Uber Ride Quotes

She is an uber-doer, exactly the kind of person you want riding shotgun when you're chasing a big goal and also trying to have a life.

They tell you to get a guy friend to walk you home, not realizing that guy friends can rape you. Take a cab! But the cab driver can rape you. Take an uber, but they're even more rapey. Take the metro -- rapists ride free. What if everyone was like me, I wondered, and hunted down their respective Will's? Would the economy collapse?

If you want to build a truly great company you have got to ride a really big wave. And you’ve got to be able to look at market waves and technology waves in a different way than other folks and see it happening sooner, know how to position yourself out there, prepare yourself, pick the right surfboard—in other words, bring the right management team in, build the right platform underneath you. Only then can you ride a truly great wave. At the end of the day, without that great wave, even if you are a great entrepreneur, you are not going to build a really great business.

You should learn how to play the flute. Then you could ride in the passenger seat of my car and play instrumental versions of classic 80s pop songs while I drive around on the clock for Uber.

And there you sit, atop the smoking mountain of rubble that was once your home, covered in gray dust, cradling the mangled corpse of your little girl in your arms, looking south to a Mexican people who, in solidarity with you, have stopped riding Uber.

Uber operates as UberTaxi in Athens. (You book your ride through the app, but a taxi picks you up.) Uber is generally cheaper than hailing a cab (often even half the cost, except for rides to and from the airport where there’s no savings). Note there is a €3 minimum charge.

If you want to build a truly great company you have got to ride a really big wave. And you’ve got to be able to look at market waves and technology waves in a different way than other folks and see it happening sooner, know how to position yourself out there, prepare yourself, pick the right surfboard—in other words, bring the right management team in, build the right platform underneath you. Only then can you ride a truly great wave.

Recent estimates have Chinese companies outstripping U.S. competitors ten to one in quantity of food deliveries and fifty to one in spending on mobile payments. China’s e-commerce purchases are roughly double the U.S. totals, and the gap is only growing. Data on total trips through ride-hailing apps is somewhat scarce, but during the height of competition between Uber and Didi, self-reported numbers from the two companies had Didi’s rides in China at four times the total of Uber’s global rides. When it comes to rides on shared bikes, China is outpacing the United States at an astounding ratio of three hundred to one.

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The bill, AB2293, addresses the insurance coverage during the period when drivers log in to a smartphone app but have not yet been matched with riders. In a well-publicized incident, an UberX driver struck and killed a young girl in San Francisco on New Year's Eve, reportedly while waiting for a ride request. Bill author Assemblywoman Susan Bonilla, D-Concord, initially wanted the companies to provide $1 million of commercial coverage during this period. In its final form, the bill requires them to provide $200,000 of coverage, on top of insurance either from the companies or drivers providing $50,000 per person, $100,000 per accident, and $30,000 for property damage. An earlier version required $300,000 per accident.

By the fall of 2017, Mobike was logging 22 million rides per day, almost all of them in China. That is four times the number of global rides Uber was giving each day in 2016, the last time it announced its totals. In the spring of 2018, Mobike was acquired by Wang Xing’s Meituan Dianping for $2.7 billion, just three years after the bike-sharing company’s founding.

Uber is already one of the most valuable startups in the world, even while giving around 75 percent of the money earned from each ride to the driver. To that end, how valuable would Uber become if in the span of a couple of years, the company was able to replace every single human driver with an AI-powered self-driving car? Or

Smartphone technology gave rise to Uber, but before the world figures out how to regulate ride-sharing, self-driving cars will have made those regulations obsolete.

We can now see how the expansion of blockspace is on track to give us a cryptographically verifiable macrohistory, or cryptohistory for short. This is the log of everything that billions of people choose to make public: every decentralized tweet, every public donation, every birth and death certificate, every marriage and citizenship record, every crypto domain registration, every merger and acquisition of an on-chain entity, every financial statement, every public record — all digitally signed, timestamped, and hashed in freely available public ledgers.26 The thing is, essentially all of human behavior has a digital component now. Every purchase and communication, every ride in an Uber, every swipe of a keycard, and every step with a Fitbit — all of that produces digital artifacts. So, in theory you could eventually download the public blockchain of a network state to replay the entire cryptographically verified history of a community.25 That’s the future of public records, a concept that is to the paper-based system of the legacy state what paper records were to oral records.

The Internet put us on this disintermediating path some time ago, well before the blockchain came along. But it’s worth noting that at the heart of each new Internet application that cuts out some incumbent middleman there has typically been a technology that helps humans deal with their perennial mistrust issues. Who would have thought a decade ago that people would feel comfortable riding in the car of some stranger they’d just discovered on their phones? Well, Uber and Lyft got us over that trust barrier by incorporating a reputation scoring system for both drivers and passengers, one that was only made possible because of the expansion of social networks and communication. Their model showed that if we can resolve our trust issues with technology and give people confidence to transact, those people are willing and able to go into direct exchanges with complete strangers. These ideas are setting us on a path to a peer-to-peer economy.

Bizarre and Surprising Insights—Consumer Behavior Insight Organization Suggested Explanation7 Guys literally drool over sports cars. Male college student subjects produce measurably more saliva when presented with images of sports cars or money. Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management Consumer impulses are physiological cousins of hunger. If you buy diapers, you are more likely to also buy beer. A pharmacy chain found this across 90 days of evening shopping across dozens of outlets (urban myth to some, but based on reported results). Osco Drug Daddy needs a beer. Dolls and candy bars. Sixty percent of customers who buy a Barbie doll buy one of three types of candy bars. Walmart Kids come along for errands. Pop-Tarts before a hurricane. Prehurricane, Strawberry Pop-Tart sales increased about sevenfold. Walmart In preparation before an act of nature, people stock up on comfort or nonperishable foods. Staplers reveal hires. The purchase of a stapler often accompanies the purchase of paper, waste baskets, scissors, paper clips, folders, and so on. A large retailer Stapler purchases are often a part of a complete office kit for a new employee. Higher crime, more Uber rides. In San Francisco, the areas with the most prostitution, alcohol, theft, and burglary are most positively correlated with Uber trips. Uber “We hypothesized that crime should be a proxy for nonresidential population.…Uber riders are not causing more crime. Right, guys?” Mac users book more expensive hotels. Orbitz users on an Apple Mac spend up to 30 percent more than Windows users when booking a hotel reservation. Orbitz applies this insight, altering displayed options according to your operating system. Orbitz Macs are often more expensive than Windows computers, so Mac users may on average have greater financial resources. Your inclination to buy varies by time of day. For retail websites, the peak is 8:00 PM; for dating, late at night; for finance, around 1:00 PM; for travel, just after 10:00 AM. This is not the amount of website traffic, but the propensity to buy of those who are already on the website. Survey of websites The impetus to complete certain kinds of transactions is higher during certain times of day. Your e-mail address reveals your level of commitment. Customers who register for a free account with an Earthlink.com e-mail address are almost five times more likely to convert to a paid, premium-level membership than those with a Hotmail.com e-mail address. An online dating website Disclosing permanent or primary e-mail accounts reveals a longer-term intention. Banner ads affect you more than you think. Although you may feel you've learned to ignore them, people who see a merchant's banner ad are 61 percent more likely to subsequently perform a related search, and this drives a 249 percent increase in clicks on the merchant's paid textual ads in the search results. Yahoo! Advertising exerts a subconscious effect. Companies win by not prompting customers to think. Contacting actively engaged customers can backfire—direct mailing financial service customers who have already opened several accounts decreases the chances they will open more accounts (more details in Chapter 7).

I can easily envision a future system in which all of our vehicles are autonomous, just like our electric grid and your refrigerator. You’d take out your smartphone and, Uber-style, summon an autonomous get-you-to-work vehicle. The autonomous vehicle company takes care of the car and sends you a bill for each ride. If those vehicles coordinated with each other the way our mobile phones and their communication cells do, and these robot cars were electric … oooh! We’d have far fewer car wrecks, less pollution, and more free time.

Uber gave more car rides in San Francisco in October, 2014 then all cab rides combined. Times three.

The logistics of getting them around were just completely insurmountable,” said Hanson-Press. “I was really stressed every single day about getting them around.” Cue HopSkipDrive, a Los Angeles start-up that has been described as ride-hailing for children. Founded by three Angelenos who are also moms, the service chauffeurs only children ages 7 to 17. In many ways, it's similar to transport network companies such as Uber, Lyft and SideCar (Uber requires customers to be over 18). Drivers are contractors who use their own vehicles to transport passengers. All drivers undergo third-party background checks and vehicle inspections. Parents can book rides for their kids through a mobile app and pay through a cashless transaction. But there are also significant differences. Unlike Uber, whose drivers simply need to have experience behind the wheel, HopSkipDrive drivers are required to have at least five years of experience caring for children (this can mean people who are themselves parents, nannies, teachers, camp counselors, etc.). And like Shuddle, a similar service that operates in the San Francisco Bay Area, all drivers are vetted in person. HopSkipDrive checks drivers' references and will even go for a ride with each driver it signs up. All rides are covered by insurance specific to transporting minors.

Uber, a car service start-up founded by Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp, has been giving out free rides during Austin’s SXSW conference for several years. During a single week, thousands of potential Uber customers—tech-obsessed, high-income young adults who cannot find a cab—are motivated to try out this service. One year Uber offered free rides. Another year, it offered BBQ delivery. Instead of spending millions on advertising or countless resources trying to reach these potential users in their respective cities, Uber just waited for the one week a year when they were all in one place and did something special. And Uber did this because a few years earlier they’d watched Twitter take SXSW by storm with a similar collaboration with the conference. This is thinking like a growth hacker—it’s how you get the most bang for your buck and how you get it from the right people.

the ride-sharing service Uber is the hottest, most valuable technology start-up on the planet. It is also one of the most controversial. The company, which has been the target of protests across Europe this week, has been accused of a reckless attitude toward safety, of price-gouging its customers, of putting existing cabbies out of work and of evading regulation. And it has been called trivial. In The New Yorker last year, George Packer huffed that Uber typified Silicon Valley’s newfound focus on “solving all the problems of being 20 years old, with cash on hand.” It is impossible to say whether Uber is worth the $17 billion its investors believe it to be; like any start-up, it could fail.

A San Francisco couple who said their family was destroyed when an Uber driver struck and killed their daughter urged lawmakers Wednesday to increase auto insurance requirements for ride-sharing companies. Ang Jiang Liu and Huan Hua Kuang of San Francisco spoke at a legislative hearing for AB2293 by Assemblywoman Susan Bonilla, D-Concord, which would require ride-sharing companies to cover drivers with commercial insurance policies from the time they turn on the app to the time it's turned off.

The ride-service companies and their supporters, including Uber, Lyft and Sidecar, as well as Google, whose Google ventures is a major investor in Uber, have spent $539,133 over that same period, those records show. The list of organizations interested in the legislation was compiled by Maplight, a nonpartisan organization that examines the influence of money on politics, based on state documents.

But the world is changing at warp speed, and cities have to evolve to stay ahead of the curve. Which brings us to the third generation of cities, Cities 3.0, where the city is a hub of innovation, entrepreneurship and technology. Cities 3.0 is paperless, wireless and cashless. In Cities 3.0, we have more cell phones than telephone landlines, more tablets than desktop computers, more smart devices than toothbrushes. We know that in order to keep up in the modern era, we have to be innovative. If cities are going to drive the nation's economic revitalization, then we need to become laboratories and incubators of change. Yet the pending state legislation, which seeks to require the same insurance for ride-sharing companies as for old-style taxi companies, would discourage innovation and force out-of-date thinking on Next Economy companies such as Uber and Lyft.

He pulls up to the medical complex, and I gather my bag. “Thanks for the ride. You can just drop me off. I’ll call an Uber home.” Ignoring me, he parks. I reach for the door handle, but he puts a hand on my elbow. “Can you give me a minute?” “I don’t know why I said all that crap. Just ignore me, okay? I’m hormonal and hungry. I can’t explain why else I feel possessive about you. I have no right to feel that way.” Finally, I brave a look at him. His blue eyes are dark and positively feral. I suck in a breath as he reaches for me and crashes my mouth to his.

We are hopping into strangers’ cars (Lyft, Sidecar, Uber), welcoming them into our spare rooms (Airbnb), dropping our dogs off at their houses (DogVacay, Rover), and eating food in their dining rooms (Feastly). We are letting them rent our cars (RelayRides, Getaround), our boats (Boatbound), our houses (HomeAway), and our power tools (Zilok). We are entrusting complete strangers with our most valuable possessions, our personal experiences—and our very lives. In the process, we are entering a new era of Internet-enabled intimacy. ~ Jason Tanz Not so long ago, activities like these would have been viewed as weird, if not downright dangerous. Today, they are familiar to millions, thanks to the trust-building mechanisms established by platform businesses.

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Uber had to get creative to unlock the hard side of their network, the drivers. Initially, Uber’s focus was on black car and limo services, which were licensed and relatively uncontroversial. However, a seismic shift occurred when rival app Sidecar innovated in recruiting unlicensed, normal people as drivers on their platform. This was the “peer-to-peer” model that created millions of new rideshare drivers, and was quickly copied and popularized by Lyft and then Uber. Jahan Khanna, cofounder/chief technology officer of Sidecar, spoke of its origin: It was obvious that letting anyone sign up to be a driver would be a big deal. With more drivers, rides would get cheaper and the wait times would get shorter. This came up in many brainstorms at Sidecar, but the question was always, what was the regulatory framework that allows this to operate? What were the prior examples that weren’t immediately shut down? After doing a ton of research, we came onto a model that had been active for years in San Francisco run by someone named Lynn Breedlove called Homobiles that answered our question.22 It’s a surprising fact, but the earliest version of the rideshare idea came not from an investor-backed startup, but rather from a nonprofit called Homobiles, run by a prominent member of the LGBTQ community in the Bay Area named Lynn Breedlove. The service was aimed at protecting and serving the LGBTQ community while providing them transportation—to conferences, bars and entertainment, and also to get health care—while emphasizing safety and community. Homobiles had built its own niche, and had figured out the basics: Breedlove had recruited, over time, 100 volunteer drivers, who would respond to text messages. Money would be exchanged, but in the form of donations, so that drivers could be compensated for their time. The company had operated for several years, starting in 2010—several years before Uber X—and provided the template for what would become a $100 billion+ gross revenue industry. Sidecar learned from Homobiles, implementing their offering nearly verbatim, albeit in digital form: donations based, where the rider and driver would sit together in the front, like a friend giving you a ride. With that, the rideshare market was kicked off.

A successful network effect requires both a product and its network, and that was true in the age of the American Telephone & Telegraph Company, and true today. For Uber, the “product” is the app that people run on their phones, and the “network” refers to all the active users at any given time who are connecting with Uber to drive or ride.

We are hopping into strangers’ cars (Lyft, Sidecar, Uber), welcoming them into our spare rooms (Airbnb), dropping our dogs off at their houses (DogVacay, Rover), and eating food in their dining rooms (Feastly). We are letting them rent our cars (RelayRides, Getaround), our boats (Boatbound), our houses (HomeAway), and our power tools (Zilok). We are entrusting complete strangers with our most valuable possessions, our personal experiences—and our very lives. In the process, we are entering a new era of Internet-enabled intimacy.9

You know the jokes about this will be never-ending, don’t you?” Augustus tugs on the cuff of his navy fitted jacket, straightening the sleeve. “There is nothing wrong with using Uber.” “Yeah, if you’re nipping out for coffee, but not when we’re riding into battle. Getting a lift to the portal on a donkey would be less embarrassing. Ask Jesus.” She stares at the ground and kicks the pavement.

Fuck it, I think, as I open the Uber app. A little white pill, my Xanax-shaped parachute, finds its way down my throat as I hit 'confirm ride'. Then it's out the door into the night that's as restless as my mind.

Rather than focusing on ride hailing per se, which is much narrower in scope, calling Uber a “transportation solution” taps the broader problem Uber is trying to solve. That, in turn, increased investment because it made the potential market seem much larger. A ride-hailing app? I can think of a few people who might need that or a few situations in which it might be useful. But a transportation solution? Wow, that seems a lot broader. Lots of people and companies could use something like that, and it seems to have lots of applications.

Metromile, which offers per-mile insurance. The company gives drivers a device that plugs into their cars to track how far they drive. The more they drive, the more they pay. Even better, Metromile can track the driving and match up trips with Uber rides, so the insurance company can see which of miles are personal miles and which are commercial. Metromile charges users only for the personal miles, since Uber covers the car when drivers are with or en route to passengers. “The existing model for insurance hasn’t been able to adapt [to Uber],” Metromile CEO Dan Preston said.3 “We have a technology that drives the insurance product.” More mainstream insurance companies, such as Geico and Progressive, have followed Metromile’s lead by offering ride-share insurance that caters to Uber and Lyft drivers.

About ten years later, in March 2018, Waymo purchased that fleet, buying twenty thousand sporty, self-driving Jaguars for its forthcoming ride-hailing service. With this many cars, Waymo intends to deliver a million trips per day in 2020 (this might be ambitious but Uber currently delivers 15 million rides a day).

Kalanick treated user privacy as an afterthought. At one point, Kalanick changed Uber’s settings so the app could track people even after they had ended their ride.

Shervin Pishevar’s other star investment, Uber, was embroiled in its own case about whether it was as humble and powerless as it claimed. A group of drivers had sued Uber, as well as its rival Lyft, in federal court, seeking to be treated as employees under California’s labor laws. Their case was weakened by the fact that they had signed agreements to be contractors not subject to those laws. They had accepted the terms and conditions that cast each driver as an entrepreneur—a free agent choosing her hours, needing none of the regulatory infrastructure that others depended on. They had bought into one of the reigning fantasies of MarketWorld: that people were their own miniature corporations. Then some of the drivers realized that in fact they were simply working people who wanted the same protections that so many others did from power, exploitation, and the vicissitudes of circumstance. Because the drivers had signed that agreement, they had blocked the easy path to being employees. But under the law, if they could prove that a company had pervasive, ongoing power over them as they did their work, they could still qualify as employees. To be a contractor is to give up certain protections and benefits in exchange for independence, and thus that independence must be genuine. The case inspired the judges in the two cases, Edward Chen and Vince Chhabria, to grapple thoughtfully with the question of where power lurks in a new networked age. It was no surprise that Uber and Lyft took the rebel position. Like Airbnb, Uber and Lyft claimed not to be powerful. Uber argued that it was just a technology firm facilitating links between passengers and drivers, not a car service. The drivers who had signed contracts were robust agents of their own destiny. Judge Chen derided this argument. “Uber is no more a ‘technology company,’ ” he wrote, “than Yellow Cab is a ‘technology company’ because it uses CB radios to dispatch taxi cabs, John Deere is a ‘technology company’ because it uses computers and robots to manufacture lawn mowers, or Domino Sugar is a ‘technology company’ because it uses modern irrigation techniques to grow its sugar cane.” Judge Chhabria similarly cited and tore down Lyft’s claim to be “an uninterested bystander of sorts, merely furnishing a platform that allows drivers and riders to connect.” He wrote: Lyft concerns itself with far more than simply connecting random users of its platform. It markets itself to customers as an on-demand ride service, and it actively seeks out those customers. It gives drivers detailed instructions about how to conduct themselves. Notably, Lyft’s own drivers’ guide and FAQs state that drivers are “driving for Lyft.” Therefore, the argument that Lyft is merely a platform, and that drivers perform no service for Lyft, is not a serious one.

An automobile ties up capital with the purchase and entails significant additional annual costs in terms of fuel, parking, insurance, and repairs. Young people with college debts or “gig” jobs may not want the added burden of ownership. Compare the economics. Let’s say the average number of miles driven in a year in the United States is twelve thousand. Owning a car for that year would cost around $7,000, including the proportionate cost of car ownership, fuel, and other operating expenses. Given the average ride-hailing trip, $7,000 would equate to around six hundred separate trips per year, or twelve per week—almost two per day. Of course, on the other side of the ledger, there’s no residual value from Uber or Lyft rides, as there is when selling a used car. And no pride of ownership.

Here’s a little thought experiment: Let’s take three radically disruptive technologies and mash them together. Bitcoin. Uber. Self-driving cars. What happens when you mash the three together? The self-owning car. A car that pays for its Toyota lease, its insurance, and its gas, by giving people rides. A car that is not owned by a corporation. A car that is a corporation. A car that is a shareholder and owner of its own corporation. A car that exists as an autonomous financial entity with no human ownership. This has never happened before, and that’s just the beginning. Audience member gasps: "Oh shit!" I can guarantee you that one of the first distributed autonomous corporations is going to be a fully autonomous, artificial-intelligence-based ransomware virus that will go out and rob people online of their bitcoin, and use that money to evolve itself to pay for better programming, to buy hosting, and to spread. That’s one vision of the future. Another vision of the future is a digital autonomous charity. Imagine a system that takes donations from people, and using those donations it monitors social media like Twitter and Facebook. When a certain threshold is reached and it sees 100,000 people talking about a natural disaster, like a typhoon in the Philippines, it can marshal the donations and automatically fund aid in that area, without a board of directors, without shareholders. One hundred percent of donations goes directly to charitable causes. Anyone can see the rules by which that autonomous altruistic charity works. We are beginning to approach things we have never seen before. This is not just a currency. Now, let’s look at how the bitcoin community is addressing this incredible potential with their design choices and metaphors. Oh boy, it’s a mess.

If you think of General Motors as a manufacturer that produces cars, then in a simplistic sense, Uber is a manufacturer that produces transactions between drivers and riders. Uber doesn’t actually deliver the ride, but it facilitates the connection and exchange of value between drivers and passengers.

What is the core transaction? The core transaction is the set of actions consumers and producers must complete in order to exchange value. Every platform has a core transaction. On Uber, drivers make themselves available and consumers submit requests for rides. On YouTube, producers upload videos and consumers watch, rate, and share them. On Lending Club people or small businesses request loans and others fund them. These examples of the core transaction highlight its purpose: to construct a set of simple, repeatable actions that producers and consumers take to create and consume value through a platform.

For consumers, most of these problems are invisible. That is by design. You’re not supposed to know that the trending topics on Twitter were sifted through by a few destitute people making pennies. You’re not supposed to realize that Facebook can process the billions of photos, links, and shareable items that pass through its network each day only because it recruits armies of content moderators through digital labor markets. Or that these moderators spend hours numbly scrolling through grisly photos that people around the world are trying to upload to the network. Uber’s selling point is convenience: press a button on your phone and a car will arrive in minutes, maybe seconds, to take you anywhere you want to go. As long as that’s what happens, what do consumers have to complain about? Now joined by a host of start-up delivery services, ride-sharing companies are in the business of taking whomever or whatever from point A to point B with minimal fuss or waiting time. That this self-indulgent convenience ultimately comes at the expense of others is easily brushed off or shrouded in the magical promise that anything you want can be produced immediately.

The trainers at Uberversity, where new employees underwent a three-day initiation, began schooling everyone on this scenario: a rival company is launching a carpooling service in four weeks. It’s impossible for Uber to beat them to market with a reliable carpool service of its own. What should the company do? The correct answer at Uberversity—and what Uber actually did when it learned about Lyft Line—was “Rig up a makeshift solution that we pretend is totally ready to go so we can beat the competitor to market.” (Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm where I work, invested in Lyft and I am on its board, so I was keenly aware of the dynamic between the companies—and I am decidedly biased.) Those, including the company’s legal team, who proposed taking the time to come up with a workable product, one far better than Uber Pool 1.0, were told “That’s not the Uber way.” The underlying message was clear: if the choice is integrity or winning, at Uber we do whatever we have to do to win. This competitiveness issue also came up when Uber began to challenge Didi Chuxing, the Chinese market leader in ride-sharing. To counter Uber, Didi employed very aggressive techniques including hacking Uber’s app to send it fake riders. The Chinese law on the tactic wasn’t entirely clear. The Chinese branch of Uber countered by hacking Didi right back. Uber then brought those techniques home to the United States by hacking Lyft with a program known as Hell, which inserted fake riders into Lyft’s system while simultaneously funneling Uber the information it needed to recruit Lyft drivers. Did Kalanick instruct his subordinates to employ these measures, which were at best anticompetitive and at worst arguably illegal? It’s difficult to say, but the point is that he didn’t have to—he had already programmed the culture that engendered those measures.

In 2014, an executive used the software’s “god view”—which shows customers’ real-time movements, as well as their ride history—to track a journalist who was critical of the company. Other sources have claimed that most corporate employees have unfettered access to customers’ ride data—and have, at times, tracked individual users just for fun.6 In 2012, Uber even published an official blog post bragging about how it can tell when users have had a one-night stand—dubbing them, somewhat grossly, “rides of glory.” (Uber deleted the post a couple years later, when major stories started breaking about its disregard for privacy.)

Uber’s got nothing Lyft is weak. And taxis? Nah My ride is da mom

Flywheel, which provides an app for users to summon taxicabs with their smartphones, will offer a flat $10 rate for all Flywheel-summoned cab rides within San Francisco from 8 p.m. Wednesday to 3 a.m. Thursday. The same price will apply in Seattle and Flywheel’s new markets of San Diego and Sacramento. “Uber can charge 30 times (normal) or whatever they hell they want to do, but we want to make sure anyone who takes a taxi pays a flat fee,” said Flywheel CEO Rakesh Mathur. (He clarified that the 30-times number was “just made up.”) That promotion will cost Flywheel a pretty penny. The startup will pay cabbies double what the metered rates would have been — so in effect, they receive surge pricing, without passengers having to pay it. While Flywheel doesn’t have the massive war chest of Uber, which has raised about $3 billion, it has a respectable $30 million in venture backing, including a recent $12 million round.

The $41 billion valuation for the ride-sharing service Uber may or may not be a bubblicious number, but it certainly shows that the venture capital industry is in a bad place. To understand, you need only peruse the startling valuations for other companies that have received venture capital funding in the last few weeks. Here are some of them: ■ Instacart, a same-day grocery delivery service based in San Francisco, began a $100 million fund-raising round valuing it at $2 billion. ■ WeWork Companies, a company that provides shared office space (think Uber for offices), closed a $355 million funding round valuing it at $5 billion. ■ Stripe, an online payment company, completed a $70 million investment round that valued it at $3.5 billion, double its $1.75 billion valuation earlier this year. ■ The mobile games maker Kabam announced that employees and investors were selling $40 million in shares to a group of investors. After an earlier round of investment last summer, the company was valued at more than $1 billion, up from $700 million last year. What do these four companies have in common, beyond the fact you probably haven’t heard of them?

Why can’t I just subscribe to transportation the same way I subscribe to electricity and internet access? But wait, you might say. Uber isn’t a subscription service—there are no monthly fees. I disagree. It sure looks and feels like a digital subscription service to me. Uber has your ID and all your payment particulars, and it employs usage-based pricing so that you pay for only what you use. It knows your usage history (your home, your work, your common destinations) and uses that information to customize its service for you. And thanks to its partnership with Spotify, it even knows your favorite music. Oh, and guess what? Uber does in fact offer monthly subscriptions. Right now Uber is testing a flat-rate subscription service in several cities. Users can pay a monthly fee in exchange for bundles of reduced-rate trips with no surge pricing. In other words, Uber will cut you a deal on rides in exchange for steady business. The company may take a short-term profitability hit, but the goal is to gain long-term customer loyalty in a very young and turbulent market—and this customer loyalty is becoming more and more important as ridesharing becomes a commodity.