This is called "Being disruptive." Basically, just ignore the law, but make sure you get enough workers and customers that love you so that they turn against politics when you break the law.
This gets called "being disruptive" but it's possible to be disruptive without ignoring the law. For example see SpaceX: successful disruption of the launch industry, without breaking any laws.
The issue is that not every industry is so inefficient as to be possible to legally disrupt profitably, so people try to do an end-run around the law.
The CEO of SpaceX did commit a couple crimes in the same podcast.
Uber's autonomous car fatally collided with a woman, raising questions of negligence and liability in automation.
Uber acquired some of Alphabet/Waymo's trade secrets when they aqui-hired one of their former engineers who apparently kept a bunch of Waymo's IP he worked on. That engineer himself is now facing a federal indictment, and Uber and Waymo have settled.
E-scooters are facilitating a number of city-specific crimes (it's usually illegal to operate a vehicle, bike, or skate on a city sidewalk and the e-scooters do not provide helmets but neither do the riders). To say nothing of the legally dubious use of public property to deploy them.
I guess I'm not sure what Musk smoking pot on Joe Rogan has to do with SpaceX's unquestionable success in a market dominated practically since its inception by pork-armored incumbents.
Are you talking about the Joe Rogan podcast? It's recorded/filmed from California, where marijuana is legal recreationaly, and had been at the time of the original broadcast.
As it was originally proliferated in reference to tech ventures, it referred to a very specific pattern highlighted by Clay Christensen's writings out of HBS.
In classical "disruption," a product or technology that is notionally "worse," but as a result greatly cheaper or more easily distributed, takes over a market from notionally "better" but more expensive legacy approach. Often includes de-skilling of the use case too.
It's sort of like guerilla warfare in that way.
The successful recent IPOs people are pointing to in this comment section -- like Zoom, Datadog, and Cloudflare -- all tend to have a version of this classical disruption if you try and see it.
I say this not for mere pedantry but because taking "disruptive" to mean "F---ing things up (rules, laws, etc.)" dilutes a useful concept in thinking about technology adoption approaches.
You seriously have a twisted and static view of what society should be.
You don't ask the question, why should an app like Uber be illegal? Why should taxi medallion holders have a monopoly on on-demand transportation in a city? To make hedgefunds rich?
Transportation across cities in North America sucked before Uber. You are completely delusional if you think pre-Uber and pre-Lyft cities were some kind of transportation mecca. It was horrible. I used to wait in the rain at UCSF for 30 - 45 minutes on the curb waiting and hoping for a taxi and finally just pitifully walking home getting drenched.
I love having a ride-hailing app and not having to waste money on a car or motorcycle.
I really think people that love static bureaucratic states should go live in France or some communist nation.
Uber and Lyft can't start up in a city if they have to wait for all the politicians and bureaucrats to give them an okay, when these people are bought and sold by unions and hedgefunds. Only delusional people think there's a path to disrupt that kind of logjam by waiting in line like a "good boy".
"you don't ask the question, why should an app like Uber be illegal? Why should taxi medallion holders have a monopoly on on-demand transportation in a city? To make hedgefunds rich?"
Medallions are just a mechanism for limiting the number of cabs to what the street network can support; isn't that obviously necessary?
On the other hand, it appears from what I read that Uber may have actually been dealing with the problem by charging surge rates and then keeping most of it, thereby reducing demand without increasing supply which is just what is needed. But that outrages everybody, so the argument for having the government ration things is that it's more socially acceptable - which is a valid reason!
The apps of Uber and Lyft seem to me like valuable innovations in that they allow you to get information on your ride, predict the cost, and pay with a credit card which are great improvements on regular cabs.
But cheering unregulated cabs makes no sense to me - the streets in a given city seem obviously a commons that needs regulation. Uber and Lyft are forms of regulation, so really, people only debate the details. Freedom vs. non-freedom is a caricature.
> Basically, just ignore the law, but make sure you get enough workers and customers that love you so that they turn against politics when you break the law.
Unfortunately, this seems to be the only way that's not outright massive violence such as Hongkong or France to get politicians to do their goddamn job. Taxi services have had a really massive lobby power in the US.
If not then this is just a silly point. Some of the regulations were unreasonable and the result of corruption - but Uber also skirted insurance and background check related laws at various times.
The end result is a safer, better-functioning street transit system (in New York at least). I don't care if they were in it for social change or for the money. They delivered results, both themselves and by kicking taxis up a notch.
(Many activists aren't in it for altruistic purposes. That doesn't make their work less meaningful.)
Exactly. Some of the regulations were due to corruption. But others we reasonable ways to create a situation fair to workers. Regulating the number of cabs allowed drivers to have some confident that they'd earn a reasonable wage. And the medallion system ended up being basically an investment/retirement plan for a lot of cab drivers.
Yes, the rise of the Internet meant it was time to change how we did cab dispatch. And it would have been great to see what else we could improve, including getting the cab companies to be less oligopolistic. But Uber was clearly after a monopoly [1] so Kalanick could jack rates up enough to justify the billions of investment they took. But national monopolies are way more harmful to both workers and customers than local, strongly regulated oligopolies. Uber was ultimately trying to make things worse, but with them skimming the monopoly rents.
> Unfortunately, this seems to be the only way that's not outright massive violence such as Hongkong or France to get politicians to do their goddamn job. Taxi services have had a really massive lobby power in the US.
This was strongly implying that Uber was causing political change. I don't disagree that the competition has been healthy or that the taxi companies were bad actors - or even that the regulations were legitimately onerous sometimes... I object to the statement that "disruption = positive social change".
I think that Uber's case is particularly weak because, while skirting regulation may have gotten accolades, the company itself was toxic to work at and brought in a bevy of sexual harassment charges.
This is called "Being disruptive." Basically, just ignore the law, but make sure you get enough workers and customers that love you so that they turn against politics when you break the law.