Today, the inter-city hype gap I most experience is with Uber. In New York, most people who know about Uber see it as the fanciest of a handful of on-demand car services. (The way it works: You open the Uber app on your smart phone and choose one of several grades of cars — luxury SUV or Prius? — indicate where you want the vehicle to pick you up, and pay for your ride by credit card, with the rate varying according to distance and your choice of vehicle.) In New York, where the yellow cab market is functional and robust, Uber is seen as a good app, but not a life-changing one, and its use is still pretty much limited to young people with disposable income.
In San Francisco tech crowds, though, Uber is seen as the messiah. Other than Tesla Motors, there's probably no Silicon Valley company that has more insane expectations swirling around it. Plugged-in people in the Bay Area will tell you things that are hard to believe: Uber is the most exciting company in the Valley. Uber will be a $100 billion company in five years.
I assumed that most of this was tech-bubble hype. But in the past few months, after conversations with Uber employees, investors, and people familiar with the company's long-term plans, I started understanding the company's potential. And now, after a set of Uber financials leaked to Valleywag this week, I feel confident joining the bandwagon: Uber very well could be enormous someday, maybe bigger than Facebook.
I can sum up the bullish case for Uber in one word: Amazon.
Amazon began in 1994 as a bookseller, then quickly realized that the efficient warehousing and shipping infrastructure they'd built to sell books could be used to get all kinds of things to customers quickly. So they branched out, first to consumer items like kitchen tools and electronics, then to cars and art and all manner of other things, some of which weren't even sold by Amazon but used Amazon as a sales portal. Then, they started shooting up all kinds of other businesses – Amazon Web Services, a now-enormous cloud data service that hosts an insane number of websites, a Kindle e-publishing business, and a streaming-TV service to rival Netflix. Now, when you think of Amazon, you don't even think books, or any other single category. You think, "Here's a place I can go to get stuff."
Likewise, Uber's plan is to outgrow its car-service roots, and become, as investor Shervin Pishevar put it, "a digital mesh" capable of providing all kinds of transportation and logistical services to people in the cities it serves. Once it has you summoning cars from your phone, the logic goes, it can use that same back-end technology to hook you in for all other kinds of deliveries — food, clothes, Christmas trees. And eventually, like Amazon, it can become something akin to an all-purpose utility — it'll just be a way you get things and go places. There's a reason the company recently changed its tagline from "Everyone's private driver" to the much broader "Where lifestyle meets logistics."
Amazon began in 1994 as a bookseller, then quickly realized that the efficient warehousing and shipping infrastructure they'd built to sell books could be used to get all kinds of things to customers quickly. So they branched out, first to consumer items like kitchen tools and electronics, then to cars and art and all manner of other things, some of which weren't even sold by Amazon but used Amazon as a sales portal. Then, they started shooting up all kinds of other businesses – Amazon Web Services, a now-enormous cloud data service that hosts an insane number of websites, a Kindle e-publishing business, and a streaming-TV service to rival Netflix. Now, when you think of Amazon, you don't even think books, or any other single category. You think, "Here's a place I can go to get stuff."
Likewise, Uber's plan is to outgrow its car-service roots, and become, as investor Shervin Pishevar put it, "a digital mesh" capable of providing all kinds of transportation and logistical services to people in the cities it serves. Once it has you summoning cars from your phone, the logic goes, it can use that same back-end technology to hook you in for all other kinds of deliveries — food, clothes, Christmas trees. And eventually, like Amazon, it can become something akin to an all-purpose utility — it'll just be a way you get things and go places. There's a reason the company recently changed its tagline from "Everyone's private driver" to the much broader "Where lifestyle meets logistics."
by Kevin Roose, NY Magazine | Read more:
