Something nobody mentions is that UberCab's business model was illegal. In order to pick up passengers in California (and many municipalities and states) you need a commercial license and a car with a livery plate. Travis Kalanick bet that he could get huge enough to force San Francisco to deal with him rather than shut him down. It's a testament to the weakness of consumer protections that he was right. Lather, rinse, repeat for half the tech industry. "Go fast and break things" is another way of saying "smash'n'grab."Mr. Kalanick deserves credit for creating a world-changing company, one that scaled vertiginously from a modest black car service in San Francisco to a global brand in hundreds of cities.
Uber hopes to be valued at as much as $120 billion in its IPO. The company was last valued in private funding at $76 billion. Both Uber and Lyft filed confidential draft paperwork for an IPO in early December and received initial feedback from the US Securities and Exchange Commission earlier this month, Bloomberg reported (paywall).