Uber, AirBNB, and the Adjacent Possible

Back in 2009, Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick founded what was then a little ride-hailing company called Uber. Odds are, though, that you've only heard of it only relatively recently. The company that bills itself as "everyone's private driver" to date has raised a mind-boggling $15 billion.

As shown below, the vast majority of that sum has come in the last two years. (Ditto for the controversies surrounding the company, but that's a post for another day.)

It turns out, though, that the idea of Uber isn't so new after all. In fact, as Ezra Klein points out on Vox, venture capitalists had heard the idea for Uber way back in 2005. From the piece:

Chris Dixon, a venture capitalist at Andreessen Horowitz, has a useful framework for thinking about this argument. 'In 2005, a bunch of companies pitched me the idea for Uber,' he says. 'But because they followed orthodox thinking, they figured they would build the software but let other people manage the cars.

This begs the question: In an age of rapid disruption and change, why did it take mass ride sharing—and Uber in particular—so long to jump from theory to practice?