What Gurley admired was the potential for scale. Most startups took a business that already existed and tried to make it slightly better or more efficient. Uber promised to upend an entire industry, one that had seen little innovation in decades. The sheer size of the taxi market could make Uber worth billions if the company continued its growth trajectory. And best of all, this new entity, potentially worth billions, had been created out of thin air. It could theoretically drag the entire transportation industry out of the analog world and into the digital one practically overnight. Best of all, whoever did the dragging would set the terms for the entire marketplace.
By downloading the Uber app, riders gave themselves the power and freedom to summon a car instantly, to any location, at any time. And drivers didn’t need to spend hundreds of dollars installing some cumbersome box in their dashboard to connect to these customers. Maybe they’d have to spend ten bucks on a dashboard smartphone caddy—Uber would give them the phone for free.
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