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Summary
Summary
A look deep inside the new Silicon Valley, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Everything Store .
Ten years ago, the idea of getting into a stranger's car, or a walking into a stranger's home, would have seemed bizarre and dangerous, but today it's as common as ordering a book online. Uber and Airbnb have ushered in a new era: redefining neighborhoods, challenging the way governments regulate business, and changing the way we travel.
In the spirit of iconic Silicon Valley renegades like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, another generation of entrepreneurs is using technology to upend convention and disrupt entire industries. These are the upstarts, idiosyncratic founders with limitless drive and an abundance of self-confidence. Led by such visionaries as Travis Kalanick of Uber and Brian Chesky of Airbnb, they are rewriting the rules of business and often sidestepping serious ethical and legal obstacles in the process.
The Upstarts is the definitive story of two new titans of business and a dawning age of tenacity, conflict and wealth. In Brad Stone's riveting account of the most radical companies of the new Silicon Valley, we discover how it all happened and what it took to change the world.
Author Notes
Brad Stone is senior executive editor of global technology at Bloomberg News and the author of the New York Times bestseller The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon . He has covered Silicon Valley for more than 15 years and lives in San Francisco.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The fast-paced look at the rapidly changing world of the tech industry gets bogged down by the complexity of the story: there are so many young guns, also-rans, VC firms, and temper tantrums that it's hard for the listener to keep everyone straight. At times the narrative has so many players and so much complexity that the audio format feels overly demanding. Temple's solid, almost soothing, reading voice provides a steady guide through Stone's text, although at times his reasonable tone is at odds with the story, like when he softens the edges of Uber founder Travis Kalanick, notorious for his hotheaded iconoclasm and public outbursts. Overall, though, Temple turns in a proficient performance. A Little, Brown hardcover. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Celebratory biography of the upstart companies that regulators love to hate.It was just eight years ago that Barack Obama was sworn into the presidency for his first term, a time of newborn hope in the heart of a grim depression. Enter an air mattress, a couple of smart youngsters, and the realization that unused guest rooms could be leveraged into extra bucks, and you have a new player in the service economy: Airbnb. You also have, writes Bloomberg News senior executive editor Stone (The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, 2013, etc.), a mess of controversy: housing costs go up, desirable neighborhoods get more crowded, hotels that pay their taxes go unfilled as guerrilla operators offer cheaper alternatives. In all this, there's the new middleman, those smart youngsters. The same story plays out with the rise of Uber, which turns every driver into a potential cabbie. Stone charts the transformation of Silicon Valley since 2008, and he writes winningly of how people with goodcommercially if not ethicallyideas can take them from inspiration to reality. In this aspect alone, the book makes highly useful reading for budding entrepreneurs, who should also take Stone's point that the winners in this Darwinian struggle were the players who studied the market exhaustively to figure out just the right angle of entry. Granted, in this anecdotally driven account, there is also plenty to pepper the ire of anyone who's not on board with the thought that a speculator, alive with realization of "lost utility," can build a robust economy on the backs of others alone. And, as the author notes, these new Silicon Valley firms seem to represent "the overweening hubris of the techno-elite" as much as they represent a disruption of the service sector. Despite patches of gee-whiz formulaic prose ("the Airbnb marketplace had the most incredible structural momentum that many of the company's investors and executives had ever seen"), Stone's account is illuminating reading for the business-minded. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
AUGUSTOWN, by Kei Miller. (Vintage, $16.) When Kaia, a schoolboy, comes home with his dreadlocks shorn off - a violation of his Rastafari beliefs - his town in Jamaica erupts, setting in motion a reckoning of the humiliations its people have suffered at the hands of the establishment, which they call Babylon. "Each observant sentence in this gorgeous book is a gem," our reviewer, V. V. Ganeshananthan, wrote. THE UPSTARTS: Uber, Airbnb, and the Battle for the New Silicon Valley, by Brad Stone. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $17.99.) Stone, of Bloomberg News, offers a balanced view of these companies' spectacular rise: On one side, the disruption ushered in a new era of freedom regarding the services people use; on the other, the start-ups' growth represents "the overweening hubris of the techno-elite." THE ROMANCE READER'S GUIDE TO LIFE, by Sharon Pywell. (Flatiron, $16.99.) The plot of a purloined novel, "The Pirate Lover," runs parallel to the lives of Neave and Lilly, two sisters in working-class Massachusetts. An unusual narrative device - Lilly's sections are told from beyond the grave - helps keep the story interesting, and Pywell clearly has fun riffing on the romance genre's tropes and overstuffed language. THE STORIED CITY: The Quest for Timbuktu and the Fantastic Mission to Save Its Past, by Charlie English. (Riverhead, $17.) Timbuktu, in Mali, had long been home to thousands of ancient African documents on everything from politics to science to religion. When A1 Qaeda arrived in 2012, intent on destroying anything that did not adhere to its vision of Islam, a heroic effort was started to move and save the manuscripts. English places this story of Timbuktu's libraries in the city's remarkable history. SYMPATHY, by Olivia Sudjic. (Mariner, $14.99.) After Alice Hare, a lonely and adrift 23-year-old, arrives in New York from London, she becomes infatuated via social media with Mizuko, a Japanese writer. As Alice's obsession intensifies, she attempts to force a friendship - to a devastating end. This debut novel deals with the particular heartbreak of unrequited affection and jilted friendship in the internet age. AMERICAN ORIGINALITY: Essays on Poetry, by Louise Glück. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $16.) The author, a Pulitzer Prize winner and former poet laureate, assesses contemporary poetry in this brief volume, with an eye to broader questions of American identity. Our reviewer, Craig Morgan Teicher, praised the collection, writing, "In the guise of a poetry critic, Glück shows herself to be a kind of dark contemporary conscience."
Library Journal Review
Stone (The Everything Store) presents a detailed account of two powerful players in the contemporary internet marketplace: Uber and Airbnb. This insider's examination uses interviews with current and former employees, Uber drivers, Airbnb hosts, government regulators, and CEOs Travis Kalanick and Brian Chesky, respectively. Both firms started as one of many ideas that fledgling entrepreneurs launched in the mid-2000s. Although there were other ride- and space-sharing companies debuting about the same time, it was the hard work, vision, and contacts with venture capitalists that allowed Kalanick and Chesky to grow their companies, first nationally then internationally. They had to overcome the entrenched interests and political connections of the transportation and hospitality industries, along with public skepticism over the wisdom of sharing automobiles and living space with -total strangers. Both companies now stand as mature, successful enterprises always searching for new opportunities in the digital world. Dean Temple does a wonderful job presenting the story, changing the tone of his voice to individualize the different players. VERDICT Listeners interested in the ever-changing world of Internet commerce should enjoy this work. ["A very readable, informative history that will likely appeal...to those interested in the sharing economy and contemporary business history": LJ 2/15/17 review of the Little, Brown hc.]--Stephen L. Hupp, West Virginia Univ. Parkersburg Lib. © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Introduction | p. 3 |
| Part I Side Projects | |
| Chapter 1 The Trough of Sorrow: The Early Years of Airbnb | p. 17 |
| Chapter 2 Jam Sessions: The Early Years of Uber | p. 39 |
| Chapter 3 The Nonstarters: SeamlessWeb, Taxi Magic, Cabulous, Couchsurfing, Zimride | p. 65 |
| Chapter 4 The Growth Hacker: How Airbnb Took Off | p. 89 |
| Chapter 5 Blood, Sweat, and Ramen: How Uber Conquered San Francisco | p. 107 |
| Part II Empire Building | |
| Chapter 6 The Wartime CEO: Airbnb Fights on Two Fronts | p. 131 |
| Chapter 7 The Playbook: Uber's Expansion Begins | p. 153 |
| Chapter 8 Travis's Law: The Rise of Ridesharing | p. 179 |
| Chapter 9 Too Big to Regulate: Airbnb's Fight in New York City | p. 211 |
| Part III The Trial of the Upstarts | |
| Chapter 10 God View: Uber's Rough Ride | p. 241 |
| Chapter 11 Escape Velocity: Fights and Fables with Airbnb | p. 269 |
| Chapter 12 Global Mega-Unicorn Death Match!: Uber versus the World | p. 295 |
| Epilogue | p. 325 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 333 |
| Notes | p. 337 |
| Index | p. 359 |