You might know of Uber as a convenient taxi service, or maybe you’ve heard of Uber as the company providing thousands of jobs driving thousands of thousands, or maybe you consider Uber the controversial company that is destroyed the taxi market. Uber has changed the public transportation game and they built up a valuation of 62.5 BILLION DOLLARS.
Uber was founded in 2009 by Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick as a way to solve San Francisco taxi problem. Garrett original idea was creating a limo timeshare service where users would split the cost of a limo, but with time the idea evolved.
Once Garrett started working on the prototype, he asked Travis to join him and later that same year in 2009 they raised 200k in seed funding to get them off the ground.
In 2010, Uber, originally known as UberCab, did a beta launch in New York to test the app. They had 3 cars running and very few users.
As the business began to grow, the team needed to hire a general manager but instead of putting a job posting on Monster.com, they decided to send out a tweet and found their general manager from Chicago.
In the summer of 2010 Uber came home to San Francisco, California. At the time Uber cost 1.5 times as much as a cab, but they still had a lot of customers.
Now with two cities successfully running, it was time to raise some money. The team spent the next year growing the business while raising 43.5 million dollars from two rounds of funding, that’s when this is when the team changed their name from UberCab to Uber.
In May 2011, Uber used the money they raised to go viral. They expanded into a new city every single month, by December of that year, they went international by expanding into Paris.
Uber grew fast and three years later in June 2014, Uber made headlines all over the world when they announced that they raised an additional 1.2 billion dollars in funding valuing them at 18.2 billion dollars. This new cab company was taking over the world.
But it wasn’t all easy. In 2014, taxi drivers protested in Europe against Uber. Uber has faced lawsuits and criticism over driver benefits and driver screening and now, Uber is being sued for price fixing by raising prices during peak times.
But at the end of the day, Uber has become the largest taxi cab service in the world and they own zero taxi cabs, and they have zero taxi drivers on payroll, yet they have raised over nine billion dollars in funding. They bring in billions of dollars a year in revenue. They pay out billions of dollars a year to their drivers. But they haven’t turned a profit yet. In the first half of 2015, they reported a paper loss of one billion dollars.
