WEBVTT - The Uber Story Part One 0:00:04.440 --> 0:00:12.080 Text technology with tech Stuff from half stuff works dot com. 0:00:12.119 --> 0:00:15.320 Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm Jonathan Strickland, 0:00:15.320 --> 0:00:18.000 an executive producer here at how stuff Works, and I 0:00:18.160 --> 0:00:22.320 love all things tech, and today we're going to take 0:00:22.360 --> 0:00:25.119 a ride with Uber. Actually, this is going to be 0:00:25.120 --> 0:00:28.440 a two part episode because even though Uber as a 0:00:28.480 --> 0:00:32.880 company is only about a decade old, the story is 0:00:32.920 --> 0:00:35.199 a really complicated one and it has a lot of 0:00:35.240 --> 0:00:38.960 consequences that are rippled into other areas of the text 0:00:39.000 --> 0:00:42.559 space and beyond. And the Uber story isn't just a 0:00:42.680 --> 0:00:45.760 tale about a startup that hit the big time, although 0:00:46.320 --> 0:00:48.920 it is that in part, but it's also a story 0:00:48.960 --> 0:00:54.520 about disruption, automation, corporate culture, and controversy. So this first 0:00:54.520 --> 0:00:57.080 episode is really going to be about the founding of 0:00:57.120 --> 0:01:00.880 the company and the challenges that it faced getting started, 0:01:01.080 --> 0:01:03.920 as well as it's early rise to prominence in the 0:01:03.960 --> 0:01:07.080 text sphere. In the second part will take a closer 0:01:07.120 --> 0:01:10.240 look at what the company has been up to over 0:01:10.280 --> 0:01:15.600 the past few years, but mainly throughout seventeen because that 0:01:15.720 --> 0:01:21.320 was a truly tumultuous year in Uber's history. But I 0:01:21.319 --> 0:01:23.880 thought it would be helpful to begin by looking at 0:01:23.920 --> 0:01:28.200 the co founder of Uber, whose behavior at times seemed 0:01:28.200 --> 0:01:30.720 to be closely aligned with some of the more criticized 0:01:30.720 --> 0:01:34.120 elements of the company's overall culture. This is a guy 0:01:34.240 --> 0:01:38.400 who has received a lot of attention, both positive and 0:01:38.560 --> 0:01:43.160 negative throughout the years, and that co founder is Travis 0:01:43.240 --> 0:01:48.600 clanic Uh. He is a bit of a character. I mean, 0:01:48.640 --> 0:01:53.440 he definitely has earned himself a reputation among the Silicon 0:01:53.600 --> 0:01:59.040 Valley as someone who is really aggressive and really visionary 0:01:59.120 --> 0:02:02.680 in many ways. But who is he? Where did he 0:02:02.760 --> 0:02:06.400 come from? And how did the idea of Uber come about? Well, 0:02:07.160 --> 0:02:10.680 spoiler alert, the story I'm about to tell you is 0:02:10.680 --> 0:02:16.080 only half the tail. This is the official story of Uber, 0:02:16.160 --> 0:02:19.880 the one that the company lists as its own history, 0:02:20.200 --> 0:02:24.200 and it traces everything back to a cold winter's evening 0:02:24.360 --> 0:02:27.120 in France in two thousand and eight. But the truth 0:02:27.840 --> 0:02:30.880 ends up being a little more complicated. But let's start 0:02:30.880 --> 0:02:35.079 with Klanic. So he attended the University of California, Los Angeles. 0:02:35.080 --> 0:02:39.040 He majored in computer engineering, but he never graduated. He 0:02:39.320 --> 0:02:43.600 dropped out just a few months away from graduating in 0:02:43.600 --> 0:02:47.520 that final year in nineteen and he went on to 0:02:47.639 --> 0:02:50.280 go work as part of the original team behind a 0:02:50.400 --> 0:02:55.480 business called Scour s c O. You are. Now. That 0:02:55.680 --> 0:02:58.640 might not sound familiar to you, and that would not 0:02:58.800 --> 0:03:01.799 be a big surprise because it didn't last that long. 0:03:01.880 --> 0:03:05.119 Within a few years of its founding, it was obliterated 0:03:05.200 --> 0:03:09.800 out of existence. But I'll explain. Scour was a peer 0:03:09.840 --> 0:03:13.080 to peer file sharing service. Now, that means you could 0:03:13.080 --> 0:03:16.320 download some software onto your computer and that would allow 0:03:16.360 --> 0:03:19.760 you to designate specific folders on your computer's hard drive 0:03:19.919 --> 0:03:22.880 as shared folders, which would be shared with the rest 0:03:22.919 --> 0:03:25.480 of the network. So other people who had also downloaded 0:03:25.520 --> 0:03:30.240 that same software would have access to those shared folders, 0:03:30.280 --> 0:03:33.440 and you would have access to the stuff they put 0:03:33.480 --> 0:03:36.480 in their own shared folders, so you could download files 0:03:36.520 --> 0:03:40.960 stored in other people's computers. You would launch the app 0:03:41.080 --> 0:03:44.040 and let's say you're looking for something specific. You you 0:03:44.080 --> 0:03:46.200 start to use a search engine to look for a 0:03:46.320 --> 0:03:49.080 very particular file. And let's say it was a piece 0:03:49.120 --> 0:03:53.240 of freeware that someone had created but had no easy 0:03:53.280 --> 0:03:56.320 way to distribute. It's a really big file. They don't 0:03:56.320 --> 0:03:57.960 want to pay for the hosting fees to put it 0:03:58.040 --> 0:04:00.800 up on a website and have to deal with all 0:04:00.840 --> 0:04:04.480 that bandwidth, so instead they've put it on a shared folder, 0:04:04.560 --> 0:04:07.760 and they've made it accessible by a peer to peer network. 0:04:08.120 --> 0:04:12.320 You could download that file to your folder, and if 0:04:12.320 --> 0:04:15.560 you kept it in your shared folder, it would mean 0:04:15.600 --> 0:04:18.000 the next person to download the file would have an 0:04:18.040 --> 0:04:20.680 extra source to pull from. They could pull some of 0:04:20.720 --> 0:04:23.080 the data from the original source and some of the 0:04:23.160 --> 0:04:25.560 data from you, and this would actually make the process faster. 0:04:25.880 --> 0:04:29.880 So the more people sharing a particular file, the less 0:04:29.920 --> 0:04:32.520 time it would take to download that file in general, 0:04:32.720 --> 0:04:36.000 so it would become much faster the more people got 0:04:36.040 --> 0:04:38.320 access to it. It was a really effective way to 0:04:38.360 --> 0:04:42.200 distribute large files across a network of computers. Now, that 0:04:42.240 --> 0:04:44.800 in itself is not a problem. In fact, it's a 0:04:44.839 --> 0:04:48.640 pretty great solution for large file distribution, particularly in the 0:04:48.720 --> 0:04:53.640 era before broadband speed's really got fast. The problem comes 0:04:53.800 --> 0:04:57.920 when you start asking yourself what types of files are 0:04:58.320 --> 0:05:03.560 particularly laur because a few things that fall into that category, 0:05:03.600 --> 0:05:07.920 like movies or TV series or computer games or other 0:05:07.920 --> 0:05:12.040 types of software, tend to be the property of very large, 0:05:12.200 --> 0:05:16.960 very powerful corporations. And here's a spoiler alert. These corporations 0:05:17.120 --> 0:05:21.000 understandably aren't too keen on people getting their grubby little 0:05:21.040 --> 0:05:24.360 hands on the products without paying for them, so we're 0:05:24.360 --> 0:05:27.680 talking about piracy. In other words, Now, I got to 0:05:27.720 --> 0:05:31.520 be clear, there is nothing inherent in peer to peer 0:05:31.560 --> 0:05:36.000 networking that suggests it is meant for piracy, But a 0:05:36.040 --> 0:05:38.960 lot of people used it for that purpose, enough of 0:05:39.040 --> 0:05:42.080 them to get the wrath of various big studios involved 0:05:42.080 --> 0:05:47.800 in a massive lawsuit against Scour. How massive, well, they 0:05:47.920 --> 0:05:53.240 claimed damages to the tune of one hundred thousand dollars 0:05:53.279 --> 0:05:56.600 per file. So if you added up all the files 0:05:56.640 --> 0:05:59.880 on the system that fell into the proprietary nature that 0:06:00.040 --> 0:06:02.960 belong to one of these studios, it amounted to about 0:06:03.040 --> 0:06:08.719 two hundred and fifty billion dollars. Now, the lawsuits scared 0:06:08.760 --> 0:06:13.760 away scours financial backers, including their majority shareholder who was 0:06:13.839 --> 0:06:18.080 a former Disney president, Michael Ovits, and it became clear 0:06:18.120 --> 0:06:21.440 that the Hollywood studios would put the screws to anyone 0:06:21.480 --> 0:06:23.880 who tried to swoop in to fill the void left 0:06:23.880 --> 0:06:29.080 by the previous investors. Essentially, it was like the mafia saying, hey, 0:06:29.120 --> 0:06:32.159 if you support these guys, we're gonna come after you. 0:06:32.800 --> 0:06:36.280 So this left Scour without any real financial support and 0:06:36.320 --> 0:06:39.480 the company had to file for Chapter eleven bankruptcy protection 0:06:39.880 --> 0:06:42.240 by the end of two thousand. It was no more. 0:06:42.640 --> 0:06:45.480 Its assets were auctioned off to a company called Center 0:06:45.560 --> 0:06:49.320 Span Communications, and Scour was a thing of the past. 0:06:50.040 --> 0:06:54.200 Now klan I took the whole thing as a learning experience. 0:06:54.240 --> 0:06:59.280 His contemporaries would describe him as being incredibly intelligent, ambitious, 0:06:59.520 --> 0:07:02.400 and a restive and they say things like he's a 0:07:02.400 --> 0:07:06.039 big thinker and he's relentless, which can be both a 0:07:06.120 --> 0:07:10.400 good and a bad thing. His move after the Scour 0:07:10.520 --> 0:07:13.440 disaster was to create what he would describe in a 0:07:13.560 --> 0:07:18.960 talk as a quote revenge business end quote. So what 0:07:19.000 --> 0:07:23.920 does that mean? It sounds really ominous. Well, in business terms, 0:07:23.960 --> 0:07:27.240 it was pretty clever. It wasn't so dark as what 0:07:27.360 --> 0:07:29.960 it might sound like. What he meant was that he 0:07:30.000 --> 0:07:33.120 was determined to create a business that would appeal to 0:07:33.160 --> 0:07:37.280 the very entities that had sued Scour out of existence. 0:07:38.160 --> 0:07:40.560 So he wanted to take the people who had filed 0:07:40.640 --> 0:07:45.640 lawsuits against him and turned them into customers, effectively taking 0:07:45.680 --> 0:07:49.520 money from them, which you know now that I say 0:07:49.520 --> 0:07:53.440 it does sound a little mafia esque, but pretty pretty 0:07:53.440 --> 0:07:56.560 clever and completely legal. Obviously, you have to create the 0:07:56.600 --> 0:07:59.200 business and you have to convince people that it's worth 0:08:00.160 --> 0:08:02.240 using the business. So it's not like it was a 0:08:02.280 --> 0:08:05.320 done deal from the beginning, And in fact his idea 0:08:05.440 --> 0:08:09.400 was not a big departure from scour. Actually he wanted 0:08:09.440 --> 0:08:12.160 to take that peer to peer technology and turn it 0:08:12.200 --> 0:08:16.080 into an enterprise software package. So the idea would be 0:08:16.120 --> 0:08:20.200 that big businesses like movie studios often need to move 0:08:20.320 --> 0:08:24.040 large files around in house, right Like, there might be 0:08:24.320 --> 0:08:27.160 one department that has a very large digital file and 0:08:27.200 --> 0:08:30.239 they need to transfer it to another department. But even 0:08:30.360 --> 0:08:32.760 within a company, there wasn't always an easy way to 0:08:32.800 --> 0:08:35.800 do this. Using the peer to peer network, which would 0:08:35.840 --> 0:08:38.719 be locked to a particular studio or company, they could 0:08:38.760 --> 0:08:41.480 do that much more quickly than with other methods. So, 0:08:41.520 --> 0:08:43.840 in other words, instead of downloading a piece of software 0:08:44.160 --> 0:08:46.360 that would give you access to all the shared files 0:08:46.360 --> 0:08:48.920 in the network, each one would be its own little, 0:08:48.920 --> 0:08:53.760 self contained island of computers, its own intra net, and 0:08:53.840 --> 0:08:55.680 you could use the peer to peer network to move 0:08:55.679 --> 0:08:58.880 files around that way, but no one from outside the 0:08:58.920 --> 0:09:02.200 company would have access to it. So he created this 0:09:02.240 --> 0:09:05.080 new company and he called it Red Swoosh, and this 0:09:05.200 --> 0:09:09.240 all started in two thousand one. But he also had 0:09:09.320 --> 0:09:12.440 some pretty hefty obstacles in his way, and a lot 0:09:12.480 --> 0:09:15.400 of it came down to timing. For one thing, this 0:09:15.520 --> 0:09:18.560 was just around the time that broadband prices were starting 0:09:18.559 --> 0:09:22.880 to come down, which meant that other options for companies 0:09:22.920 --> 0:09:25.320 that needed to share large amounts of data across multiple 0:09:25.360 --> 0:09:29.160 machines were opening up. Another problem for him was that 0:09:29.240 --> 0:09:32.600 the dot com bubble had burst and the Internet startup 0:09:32.640 --> 0:09:36.959 world was totally upside down as a result. You can 0:09:37.040 --> 0:09:39.600 listen to episodes of tech Stuff where I talked about 0:09:39.679 --> 0:09:44.440 the Internet dot com bubble. It was spectacular and it 0:09:44.520 --> 0:09:48.960 had really an incredible effect across the industry for years 0:09:48.960 --> 0:09:51.440 and years, and no one at this time was really 0:09:51.520 --> 0:09:55.000 bullish about getting into startup companies because so many had 0:09:55.080 --> 0:09:56.959 just gone belly up over the course of about a 0:09:57.040 --> 0:09:58.920 year and a half. So it was really hard to 0:09:58.920 --> 0:10:02.520 find financial back. According to a Fast Company article I read, 0:10:02.679 --> 0:10:06.760 at one point, red Swosh got down to just two employees. 0:10:07.480 --> 0:10:10.560 You had Klanic and you had an engineer, and Clinic 0:10:10.640 --> 0:10:13.000 himself had to move back in with his parents, and 0:10:13.080 --> 0:10:17.559 eventually his one engineer left the company too, so it 0:10:17.600 --> 0:10:20.800 became a one man operation. But he didn't give up. 0:10:21.160 --> 0:10:24.480 He kept plugging away, He kept looking for investors and 0:10:24.520 --> 0:10:28.920 eventually he found one in Mark Cuban. Cubans investment allowed 0:10:29.000 --> 0:10:31.959 Clinic to get red Swush on track, hiring a new team, 0:10:32.120 --> 0:10:36.520 although a small one, and landing a client named Echo Star, 0:10:36.640 --> 0:10:39.960 which is a satellite TV service provider, And this was 0:10:40.120 --> 0:10:44.520 enough to make red Swoosh and attractive property. And in 0:10:44.600 --> 0:10:48.720 two thousand seven, another company called akam I made an 0:10:48.760 --> 0:10:52.559 acquisition offer to that which Clinic accepted. He said sure. 0:10:52.679 --> 0:10:54.640 He sold his company for an amount that has been 0:10:54.679 --> 0:10:58.720 reported to be between fifteen and eighteen million dollars, which 0:10:58.760 --> 0:11:00.600 is not a bad chunk of chain age, though by 0:11:00.600 --> 0:11:03.520 no means the enormous amount of money represented by other 0:11:03.559 --> 0:11:07.280 acquisitions we've seen in the text space. Still, this experience 0:11:07.320 --> 0:11:11.920 reinforced Calantics confidence in himself and his ideas. He bought 0:11:11.920 --> 0:11:14.960 a home in San Francisco and became kind of an 0:11:14.960 --> 0:11:17.640 angel investor, and he would invite lots of younger people 0:11:17.679 --> 0:11:19.960 to come by and pitch ideas to him for various 0:11:20.000 --> 0:11:24.160 businesses because he loved that part of the experience. He 0:11:24.240 --> 0:11:26.400 seems to be the kind of guy who just really 0:11:26.559 --> 0:11:30.880 enjoys innovative ideas and disruptive ideas, whether they come from 0:11:30.880 --> 0:11:33.040 other people or he can take an idea that he 0:11:33.080 --> 0:11:35.520 thinks is maybe seventy of the way there, and help 0:11:35.600 --> 0:11:38.439 try and get it all the way there. Sometimes he 0:11:38.440 --> 0:11:41.320 would just argue with people and say, your idea just 0:11:41.360 --> 0:11:43.079 doesn't make sense, it's not a it's not a big 0:11:43.160 --> 0:11:46.160 enough idea for a business. And he would have these 0:11:46.160 --> 0:11:48.720 discussions on a regular basis and invited a lot of 0:11:48.720 --> 0:11:51.400 people over to be part of them. And he seems 0:11:51.400 --> 0:11:55.000 to have the instincts really necessary to go from practically 0:11:55.000 --> 0:12:00.240 nothing to something and in an accelerated amount of time. Well, 0:12:00.280 --> 0:12:03.960 in December two thousand eight, Clinic attended a conference in 0:12:03.960 --> 0:12:09.640 Paris called loeweb I Love the French. During his stay there, 0:12:09.840 --> 0:12:13.680 it snowed, which is a pretty rare event in Paris actually, 0:12:13.760 --> 0:12:15.600 and the snow was sticking to the ground, which is 0:12:15.880 --> 0:12:19.200 even more rare, And he found himself in need of 0:12:19.240 --> 0:12:22.199 a taxi cab and he was frustrated that he couldn't 0:12:22.280 --> 0:12:26.040 find one. He happened to be with another attendee. That 0:12:26.080 --> 0:12:29.720 guy was named Garrett camp who is the other co 0:12:29.880 --> 0:12:33.439 founder of Uber. And it was this experience of being 0:12:33.520 --> 0:12:37.199 stuck in snowy Paris near the Eiffel Tower with no 0:12:37.400 --> 0:12:40.679 cab in sight that inspired the two to dream up 0:12:40.720 --> 0:12:44.880 the service that would become known as Uber, or so 0:12:45.000 --> 0:12:49.559 the official story goes. The real one, Well, let's talk 0:12:49.600 --> 0:12:52.320 about Garrett Camp for a little bit. He was born 0:12:52.320 --> 0:12:56.120 in Canada, and while attending the University of Calgary's graduate 0:12:56.200 --> 0:12:59.800 school program, he and a friend named Jeff Smith founded 0:12:59.840 --> 0:13:04.080 a service called stumble Upon. Now, this was a recommendation 0:13:04.240 --> 0:13:07.719 engine and discovery platform. In other words, stumble Upon was 0:13:07.760 --> 0:13:10.200 a service that let people share the cool things they 0:13:10.200 --> 0:13:12.920 came across on the web with their friends. Now keep 0:13:12.920 --> 0:13:15.679 in mind, this is before you have stuff like Facebook 0:13:15.800 --> 0:13:18.480 or Twitter. This was a way for you to say, Hey, 0:13:18.920 --> 0:13:22.160 I just happened to find this really great web comic 0:13:22.280 --> 0:13:24.520 that hasn't really taken off yet, and I think you 0:13:24.520 --> 0:13:26.520 need to know about it. You can use stumble Upon 0:13:26.640 --> 0:13:29.640 to help your friends discover this stuff. It was one 0:13:29.640 --> 0:13:31.880 of the first services to hit upon this formula, and 0:13:31.880 --> 0:13:35.280 it became very successful. By the mid two thousands, Camp 0:13:35.320 --> 0:13:39.000 and his team had to relocate to San Francisco, largely 0:13:39.040 --> 0:13:41.640 because that's where the investment money was coming from. So 0:13:41.880 --> 0:13:44.640 they actually left Canada and moved to San Francisco, and 0:13:44.640 --> 0:13:48.680 stumble Upon grew into an enormous endeavor. In two thousand seven, 0:13:48.800 --> 0:13:52.800 eBay acquired the company for seventy five million dollars, making 0:13:52.840 --> 0:13:55.960 Camp a wealthy guy. Camp would continue to work with 0:13:56.000 --> 0:13:59.240 the company as an eBay employee. A couple of years later, 0:13:59.480 --> 0:14:02.240 eBay would spin out stumble Upon so that it would 0:14:02.240 --> 0:14:05.880 once again be an independent company, and Camp was CEO 0:14:06.040 --> 0:14:08.760 until two thousand twelve, when he moved off to pursue 0:14:08.840 --> 0:14:11.920 other interests, and by two thousand fifteen, stumble Upon was 0:14:11.960 --> 0:14:15.679 in trouble, but Camp came back and reacquired the company 0:14:15.720 --> 0:14:18.880 because he didn't want to just see his baby go 0:14:18.960 --> 0:14:22.680 away anyway. During those years when Camp first moved to 0:14:22.720 --> 0:14:25.720 San Francisco, he found getting around in the city to 0:14:25.800 --> 0:14:28.480 be a bit of a challenge. He was never really 0:14:28.520 --> 0:14:32.400 a driver in Calgary, and he hadn't really planned on 0:14:32.480 --> 0:14:35.280 becoming a driver in San Francisco. He had been vexed 0:14:35.280 --> 0:14:37.440 by the problems he saw on the taxi cab industry 0:14:37.520 --> 0:14:39.960 for a while, and he saw that there were too 0:14:40.000 --> 0:14:43.960 few cars servicing too many people who needed to go somewhere. 0:14:44.440 --> 0:14:47.760 He had actually bought himself a really expensive sports car 0:14:48.080 --> 0:14:50.360 once eBay came in, but he found driving in San 0:14:50.360 --> 0:14:54.520 Francisco was way too stressful, and if you've never driven 0:14:54.520 --> 0:14:56.680 in San Francisco, the first time you come to an 0:14:56.720 --> 0:15:00.600 intersection at the top of an extremely steep hill, you'll 0:15:00.600 --> 0:15:03.920 start exploring lots of philosophical and religious concepts and the 0:15:03.960 --> 0:15:06.160 hopes that you can make it through the light once 0:15:06.200 --> 0:15:10.520 it changes. But options outside of personal transportation were pretty 0:15:10.600 --> 0:15:15.560 limited or lackluster. Public transportation in San Francisco has often 0:15:15.680 --> 0:15:21.040 been the subject of consternation, let's say, so, Camp began 0:15:21.160 --> 0:15:24.840 using what The Guardian called in an article the gypsy 0:15:25.040 --> 0:15:28.760 cab fleet of San Francisco. Now I'm not a big 0:15:28.800 --> 0:15:31.760 fan of the word gypsy, I mean, it's essentially a slur, 0:15:32.240 --> 0:15:34.800 but what the paper meant by this was that there 0:15:34.840 --> 0:15:37.520 were people trying to earn extra money by driving black 0:15:37.560 --> 0:15:40.920 sedans and transporting people to various places in the city. 0:15:41.680 --> 0:15:44.720 Most of this was unofficial stuff, and they might be 0:15:44.880 --> 0:15:47.880 livery drivers, but they might be doing this on their 0:15:47.880 --> 0:15:50.800 own time, not on company time, So essentially it was 0:15:50.880 --> 0:15:54.080 kind of like a black market for taxi services. And 0:15:54.160 --> 0:15:56.680 Camp found that many of the drivers were reliable and 0:15:56.760 --> 0:16:00.360 friendly and they weren't overcharging him, so he began to 0:16:00.360 --> 0:16:03.240 collect phone numbers of the drivers he liked so that 0:16:03.280 --> 0:16:06.160 he could use them instead of the official taxi service, 0:16:06.640 --> 0:16:09.320 and that led Camp to envision an app that would 0:16:09.320 --> 0:16:12.280 allow you to hail a ride at any time. It 0:16:12.320 --> 0:16:14.880 would also keep you informed of where your driver was, 0:16:15.040 --> 0:16:17.240 how long it would take the car to reach you, 0:16:17.440 --> 0:16:20.200 and when you could expect to arrive at your destination. 0:16:20.800 --> 0:16:23.440 Now this was all just in the concept phase, but 0:16:23.640 --> 0:16:26.440 sometime in early two thousand and eight, Camp wrote down 0:16:26.440 --> 0:16:29.360 an idea for the services name. He called it Uber, 0:16:30.120 --> 0:16:32.760 but he actually put an umble out over the you, 0:16:33.000 --> 0:16:38.160 which I, I guess means you would call it Uber anyway. 0:16:38.240 --> 0:16:41.680 Camp decided he would call the service uber Cab. He 0:16:41.720 --> 0:16:45.480 registered uber cab dot com in August two thousand, eight 0:16:45.840 --> 0:16:49.280 months before he would have that snowy meeting with Clanic 0:16:49.360 --> 0:16:53.120 in Paris. Now that same summer, Apple had launched the 0:16:53.160 --> 0:16:56.320 App Store for iPhones, which opened up the opportunity to 0:16:56.400 --> 0:16:59.520 create a smartphone app that could do exactly what Camp 0:16:59.560 --> 0:17:02.720 had been imagining. So that things were falling into place. 0:17:03.680 --> 0:17:05.640 On the other side of the equation where the drivers, 0:17:05.920 --> 0:17:08.000 Camp had figured out that a lot of those drivers 0:17:08.040 --> 0:17:11.800 were spending a huge amount of time not transporting anyone 0:17:11.840 --> 0:17:15.080 at all, They were just waiting for a potential fair, 0:17:15.119 --> 0:17:18.480 maybe at an airport or at out front of a hotel. 0:17:18.880 --> 0:17:21.920 They would just park in these areas and wait, which 0:17:21.960 --> 0:17:25.119 was wasted time. Camp knew that the driver's side of 0:17:25.160 --> 0:17:28.000 such an app could help them maximize their time and 0:17:28.000 --> 0:17:31.439 their fares, which meant everyone would benefit. Cars would be 0:17:31.440 --> 0:17:33.880 able to move throughout the city going to where they 0:17:33.880 --> 0:17:37.200 were needed, and drivers would have less downtime and therefore 0:17:37.280 --> 0:17:40.640 make more money while they were actually working for this 0:17:40.840 --> 0:17:45.439 app service. Camp registered uber Cab as a limited liability 0:17:45.480 --> 0:17:48.760 company on November two thousand and eight, still a month 0:17:48.800 --> 0:17:51.520 before he has that meeting in Paris. He was trying 0:17:51.560 --> 0:17:54.199 to decide if it would make sense to purchase several 0:17:54.280 --> 0:17:56.560 cars so that a small group of people he knew 0:17:56.680 --> 0:17:59.920 could become the first drivers in the service. He talked 0:18:00.000 --> 0:18:03.600 of an engineer named Oscar Salazar about developing the app 0:18:03.640 --> 0:18:06.280 side of the business. Now, Salazar was in the United 0:18:06.280 --> 0:18:09.480 States on a student visa, and as such he could 0:18:09.480 --> 0:18:14.359 not accept cash as payments, so instead Camp offered Salazar 0:18:14.480 --> 0:18:17.520 some ownership of the company. If it paid off, Salazar 0:18:17.520 --> 0:18:20.400 would make a profit. As it turned out, Salazar would 0:18:20.400 --> 0:18:24.960 make hundreds of millions of dollars. As for Camp, he 0:18:25.119 --> 0:18:28.359 took a little trip to Paris in December two thousand eight, where, 0:18:28.400 --> 0:18:31.240 through a mutual friend, he was put into contact with 0:18:31.280 --> 0:18:34.359 a certain Travis Kellenic. And while the story goes that 0:18:34.400 --> 0:18:36.879 the two started coming up with Uber while trying to 0:18:36.880 --> 0:18:40.520 get a cab on that snowy Parisian night, the truth 0:18:40.560 --> 0:18:43.639 of the matter is that Camp and Kalanic had been 0:18:43.680 --> 0:18:47.880 talking about it all week, and you had two different 0:18:47.960 --> 0:18:52.040 arguments here. Kalin Nick wanted to create a startup that 0:18:52.160 --> 0:18:54.840 was a lot like what Airbnb would turn into. He 0:18:54.880 --> 0:18:58.040 was thinking of a sort of a luxury apartment kind 0:18:58.040 --> 0:19:01.120 of business that you could book using an app, whereas 0:19:01.160 --> 0:19:04.359 Camp was advocating for the idea that would become Uber. 0:19:04.720 --> 0:19:09.439 And eventually they decided to go with Camp's idea. So 0:19:09.480 --> 0:19:13.640 what happens next, Well, I'll tell you, but first let's 0:19:13.680 --> 0:19:23.280 take a quick break to thank our sponsor. So Clinic 0:19:23.480 --> 0:19:26.760 and Camp get to talking at LOWBB in Paris and 0:19:26.800 --> 0:19:31.360 they decided to work together on Camp's Uber cab idea. Immediately, 0:19:32.119 --> 0:19:35.760 the two founders were at a disagreement, so Camp wanted 0:19:35.760 --> 0:19:39.800 the business to purchase several Mercedes luxury cars and own 0:19:39.920 --> 0:19:43.600 the cars outright and just hire the drivers. Clinic felt 0:19:43.640 --> 0:19:45.800 that this was a mistake and that the business should 0:19:45.800 --> 0:19:49.360 instead rely on drivers supplying their own cars in return 0:19:49.440 --> 0:19:53.640 for access to the app, and eventually Clinic convinced Camp 0:19:53.680 --> 0:19:55.919 to try it his way, and Camp backed off of 0:19:56.000 --> 0:20:00.720 making the purchase. At the beginning, uber Cab focused on 0:20:00.840 --> 0:20:04.879 contacting limo drivers only. It was a black car service, 0:20:04.920 --> 0:20:08.560 so a bit posh and definitely not something that relied 0:20:08.600 --> 0:20:10.720 on the average automobile. That would come a couple of 0:20:10.760 --> 0:20:14.520 years later. Camp got to work with Oscar Salazar, the 0:20:14.720 --> 0:20:19.280 engineer who was working on the promise of equity in 0:20:19.280 --> 0:20:22.399 the company, and they started to build out the uber 0:20:22.440 --> 0:20:25.960 Cab app for real zs. He also reached out to 0:20:26.000 --> 0:20:29.439 a friend of his named Conrad Wheland. Now, Wheland had 0:20:29.480 --> 0:20:33.000 worked for a Canadian company called excel Aware, and he 0:20:33.040 --> 0:20:35.520 had cashed out of that and he wasn't exactly looking 0:20:35.560 --> 0:20:37.800 for a new job at the time, but Camp called 0:20:37.840 --> 0:20:40.280 him up, or he called up Camp, and Camp was 0:20:40.320 --> 0:20:42.320 able to convince him to come on over and join 0:20:42.400 --> 0:20:47.280 the uber Cab team as the first official software engineer 0:20:47.359 --> 0:20:51.159 for the company. Now in a piece in Fortune, Whelan 0:20:51.280 --> 0:20:54.840 revealed that when he joined the Uber Cab apps development 0:20:55.520 --> 0:20:58.320 it was in its earliest stages. It allowed a user 0:20:58.359 --> 0:21:00.919 to order a car, but there was no link to 0:21:00.960 --> 0:21:04.680 create an account or associate a payment method with the service, 0:21:04.840 --> 0:21:07.560 so you would have to pay in some other method. Now, 0:21:07.600 --> 0:21:10.600 this was all in the development phase. Nothing was rolled 0:21:10.600 --> 0:21:13.000 out to the public at this stage, but it was 0:21:13.040 --> 0:21:16.800 still pretty primitive. Wheland got to work building out the 0:21:16.880 --> 0:21:19.040 various aspects of the app that would allow you to 0:21:19.080 --> 0:21:22.360 create an account and associate a credit card or PayPal 0:21:22.400 --> 0:21:24.880 account with it, so that that way you could pay 0:21:24.920 --> 0:21:28.840 for everything seamlessly. It was an idea that would appeal 0:21:28.880 --> 0:21:33.520 both to writers and to drivers, and he also wanted 0:21:33.560 --> 0:21:36.800 to guarantee that Uber would get a cut of the action. 0:21:37.400 --> 0:21:39.199 You had to have some sort of way for the 0:21:39.240 --> 0:21:44.000 company to earn some money from every transaction. Whelan also 0:21:44.080 --> 0:21:47.680 worked on creating algorithms for the dispatch side of the service. 0:21:48.080 --> 0:21:49.960 So when you look at what Uber does from a 0:21:50.040 --> 0:21:54.200 macro level, it's pretty fascinating. On the one hand, it's 0:21:54.200 --> 0:21:56.440 an app that allows you to send out a message 0:21:56.480 --> 0:21:59.840 to nearby drivers, and that message essentially says, I need 0:21:59.840 --> 0:22:02.359 a car to drive me somewhere the app connects to 0:22:02.359 --> 0:22:05.080 an account and payment method so that no cash is 0:22:05.119 --> 0:22:08.080 needed to change hands, which is pretty useful as more 0:22:08.080 --> 0:22:10.320 and more people are going cashless in their day to 0:22:10.400 --> 0:22:12.679 day lives. But on the other side of that app 0:22:13.320 --> 0:22:16.360 is the management system that decides things such as which 0:22:16.440 --> 0:22:19.960 drivers will get contacted for specific jobs. So it's both 0:22:20.000 --> 0:22:23.240 proximity based and takes into account what sort of service 0:22:23.359 --> 0:22:26.080 is being requested and whether or not the Uber drivers 0:22:26.080 --> 0:22:29.359 in the area are currently engaged in another job. So 0:22:29.400 --> 0:22:31.280 the goal on the corporate side of things is to 0:22:31.320 --> 0:22:33.840 do two things. Cut down on the idle time a 0:22:33.960 --> 0:22:36.800 driver experiences between dropping someone off and picking up the 0:22:36.840 --> 0:22:39.639 next fair because whenever they're idle, they're not making money 0:22:39.720 --> 0:22:42.520 for themselves or for the company. And the second thing 0:22:42.600 --> 0:22:44.400 is to cut down the wait time for someone who 0:22:44.400 --> 0:22:47.040 needs to get a ride, because if the wait times 0:22:47.040 --> 0:22:49.400 are really crazy, no one's going to use your service. 0:22:49.840 --> 0:22:52.800 Wheeland worked on that technology to improve the experience for 0:22:52.840 --> 0:22:56.720 both sides, both drivers and riders. Now, according to that 0:22:56.800 --> 0:23:00.440 same piece and Fortune, Uber's second engineer are was a 0:23:00.440 --> 0:23:04.040 guy named Ryan McKillen who found things in a pretty 0:23:04.119 --> 0:23:08.600 unusual state for a startup in San Francisco. At that time, 0:23:08.720 --> 0:23:11.119 Uber was using a small space in the office of 0:23:11.160 --> 0:23:15.399 another company called Zozie. The story of Zozie is also 0:23:15.480 --> 0:23:18.960