From New York Magazine:
One of the odd things about traveling between the Bay Area and
New York a lot is the asynchronicity of mass culture between coasts:
That is, the things that get popular in the Bay Area (PostMates, Burning
Man) don't always get popular in New York right away, and things New
Yorkers think are a big deal (cronuts, Banksy) are greeted with shrugs
in San Francisco.
Today, the inter-city hype gap I most experience is with Uber. In New
York, most people who know about Uber see it as the fanciest of a
handful of on-demand car services. (The way it works: You open the
Uber app on your smart phone and choose one of several grades of cars —
luxury SUV or Prius? — indicate where you want the vehicle to pick you
up, and pay for your ride by credit card, with the rate varying
according to distance and your choice of vehicle.) In New York,
where the yellow cab market is functional and robust, Uber is seen as a
good app, but not a life-changing one, and its use is still pretty much
limited to young people with disposable income.
In San Francisco tech crowds, though, Uber is seen as the
messiah. Other than Tesla Motors, there's probably no Silicon Valley
company that has more insane expectations swirling around it. Plugged-in
people in the Bay Area will tell you things that are hard to believe: Uber is the most exciting company in the Valley. Uber will be a $100 billion company in five years.
I assumed that most of this was tech-bubble hype. But in the past
few months, after conversations with Uber employees, investors, and
people familiar with the company's long-term plans, I started
understanding the company's potential. And now, after a set of Uber financials leaked to Valleywag this week, I feel confident joining the bandwagon: Uber very well could be enormous someday, maybe bigger than Facebook.
I can sum up the bullish case for Uber in one word: Amazon....MUCH MORE
