Ironically, mostly in the back of Lyft and Uber’s on the way to one of the properties I manage on Airbnb.
Here’s a quote from p. 13 when I suspected I was going to be pleased by the end of the book:
“It is not a comprehensive account of either company, since their extraordinary sorties are still unfolding. It is instead a book about pivotal moments in the century-long emergence of a technological society. It’s about a crucial era during which old regimes fell, new leads emerged, new social contracts were forged between strangers, the topography of cities changed, and the upstarts roamed the earth.”
Translation: This book dives deeper into fewer issues in the 9-year history of both companies rather than covering a vast amount of topics with little detail.
Even though Airbnb and Uber are in the title of the book, it must have been about 70% Uber.
Overall, I felt the book was really well researched and well put together from a storyline point of view. The Uber/Airbnb stories crisscrossed nicely. Actually, I was surprised at the amount of overlap from the founders both attending the 2008 presidential inauguration (though, from different perspectives) to friendships formed between Chesky and Kalanick in the early days that last through today.
The book didn’t try to cover every topic over the past 8 years. Instead Brad Stone focused on fewer topics while adding more substance to them. As a prior Airbnb employee and an early adopter of Lyft and Uber, I still learned much from reading this book. Not to mention it was entertaining and more so based on storytelling rather than analyzing past events.
I was pleased to learn that my memory of history is accurate (well, kind of). The Uber as we know it today has Lyft to thank. In 2012 when Lyft put those pink mustaches on their cars in San Francisco and popularized ride-sharing as we know it today, Uber was still a black car service for rich people. Uber copied Lyft about six months later and started allowing anyone to drive while offering lower cost alternatives to passengers. In reality, SideCar beat Lyft by about 2 months, but they no longer exist.
The book went into an interesting history of Uber’s Chinese competitor, Didi Kuaidi (which means ‘honk-honk speedy’ in English) starting p. 303. It put some color to the news headlines, ‘Uber loses in China, sells to Didi.’
A couple interesting factoids:
Lyft was originally named Zimrides (short for Zimbabwe rides). Designer Harrison Bowden came up with ‘Lyft’.
On New Yeas Eve 2015, 550K guests slept in Airbnbs; on NYE 2016, it was 1.3M; by the middle of 2016, 1.3M guests per night was the average.
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Reviews with images
Stone's access to the CEOs and their inner circle is what makes this book!
I've never met Travis Kalanick in person but most of the stories you read about him describe the man as ruthless, arrogant and sometimes worse. I read this book because I was interested in the Uber side of the story but it turns out that the Airbnb portion was just as interesting. Brian Chesky and Travis Kalanick have more parallels than you might think and the companies faced many of the same regulatory challenges during their early years but how they handled these battles was vastly different.I enjoyed this book and found the style similar to Ashlee Vance's book on Elon Musk; it turns out that Stone and Vance are good friends. What makes this book stand out compared to others though is the unparalleled access that Stone had to the CEOs and their inner circle. I'm sure it helps to be a New York Times best-selling author and Bloomberg Editor but I don't think the book would have been the same without that level of access. I work in the rideshare industry as a blogger and I kept wanting to think to myself that Stone missed something or was inaccurate on a specific account, but that never happened.As others have noted, it's a little heavy on the regulatory side of things but I'm not sure you could do a book on Uber and Airbnb's meteoric growth period without talking about regulation, a lot. I think this book will appeal to anyone that's ever been involved with Uber or Airbnb or the general entrepreneur looking to learn from two of our generation's most successful CEOs.
