Speaker 1: Don't let your legacy I T systems cost you money,
Speaker 1: innovation and a place at the digital table of the future.
Speaker 1: You can change your systems and the economics of it
Speaker 1: with software from red Hat. See how at red hat
Speaker 1: dot com. More than one point five million people drive
Speaker 1: for the global ride sharing juggernaut Uber. They're always available
Speaker 1: day and night, taking us where we want to go.
Speaker 1: But it's driving for Uber a productive, profitable way to
Speaker 1: make a living. Does Uber come through and its promises
Speaker 1: to drivers. It provides much needed income for college students,
Speaker 1: the recently retired, and the unemployed. But half the driving
Speaker 1: gets done by people working more than thirty five hours
Speaker 1: a week. These people often fight to make ends meet.
Speaker 1: The hours are long and the returns can be meager.
Speaker 1: Today we're exploring the sensitive relationship between Uber and its drivers.
Speaker 1: Our story starts back in the fall of two thousand ten,
Speaker 1: when Uber was just starting out in the Golden City
Speaker 1: by the Bay, San Francisco. One of the first Uber
Speaker 1: drivers was a soft spoken immigrant in his mid thirties
Speaker 1: named Sophia and Uali, an Algerian former safety specialist in
Speaker 1: the oil industry. Like many immigrants to the US, Sophia
Speaker 1: found work in the taxi and limousine industry. A fleet
Speaker 1: owner gave him a smartphone with the Uber app and
Speaker 1: a pearl white two thousand three Lincoln town Car. It
Speaker 1: gets people to like the car because it's white and
Speaker 1: the whole system was black. At that time, all Uber's
Speaker 1: cars were black. This car stood out. In fact, as
Speaker 1: Sophia tells us, Uber initially wanted him to change the car.
Speaker 1: Even Ubert got in touch with me to UH to
Speaker 1: try to to convince me to to change the car.
Speaker 1: And I was like, if if the car changes, I
Speaker 1: am not here too. So because you had no other option, exactly,
Speaker 1: I had no no other option, and I started to
Speaker 1: to build some right there's esteem to that car. And
Speaker 1: how I did that it was it was like tedding
Speaker 1: my riders that this is the only single white car
Speaker 1: in the whole branded the car exactly, branded the car exactly.
Speaker 1: Pretty soon Uber's customers were tweeting about the car and
Speaker 1: reviewing it on Yelp, hoping that they would call an
Speaker 1: Uber and get Sophian's majestic white ride. There was something
Speaker 1: magical about Sofian's car, and someone who it was exactly
Speaker 1: it's lost to history decided to call it the Unicorn. Hi,
Speaker 1: I'm Brad Stone and I'm Eric Newcomer. Welcome to this
Speaker 1: week's episode of Decrypted. Now, Brad, come clean. The timing
Speaker 1: of this podcast isn't totally coincidental, Okay right. My new book,
Speaker 1: The Upstarts comes out this week on January one. It's
Speaker 1: about the rise and rapid expansion of the global sharing economy, juggernauts,
Speaker 1: Uber and Airbnb, and the nearly NonStop controversy and turmoil
Speaker 1: that they have left in their week. Today's story of
Speaker 1: Sophion in the Unicorn is drawn from Brad's book, and
Speaker 1: through Sophia's experience, will dig into the skills at all entrepreneurs,
Speaker 1: including Uber drivers, need to make it in a rapidly
Speaker 1: changing business world. Will also looks specifically at what Uber
Speaker 1: offers its drivers and ask whether one of Silicon Valley's
Speaker 1: most celebrated successes is living up to its mission of
Speaker 1: helping drivers generate self sustaining income. Sophion is one of
Speaker 1: the world's most prolific Uber drivers. He's been there since
Speaker 1: the beginning and says he's driven around thirty thousand rides. Now,
Speaker 1: that's five thousand rides a year. More than four fifteen
Speaker 1: rides a month, more than eighty three rides a week,
Speaker 1: working six days a week. Not to be glib, but
Speaker 1: that's a lot of sitting down. It is so it's
Speaker 1: San Francisco in the fall of two thousand ten. Even
Speaker 1: in Uber's early months, sophia On implicitly understood its potential.
Speaker 1: Customers loved it. Drivers didn't waste as much time sitting
Speaker 1: around waiting for fairs, and the app was easy to use,
Speaker 1: so newcomers to the city could seamlessly find their way around.
Speaker 1: In the beginning, sophia says it just paid the bills,
Speaker 1: but after a while the money started pouring in. Sophion
Speaker 1: was like a lot of early Uber drivers. He saw
Speaker 1: the company as a platform on which he could build
Speaker 1: a business. Uber encouraged this. Travis Kalinnik, Uber CEO, boasted
Speaker 1: about drivers who were building fleets of cars on the
Speaker 1: Uber system. After seven months, Sophion left the fleet and
Speaker 1: took over the Unicorns lease from the owner. Then he
Speaker 1: started taking loans out, leasing new town cars and hiring
Speaker 1: new drivers. His company was called Global Way Limousine because
Speaker 1: he had aspirations to expand a around the world, and
Speaker 1: business was good. He told you he was making seven
Speaker 1: hundred or eight hundred dollars a day, right, he was
Speaker 1: doing that by taking commissions from his drivers who were
Speaker 1: driving his cars for Uber. Meanwhile, Sophie and kept driving
Speaker 1: the Unicorn, which was getting famous in the city. And
Speaker 1: at the same that You've got this car and it's
Speaker 1: kind of a local celebrity, right, the exact unicorn. Did
Speaker 1: you find that people wanted the Unicorn, that they were
Speaker 1: trying to hail it? Oh? Yes, definitely. I mean a
Speaker 1: lot of people who I get every day, they all
Speaker 1: the ones who love it. They all say, how how
Speaker 1: could we How can we get you every day as
Speaker 1: our driver? But unfortunately the Uber system doesn't allow allow
Speaker 1: people to have that option. Well, that might have been
Speaker 1: some of the magic of the Unicorn, that I could
Speaker 1: only show up like a real unicorn. It can only
Speaker 1: it can only show up through a circumstance. Exactly, luck, Exactly,
Speaker 1: that's what I say when when I find people who
Speaker 1: doesn't like that. And then the ground shifted under his feet.
Speaker 1: In the fall of two thousand thirteen, following rivals like
Speaker 1: Lift and Sidecar, Uber introduced a ride sharing service called
Speaker 1: uber x that let anybody with the driver's license pick
Speaker 1: up a passenger with their own vehicle as long as
Speaker 1: they met certain criteria. And with the rollout of uber X,
Speaker 1: Uber started lowering prices and it kept on lowering them. Travis,
Speaker 1: the CEO of Uber, raised a fortune and venture capital.
Speaker 1: He was using price as a weapon to grow quickly
Speaker 1: and outpaced rivals with less money. There was also a
Speaker 1: bigger mission. He said that Uber would replace car ownership
Speaker 1: right but Travis is, above all else a competitor. He
Speaker 1: wanted to make sure Uber, not Lift or anyone else,
Speaker 1: dominated the market for ride sharing. It took a while
Speaker 1: for Sophie On to feel the effects of these changes.
Speaker 1: Writers slowly migrated from Uber Black to the cheaper alternatives
Speaker 1: Uber Black rates fell each ride became less profitable. But
Speaker 1: worst of all, Sofian's drivers eventually gured out that they
Speaker 1: shouldn't be giving them a commission at all, but driving
Speaker 1: their own cars directly for Uber. So when uber x
Speaker 1: rolled down, I I was thinking to find other ways
Speaker 1: how to how to balance up my my business with
Speaker 1: the changes. So so the business kept being good up
Speaker 1: up to to the first I would say, to the
Speaker 1: first quarter of of the thousand and fourteen, and then
Speaker 1: it started we started to uh to fill the effect
Speaker 1: of uber X, you know, so prices started to drop down,
Speaker 1: and maybe the demand was the same, but prices started
Speaker 1: to drop down because of the the Uber x launch.
Speaker 1: So from there I I felt that it was a
Speaker 1: turning point for the Uber system. Not necessarily on the
Speaker 1: bad way, I would say. I would say, knowing the
Speaker 1: business from the beginning, I had to take some some
Speaker 1: action to to not lose money. What about your drivers,
Speaker 1: did they start to leave and go out on their
Speaker 1: own because there was this opportunity to use their own cars? Well,
Speaker 1: definitely you have. You have you have this pressure from
Speaker 1: your drivers to to go away from you because there
Speaker 1: is that that opportunity to end and honestly you don't
Speaker 1: have any choice. Then of course encouraging the drivers just
Speaker 1: being nice with them and make as much as business
Speaker 1: they can with you, and then encourage them to go,
Speaker 1: you know so, because because it's open for them. By
Speaker 1: two fourteen, Sophie had to shut down his business Global
Speaker 1: Wey Limousine. But it's remarkable that he really understands why
Speaker 1: Uber made these changes and it is a piece with it.
Speaker 1: There was a huge, huge demand from from customer customer
Speaker 1: site and the huge demand from Uber to encourage people
Speaker 1: to to have fleets at the beginning. But when the
Speaker 1: business started to change and policies change and prices started
Speaker 1: to go down a little bit, they had this idea,
Speaker 1: which is a brilliant idea and I totally understand it.
Speaker 1: Drivers are more happy being their their own to be
Speaker 1: to be our own boss, you know. So I think
Speaker 1: that that what makes Uber change change their their policies
Speaker 1: to not encourage people to have to have fleets anymore,
Speaker 1: because the drivers are more happy, happier when they have
Speaker 1: their own car and their own business. And to be honest,
Speaker 1: it's a good decision. It's a good decision from them
Speaker 1: because the companies health here this way then he used
Speaker 1: to be. Because some of the partners who had fleets
Speaker 1: and a lot of drivers, I can't tell you my
Speaker 1: drivers they were happy, but not all drivers who were
Speaker 1: driving for someone they were happy. So because they were
Speaker 1: sharing their income exactly, they were sharing their income and
Speaker 1: sometimes without any any good business criterias, you know, so
Speaker 1: they are sharing it. Ah, there was a lot of
Speaker 1: injustice in there, you know. So I saw things from
Speaker 1: from partners who had fleets. That's that's sometimes you hire.
Speaker 1: They hire drivers and they give them like a very
Speaker 1: very low, the lowest portion from from the business they had.
Speaker 1: They they were doing it in percentages, and the percentage
Speaker 1: they give them it's it's just fair low. So let's say,
Speaker 1: let's say the part to know who hires ten drivers,
Speaker 1: they give deals that that are not in the favor
Speaker 1: of the driver. It's there is no badance to help
Speaker 1: to help a driver. So they were given, let's say,
Speaker 1: for an example, sevent thirty percent deal, So the owner
Speaker 1: of the card takes seventy and the driver takes which
Speaker 1: is not not right. So at this point Brad is
Speaker 1: Sophia and still writing that white unicorn. Well Eric will
Speaker 1: get to that, but yeah, Sophie and was now working
Speaker 1: for himself, driving for Uber Black, trying to make it.
Speaker 1: In Uber's new economic reality, the days of seven hundred
Speaker 1: dollars a day earnings were a thing of the past.
Speaker 1: How much are you making now per day? I would
Speaker 1: say it's an average of three fifty three three fifty
Speaker 1: three hundred, three hundred fifty dollars, which is still pretty
Speaker 1: pretty good. Pretty good. Sounds like half of what you're
Speaker 1: making in the heyday. Yes, but I would say, let
Speaker 1: me tell you this. I would say, back in the day,
Speaker 1: it wasn't normal. The prices were there was very little competitions, yes,
Speaker 1: little competition, and it was to be honest, it was overpriced.
Speaker 1: I mean for someone to take an Uber and Uber Black,
Speaker 1: which is the only option on the system, take an
Speaker 1: an Uber black from the financial district to the North
Speaker 1: Beach for twenty five bucks, that's that's a lot of money.
Speaker 1: That's a lot of money. It sounds like Sophian is
Speaker 1: happy being his own boss, working for Uber Black, making
Speaker 1: a decent living well. His story is a bit of
Speaker 1: an aberration. There are many drivers who work for uber
Speaker 1: x and other Uber services who struggle to make ends
Speaker 1: meet and don't make much above minimum wage. Up Ahead
Speaker 1: will zoom in on that struggle so many drivers are facing,
Speaker 1: and we'll see what Uber is doing to make things
Speaker 1: better for drivers. But first a word from our sponsor.
Speaker 1: Inside the most successful organizations, I t has gone from
Speaker 1: supporting the business to driving the business. But the costs
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Speaker 1: Learn more at red hat dot com. Okay, we're back.
Speaker 1: Right before the break, we saw Sophion forced to dismantle
Speaker 1: its dreams of running a global taxi fleet and deal
Speaker 1: with a fifty pay cut after Uber started rolling out
Speaker 1: cheaper services like uber x and Uberpool, chipping away at
Speaker 1: drivers salaries. Eric you and olivia's Aleski recently wrote an
Speaker 1: amazing story about one extreme Some drivers now go to
Speaker 1: trying to make ends meet sleeping in their cars in
Speaker 1: parking lots. Now, why would anybody possibly do this? You know,
Speaker 1: we talked to one driver who lives in Sacramento, drives
Speaker 1: into San Francisco, slept in a safe way. Now McDonald's
Speaker 1: worked all week. It's a way to maximize his income
Speaker 1: while keeping costs low. It's free to sleep in your car.
Speaker 1: I can't imagine that they're smelling too good after a
Speaker 1: couple of days. Well, some sneak off to a hostel
Speaker 1: or find a gym and take a shower. So is
Speaker 1: there anything Uper is doing to incentivize this or to
Speaker 1: put another way, could they discourage it if they wanted to?
Speaker 1: But sort of the ultimate Uber value here, right, flexibility.
Speaker 1: The drivers are free to do whatever they want. Lift
Speaker 1: restrict drivers to fourteen hours of working continuously. Uber drivers
Speaker 1: set their own schedule. It makes me wonder if drivers
Speaker 1: are kind of locking themselves into a career and the
Speaker 1: lifestyle that's getting worse and worse and harder and harder
Speaker 1: over time. Drivers say their pay has gone down over
Speaker 1: time and they're not really building up the skills to
Speaker 1: find another job. It feels to many of them like
Speaker 1: their career as they've chosen is getting worse and worse.
Speaker 1: But we should point out that some of the drivers
Speaker 1: you guys spoke to were actually proud of the fact
Speaker 1: that they were sleeping in in parking lots and in
Speaker 1: camps at night. That they felt like they kind of
Speaker 1: hacked the Uber system. Yeah, they're taking fars when they're
Speaker 1: at their most lucrative, you know, late at night, early
Speaker 1: in the morning, building their schedule around sort of the
Speaker 1: commuter and the late night millennial going out to a bar.
Speaker 1: So so you know they're they're going into this pretty
Speaker 1: clear eyed. UH. To explore this further, I spoke with
Speaker 1: one of our favorites, the ride share Guy Love the
Speaker 1: ride chair Guy. He's one of the most prominent experts
Speaker 1: when it comes to sort of thinking about the best
Speaker 1: way to make a living as an Uber driver. My
Speaker 1: name is Harry Campbell. I'm an Uber and Lift driver
Speaker 1: and founder of the Ride Share Guy blog, podcast, and
Speaker 1: YouTube channel. Harry has been driving for Uber and Lifts
Speaker 1: since two thousand fourteen. I pretty quickly realized that it's
Speaker 1: not the most difficult job in the world, but it's
Speaker 1: definitely a little bit more complex than it seems, And
Speaker 1: so I started a blog about my experience as a driver,
Speaker 1: what it was like getting signed up, what it was
Speaker 1: really like working for the services, and now we try
Speaker 1: to really highlight the good and the bad about being
Speaker 1: an Uber and Left driver. When Harry started driving for Uber,
Speaker 1: drivers could make thirty to forty dollars an hour on
Speaker 1: weekend nights, and Uber was advertising drivers could make ninety
Speaker 1: thousand dollars a year right. Although they recently settled the
Speaker 1: lawsuit about those kinds of exaggerated claims. Yeah, Uber paid
Speaker 1: a twenty million dollar penalty to the Federal Trade Commission
Speaker 1: for misleading drivers about earnings and vehicle financing claims. So
Speaker 1: what does Harry the rideshare guy say about driving for
Speaker 1: Uber now? He says Uber has been changing all along,
Speaker 1: and not many drivers are as accepting of this as Sophia.
Speaker 1: The only constant in this industry is changed. Just knowing that,
Speaker 1: especially from a driver's perspective, I mean, what the strategies
Speaker 1: that you're using, or the places you are driving, or
Speaker 1: even the pay that you're getting six months twelve months
Speaker 1: ago is not going to be the same today, right,
Speaker 1: And I think that's the big thing for a lot
Speaker 1: of drivers. Drivers don't like change. Nobody likes change, whether
Speaker 1: it's uberpool or whether it's lower rates or whatever it
Speaker 1: might be. So you definitely have that side of the
Speaker 1: equation for drivers, And I mean for drivers that have
Speaker 1: been doing this for a while, they've sort of seen
Speaker 1: a very big shift. Is that sort of vision of
Speaker 1: the k a year salary still a vision that drivers
Speaker 1: believe in today? How is sort of both the myth
Speaker 1: and the reality of being an Uber driver changed since
Speaker 1: you started tracking the company? Well, I don't think there
Speaker 1: are any drivers today that are going in or getting
Speaker 1: into Uber expecting to make anywhere near ninety thousand dollars
Speaker 1: a year. I think that if anything, Uber has had
Speaker 1: more publicity sort of against that notion than they have
Speaker 1: for it. And you know, kind of like what I
Speaker 1: always say is that it's still a good opportunity for
Speaker 1: a lot of people. It is still one of the
Speaker 1: most flexible jobs in the world. You can log on
Speaker 1: and log off whenever you want. It's just that it's
Speaker 1: shifting more towards if you want to make the most
Speaker 1: amount of money, you need to log on during certain times,
Speaker 1: you need to drive certain places, and so it might
Speaker 1: seem like it's flexible, well paying from the outside, but
Speaker 1: once you actually start doing it and you start driving,
Speaker 1: you do realize that Uber does control a lot of
Speaker 1: when and where you drive. Eric I've noticed this also
Speaker 1: from talking to Uber drivers. Why are they dissatisfied with Uberpool?
Speaker 1: As Harry suggests, Pool makes their lives harder, it's more complicated.
Speaker 1: The hardest part of being Uber drivers picking up passengers
Speaker 1: and dropping them off, and Pool asked them to do
Speaker 1: much more of that an hour. There's the perception, at
Speaker 1: least that they're making less money do you think that's right?
Speaker 1: The pay on pool is super confusing and it depends
Speaker 1: sort of who you trust. I think Uber would say.
Speaker 1: When it works on an hourly basis, drivers are making
Speaker 1: more because they're getting more people in their cars. But
Speaker 1: drivers see that on a per passenger basis, they're making less.
Speaker 1: Passengers pay less in the hopes that they'll be able
Speaker 1: to cram multiple people and they may not always have
Speaker 1: a full car exactly. So last summer, Uber hired a
Speaker 1: new president, Jeff Jones, and marketing exact at Target and
Speaker 1: Jeff is called two thousand seventeen the Year of the
Speaker 1: Driver at Uber. What does that mean exactly? Well, One,
Speaker 1: it means they're just going to communicate with drivers better.
Speaker 1: You know, you can see him tweeting it, drivers trying
Speaker 1: to answer their problems, posting on LinkedIn. They're going to
Speaker 1: improve their support so that drivers have someone they can
Speaker 1: reach out to. But this is an engineering company. More
Speaker 1: and more in Uber really thinks it can build tools
Speaker 1: to help drivers. That means, you know, when they want
Speaker 1: to head home, helping the route more efficiently get them
Speaker 1: home with fares along the way, so they're getting paid
Speaker 1: for every hour. The more rides you can get, the
Speaker 1: more your per hour pay is going up, or at
Speaker 1: least staying the same. Uber has always, of course paid
Speaker 1: lip service to drivers, but it feels to me that
Speaker 1: the key constituency has always been writers, and that over
Speaker 1: the years they've basically focused on lowering fares as almost
Speaker 1: a competitive weapon to try to corner the market in
Speaker 1: ride sharing. Yeah, Brad, you know this better than anybody.
Speaker 1: Uber is built around the founding story of serving the writer.
Speaker 1: It's about calling a car with a push of a
Speaker 1: button when you want to go out late at night.
Speaker 1: It's not a company that was built sort of to
Speaker 1: give employment to sort of hundreds of thousands in the
Speaker 1: United States alone drivers. And so I think after the fact,
Speaker 1: there's sort of had to realize this is a two
Speaker 1: sided marketplace. We need to celebrate riders and drivers. So
Speaker 1: what is Uber telling you right now about this new
Speaker 1: focus on drivers. I spoke with none new John A. Karam,
Speaker 1: Uber's head of driver engagement, for the story about drivers
Speaker 1: who sleep in their cars. I thought it had relevance
Speaker 1: to this discussion. He said, the way to make more
Speaker 1: money on our platform in general, and the way that
Speaker 1: everyone makes more money is when the system becomes more efficient,
Speaker 1: so there is less time between trips for drivers they're
Speaker 1: driving to um, you know, places that are closer by
Speaker 1: to pick up passengers or or or things like that,
Speaker 1: expanding the number of different kinds of trips that they
Speaker 1: can take, so uber eats and things like that. Like,
Speaker 1: the more efficient our system gets for drivers, um, you know,
Speaker 1: the more that drivers will engage in our platform, and
Speaker 1: um you know, the more that we can you know,
Speaker 1: keep driver earnings in a kind of able place. And
Speaker 1: I think that's the big thing that we've been really
Speaker 1: pushing for from product perspective, which is how can we
Speaker 1: bring general kind of stability to earnings. So, Eric, what
Speaker 1: does Harry Campbell think about some of these new driver programs.
Speaker 1: He's a bit skeptical. Uh. He believes there's one thing
Speaker 1: that can improve life for drivers, and that's more cash.
Speaker 1: Show me the money. A lot of people ask me
Speaker 1: what drivers care about, and honestly, drivers are just like
Speaker 1: everyone else. They care about frankly, their money, right, how
Speaker 1: much they're getting paid. All of the top articles on
Speaker 1: my site have to do with how much you can
Speaker 1: learn how to make more money. When we surveyed our audience,
Speaker 1: pay was the number one thing and the drivers cared about.
Speaker 1: So I mean, I think that anything that can affect
Speaker 1: a driver's bottom line, and you know, if I'm sitting
Speaker 1: at Uber, those are the things that I'm looking at. So, Brad,
Speaker 1: let's get back to Sophia Newali and the Unicorn of
Speaker 1: San Francisco. Is Sophian still drive? He is still driving.
Speaker 1: In fact, I took a ride with him recently. He's
Speaker 1: still a faithful Uber Black driver and he's starting to
Speaker 1: work on a book sharing some of his tips about
Speaker 1: driving for Uber. And whatever happened to the unicorn. The
Speaker 1: unicorn actually met a tragic end. Here's Sophia describing to
Speaker 1: me what happened on a faithful Easter two fourteen. So
Speaker 1: the Unicorn. That was a very sad end of story
Speaker 1: for the Unicorn. So one of my drivers actually, so
Speaker 1: this is what I do with my drivers when they
Speaker 1: have any problem with with their car, at their own
Speaker 1: car that they are driving, I just decided to give
Speaker 1: them my car, which is the Unicorn. Of course, I
Speaker 1: gave the Unicorn for for one of my drivers, and
Speaker 1: I got his car to some maintenance. And I remember
Speaker 1: the day when I when I gave him the unicorn.
Speaker 1: I said, hey, please take care of off my baby
Speaker 1: and he said okay, yes, And two three hours later,
Speaker 1: oh no, he called me and then he said, I gotta,
Speaker 1: I gotta in an accident. I said, no, please don't.
Speaker 1: And when I got there, I saw the car and
Speaker 1: it was it was completely what happened total do you know?
Speaker 1: So someone It was the night of Easter and some
Speaker 1: drunk driver runner at laid and this guy hite him,
Speaker 1: you know, he hits, he hit the unicorn. Was everybody okay?
Speaker 1: Everybody was okay? Fortunately, yeah, but the unicorn was totaled.
Speaker 1: So and from from then I just decided to not
Speaker 1: to not buy another unicorn, you know. So and then
Speaker 1: and so ends the story of the white Lincoln town Car.
Speaker 1: And that was the end, the said, end, story of
Speaker 1: the Lincoln Tonka. That's sad. Yeah, in a weird way.
Speaker 1: Sophia accepts it, just as he accepts the changes to
Speaker 1: the Uber system and seems to understand why the company
Speaker 1: made them. Towards the end of our conversation, I asked
Speaker 1: him one last question, do you ever dream about the Unicorn?
Speaker 1: To be honest, yes, yes, I like that car. I
Speaker 1: love that card, but it's a sad story at the
Speaker 1: end of story. But I loved it. I loved the
Speaker 1: whole experience, you know, So the whole experience was just beautiful, beautiful,
Speaker 1: So no regrets, Eric, when all of a saidden done.
Speaker 1: Do you agree with Sophion, do you think Uber has
Speaker 1: been a generous steward of this powerful platform for drivers,
Speaker 1: or to put in another way, has Uber been a
Speaker 1: benign dictator in the taxi world? I don't think I
Speaker 1: would ever use the word benign to describe Uber. I mean,
Speaker 1: they're sort of ruth lists, economic marketplace optimizers. You know,
Speaker 1: it's how can we get the most number of riders
Speaker 1: and drivers, And so when that's meant that they were
Speaker 1: getting plenty of drivers and not enough riders, they would
Speaker 1: lower the fair, attract riders, and make life a lot
Speaker 1: more difficult for drivers who are hoping to pay their bills. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that's right. I think for a long time
Speaker 1: the flywheel at Uber started with fares. If they lowered fares,
Speaker 1: they increased ridership, they put pressure on competitors, and they
Speaker 1: drew drivers to them. The problem is, and we both
Speaker 1: saw this over the past few years, it alienated drivers,
Speaker 1: even if they were making as much or maybe even
Speaker 1: a little more money. And I don't know that that
Speaker 1: was the reality. They saw the decreased fares and they
Speaker 1: got mad and they protested, and Uber over over time
Speaker 1: kind of developed a little bit of a poor reputation
Speaker 1: with some of its hardest working drivers. And now obviously
Speaker 1: they're trying to improve it. But I'd like to point
Speaker 1: out one more problem on the horizon. Uber probably lost
Speaker 1: three billion dollars globally in rebillion, and that's of course
Speaker 1: counting the big China competition that they basically surrendered on right,
Speaker 1: and they're losing money in the United States. So looking
Speaker 1: at those numbers, you might think Uber is pain drivers
Speaker 1: too much. Uber will need to do something about costs.
Speaker 1: Is this where we say only time will tell? Only
Speaker 1: time will tell? Hey, guys, it's acky. I co host
Speaker 1: and helped produce this podcast. And as we were about
Speaker 1: to publish this episode, a series of things happened that
Speaker 1: made consumers question Uber CEO Travis Kalenik's relationship with President
Speaker 1: Trump and also Uber stands on Trump's executive order banning
Speaker 1: visitors from certain countries. I'm sure you all saw the
Speaker 1: hashtag delete Uber trending over your social media feeds. We
Speaker 1: ended up running out of time to discuss this in
Speaker 1: the depth that it really deserves, but our episode next
Speaker 1: week is going to be all about this, all about
Speaker 1: the executive order, the tech industry's response to it, and
Speaker 1: what it means for the companies that we cover going
Speaker 1: forward to stay tuned, and that's it for this week's
Speaker 1: episode of Decrypted. Thanks for listening. Tell us what you
Speaker 1: thought of the episode. Send us a voice message to
Speaker 1: our producer Pia at p G A D k A
Speaker 1: r I at Bloomberg dot net, or write to me
Speaker 1: on Twitter. I'm at Eric Newcomber and I'm at brad Stone.
Speaker 1: Remember to check out my new book, The Upstarts How Uber,
Speaker 1: Airbnb and the killer companies of the New Silicon Valley
Speaker 1: are changing the world. Available from Amazon dot Com or
Speaker 1: your friendly neighborhood bookstore That's really shameless red another book blog. Okay,
Speaker 1: I know, I know. You can subscribe to Decrypted on
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Speaker 1: This episode was produced by Pa got Kari Magnus Hendrickson
Speaker 1: and Liz Smith Alec McCabe as head of Bloomberg Podcasts.
Speaker 1: We'll see you next week. Don't let your legacy I
Speaker 1: systems cost you money, innovation, and a place at the
Speaker 1: digital table of the future. You can change your systems
Speaker 1: and the economics of it with software from red Hat.
Speaker 1: See how at red hat dot com.