Uber

"As the fairy tale goes, Uber was born on a snowy night in Paris in 2008, when Kalanick and his friend Garrett Camp could not get a cab. The two vowed then and there to solve the problem with a revolutionary new app. The premise was dead simple: push a button and get a car."

Vanity Fair, 12/2014

VIew

Presented in Stanford Memorial Auditorium by Y Combinator and the Stanford Technology Ventures Program at Startup School, October 20, 2012 (28:48)

Travis Kalanick, Startup School 2012

Sadly you can't see Kalanick's slides in this video (why, oh why? What a missed opportunity!). Pay attention to the words he uses to describe the Uber experience. How does the simple choice of words help to differentiate Uber from other offerings? Pay attention to the metrics he identifies. For example, he knows how many town cars were in San Francisco (600) before Uber launched there and the average amount of time it will take a driver to get to you once you order a ride in same town.

Note the conversation Travis and Garrett had in Paris about owning a parking garage and a fleet of vehicles (which Garrett envisioned); Travis said no, we'll be a logistics company.

"When math goes operational"

dynamic pricing
dynamic routes
"Uber Vegas" (19:07) demand surge for rides in SFO occurs three hours before the SFO Giants win a baseball game.
"scaling romance" (20:03)
<-- "Ubercade" for one out of 20 riders in Washington, DC, on President's Day (20:25)
How to win legislative overreach through social media - corrupt governments...
"Gambling and prostitution are legal in Las Vegas, but Uber's not."

Uber Technology Day: Q&A with CEO Travis Kalanick (1:05:01)

The conclusion of the day long event at Uber's Palo Alto office on March 10, 2017. Presentation and Q&A session with Uber co-founder and CEO Travis Kalanick. Moderated by senior director of engineering Komal Mangtani, who is the executive sponsor for Uber's LadyEng group.

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi | Full interview | Code 2018

At Recode's 2018 Code Conference, Kara Swisher interviewed Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi about the company's self-driving future, culture issues, former CEO Travis Kalanick and Uber's board.

Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO, Uber at Stanford GSB (12/3/18; 41:12)

“People often optimize for the role or for the company. The first thing I optimize for is who I will work with. Don’t bet on companies, bet on people,” Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO of Uber, told students at today’s View From The Top event. Khosrowshahi discussed his departure from Expedia and his approach to shifting company values at Uber to focus on diversity and inclusion. “An important factor in our change was setting a new culture and new norms,” he said. “We crowdsourced those norms and asked people – what kind of company do we want to be?”

Khosroshahi advised students to let go of benchmarking via titles and salaries when it comes to career goals. “Have a theme but don’t get locked in. I’m always looking around to make sure my own biases don’t prevent me from seeing something great,” he said. “When you’re lucky enough to take that risk, jump!”

read

Popular Press

LETTER FROM SILICON VALLEY: MAN AND UBER MAN (Vanity Fair, 12/2014) - Travis Kalanick and his many "enemies"
Kneecapping the competition: Kalanick readily admits to trying to tamper with a recent fund-raising round that Lyft was doing. “We knew that Lyft was going to raise a ton of money,” says Kalanick. “And we are going [to their investors], ‘Just so you know, we’re going to be fund-raising after this, so before you decide whether you want to invest in them, just make sure you know that we are going to be fund-raising immediately after.’ ” It’s part of what seems to be an unabashed effort to kneecap Lyft. In August, it was revealed that Uber was employing some dicey tactics by sending so-called brand ambassadors to order Lyft rides undercover and then persuade the drivers to defect to Uber.
Uber for everything: “If we can get you a car in five minutes, we can get you anything in five minutes,” he (Kalanick) says. But the desire to enter and dominate the “everything economy” echoes the ambitions of much bigger and more established companies such as Google, Amazon, eBay, and Walmart. “They are much like Amazon in the early days of just selling books. As a bookseller, Amazon was good but replaceable. So Bezos pushed quickly to become indispensable,” says entrepreneur Mark Cuban... (Uberzon?)

Business Press

Here's how Uber got its start and grew to become the most valuable startup in the world (Businessinsider.com, 2015) with a useful timeline of major Uber developments, e.g.,...--->>

Note: If you're not in China, you live in a place called "ROW."

Trade Publications

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Google Scholar

An App for That: Local Governments and the Rise of the Sharing Economy, Notre Dame Online Law Review <Bond, A. T. (2014). An app for that: Local governments and the rise of the sharing economy. Notre Dame L. Rev. Online, 90, 77- _/>

Patents:

<CA return to google scholar to build this section/>

Page origination date: 1/12/19

SEC Filings and Disclosures

Uber Form D Filing April, 2008, for Series B offering

Armstrong Field Notes

Uber Early-Stage Rounds of Financing (including Drama) (google doc) - focuses on the Kara Swisher article section that talks about Uber's financing efforts. This is an early-stage document that I'll update with information from Crunchbase, press release databases, and so on.

Page updated

Google Sites

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