Creative disruptions

Books review of 'Wild Ride', 'The Airbnb Story', 'The Upstarts' and 'Move Fast And Break Things'

WILD RIDE

Inside Uber’s Quest for World Domination 

Adam Lashinsky 

Portfolio/Penguin

228 pages; $28

THE AIRBNB STORY

How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions... and Created Plenty of Controversy 

Leigh Gallagher 

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 236 pages; $28

THE UPSTARTS 

How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World 

Brad Stone

Little, Brown & Company; 372 pages; $30

MOVE FAST AND BREAK THINGS

How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy 

Jonathan Taplin 

Little, Brown & Company; 308 pages; $29

During the week of Barack Obama’s inauguration in January 2009, three young would-be entrepreneurs — Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia and Nathan Blecharczyk — crashed on air mattresses in unfurnished rooms they had rented in a rundown house in Washington. They spent some of their days at a Metro station handing out fliers that urged strangers to offer rooms for rent, and in the evenings they fielded angry email complaints from a woman who had rented space in the basement. Despite the difficulties they faced that week, the huge demand for accommodations from people who had flocked to the inauguration convinced the group that the business they were hoping to create would succeed if they persisted. 

Also in town for the festivities were two other hustling San Francisco start-up jockeys, Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp. They had used a website to find more comfortable accommodations, but on Inauguration Day they couldn’t get a cab and had to sprint miles in the wicked cold to get to the mall on time. The cab problems they had in Washington helped persuade him that the company, then called UberCab, had potential. 

At certain moments in history, a confluence of technological and social advances creates the opportunity for a new field of innovation. That was happening at the beginning of 2009. A few months earlier, a reluctant Steve Jobs had been persuaded by his colleagues to allow other companies to develop apps for the iPhone. That happened just as Google Maps and GPS and other tools were enabling more wondrous mobile-based services. And as the 2008 financial crisis receded, the overcaffeinated venture capitalists of Silicon Valley became frenzied in the pursuit of new potential unicorns. 

Three new fast-paced narrative books written by seasoned business journalists. In addition to these narratives, which are generally celebratory, it is also useful to read a darker counterpoint, Jonathan Taplin’s Move Fast and Break Things, which argues that the radical libertarian ideology and monopolistic greed of many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs helped to decimate the livelihood of musicians and is now undermining the communal idealism of the early internet. “The original mission of the internet,” he writes, “was hijacked by a small group of right-wing radicals to whom the ideas of democracy and decentralisation were anathema.” 

In the case of Uber, both co-founders were already somewhat successful serial entrepreneurs. The idea for an on-demand car service originated with Camp, but Kalanick shaped it. He was a maestro of collaborative brainstorming. He turned his San Francisco apartment into a gathering place he called the Jam Pad. 

Collaboration, however, can only go so far. It is also necessary to have an intense, driven leader with the visionary brilliance and obstinacy of a Steve Jobs. After finally signing up full-time as CEO in 2010 and edging Ryan Graves down a notch, Kalanick became that. 

A good litmus test to determine a person’s basic ideological outlook is to ask about Uber’s use of surge pricing. To some, it is a sensible way to match supply and demand by encouraging more drivers to come out and some consumers to find other transportation during periods of peak demand. Hotels and airlines use variable pricing all the time. Some of the problems could have been avoided with a bit more sensitivity — Uber would have been wise to kick in its own financial incentives for drivers during a major crisis — but that was not an instinct that came naturally to Kalanick. “Anyone who whined about surge pricing, in his eyes, was too thick to understand the laws of supply and demand,” Lashinsky writes. The hard-driving testosterone-fuelled culture of Uber eventually caused problems.  Chesky has been more sensitive to public concerns, but the complex issues raised by Airbnb are as challenging, especially in places where the service is dominated not by easygoing millennials renting out a spare bedroom but instead by developers who buy up multiple houses and apartments to convert into short-term rentals. That can destroy residential neighbourhoods and decimate the supply of affordable housing. To his credit, Chesky has tried to deal with these issues as well as the problem of racial discrimination that had infected the service. I watched in admiration earlier this year as Airbnb and my hometown, New Orleans, painstakingly negotiated a complex agreement, with enforcement and taxing mechanisms, specifying the number of days per year each type of place could be rented on Airbnb. 

What these books show is that societies must find ways to absorb economic transformations, because it is futile to resist them. Peer-to-peer technology may be disruptive, and its effects can be messy. But it has an inexorable tendency to empower people to find — and produce — new offerings that improve our lives by reinforcing the most basic rule of entrepreneurship, which is to make something that people really want.
 

© 2017 The New York Times News Service