Essay Questions

Which fairly famous and successful internet startup company’s founder and CEO is Travis Kalanick obsessed with?

When it comes to blazing a trail that leads to being worth billions on the paper used in stock exchanges, forging new trails is always subservient to following the trails blazed by others. While innovation is almost always a good thing when it comes to creating products and ideas, it is absurdly useless when it comes to marketing that originality to the tune of zeroes in the bank. Of course, in Uber’s case, there was never anything innovative or original to begin with, so it makes perfect sense that his hero would be the grasshopper standing tallest among all the ants around him: Jeff Bezos. Bezos took an idea an idea that had literally been around for more than a hundred years—the bookstore—and transformed it into obscene personal wealth. As the author asserts, it was Amazon more than any other company on the planet that “embodied the type of business” Kalanick was pushing Uber to emulate.

What was the “chicken-and-egg” problem which plagued Uber in its early years?

Although often termed an innovative answer to a daily problem, the foundation upon which Uber rests is completely free from any originality. It is basically a taxi service freed from regulation and in addition to actual cab service it has existed for decades in the form of things like the limo services found in just about any American town with a population over 25,000. The daily problem that Uber is said to have solved is simply that in most of those cities there either aren’t enough cabs to meet demand or—which is really the case with a limo service—the cost is deemed to high for the majority of those needing it. Uber faced a tough going with its startup actually getting started because it could find drivers willing to sign up if there weren’t enough potential customers willing to sign up for the service and there were never enough customers willing to sign up for the service because there weren’t enough drivers to ensure prompt service. Typically, the “innovative” solution to this problem was simply to buy as many eggs (drivers) as possible in order to satisfy the concerns of the chickens (riders). The amazing thing about this solution is not merely that it actually worked at all, but that it worked so astonishingly well.

What is Greyball?

Uber is really just a taxi service without regulation. And, also, of course, without a powerful union supporting its drivers. Philadelphia is perhaps second only to New York when it comes to powerful interests at work behind its taxi service and those interests took a decidedly proactive approach in their attempts to keep Uber out of town entirely. The Philadelphia Parking Authority went so far as it issue a bona fide threat to impound any Uber car it found operating within its jurisdiction which presented a serious issue to the company hoping to make a revolutionary change in a city ironically resistant to such change. Greyball became the name of the uber-sophisticated software update to the Uber app which actually made it possible for drivers to identify troublesome regulators looking to catch them in the act of operating against government mandates by posing as just another average customer looking for a ride. The term refers to the fact that the entire process operates in that ambiguous “grey area” bordering violating the spirit of the law and violating the letter of the law.