he preferred to take public transportation. “Driving in San Francisco was too stressful,” he says. “I didn’t want to park the car on the street and I didn’t want people to break into it. Just logistically, it was much harder to drive.”
March 6, 2017
“So the city’s sad taxi situation put a serious crimp in Camp’s new lifestyle. Since he couldn’t reliably hail a cab on the street, he began putting the yellow-cab dispatch numbers in his phone’s speed-dial. Even that was frustrating. “I would call and they wouldn’t show up and while I was waiting on the street, two or three other cabs would go by,” he says. “Then I’d call them back and they wouldn’t even remember that I called before. I remember being late for first or second dates.”
March 6, 2017
“Then Camp got a girlfriend.
A few months after eBay’s acquisition of StumbleUpon, he sent a message over Facebook to a smart, beautiful television producer named Melody McCloskey, and—after noting that they had a vague connection because they shared the blogger Om Malik as a friend on the social network—asked her out on a date.
McCloskey, who is now the founder and CEO of the online beauty and wellness company StyleSeat, recalls being wary, but she agreed to go for coffee. Camp suggested they meet at a restaurant at eight on a Friday night. She countered that a café at six p.m. on a Tuesday might be more appropriate. He offered seven o’clock on a Thursday night as a compromise and then changed the meeting location to a bar at the last minute.
McCloskey told herself she was going for only forty-five minutes. They stayed out until 2:00 a.m. “I accidentally went out with this person on this wild date,” McCloskey recalls years later. “I don’t think I made it into work the next day.”
March 6, 2017
“The relationship posed a new set of transportation hurdles as well. McCloskey lived a few miles away from Camp, in Pacific Heights. Meeting anywhere was a hassle and Camp often wanted to get together somewhere out at night.
“The logistics of dating you are very hard,” she told him once. “I can’t afford to meet you all over the city. I can’t keep up with your lifestyle.”
March 6, 2017
“Suddenly Camp was obsessed with a new notion. He frequently talked with McCloskey about the idea of an on-demand car service and vehicles that passengers could track via a map on their phones. At one point that year, Camp scrawled the word Über—with the umlaut over the U—into a Moleskine notebook that he kept to jot down new ideas and logos for companies and brands. “Isn’t that pronounced Yoober?” she asked him.
“I don’t care. It looks cool,” he said.
McCloskey recalls that Camp “wanted it to be one word and a description of excellence” and that his musings on the word, its sound and meaning, were incessant. “What an uber coffee that was,” he’d say randomly after drinking a cup. “It means great things! It means greatness!”
March 6, 2017
“He talked it over that year with many of his friends. The author and investor Tim Ferriss first brainstormed with Camp about the then-unnamed Uber at a bar in the Mission District. He thought it was a great idea, then forgot all about it. A month or two later he got a call from Camp, and when they started talking about Uber again, Ferriss was shocked. Camp “had done an incredibly deep dive into the flaws of black cars and a kind of lost utility, the downtime of black cars and taxis,” he says. “It was clear that he was probably already in the top one percent of market analysts who have looked at the space.”
The idea behind Uber was crystallizing in Camp’s mind.”
March 6, 2017
“At the end of the e-mail, Camp wrote to Ferriss, “My goal is to be at a go or no-go decision by December 1 and to be live with five cars in January.”
Camp does not recall getting much help from Ferriss’s assistant, but nevertheless he plunged ahead. In December, on the way to LeWeb, a high-profile annual technology conference in Paris, he stopped in New York City. There he met Oscar Salazar, a friend and fellow graduate student from the University of Calgary.
Salazar was a skilled engineer from Colima, Mexico, the son of an agronomist (a technician who worked on farms) and a kindergarten teacher.”
March 6, 2017
“Uber’s own official story begins here in Paris, when Camp and Kalanick famously visited the Eiffel Tower on a night after LeWeb and, looking out over the City of Light, decided to take on an entrenched taxi industry that they felt was more interested in blocking competition than in serving customers.”
March 19, 2017
“We actually came up with the idea at LeWeb in 2008,” Kalanick would say five years later at the same conference, citing the challenges of getting a cab in Paris. “We went back to San Francisco and we created a very simple, straightforward to us at the time, [way] to push a button and get a ride. We wanted it to be a classy ride.”3
Like all mythologies, it is not really true. “The story gets misrepresented a lot of times.” Camp sighs. “The whole LeWeb thing. I’m okay with it, as long as it’s directionally correct.”
March 19, 2017
“McCloskey remembers one dinner at a fancy restaurant at Paris where the debate raged over the best way to run an on-demand network of town cars. The restaurant was elegant, with expensive wine, light music, and a sophisticated French clientele. Apparently there was also paper over the tablecloth because Camp and Kalanick spent the entire meal scrawling their estimates for things like fixed costs and maximum vehicle utility rates.”
March 19, 2017
“On a separate night in Paris, the group went for drinks on the Champs-Élysées and then to an elegant late-night dinner that included wine and foie gras. At 2:00 a.m., somewhat intoxicated after a night of revelry, they hailed a cab on the street.
Apparently they were speaking too boisterously, because halfway through the ride home, the driver started yelling at them. McCloskey was sitting in the middle of the backseat, and, at five feet ten inches tall, she’d had to prop her high heels on the cushion between the two front seats. The driver cursed at them in French and threatened to kick them out of the car if they didn’t quiet down and if McCloskey didn’t move her feet. She spoke French and translated; Kalanick reacted furiously and suggested they get out of the car.”
March 19, 2017
“Kalanick would brag a few years later, in one of our first interviews: “Garrett brought the classy and I brought the efficiency. We don’t own cars and we don’t hire drivers. We work with companies and individuals who do that. It’s very straightforward. I want to push a button and get a ride. That’s what it’s about.”
March 19, 2017
“Graves completed a business-development internship at the location app Foursquare. He had tried to develop his own social app, with little success. Though he was technically in General Electric’s leadership training program, he wasn’t there a lot. “You can come in at ten a.m. and leave at four p.m. and no one knows,” he says. “I was putting in very little time at GE while getting a very high ranking.”
Kalanick was interested enough to meet with him, so Graves snuck out of a GE training class in Crotonville, New York, and drove an hour to New York City to meet Kalanick at a SoHo coffee shop. They talked for more than two hours and Kalanick showed Graves the prototype iPhone app.
Graves was intrigued. This was the opportunity to run something by himself. It was also a position working with some very connected Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and most likely would allow him to stick a foot in a much bigger door. Plus: “I don’t think there was anyone else competing for the job,” he says.”
March 19, 2017
“Most of Silicon Valley’s best and brightest passed on the deal, just as they had with Airbnb. They said no because Ryan Graves wasn’t experienced enough or because the two founders weren’t involved enough or because they saw the concept as an extravagant indulgence for wealthy urbanites. Some said no because they had worked with the combative Travis Kalanick before at his previous companies and didn’t want to deal with the aggravation again; others because they knew the company was going to run headlong into a hostile tangle of city and state transportation laws.”
March 19, 2017
“Investor Bill Gurley, a partner at Benchmark who would hitch his ride to the Uber rocket a year later and was watching the taxi market closely, took Kalanick and Graves out to dinner in early July to Absinthe, a restaurant in the Hayes Valley neighborhood of San Francisco. But Benchmark didn’t usually invest in seed deals and he couldn’t get his partners to make a commitment so early.”
March 19, 2017
“Jason Calacanis, a blogger and founder of internet media startups, was friendly with Kalanick and invited him to pitch to a group of investors at his own event in San Francisco, the Open Angel Forum. Kalanick found a few willing backers there, including Calacanis himself, who for the next ten years would revisit his investment decision on various podcasts, in blogs, and on the Q-and-A website Quora.”
March 19, 2017
“Even though they got lucky, some of the earliest Uber investors had to live with the fact that they could have been even luckier. Ravikant of AngelList planned to invest $100,000 but waited until the end of the fund-raising process to avoid the appearance that he was favoring certain AngelList deals over others.
When Ravikant finally made an offer, Graves said that he no longer had room in the round. Ravikant begged and eventually got to put in $25,000. It’s still by far the best investment he’s ever made (current value: over $100 million). “I don’t fixate on it,” Ravikant says. “I’ve made peace with the fact that Silicon Valley is so random. You have to make peace with it or otherwise you’ll never get a good night’s sleep in this town.”
March 19, 2017
“With the wind now blowing softly at his back, Graves started to build his staff. Ryan McKillen, one of the new hires, attended Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, a year ahead of Graves and they had several friends in common. They had hung out earlier that year while Graves was in San Francisco without his wife. Then, fortuitously, as it turned out, the accounting startup where McKillen rather enjoyed working imploded. So Graves hired him. (Because the two men have the same first name, colleagues took to calling them by their initials, a practice at Uber that endures today.)
On his first day in the office, McKillen noted the table had piles of programming books in pristine condition and a well-worn Spanish/English dictionary. (The engineers had been trying to translate some of the instructions around the code written by Jose Uribe.) McKillen asked Conrad Whelan why the dictionary was there and later he would enjoy recalling Whelan’s response: “Well, Ryan, because the code is written in Spanish. Welcome to Uber.”
Notes From: Brad Stone. “The Upstarts.” iBooks.
