How Uber Started

Part I: The Idea Is Born

Our story begins on a cold winter night in Paris, 2008. Two friends, Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp, were attending LeWeb, an annual tech conference that The Economist describes as "where revolutionaries gather to plot the future". Both men were successful entrepreneurs: Kalanick had sold Red Swoosh to Akamai Technologies for $19 million, while Camp had sold StumbleUpon to eBay for $75 million.

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After a long day at the conference, they found themselves stranded, unable to get a cab. That was when they had an epiphany: "What if you could request a ride from your phone?" Initially, the idea was for a timeshare limo service that could be ordered via an app. After the conference, the men went their separate ways, but Camp, fixated on the idea, bought the domain name UberCab.com.

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Part II: The Early Days and The Prototype

In 2009, Camp started working on a prototype for UberCab as a side project while still being the CEO of StumbleUpon. By the summer of that year, he persuaded Kalanick to join the project as UberCab's "chief incubator". They built a prototype of the mobile app with their friends, Oscar Salazar and Conrad Whelan. Kalanick acted as the "mega advisor" to the company. 

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The company's early hires were nothing short of extraordinary. They included a nuclear physicist, a computational neuroscientist, and a machinery expert whose job was to predict arrival times for Uber's cars more accurately than Google APIs. 

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In February 2010, Ryan Graves became the first Uber employee and was named CEO in May 2010. Later in December, Kalanick succeeded Graves as CEO, and Graves became the chief operating officer.

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Part III: Public Launch and Expansion

After a beta launch in May 2010, Uber's services and mobile app launched publicly in San Francisco in 2011. The service was initially tested in New York in early 2010 using only three cars, with the official launch taking place in San Francisco later that May. Initially, the application only allowed users to hail a black luxury car, and the price was approximately 1.5 times that of a taxi. After complaints from San Francisco taxicab operators, the company changed its name from UberCab to Uber.

In 2010, the company received its first major funding, a $1.3 million round led by First Round Capital. In early 2011, it raised another $11 million in a Series A funding round led by Benchmark. This funding helped them expand to New York, Seattle, Boston, Chicago, and Washington, D.C., as well as abroad in Paris, where the idea for Uber first took root.

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Part IV: The Road to UberX and Beyond

In July 2012, Uber introduced UberX, a cheaper option that allowed drivers to use non-luxury vehicles, including their personal vehicles, subject to a background check, insurance, registration, and vehicle standards. By December 2013, the service was operating in 65 cities.

Uber's success story continued, and in July 2015, it became the most valuable startup in the world, valued at $51 billion after its funding rounds. In June 2016, Uber raised a further $ 3.5 billion from Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund.

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Part V: Financial Transparency and Losses

In April 2017, Uber opened up about its finances for the first time, reporting a global loss of $3.8 billion for 2016. This included losses from its China business, which it sold in the summer of 2016—without it, net adjusted losses were $2.8 billion.

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