, Columnist
Uber Isn't Going to Conquer the World
City by city, it's possible for upstart competitors to make headway against the ride-sharing giant.
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Travis Kalanick takes on the world one city at a time. “My company, we’re all about serving cities,” Uber’s co-founder and chief executive said Sunday. “We don’t have the macro view; we are in cities,” he added the next day. A little while later he mused, “People live differently in different cities.”
Kalanick said these things at a World Economic Forum meeting in Tianjin, one of the 60 Chinese cities where Uber now offers rides. To me, they sounded like an acknowledgement that the business of driving people around is for the most part metropolitan, not national or global. Which is interesting to hear from the CEO of a company that has tapped investors for up to $15 billion to finance a breakneck global expansion.