The rise of smartphones and social media has enabled the expansion of the sharing economy, a phase during which the likes of Uber and Airbnb were born.
The power of these entrepreneurial ventures is continuously rising. Airbnb has already exceeded 10 million guest stays and Uber continues to grow despite its current failings. No matter how bad the PR is getting for Uber, consumers do not seem to care. As long as the company’s ride hailing app continues to outperform rival apps, Uber will continue to dominate the market.
Brad Stone has covered the Silicon Valley as a journalist for more than fifteen years. After his book “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon,” which won the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award in 2013, he is back with an enthralling account of how Uber and Airbnb came to be and how a new generation of entrepreneurs are changing the way we live in “The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World.”
Travis Kalanick and Brian Chesky, the young CEOs behind Uber and Airbnb respectively, are part of a new breed of tech leaders who are different from the previous generation of introverted innovators such as Bill Gates, Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg.
“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” Stone wrote in the book.
Chesky grew up in Niskayuna, New York, in a middle-class family. Joe Gebbia, who co-founded Airbnb with Chesky, was born in Atlanta, Georgia. The pair met in classes at the Rhode Island School of Design and became firm friends.
After Gebbia graduated, he went to San Francisco and asked Chesky if he would like to come and share the rent of his apartment. Chesky told Gebba that if he made the move, he would keep a new part-time teaching job in Los Angeles but would spend the weekends in San Francisco. For that reason, he asked Gebbia if he could rent the couch in the living room for $500 a month instead of renting a whole room. Gebbia replied that Chesky needed to be fully committed or else he would have to give up the apartment. Just as Chesky decided to make the move, Gebba sent him the e-mail that would change their lives: “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 four-day event (a design conference), complete with wireless Internet, a small desk place, sleeping mat and breakfast each morning. Ha!”
It took the pair three days to put together the first Airbedandbreakfast.com website using free tools available online. The first guest to use Airbedandbreakfast.com was Amol Surve. He was greeted at the door by the site’s co-creator Gebbia. Surve, who came from Mumbai, had use the Internet to rent an airbed for $80 a night because all the hotels in the area were either booked or too expensive.
He did not know what to expect but soon loved the experience of living in a temporary home. Two other guests also used the apartment during the design conference. After the three travelers left, the co-founders were not only able to pay their rent but they were also touched by the friendships they had made with their guests.
For a year, nothing happened. Chesky and Gebbia looked for investors but “very few people even met with us, they considered us crazy,” Chesky admitted. However, by 2010, Airbnb covered 8,000 cities.
While Chesky and Gebbia were working on better versions of what was still known as Airbedandbreakfast.com, Garret Camp, a Canadian entrepreneur, had just sold a website discovery tool, StumbleUpon, to eBay for $75 million. He was rich and living the good life but he had one problem — his Mercedes-Benz sports car. It stayed in the garage and he barely used it as he found driving in San Francisco to be too stressful. He became obsessed with the idea of an on-demand car service that passengers would be able to track via a map on their phones. He soon found out about the German word “Uber” and settled for the name “UberCab.”
On Nov. 17, 2008, Camp registered UberCab as an LLC in California. In December, on his way to attend LeWeb, a high-profile technology conference in Paris, he stopped in New York to meet Oscar Salazar, a friend. He shared his idea with Salazar who had also experienced problems with cabs in Mexico, Canada and France. “I don’t know if this is a billion-dollar company but it’s definitely a billion-dollar idea,” Salazar said before developing a prototype for Camp.
When UberCab looked for capital, most Silicon Valley investors passed on the deal, just as they had with Airbnb. Eventually, Uber gathered $1.3 million and proceeded to make history.
Uber, unlike Airbnb which had become global as soon as it was launched, had to enter each market on an individual basis. Each city was different and presented unique challenges. One of the greatest problems that Uber faced was the fact that it used contract drivers instead of full-time employees. This triggered endless controversies linked to background checks, proper insurance and the safety of both the drivers and the riders using its service.
By the end of 2016, Uber introduced a new type of work flexibility for its drivers and it also lowered the price of its fares. These measures boosted Uber’s business. In 2014, Uber booked 200 million rides while in 2016, the total number of rides reached one billion and six months later, the number had already doubled.
By the end of 2016, Airbnb and Uber had thousands of employees and offices around the world.
Stone gives us a detailed account of how this new breed of CEO — bold, ruthless and resourceful — is making a lasting impact on the way we live and travel.
Book Review: How Uber and Airbnb are changing the world
Book Review: How Uber and Airbnb are changing the world
What We Are Reading Today: Myanmar’s Enemy Within by Francis Wade
In 2012, violence between Buddhists and Muslims erupted in western Myanmar, pointing to a growing divide between religious communities that before had received little attention from the outside world.
In this gripping and deeply reported account, Francis Wade explores how the manipulation of identities by an anxious ruling elite has laid the foundations for mass violence, and how, in Myanmar’s case, some of the most respected voices for democracy have turned on the minorities at a time when the majority of citizens are beginning to experience freedoms unseen for half a century.
What We Are Reading Today: The Fetters of Rhyme
- “The Fetters of Rhyme” traces this dynamic history of rhyme from the 1590s through the 1670s
Author: Rebecca M. Rush
In his 1668 preface to Paradise Lost, John Milton rejected the use of rhyme, portraying himself as a revolutionary freeing English verse from “the troublesome and modern bondage of Riming.”
Milton, however, was not initiating a new line of thought — English poets had been debating about rhyme and its connections to liberty, freedom, and constraint since Queen Elizabeth’s reign.
“The Fetters of Rhyme” traces this dynamic history of rhyme from the 1590s through the 1670s. Rebecca Rush uncovers the associations early modern readers attached to rhyming forms.
What We Are Reading Today: Desert Edens
- Lehmann examines some of the most ambitious climate-engineering projects to emerge in the late 19th and early 20th centuries
Author: Philipp Lehmann
From the 1870s to the mid-20th century, European explorers, climatologists, colonial officials, and planners were avidly interested in large-scale projects that might actively alter the climate. Uncovering this history, “Desert Edens” looks at how arid environments and an increasing anxiety about climate in the colonial world shaped this upsurge in ideas about climate engineering.
From notions about the transformation of deserts into forests to Nazi plans to influence the climates of war-torn areas, Philipp Lehmann puts the early climate change debate in its environmental, intellectual, and political context, and considers the ways this legacy reverberates in the present climate crisis.
Lehmann examines some of the most ambitious climate-engineering projects to emerge in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Confronted with the Sahara in the 1870s, the French developed concepts for a flooding project that would lead to the creation of a man-made Sahara Sea.
What We Are Reading Today: ‘Becoming Earth’
- Surprisingly, as Jabr discusses the disadvantages of human activity leading to environmental crises, he also highlights the importance of humans in improving ecosystems
Author: Ferris Jabr
Published in 2024 and written by Ferris Jabr, “Becoming Earth” talks about how the planet we know and live in started and came to life.
One of the significant thoughts Jabr argues through his book is the idea that billions of years ago, life transformed from a collection of orbiting rocks into what we now know as our cosmic oasis. This process released oxygen into the atmosphere, formed seas and oceans, and shaped rocks into fertile soil.
Through the book, the author also discusses various environmental systems and how they operate. He talks about the roles of microbes in shaping continents, the Amazon rainforest’s self-sustaining rain cycle and the impact of human activities on planetary systems, all connected to other natural events.
Surprisingly, as Jabr discusses the disadvantages of human activity leading to environmental crises, he also highlights the importance of humans in improving ecosystems. Despite the negative impacts people have had on the environment, humanity has expended a great deal of energy to understand and mitigate environmental problems, he argues.
However, the book has received some criticism, with reviewers arguing that Jabr may have conflated his personal perspective on Earth with scientific research and evidence in the process of using metaphors to explain science.
Other reviewers said that a few sections of “Becoming Earth” may need improvement and more in-depth scientific evidence to support the conclusions Jabr makes.
What We Are Reading Today: Red Bandit by Mike Guardia
Mike Guardia's "Red Bandit" pulls you into the cockpit of this legendary jet, delivering a visceral, no-holds-barred chronicle of its battlefield legacy, stripping away the myths to reveal the true capabilities — and limits — of Russia’s iconic warbird.
Based on declassified reports, first-hand pilot accounts, and meticulous combat analysis, Red Bandit is more than just a parochial history — it’s a high-stakes, sky-scorching narrative of power, politics, and heart-pounding dogfights.
