How James Bond, an abusive Parisian cabbie, and one mans frustration with going out in San Francisco led to a transport revolution
The whole thing might not have happened without Bond James Bond. It was mid-2008, the Canadian entrepreneur Garrett Camp had just sold his first company, the website discovery engine StumbleUpon, to eBay for $75m. Now he was living large, enjoying San Franciscos nightlife, and when relaxing at his apartment in the citys South Park neighbourhood, he occasionally popped in the DVD of Daniel Craigs first Bond movie, Casino Royale.
Camp loved the movie, but something specific in it got him thinking. Thirty minutes into the film, Bond is driving his silver Ford Mondeo in the Bahamas on the trail of his adversary, Le Chiffre, when he glances down at his Sony Ericsson phone. Its brazen product placement and by todays standards the phone seems comically outdated. But at the time, what Bond saw on his phone startled Camp: a graphical icon of the Mondeo moving on a map toward his destination. The image stuck in his head and to understand why, you need to know more about the restless, inventive mind of Garrett Camp.
Camp was born in Calgary, Canada, and spent his early childhood playing sports, learning the electric guitar and asking lots of questions. Eventually, his curiosity settled on the world of personal computers. An uncle gave the family an early model Macintosh, from the days of floppy disks and point-and-click adventure games, and Camp spent hours on it during the frigid winters, toying with early computer graphics and writing basic programs.
By the time Camp graduated from high school, his parents had a three-storey home that included a comfortable office and a computer room in the basement. There wasnt much reason to leave, he says. He enrolled at the nearby University of Calgary, saved money by living at home and spent the next few years there (aside from one year in Montreal, interning at a company called Nortel Networks). He got his undergraduate degree in 2001 and stayed at the university to pursue a master of science, finally leaving his comfortable nest after he turned 22 to move into a campus apartment with classmates.
Camp met Geoff Smith, who would become his StumbleUpon co-founder, through one of his childhood friends and they started the site as a way for users to share and find interesting things on the internet without having to search for them on Google. By the time Camp finished his degree in 2005, StumbleUpon was starting to show promise. Camp and Smith met an angel investor that year who convinced them to move to San Francisco to raise capital. Over the next 12 months, the number of users on StumbleUpon grew from 500,000 to 2 million.
With the trauma of the first dot-com bust fading and the scent of opportunity again wafting across Silicon Valley, offers for StumbleUpon started pouring in. In May 2007, eBay bought StumbleUpon for $75m, turning it into one of the early successes of what became known as Web 2.0, the movement in which companies such as Flickr and Facebook mined the social connections among internet users. For Camp, it seemed the highest possible level of success in Silicon Valley and it was, by any reasonable standard until the one that he achieved next.
Camp continued to work at eBay after the sale and he was now young, wealthy and single, with a taste for getting out of the house. This is when he ran headlong into San Franciscos feeble taxi industry.
For decades, San Francisco had kept the number of taxi licences capped at about 1,500. Licences in the city were relatively inexpensive and couldnt be resold and owners could keep the permit as long as they liked if they logged a minimum number of hours on the road every year. So new permits usually became available only when drivers died and anyone who applied for one had to wait years to receive it. Stories abounded about a driver waiting for three decades to get a licence, only to die soon after.
The system guaranteed a healthy availability of passengers for the taxi companies even during slow times and ensured that full-time drivers could earn a living wage. But demand for cars greatly exceeded supply and so taxi service in San Francisco famously sucked. Trying to hail a cab in the outer neighbourhoods near the ocean, or even downtown on a weekend night, was an exercise in futility. Getting a cab to take you to the airport was a stomach-churning gamble that could easily result in a missed flight.
Attempts to improve the situation were fruitless, since the fleets and their drivers were adamant about limiting competition. Over the years, whenever the mayor or the citys board of supervisors tried to increase the number of permits, angry drivers would fill city council chambers or surround city hall, causing havoc.
After the eBay acquisition, Camp splurged out on a red Mercedes-Benz C-Class sports car, but the vehicle sat in his garage. He hadnt driven much in Calgary and at college he preferred to take public transport. Driving in San Francisco was too stressful, he says. I didnt want to park the car on the street and I didnt want people to break into it. Just logistically, it was much harder to drive.
So the citys sad taxi situation seriously cramped his new lifestyle. Since he couldnt reliably hail a cab on the street, he began putting the yellow cab dispatch numbers in his phones speed dial. Even that was frustrating. I would call and they wouldnt show up and while I was waiting on the street, two or three other cabs would go by, he says. Then Id call them back and they wouldnt even remember that I called before. I remember being late for first or second dates. I could start getting ready 20 minutes early and still Id end up being 30 minutes late.
The sparkling city by the bay beckoned, but Camp had no reliable way to answer its call. Habitually restless and frustrated by inefficiencies, he came up with his first attempt at a solution: he would call all the yellow taxi companies when he needed a cab. Then he would take the first one that arrived.
Not surprisingly, the cab fleets didnt like that tactic. Though impossible to confirm, Camp believes his mobile phone was blacklisted by the San Francisco taxi companies. They wouldnt take my calls, he says. I was banned from the cab system.
Then Camp got a girlfriend: a smart, beautiful television producer named Melody McCloskey. The relationship posed a new set of transport hurdles: McCloskey lived a few miles away from Camp, in Pacific Heights. Meeting anywhere was a hassle and Camp often wanted to get together somewhere out at night.
To solve these challenges, Camp started to experiment with the citys gypsy cab fleet the unmarked black sedans that would approach prospective passengers on the street and flash their headlights to solicit a fare. Most San Franciscans, particularly women, would stay away from these unmarked cars, fearing for their safety or worried by the ambiguity of a cab without a running meter. But Camp found that a majority of the cars were clean and that many of the drivers were friendly. The biggest problem for these drivers was filling in the dead time between rides, when they tended to wait outside hotels. So Camp started collecting the phone numbers of town-car drivers. At one point, I had 10 to 15 numbers in my phone of the best black-car drivers in San Francisco, he says.
Then he started gaming the system further: texting a favourite driver hours before he needed him and telling him to meet him at a restaurant or bar at an appointed time. On another night, he rented a town car and driver for himself and a group of friends for an entire evening. It was an indulgence that cost $1,000 and zooming around the city at the end of the night dropping everyone off was a pain.
And that is when the futuristic image from Casino Royale popped into Camps head. Suddenly, he was obsessed with a new notion. He frequently talked with McCloskey about the idea of an on-demand car service and vehicles that passengers could track via a map on their phones. At one point that year, Camp scrawled the word ber into a Moleskine notebook that he kept to jot down new ideas and logos for companies and brands. Isnt that pronounced Yoober? she asked him.
I dont care. It looks cool, he said.
McCloskey recalls that Camp wanted it to be one word and a description of excellence and that his musings on the word, its sound and meaning, were incessant. What an uber coffee that was, hed say randomly after drinking a cup. It means great things! It means greatness!
Camp says he contemplated calling this new service berCab or BestCab and finally settled on just UberCab, losing the umlaut. (He registered the domain name UberCab.com in August 2008.) McCloskey loved Camps endless examination of new ideas but wasnt so sure she believed in this particular one. Sure, cabs are terrible, she said. But you are only in the cab for eight minutes! Why does itmatter?
But Camp was certain that he wanted such a service. He also knew that the iPhone and its new app store, which Apple introduced over the summer of 2008, were going to finally make the futuristic vision in Casino Royale practical. Not only could you chart the location of an object on a map, but since the earliest models of the phone had an accelerometer, you could also tell if the car was moving or not. That meant that an iPhone could function like a taximeter and be used to charge passengers by the minute or the mile.
He talked it over that year with many of his friends. The author and investor Tim Ferriss first brainstormed with Camp about the then-unnamed Uber at a bar in the Mission District. He thought it was a great idea, then forgot all about it. A month or two later, he got a call from Camp and when they started talking about Uber again, Ferriss was shocked. Camp, he says, had done an incredibly deep dive into the flaws of black cars and a kind of lost utility, the downtime of black cars and taxis. It was clear that he was probably already in the top 1% of market analysts who have looked at the space.
The idea behind Uber was crystallising in Camps mind.
Both the passenger and the driver could have an app on their phones. The passenger could have a credit card on file and wouldnt have to travel with any pesky cash. I bounced the idea off of everyone, Camp says. All these ideas kept building and building.
The original idea was to buy cars, then share the fleet among his friends who were using the app. But Camp says that was only a starting point and that even back then he was considering the potential to use such a system to co-ordinate not just black taxis but eco-friendly Priuses and even yellow cabs.
I always thought it could become a more efficient cab system, particularly in San Francisco, he says. He wasnt sure it would work outside the city, though. If he could get it to work in just 100 cities, he reasoned, it could be big enough for a company that generated about $100m a year in service fees.
By the autumn, Camp had more free time to work on Uber, since he and McCloskey had broken up, though they remained friends, and he was going less frequently into StumbleUpon. He recalls spending his weekends getting coffee, cruising the web and doing research into the transport industry and then going out with friends at night.
On 17 November 2008, he registered UberCab as a limited liability company in California. Soon after, hungry for some basic market research, he sent an email to Ferriss, saying: My goal is to be at a go or no-go decision by 1 December and to be live with five cars in January.
In December, on the way to LeWeb, a high-profile annual technology conference in Paris, Camp stopped in New York. There he met Oscar Salazar, a friend and fellow graduate student from the University of Calgary. Salazar was a skilled engineer from Colima, Mexico. He got his masters in electrical engineering in Canada and his PhD in France, then moved to New York.
During this time, he kept in touch with Camp and they reunited that December at a delicatessen in lower Manhattan. Camp pitched UberCab to Salazar and asked him to lead the development of the prototype.
I have this idea. In San Francisco its hard to get a taxi. I want to buy five Mercedes, Camp said, taking out his phone and showing him a picture of a Mercedes-Benz S550, a high-end coupe that sold for about 80,000. Im going to buy the cars with some friends and were going to share drivers and the cost of parking. He showed mock-ups of iPhone screens demonstrating how cars would move on maps and how passengers might see a town car coming toward them.
Salazar had experienced his own troubles hailing cabs in Mexico, Canada and France and remembers telling Camp: I dont know if this is a billion-dollar company, but its definitely a billion-dollar idea. Since Salazar was in the US on a student visa, he couldnt receive payment in cash for the job. Instead, he received equity in the fledgling startup. His stake is now worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Its way more than I deserved. Its more than any human deserves, he told me over breakfast at a New York cafe in 2015. UberCab was officially in development, and so Camp left for Paris and the LeWeb conference, where he was meeting McCloskey and a close friend and fellow entrepreneur Travis Kalanick.
Every company creates its own origin myth. Its a useful tool for expressing the companys values to employees and the world and for simplifying and massaging history to give due credit to the people who made the most important contributions when it all started. Ubers official story begins here in Paris, when Camp and Kalanick famously visited the Eiffel Tower on a night after LeWeb and, looking out over the city of light, decided to take on an entrenched taxi industry that they felt was more interested in blocking competition than serving customers.
We actually came up with the idea at LeWeb in 2008, Kalanick would say five years later at the same conference, citing the challenges of getting a cab in Paris. We went back to San Francisco and we created a very simple, straightforward [way] to us at the time, to push a button and get a ride. We wanted it to be a classy ride.
Like all mythologies, it is not really true. The story gets misrepresented a lot, Camp sighs. The whole LeWeb thing. Im OK with it, as long as its directionally correct.
Camp had previously discussed the Uber idea with Kalanick, as he had with other friends. At the time, Kalanick was enthusiastic about Camps notion for a smartphone-based town-car-sharing service but only mildly interested in getting involved. He had just sold a previous startup, the streaming-video company Red Swoosh, to a much larger competitor, Akamai, and was in the middle of what he later called his burnout phase, travelling through Europe, Thailand, Argentina and Brazil, and sizing up different career options. Travis thought it was interesting but he was in this mode, Camp says. He had just left Akamai and was travelling a lot and angel investing. He wasnt ready to go back in.
In Paris, they all stayed at a lavish apartment that Kalanick had found on the website VRBO. Camp was talking endlessly that week about Uber, but Kalanick had his own startup idea, which, considering everything that subsequently happened, was ironic: he was envisioning a company that would operate a global network of luxurious lodgings, identically furnished and separated into different classes, which could be leased via the internet. Frequent business travellers could subscribe to this network, rent places and pay for them seamlessly. He called this business idea Pad Pass. It was sort of a cross between a home experience and a hotel experience, Kalanick later told me. I was trying to bring those two together. Camp recalled it too. Travis had hacked out a whole Airbnb-like system that we were considering starting, he said. Uber was my idea; that was his idea.
McCloskey remembers that Kalanick had reached the same conclusions as the founders of Airbnb. The internet could allow travellers to find luxurious yet cheap accommodations while also offering a far more interesting travelling experience.
Nevertheless, the conversation that week in Paris gradually came to focus more on Uber than Pad Pass. Camp was convinced that the right way to start the business was to buy those top-line Mercedes. Kalanick strongly disagreed, arguing that it was folly to own the cars and more efficient just to distributethemobile app to drivers.
McCloskey remembers one dinner at a restaurant in Paris where the debate raged over the best way to run an on-demand network of town cars. The restaurant was elegant, with expensive wine, light music and a sophisticated French clientele. Apparently there was also paper over the tablecloth because Camp and Kalanick spent the entire meal scrawling their estimates for things such as fixed costs and maximum vehicle utility rates.
On a separate night in Paris, the group went for drinks in the Champs-lyses and then to an elegant late-night dinner that included wine and foie gras. At 2am, somewhat intoxicated after a night of revelry, they hailed a cab on the street.
Apparently they were speaking too boisterously, because halfway through the ride home, the driver started yelling at them. McCloskey was sitting in the middle of the backseat and, at 5ft 10in tall, shed had to prop her high heels on the cushion between the two front seats.
The driver cursed at them in French and threatened to kick them out of the car if they didnt quieten down and if McCloskey didnt move her feet. She spoke French and translated; Kalanick reacted furiously and suggested they get out of the car.
The experience seemed to harden their resolve. It definitely lit a fire, McCloskey says. When you are put in a situation where you feel like theres an injustice, that pisses Travis off more than anything. He couldnt get over it. People shouldnt have to sit in urine-filled cabs after a wonderful night and be yelled at.
That cantankerous Paris cab driver may have left an indelible mark on transport history. By the time they got back to San Francisco, Kalanick was ready to get more involved, at least as an adviser, and Camp was ready to listen to him. A few weeks into 2009, after a trip to Washington DC to see Barack Obamas first inauguration as president, Camp called Kalanick. He was about to lease parking spaces in a garage near his home in San Francisco for the fleet of Mercedes he was still determined to buy. Kalanick counselled him against it one last time: Dude, dude! You dont want to dothat!
Camp finally gave in and ended the ongoing debate; he never signed the lease and never purchased the cars. Instead of buying a dozen flashy Mercedes, Camp, along with Kalanick, would pitch the app to owners and drivers of limousines.
Kalanick would brag a few years later, in one of our first interviews: Garrett brought the classy and I brought the efficiency. We dont own cars and we dont hire drivers. We work with companies and individuals who do that. Its very straightforward. I want to push a button and get a ride. Thats what its about.
Edited extract from The Upstarts by Brad Stone published by Bantam Press (20)
