I thought that this article was going talk about how 2020 broke apart SV and caused everyone to scatter. But to say it was 2012? No way. That totally misses out on Uber, Stripe, Coinbase, Lyft, Plaid, and many more.
1) Going global as quickly as possible. He aggressively moved into a lot of countries as quickly as possible with the same formula, and for the most part it worked.
2) He created an entire industry by having the balls to lower prices to the point where it fundamentally changed transportation. Everyone ubered everywhere (before the pandemic) and I know many people who sold their cars because ubering was cheaper.
The downside was that both are extremely capital intensive, which showed in how much money they raised. But I would say both techniques are extremely innovative and what most startups these days are trying to strive for.
Kalanick is a billionaire, many employees in SF are multi-millionaires, and millions of drivers around the world made a lot of money driving on the platform and continue to do so. I heard in Brazil, Uber helped 300,000 drivers alone make money during their very deep recession. I think that sounds like a genius to me.
California inspired: from flower power to Silicon Valley. How 1960s Bay Area radicalism helped shape the technological powerhouse of northern California.
>Gage first arrived at UC Berkeley as a maths student in 1960, becoming involved in the Free Speech Movement and towards the end of the decade in George McGovern’s presidential campaign against Richard Nixon. It wasn’t until 1975 that he completed his bachelor’s degree at Berkeley. At the university he became friends with Joy. [...]
>Brand argued in his essay ‘We Owe It All to the Hippies’: “The counterculture’s scorn for centralised authority provided the philosophical foundations of not only the leaderless internet, but also the entire personal-computer revolution.”
WE OWE IT ALL TO THE HIPPIES. Stewart Brand.
Forget antiwar protests, Woodstock, even long hair.
The real legacy of the sixties generation is the computer revolution.
>The third generation of revolutionaries, the software hackers of the early '80s, created the application, education and entertainment programs for personal computers. Typical was Mitch Kapor, a former transcendental-meditation teacher, who gave us the spreadsheet program Lotus 1-2-3, which ensured the success of IBM's Apple-imitating PC. Like most computer pioneers, Kapor is still active. His Electronic Frontier Foundation, which he co-founded with a lyricist for the Grateful Dead [John Perry Barlow], lobbies successfully in Washington for civil rights in cyberspace.