The story of “Uber” began in 2008, in Paris, on one of the cold winter nights. After selling their startups, two friends named Travis Kalanick and Gret Kemp decided to attend the annual technology conference in Paris called LeWeb. The participants of this conference exchanged ideas about the revolutionary ideas they had in their heads and planning for the future. After the conference, Garrett and Travis decided to go back to the hotel to relax. The weather was very cold, there were no taxis on the street and the two friends were very confused and confused.

The unavailability of a taxi made Garrett and Travis think; They thought to themselves, what if they could send taxi requests online with their phones? This is how the idea of ​​requesting a taxi online was born. On that cold winter night, an idea was born that would turn into a billion-dollar empire years later. However, let’s not forget that although Uber’s idea later became revolutionary, it was initially illegal.

Constantly teased by others as a youngster, Travis took refuge in work to escape the status quo, selling kitchen knives as a peddler. To sell more, Travis sometimes went door to door and tried to sell kitchen knives to housewives. At that time, he proved that he had strong marketing power and could present and sell his products to customers. Later, Travis was able to attract the opinion of investors for investment with this ability.

Before starting Uber, Travis dropped out of college to become an entrepreneur and focus on a project he had in mind called Score. Score was a peer-to-peer search engine for files and a bit like Napster. Similar to Napster, Score faced heavy lawsuits and a huge fine of $250 billion due to copyright violations. In this case, the founders of the company had to declare bankruptcy, and Travis was very upset about this, but after declaring bankruptcy, he did not despair and sought to start a business that he called Revenge Profession.

After selling the failed business for millions of dollars, Travis got the money to start a bigger project; A project called Uber. Travis and his friend Garrett were fed up with taxi companies and thought there must be a better alternative. Then, while watching a James Bond movie, they decided they should start Uber.

It is important to mention that Uber used very stylish cars with leather upholstery and inside each car, a bottle of water was placed for each passenger. In addition to the mentioned items, the payment of travel expenses was easily and automatically deducted from the passenger’s card, so there was no need to pay change or tip manually.

At first, the Uber service was a black luxury car and limousine to give passengers a James Bond-like experience. As a result, Uber’s quick take has become a symbol of luxury in the affluent San Francisco area. It was a glorious start for a fledgling company; But on the 20th of October, the transportation representative went to the Uber company and informed them that what they were doing was against the law. Until then, all Uber drivers were certified professional drivers registered with the Department of Transportation. As a result, Uber considered these rules too strict and unreasonable; But apparently, there were other strict rules for setting up and running a taxi business, and Uber had broken them.

One of Uber’s illegal actions was that the cars did not belong to the company; In fact, this company hired professional drivers and asked them to use their cars to transport passengers. Although this resulted in significant cost savings for Uber, it created several legal issues. Local officials warned Uber that it would be fined up to $5,000 per trip for each day of operation. But this was not the whole story; Local officials warned that the Uber team could face up to 90 days in jail for each day the company operated. Uber employees were very disappointed after hearing these strange punishments and continued their work with fear.

After doing this, he said that his company is now not a taxi company, but a company that operates in the field of technology, so the rules related to taxi driving are not relevant to them. Doing so saved the company billions of dollars, but it also generated a lot of controversy. For example, Travis stated that Uber drivers are not employees of the company, but partners. As a result, Uber is not responsible for their employment rights and interests. But Travis knew for sure that the authorities didn’t care about his way of thinking, so he prepared for battle.

Travis knew that if he could get enough people to use the Uber app, people would decide that Uber was a much better way to travel than standing on the side of the street and hailing a taxi. In this case, the authorities had to answer to many people to prevent Uber from operating. Uber didn’t have a lot of time and needed to do it as quickly as possible, so it made a deal with AT&T to buy thousands of iPhones in bulk at a discount. They delivered the phones to drivers with the Uber software already installed. Also, each driver was rewarded by Uber for a certain number of trips per week.

The news of the bonus attracted many drivers to Uber and in a very short time, the number of drivers working for Uber multiplied. An important question that may arise is what did Uber do to attract passengers? Free first trip and discount for second and third trips seemed like an attractive offer. By presenting this offer, Uber believed that after the first or second trip, passengers will conclude that this service is much better than the old taxi system and is worth paying the full fare.

Since Uber was losing some money on every trip, the offer to attract passengers seemed like a costly proposition, but the costs were recouped and even turned into profits in a very short period of time; Because only after a very short time of Uber offer, a large number of passengers were attracted to this company and preferred to use Uber cars instead of regular taxis. Later, Uber expanded its operations to other American cities and states.

With the popularity of Uber, the authorities of different cities in America decided to check what this company is really doing and whether it is approved or not; But Uber had prepared itself against threats from various authorities. After each threat, Uber notified its users using a message in the Uber app, asking them to support the campaign created to support Uber. Users could even express their support for Uber by emailing local or national authorities. The Uber company was not satisfied with doing these two tasks and by organizing civil gatherings in a certain place, it asked its users to show their support for Uber to the authorities by joining these gatherings.

In one of Uber’s protests and strikes in New York, few Uber users showed up to support it, so Uber asked its employees at one of its branches to participate in the strike. After facing protests and being surprised by the number of people participating, local officials did not realize that many of these people were Uber employees. Travis believed that the taxi industry was tainted with corruption and collusion and that groups in the industry had the support of politicians by bribing them. As a result of this support, it became very difficult for competing companies, such as Uber, to obtain a license. By saying this, Travis tried to justify bypassing traditional processes and launching Uber without a license. Also, he insisted that the emergence of Uber provided much better conditions for passengers and drivers.

After Uber introduced a new service called Uberx, the war between the company and the regulators became much more intense. Uber X allowed almost anyone to work as a driver for Uber. This raised many legal issues, and by this time city officials had realized that Uber was unwilling to cooperate. As a result, instead of directly threatening Uber, the authorities threatened the poor drivers, saying that if they found anyone driving for Uber, they would impound their car. By doing this, city officials restricted people from working for and using Uber, but we mustn’t forget that Travis and his company were a few steps ahead.

Uber has consistently posted messages on its app that if any driver working for Uber is fined, their fine will be paid in full. Travis saw this as a cost to his career. But the real genius was designing a secret system called Greyball to bypass local authorities. Greyball was a tool that allowed Uber to keep its drivers away from monitored locations.

Travis knew that various people, including city officials, were downloading the Uber app so that they could follow the cars displayed in the app. As a result, with the help of Grayball software, Uber could easily identify local authorities and prevent them from joining. Even if a local authority could sign up for the Uber app, once logged in, they would not see any cars on the map. Also, if he wanted to rent a car, he would get a message saying “no cars nearby”.

Uber has been very successful with its own quasi-spy team. Many authorities requested a car to arrest the Uber driver during the violation, but suddenly their request was canceled; Because apparently no Uber driver used the app. Officials thought people had heeded the warnings and stopped working for Uber, but in practice, they were seeing a fake map and had no chance of going after the Uber drivers. Uber kept its activity secret until 2017 and used Greyball software to keep its drivers safe; Until extensive investigations revealed the use of this system and Uber’s secret activity years later.

Uber, while operating undercover and using Greyball, spent huge sums lobbying the government to legalize its service. Therefore, until the discovery of the secret operation Greyball and the attention of the public, Uber was operating legally in most major American cities and was highly popular, in such a way that the suspension of its operation by the government faced a wide reaction.

According to existing trends, after gaining enough support and influence in each city, Uber would negotiate with local authorities as if trying to free a hostage. In fact, after ensuring the power and support of the people, Uber used it to change the rules in favor of its own business model; For example, it would change the rules on contract workers so that they don’t have to pay full benefits to drivers.

In the early years of its establishment, Uber developed a smart plan to evade laws confront government officials, and expand its company; But this war was not the main war, and a bigger battle was coming.

One morning, Travis received a call from his friend, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Mark talked to Travis about a new app called Lyft and mentioned that Facebook employees are very excited about the app. To this day, there is a lot of debate about whether Uber copied its app from Lyft or Lyft copied Uber.

Although Uber started first, it started out with fancy cars. Therefore, not many people could work as drivers in this company. Finally, in 2012, at the same time as Lyft, Uber changed its service to hire more people as drivers. Lyft and Uber have entered a head-to-head battle, offering car-hailing apps along with similar services.

Travis wanted nothing but complete dominance in any competition, he believed that every war has a winner, so in the competition and war between Lyft and Uber, Travis sought victory and complete dominance in the field of taxi driving and car rental. Travis was willing to do anything to win.

Hosting small parties with food and games has been one of Lyft’s most effective marketing techniques to attract people to the company as drivers, and Uber often throws these parties and offers various discount codes to drivers who choose to join Uber instead of Lyft.

Lyft did an interesting thing to get recognition; Installing a very large pink mustache in front of your cars. To counter this marketing tactic, Uber installed billboards with the slogan “Shave Your Mustache” at all Lyft locations. Also, by creating a large number of fake accounts on Lyft, Uber was able to easily track the location of Lyft drivers and give the obtained data to a software called Hell.

Why did Uber choose the name hell for this software? This company had another system called Heaven that showed all drivers active in Uber on the map; But the Hell system was the opposite of Heaven, showing all active drivers on Lyft. Using these two systems, Uber could easily understand which drivers are operating on Uber and Lyft at the same time. After finding these drivers and giving them special points, Uber encouraged them to choose this company. Of course, the perks didn’t last forever, ending once the driver ditched Lyft entirely and accepted Uber as their only option.

At times, Uber employees used disposable phones to submit multiple requests for car rentals on the Lyft app at the same time and cancel them at the last second. Years later, when people learned about Uber’s deliberate vandalism against Lyft and stealing its drivers, they organized many rallies against the company; But Travis and his staff believed they had done nothing wrong. Travis believed that in professional competition one should do everything to win. On March 19, 2013, he even published an insulting tweet against the founder of Lyft on Twitter.

One of the most important reasons for Uber’s success against Lyft was that whenever Lyft had a meeting with investors to raise capital, Uber quickly noticed and contacted investors to inform them that the company was going to raise capital soon. Knowing that Uber is a bigger company, investors are scrapping their deal with Lyft to invest in Uber. Travis was a real showman and had an uncanny ability to convince investors. With his seductive words, he could easily convince investors that Uber will soon become one of the largest companies in the field of transportation and that in addition to transporting passengers, it can also transport any goods to any place. With this claim, Uber considered itself a serious competitor to Amazon.

Investors were very excited after hearing what Travis said and considered Uber as the best company to invest in and get huge profits in the future. But that was the beginning, Travis wouldn’t return their calls for a certain amount of time after the meeting. Therefore, the investors thought that Uber did not need their capital, so they showed more enthusiasm to invest in Uber. It wasn’t long before Uber received huge funding from venture capital funds, such as $258 million from Google. With more investors, Uber had more money to spend on expansion and marketing. As a result, with more funding and capital, Uber was able to outperform competitors such as Lyft.

Uber used many advertising tricks to attract people’s attention. For example, on Valentine’s Day, the company gave out thousands of roses to drivers to present to girls who board Uber cars after 4 p.m. Uber, powerful and using every trick, continued its way. You might think to yourself that the tricks mentioned so far were the whole story, But Uber’s dark side has yet to reveal itself.

The rise of Uber caused the financial ruin of one taxi driver, Doug Shifter. “When the taxi industry started, I worked an average of 40-50 hours a week, but I can no longer survive by working 120 hours,” he wrote on Facebook. I am not a slave.” Shortly thereafter, Doug drove to City Hall, put a gun to his head, and pulled the trigger. To be sure, Doug isn’t the only driver who has committed suicide and blamed Uber. In India, a driver committed suicide after failing to pay his car loan on time. This suicide led to the angry presence of a group of drivers in the Uber office. They carried the driver’s body and shouted that the driver would still be alive if Uber’s wages weren’t so low.

You might ask yourself what Travis’s reaction was after the suicides and the drivers’ protest. Travis believed that Uber has greatly improved the lives of people who work as drivers for Uber and that there is nothing wrong with what Uber is doing. Some people agreed with Travis, calling Uber an innovative, high-performing company that allows drivers to get paid more and provides cheaper rides for passengers.

The reality was that the money the drivers earned was spent on fuel, taxes, and car maintenance instead of spending it on a better life, so the amount of money left for them was even less than the monthly minimum wage. We should also not forget that Uber drivers lost the benefits they received from taxi companies in this company.

Because anyone could work as a driver for Uber, public safety was compromised. Also, drivers and taxi operators were not going to let Uber win easily, so they started countless protests against Uber. According to reports sent from some countries, the taxi cartel organized criminal activities, attacking Uber drivers, stealing their cars and even setting them on fire. In some places, such as Mexico, there have been reports of Uber drivers being killed, with many blaming local taxi drivers. This conflict was an all-out war between Uber and the traditional transportation system.

After this incident, some countries banned the use of Uber completely. Over the years, many similar incidents have occurred, but Uber has not changed the terms of employment of its drivers. People had a positive view of Uber in its early years, but over the years their views have changed. Uber faced problems such as the leakage of passenger data and their privacy. By changing the settings of the Uber app, the company tracked passengers (especially celebrities) even after the trip was over; Because their next path was an interesting topic for Travis.

In recent years, Uber paid hackers hundreds of thousands of dollars to cover up a massive data breach that exposed the personal information of 57 million Uber users. Also, the company had to pay $28.5 million to settle a lawsuit due to false advertising about having the best driver background check system; But one of Uber’s biggest public relations disasters came in 2017, when taxi drivers went on strike to protest Trump’s travel ban on citizens of Muslim countries.

Uber made huge profits by ignoring the strike and exploiting the taxi drivers’ strike. This led to the anger of many people; In such a way that in a very short time, the #DeleteUber hashtag became a trend on Twitter. More than half a million people deleted their accounts and probably millions more deleted the Uber app from their phones. At the same time, Lyft, which had been nearly destroyed by Uber’s disruptions, was booming again as many people joined it. Although Uber continued to expand and market itself, its popularity among the public had reached an all-time low.

Travis was trying to make a name for himself in China because of its huge population, but very few tech companies were successful in China. Travis did everything he had done in other countries to attract drivers and passengers in China, but it didn’t work as he expected. Fraudsters in China purchased a large number of cheap smartphones and set up half of them with driver accounts and the other half with passenger accounts. Then, each scammer would request a ride with one of their passenger’s phones and accept it with one of their driver’s phones.

Don’t forget that because of Uber promo codes, all rides were free for the passenger’s phone and the driver’s phone still got paid for the ride. In other words, the fraudsters would get double the money for every fake trip they made, and after hours of driving and racking up huge fees, the driver would simply cash out, reset the phones, and repeat the process with new Uber accounts.

As a result of these processes and making fraudulent trips, Uber lost millions of dollars. Despite the huge costs and the loss of millions of dollars, Travis refused to remove his points for the first ride, instead putting a secret code in the Uber app to prevent fraudsters from creating multiple accounts on the same phone. By doing so, Uber once again broke the rules and angered many tech companies, including Apple.

Fraudsters weren’t Uber’s only problem in China, the company had a Chinese competitor called DiDi that was heavily backed by the Chinese government. DiDi encouraged local taxi drivers to protest against Uber by paying them to work for DiDi instead of Uber by sending fake messages that Uber was shutting down in China. In addition to all these things, DiDi company was aware of the information of Uber company and their programs by sending people as employees. Uber used these hacks against Lyft in its early years in the US but faced the same hacks in China years later.

Eventually, Uber reached an agreement with DiDi and ended its operations in China, but Travis was furious at his failure. You must have wondered why we have talked about Travis so far and not mentioned his friend Garrett; This is because Garrett played a lesser role in the business; But Garrett finally stepped in after all these adventures and publicly confirmed Uber’s plans to enter the field of self-driving cars. Self-driving cars did not need drivers, and Uber drivers once again realized that the company did not care about them. But Uber’s point of view was different; If the company didn’t work on self-driving cars, other companies like Google could put Uber out of business.

In competition with Google, Uber hired some self-driving car engineers who worked for Google. As a result, another court case was opened for Uber in this regard. At this time, Uber was fighting an all-out war and considered the whole world against him, but Uber’s main enemy was himself.

By immersing himself in work, Travis was doing everything he could to grow his company. He didn’t see his friends for days, and he didn’t even wash his clothes, but by working for hours in his office, he thought about expanding Uber as much as possible. Travis expected the same from his employees and wanted them to spend their whole lives growing Uber; As a result, many of the company’s employees worked even after hours. Some of them were referred to a psychologist due to high work pressure.

After each success, Uber would throw a big party. The x to X event was one of Uber’s biggest celebrations held in Las Vegas and cost the company about $25 million, But these things could not keep the realities of Uber hidden forever. There have been numerous reports of sexism and harassment of women at Uber. In 2017, Susan Fowler, a former Uber engineer, described her experiences of sexism and harassment at the company in a blog post. This led to an internal investigation and the firing of several top Uber executives.

Uber ran from one problem to another. Although Travis was a warrior manager and tried to develop Uber using all the hacks he could think of, he couldn’t handle the huge pressures placed on him. Travis’s true breakdown came when he heard the news of his mother’s death and his father’s hospitalization in a sea accident. Finally, in June 2017, Travis announced his leave of absence from Uber for an unspecified period of time. He decided to become a better manager and human after returning from leave, But Travis didn’t know he would never return to Uber.

Less than a month after leaving Uber, Travis resigned under pressure from the board and investors. The reason for this was that they blamed Travis for everything that happened and the controversies that happened to Uber. This matter was very bitter for Travis, he spared nothing to establish, develop, and maintain his company and did not expect this bitter end. He wanted to expand Uber like Amazon, but never got the chance to do so.

Uber’s situation became much more stable after Travis’ resignation. Dara Khosrowshahi, the new CEO, focused on improving relations with drivers and improving the image of the brand among customers. Although there were still controversies, Uber pleased investors by staying out of the headlines.

Read more: Amazon brand story; A store for everything

After going through many ups and downs, Uber is now one of the top transportation apps in the whole world, which is available to the public in more than 70 countries and 10,000 cities. Today, 149 million users use Uber and 7.1 million drivers work for the company. Also, the total transaction of Uber in the transportation sector in 2023 was equal to 68.9 billion dollars and in the first quarter of 2024, it was equal to 18.67 billion dollars.