Uber is the Netscape of transportation.
Rewind to October 13, 1994, Netscape released its first browser for sale and began making the internet mainstream. Fast forward to 1995 and Microsoft released Internet Explorer bundled with Windows 95 for free and won the first browser war.
Netscape popularized the web but couldn’t compete when Microsoft made it free
Cars spend an estimated 96% of their time underutilized. In March 2009 Uber started popularizing ride sharing, come December 2015 Uber announced having completed 1,000,000,000 rides, in July 2016 2,000,000,000 rides. This rapid growth has been fueled by making transportation cheaper and increasing utilization, subsidized with $11.56B in Venture Capital.
Lyft Line and Uber Pool both fed into the virtuous cycle by making the price of getting around San Francisco similar to catching public transport. While UberEats and UberRush have further increased utilization of the network.
“It starts with understanding that the world is going to go self-driving and autonomous. So if that’s happening, what would happen if we weren’t a part of that future? If we weren’t part of the autonomy thing? Then the future passes us by basically, in a very expeditious and efficient way.” — Uber CEO Travis Kalanick
