Did the massive regulation on the taxi industry stop Uber? If you build something people find genuinely useful, you will become a force that causes the market to adapt. Regulation follows innovation.
I'm founding Uber for Biotech. No biosafety regulation is going to stop us from CRISPRing our way into better future!
Seriously though, I get that archaic rules need to be fought in order to be changed. But there are proper ways to do that, and Uber did it in about the most antisocial way possible aside from murdering people. Please, don't be like Uber. Innovations need a stable society to flourish.
Eh. No defence of the way Kalanick or some of his minions acted in certain situations, but... Uber was entering an incredibly difficult space, given the power and entrenchment of the existing taxi business/lobby, and the generally anti-innovation and protectionist approach of many local politicians.
Without their 'hustle' and willingness to take steps which were risky, relatively antisocial, and often illegal (e.g. entering cities illegally first and asking for permission later, organising pretty challenging pressure campaigns against local politicians, authorities, etc.) they'd not have made it past a year, let alone revolutionised an industry.
Their downfall was applying the same risk and hustle mentality indiscriminately, including within their own company.
>>Without their 'hustle' and willingness to take steps which were risky, relatively antisocial, and often illegal (e.g. entering cities illegally first and asking for permission later, organising pretty challenging pressure campaigns against local politicians, authorities, etc.) they'd not have made it past a year, let alone revolutionised an industry.
Are you kidding? If SpaceX was able to break ULA’s monopoly on launching god damn rockets to space and do it in a way that doesn’t break laws and regulations, Uber certainly could have done the same in the taxi industry.
SpaceX had essentially one body to convince - NASA. And given NASA's dependence on ULA to get things into space, and ULA's reliance on Russian rocket engines (aside from NASA's traditional conservatism and reluctance to support a brash new young Silicon Valley upstart company not doing things the NASA way) they quietly welcomed SpaceX with open arms, and paid SpaceX huge amounts for their development. Also, I'm not aware that ULA was a 'monopoly' in the usual sense of the word - they've not taken measures to suppress potential competition in the past, have they? (There's no launch provider badge system!). They were just the only US company that could offer orbital services at that time.
tl;dr, NASA had major incentives to support SpaceX, and ULA wasn't a true monopoly.
In contrast, Uber faced hundreds of different NASAs - each one the local government of any and every major city they wanted to enter. In each case, the challenge and the hurdles in their way would have been different. In each case, there were multiple long-established alternatives (the incumbent taxi firms). And in many cases, the lobbying power of the incumbent taxi firms on the local decision makers would have been considerable (via overt lobbying, relationships, threat of strikes, maybe even bribery). All of this would have made making the case for Uber in theory to unenlightened local politicians almost a non-starter. What worked for Uber was getting their service up and running (sometimes illegally), users seeing that it was a dramatically better option than the incumbent uninnovative taxi firms offered, and then leveraging that support, together with other forms of pressure, to be allowed to continue business.
tl;dr, local governments generally had disincentives to support Uber, and Uber faced multiple entrenched competitors, sometimes in a monopoly position.
Discussing this locally, I usually give example of iCar, which is a people transportation company that run borderline-afoul of taxi laws in my city (Kraków, Poland). Their innovation back ~10 years ago (or more) was to drive primarily by GPS, bill by distance instead of time, and thus being able to tell you how much you'll pay before even starting the trip. The primary point of conflict was, AFAIR, that iCar figured out a sorta-loophole that allowed them to have one taxi license for the entire company instead of for each individual driver.
There was some bad blood between them and the regular taxi corps, some tyres got slashed, but the court sorted things out, updated the regulations a bit, and now iCar and other companies happily coexist. The major difference between them and Uber is that they didn't keep breaking law with impunity, but engaged in finding a legal solution and made the entire space better for everyone.
Sure, this is not the path to exponential growth, but maybe not everything is best done by VC-backed "zero to billion dollars corporation in 5 years" businesses.
