Uber’s founder Travis Kalanick, whose business is already valued at over $50 billion and counts Google and Microsoft among its investors, is a typical Silicon Valley tech titan: out of the same mould as Zuckerberg, Page and Brin, Bezos and Elon Musk.
He reckons he’s part of mission control to the future: a future that will be made of maths and computing. He has no time for anyone who doesn’t see that and act that.
Like his peer titans, he has no time for what he considers to be ‘narrow bandwidth’ people who are an egg short of a full omelette. Remember Zuckerberg’s comment that he only makes friends with people who are smarter than him!?
Like the other titans Kalanick sees an inefficient world in need of vast improvement via the wholesale application of big streaming data analytics and other ‘math house’ tricks: a world which is held back by woefully out of date regulations, and by ‘egg short’ people like black cab drivers.
Kalanick’s mindset permeates the Uber culture and helps explain the heat of the protests building against the company across the world, notably in Europe in London, Paris and Brussels.
Uber operates in 300 cities ranging from London and Paris to Mumbai and Nairobi. The stretch goal is to reach 500 by 2017.
Provided Uber can ride out the current protests, and law suits, and its high octane and already legendary team of lobbyists can keep key politicians and people in high places onside, he suggests that in 10 years time nobody will think of Uber as a taxi company.
What Uber is really about is truly transforming the way ‘things’, including people, are moved about so as to minimise pollution, congestion, wear and tear, cost and time waste. His slogan is to make transport as ‘’efficient as running water.’’
Just think: the average car costs nearly $10,000 to own and yet spends less than 5% of its time in action and 30% of the traffic in major cities is looking for somewhere to park.
Meeting and beating what Uber people call one of humanity’s major ‘organising challenges’ is what it’s all about in an operating environment shaped by urbanisation , pollution, and the rise and rise of the Millennial generation of which he is one, who number nearly 2.5 billion worldwide.
The much heralded autonomous vehicle, that drives itself, and expected to be commercially available by 2020 from Tesla, Apple, Google, and several legacy car companies, is at the core of Uber’s forward vision.
Fleets of 24/7 on-call vehicles will populate the world’s major cities to ferry people and goods about.
A recent study by Columbia University’s Earth Faculty argued that by 2023 New York’s 18,000 Yellow cabs will be supplantable by 9000 robot taxis yielding an average wait time of under a minute and a cost per mile of $0.50.
Kalanick says he’s approached Tesla about buying its entire putative output of autonomous EVs in 2020, some 500,000 vehicles, provided Uber can build some products and functions on top of what Tesla has installed.
That puts Kalanick in the same class of making breathtaking plans and claims as Musk himself. Well, not quite, he hasn’t said his ambition is die living on Mars.
And his biggest competitor? Amazon, of course. The Cloud meister and for now peerless order fulfilment and logistics giant.
Brave new world?
Smacks of the landscape and technology shown in Minority Report.
So waiting for pre-cog? Actually, it’s arrived via Facebook, Google and Amazon. But that’s a different tale.