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
Book Review: ‘The Culture Map’ by Erin Meyer
“The Culture Map” by Erin Meyer, which was published in 2014, discusses the cultural differences between people and how they influence business interactions.
American author and professor at INSEAD Business School, Meyer talks from personal experience about fundamental points to pay attention to while having interactions with international business owners, peers, or clients.
She uncovers the meaning behind certain behaviors and suggests solutions to overcome the differences between people to accomplish shared goals.
As a cross-cultural management expert, Meyer discusses the elements that contribute to people’s communication and collaboration, including evaluation, persuasion, leadership, decision-making, and trust.
Using practical examples, she explains how misunderstandings sometimes happen when people interpret attitudes using their own lens, which may not be appropriate when relying on personal background and general understanding of the world.
She writes about people appreciating and focusing on what they find meaningful to them. Some cultures value direct feedback, while others tend to lean toward indirect communication when asked to give an opinion.
In addition, the author provides strategies to overcome differences and find common ground, focusing on the importance of learning and understanding cultural norms, and also being adaptable when an individual becomes part of an international team.
She also encourages readers to understand and respect other traditions to build effective relationships with the world around us.
“The Culture Map” is a guide for people who may be working in multicultural environments and want to elevate teamwork while improving intercultural skills.
What We Are Reading Today: ‘The Importance of Being Educable’ by Leslie Valiant
We are at a crossroads in history. If we hope to share our planet successfully with one another and the AI systems we are creating, we must reflect on who we are, how we got here, and where we are heading.
“The Importance of Being Educable” puts forward a provocative new exploration of the extraordinary facility of humans to absorb and apply knowledge.
The remarkable “educability” of the human brain can be understood as an information processing ability.
What We Are Reading Today: ‘Deadly Force’
Authors: Tom S. Clark, Adam N. Glynn, & Michael Leo Owens
Police shootings in America spark outrage and protest and raise questions about police use of lethal force. Yet despite the attention given to high-profile shootings, it is extremely difficult to draw wider conclusions about the frequency and outcomes of police gunfire because there is no systematic and centralized source of information on these incidents.
This pioneering book draws on original data, compiled by the authors, to examine police shootings, both fatal and non-fatal, in hundreds of American cities.
What We Are Reading Today: ‘Volcanoes: Crucibles of Change’
Author: Richard V. Fisher
“Volcanoes: Crucibles of Change” explores the science and mystery of volcanoes. The author chronicles not only their geologic behavior but also their profound effect on human life.
The book covers the surprisingly large variety of volcanoes, the subtle to conspicuous signs preceding their eruptions, and their far-reaching atmospheric consequences, according to a review on goodreads.com.
Tourists will find their scientific curiosity whetted by this informative and entertaining book.
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.
