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: ‘The Evolution of Imperfection’
Author: Laurence D. Hurst
If we start with the presumption that evolution is a constantly improving process, some aspects of our evolution just do not make sense. We have a high rate of genetic diseases, for example, and much of our DNA seems to be pointless.
In “The Evolution of Imperfection,” Laurence Hurst explores our apparently rotten genetic luck.
Hurst, a leading authority on evolution and genetics, argues that our evolutionary imperfections proceed directly from two features: the difficulties of pregnancy and the fact that historically there are relatively few of us.
In pregnancy, natural selection can favor chromosomes that kill embryos in species (including ours) that continuously receive resources from the mother. Most fertilized eggs don’t make it, and incompatibilities between the fetus and mother can lead to lethal disorders of pregnancy.
The historically small population size enhances the role of chance, which in turn leads to both accumulation of unnecessary DNA and more mutation.
REVIEW: Kuwaiti Palestinian author looks at women and disability in a transformative, speculative memoir
JEDDAH: Kuwaiti Palestinian writer Shahd Alshammari’s new speculative memoir “Confetti and Ashes” is a bold departure from her previous work “Head Above Water,” which was longlisted for the Barbellion Prize in 2022.
Alshammari’s layered meditation on the disabled body as both a site of loss as well as endurance is propelled forward by sharp observations and a quiet brilliance that had me turning pages well into the night.
Her first memoir, “Head Above Water,” offered an unflinching look at navigating multiple sclerosis as an Arab woman teaching literature in Kuwait. Her latest, however, ventures into a realm where memory and personal narrative intersect with poetry, imagination, and otherworldly presences.
The voices of ghosts and Zari, her qareen — the jinn-companion assigned to each person in Islamic belief — transform Alshammari’s personal narrative. It becomes a dialogue, a captivating dance between the seen and unseen worlds.
This inclusion shakes up the conventional memoir structure to broaden the scope beyond Western frameworks of storytelling. It also offers readers a visceral look at the ways living with disability and chronic illness can disrupt and reshape an individual’s perspective and worldview.
The dreamlike and omniscient voice of the qareen also mirrors the disorientation and internal struggles that come with living with chronic illness and disability.
Alshammari astutely draws parallels between the disabled body and the female body in the social and cultural context of Kuwait. In a world of able-bodied norms, she reflects on their intersecting experiences of marginalization, scrutiny, and resistance.
She rejects predictable storytelling, and not just in her writing, but also in life. Her body rebels, yet she defies societal stigmas — including concerns voiced from other women with MS.
She explores holistic wellness practices and eventually takes up squash, expanding her social circle and pushing her limits to build her mental and physical endurance.
In capturing her dual journeys of illness and wellness, the author invites readers to reflect on the disabled body not as a burden, but as a site of poetic possibility.
In “Confetti and Ashes,” Alshammari presents a profound reclamation of the self and cements herself as a vital voice in reimagining the female disabled experience.
What We Are Reading Today: ‘Whale: The Illustrated Biography’ by Asha De Vos
Whales are the majestic giants of the ocean, yet much of their world remains a mystery to us. The routes of their vast oceanic migrations are largely elusive, as are the intricacies of their behavior and social dynamics.
This narrative biography takes you out beyond our shorelines and into the depths, providing an up-close exploration of the life of the whale.
Written by internationally acclaimed expert Asha de Vos, “Whale: The Illustrated Biography” blends engaging profiles of the best-known species with stunning illustrations to tell the story of these magnificent creatures in all their diversity and complexity.
What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Measure of Progress’ by Diane Coyle
The ways that statisticians and governments measure the economy were developed in the 1940s, when the urgent economic problems were entirely different from those of today.
In “The Measure of Progress,” Diane Coyle argues that the framework underpinning today’s economic statistics is so outdated that it functions as a distorting lens, or even a set of blinkers.
When policymakers rely on such an antiquated conceptual tool, how can they measure, understand, and respond with any precision to what is happening in today’s digital economy?
What We Are Reading Today: ‘Stranger in the Village’
- Baldwin’s narrative transcends mere anecdote, evolving into a meditation on the legacy of Western colonialism and slavery
Author: James Baldwin
James Baldwin’s 1953 essay “Stranger in the Village,” from his seminal collection “Notes of a Native Son,” is a searing exploration of race, identity, and the weight of history.
Baldwin juxtaposes his experience as the first Black man in a remote Swiss village — where villagers gawk, children shout racial epithets, and his presence sparks both fascination and fear — with the entrenched racism of America.
Through this contrast, he dissects the paradox of being perceived as an exotic “stranger” in Europe while remaining an oppressed outsider in his homeland.
Baldwin’s narrative transcends mere anecdote, evolving into a meditation on the legacy of Western colonialism and slavery.
In Switzerland, the villagers’ “innocent” othering lacks the violent history of American racism, yet Baldwin reveals how both contexts dehumanize Blackness.
He argues that white America, built on the subjugation of Black people, cannot escape its past — a past that distorts both the oppressor’s and the oppressed’s sense of self.
“People are trapped in history,” he writes, “and history is trapped in them.”
The essay’s power lies in Baldwin’s ability to weave personal reflection with incisive social critique. His encounters in the village mirror the broader African American experience: the exhaustion of being perpetually “seen but not seen,” and the rage born of systemic erasure.
Yet Baldwin resists despair, asserting that acknowledgment of this shared history is the first step toward liberation, even as he questions whether true equality is achievable.
Stylistically, Baldwin’s prose is both lyrical and unflinching, blending vivid imagery with philosophical depth.
The essay’s enduring relevance lies in its piercing examination of otherness and its challenge to confront uncomfortable truths.
Published over seven decades ago, Baldwin’s call to reckon with history’s ghosts remains urgent, a testament to his unparalleled vision and moral clarity.
