Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
There's a reason why start-ups, especially disruptive start-ups - like Google or Amazon or Uber - are full of young people. That's because young people are not as wedded to the old fashioned ways of doing things.
Uber survives only if people trust us. You have to trust us with your data. You have to trust us with your safety or the safety of your loved ones. And we have to earn that trust every day in the way that we operate.
I think I'm not uber into the comedy scene, but I love to laugh, especially in our business, where you're always front and center over an extremely, sometimes overly-critical live audience. I think it helps to laugh.
Uber, and Airbnb to a different extent, implemented the same battle plan. Bezos is an investor in both companies and, to some degree, has relationships with both CEOs. It is not a surprise that they are heirs to Amazon.
My life has become extremely hard. I am banned on Twitter. I'm banned on Uber. I'm banned on Lyft. I'm banned on Venmo. I'm banned on GoFundMe. I'm banned on PayPal. I'm banned on Uber Eats. I can't even order a sandwich.
For every Tesla or Uber, there's a Valeant Pharmaceuticals or Theranos - two story stocks that seduced an astounding array of prominent investors and supporters based on stories that did turn out to be too good to be true.
If you look at a company like Uber, a company that so anti-establishment that cab companies are trying to find ways to shut it down, one could compare that to how Public Enemy and NWA went after then-modern society in hip hop.
A lot of the drawbacks, a lot of the difficulties that Uber has had, have been completely predictable, and they handled them poorly, so by their own standards they made a lot of mistakes, and I think that they would admit that.
About Jimi Hendrix - although his playing is at an uber-level, his voice is quite lo-fi and normal, like a regular person singing in the shower, and this makes his music much better than if he was just a technical player and singer.
With tough interpretation of taxi and zoning regulations, neither Uber nor Airbnb would have gotten started. By the time many cities recognized their existence, both were fairly large and had the political support of their customers.
I like having my autonomy; I like going into the vegetable aisle with little fanfare. Very few go into that star category, in that uber above-the-title category. The rest of us, day in and day out, we're there to support what they do.
I do think there is magic that made Uber possible, made that disruption possible, made that innovation possible, and was critical to its success. I believe you can still have the magic that underlies that and yet be a compliant company.
All business leaders need to be technologists, as every industry now has a Netflix or an Uber on the horizon, threatening to upend business as usual. Apps are driving this disruption, and every enterprise needs to become an app company.
You're basically competing with the same exact product. Coke and Pepsi are at least in different cans. Lyft and Uber drivers are just swapping out the mustache for the U on the dashboard, depending on which one they're getting the call on.
Just start thinking about all the different services in your life. Like getting your dry cleaning picked up and dropped off. Nobody has done the Uber of that yet. But that will be Uberfied. You will arrange your dry cleaning via your phone.
When theres no other dude in the car, the cost of taking an Uber anywhere becomes cheaper than owning a vehicle. So the magic there is, you basically bring the cost below the cost of ownership for everybody, and then car ownership goes away.
What's interesting about the transportation market is that you're often dabbling in multiple categories. The same person who might own a car is still using Uber, is still using a taxi, still might go to Avis on a business trip and rent a car.
I think Uber is just very different; there's no model to copy. It may be the reason why we've been a lightning rod in so many ways, because we don't do anything conventional... And then I think also, as an entrepreneur, I'm a bit of a lone wolf.
When we grew up, we couldn't wait to get our hands on cars, work with them, change the look of them. Now you see kids being like, 'I'll just take the Uber,' or 'Oh, I don't even have my driver's license yet.' I'm like, 'Ugh, who are you people?'
Relative to the taxi industry, Uber is a sustaining innovation; that is, it makes customers' lives better. Uber targeted mainstream markets with a better service for existing customers, and it succeeded in serving them better than the incumbents.
Managing directors at top-tier investment banks may pocket a million a year and be worth tens of millions after a long career. Early employees at tech firms like Uber, Airbnb, and Snapchat can make many times that amount of money in a matter of years.
Early investors in Uber and Airbnb, though they remain private companies, have valued them at stratospheric multiples based largely on the notion that Uber will transform and dominate local transportation and Airbnb will revolutionize the hotel industry.
Our tenants now are companies like Uber, the taxi service, Meituan.com, China's version of Groupon - and a large number of startups. These companies operate in a modern way, just like their customers: They go on the Internet, look for an offer and take it.
Investors are always biased to invest in things they themselves understand. So venture capitalists like Uber because they like driving in black town cars. They don't like Airbnb because they like staying in five-star hotels, not sleeping on people's couches.
I was very compelled by a woman who would choose this profession. She [Maura Isles] came from a very highly-educated, wealthy background and could have chosen to do a lot of other things, and has this uber-feminine, modern woman mentality, but works this job.
We see these wonderful apps that really have changed our world in many good ways such as Uber or Airbnb, but at the same time, they're drastically changing the workforce. And they're changing them so much that the industries themselves are not able to keep up.
I'm not a very organized person for being uber work-obsessed. I struggle to keep it all organized because everything can become important and, when you have so many spinning plates, they sometimes can cancel each other out because you lose track of everything.
In December 2014, Uber held its annual holiday party on an unfurnished floor at its swank, mood-lit headquarters in San Francisco. Employees and investors attended in flamboyant attire from the Roaring '20s and drank at an open bar into the early morning hours.
A stage play is basically a form of uber-schizophrenia. You split yourself into two minds - one being the protagonist and the other being the antagonist. The playwright also splits himself into two other minds: the mind of the writer and the mind of the audience.
One of the facts about sexual assault is that it is a very underreported offense, and there are a whole lot of reasons why individuals don't report to law enforcement. Uber shouldn't make that choice for survivors. Survivors should make that choice for themselves.
Whereas most technologies tend to automate workers on the periphery doing menial tasks, blockchains automate away the center. Instead of putting the taxi driver out of a job, blockchain puts Uber out of a job and lets the taxi drivers work with the customer directly.
In our economic structure, the people who work the hardest oftentimes make the least. I know migrant farm workers who do back-breaking labor every day, or Uber drivers and Lyft drivers who drive 10 to 12 hours a day in traffic. You can't be lazy doing that kind of work.
When you think about Uber and Airbnb and the other companies that are turning things upside down, Uber isn't big 'cause they ran a lot of ads. They're big because someone took out their iPhone and said to their friend, watch this, and pressed a button and a car pulled up.
If SoftBank can complete the tender offer it contemplates to buy a large stake in Uber, the company's bizarre governance war will be over for the time being, putting Uber back on par with other normal companies whose boards of directors dont fight publicly with each other.
The emergence of Uber X was really the most important pivot maybe in the history of Silicon Valley. It's a vast majority of Uber's revenues, and so that flexibility and the rapid growth and the fighting the battles, it's all Travis. You can't take any credit away from him.
We have this culture valued at Uber, which we call the champions' mind-set. And champions' mind-set isn't always about winning. It's about putting everything you have on the field, every ounce of passion and energy you have. And if you get knocked down, overcoming adversity.
When I published a book earlier this year about Uber, the most common question I got about it was how many of the tumultuous events of 2017 I was able to include. My gag-line response: I managed to cover the first 17 scandals of the year, but not Nos. 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, and so on.
At Uber, we say, 'Always be hustling.' Even if you are an introvert and you haven't got hustle in you, you better get a co-founder who does. And if you haven't got enough hustle to find a co-founder who's got hustle, it's going to be tough. You've got to have a little hustle in you.
We operate in a world where you can have a package from Amazon arrive on your doorstep the same day; where Uber has a private driver at your front door within minutes; but when it comes to Congress, it takes three weeks for someone to get a form letter response to his or her questions.
Asana and complementary services are bringing the evolved team brain to the entire world. In great companies like Twitter, Uber, Airbnb, Foursquare, and LinkedIn, people already add information to and extract insight from these systems much the same way our hands and brain exchange signals.
Uber has an information advantage, a computational advantage. There's massive structural advantages to the player who's smartest about how to deploy cars, where to deploy cars, how to adjust pricing dynamics, how to ensure supply of drivers - the party that understands best the behavior of riders.
When I joined Uber, the organization I was part of was over 25% women. By the time I was trying to transfer to another Eng. organization, this number had dropped down to less than 6%. Women were transferring out of the organization, and those who couldn't transfer were quitting or preparing to quit.
There are very few industries that I know of - I mean, there are companies in fashion, in cosmetics. They're developing AI models and training them in the cloud in the beginning. If they're successful, they build their own datacenters and develop the software in their own datacenter, like Uber does.
I'd already been using the Uber Eats app for a long time - and it's super simple to use. That's just what I look for when I go into partnerships. If something comes to me that I've never used before for a potential partnership, then it doesn't feel real or natural. This one is a match made in heaven.
If you have to keep telling us that Hillary Clinton’s uber-qualified, there must be some doubt about it. It must not be self-evident. It must not be apparent. And the reason it is not apparent and self-evident is because it isn’t true. The woman is no more qualified to be president than anybody else.
If Uber is lower-priced, then more people will want it. And if more people want it and can afford it, then you have more cars on the road. And if you have more cars on the road, then your pickup times are lower, your reliability is better. The lower-cost product ends up being more luxurious than the high-end one.
For someone in an alternative job, an alternative lifestyle, it's very hard to explain what I do. So I sometimes try and dumb it down as much as possible, so I'm changing what I do every time! So sometimes I'm in an Uber, and they ask, 'So what do you do?' and I say, 'I'm a comedian,' or, 'I'm a graphic designer.'
Certainly some hosts on Airbnb are opening up their spare bedrooms to meet new people; and some drivers use Uber to carpool with strangers for the companionship. But the most productive members of each community are professional operators, making available their homes or cars as a way to earn or supplement a living.
Uber is hardly the first company to exploit the financial vulnerability of teachers - and the desperation of public schools more broadly - to score PR points. Amazon, Boeing, Bank of America, and other corporations have played the part of school benefactor, offering everything from reward programs to school supplies.
I think it's always interesting when you see a company start moving so quickly - it's like wow, incredible. When a company like Uber starts breaking away, it's not a linear thing. It's exponential. All of a sudden, the guy you know who threw $25,000 at Uber very early on - all the sudden, that $25,000 is $25 million.