Continuations

In 2015 I wrote a blog post titled “Uber’s Greatest Trick Revealed” in which I argued that Uber’s success was the result of providing a transportation service. This was and is exactly what consumers wanted but is not a neutral platform or marketplace. It would appear that regulators have finally caught up with this with the European Union’s top court ruling yesterday that Uber is in fact a transportation service. Now we will hopefully enter a new phase in which regulators figure out how to ge...

Ok, so this is not really about the NPR show, although Click and Clack did speak at my MIT graduation. Instead I am talking tonight at a BMW event which is about introducing their own venture activities as well as the i3 and i8 electric models and broader mobility initiatives. I am planning to talk a bit about the impact of the internet and mobile on cars. My basic thesis is that cars fulfill at least three separate needs. First of course is on demand transportation from point A to point B, w...

There were two tweets about Uber recently that I found myself disagreeing with somewhat. Paul Graham tweetedUber is so obviously a good thing that you can measure how corrupt cities are by how hard they try to suppress it.And on the same day Chris Sacca (who is an investor in Uber) tweetedBefore Uber came along, I never understood how deeply corrupt so many American cities and politicians are.What do I not like about them? Equating Uber with the much larger idea of using technology to efficie...

I took last week off from blogging for family reasons which means I sat out a big wave of posts about Uber. Don’t worry, I am not going to rehash that particular discussion. Instead, I want to point out what I believe the big questions are that should be asked of all companies in this sector which includes two USV investments (Hailo and Sidecar). Here are two questions: 1. Are drivers genuinely independent contractors? A legitimate concern here should be that the level of control that comes f...