According to a new report from The Wall Street Journal, the cab-renting service Uber and Lyft are planning to allocate some cash bonuses to their drives so that they can invest in the company’s shares through the upcoming IPO of those companies.
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There
has been a lot of discussions about the role of a driver in a
transport company and most of the times those drivers are not
recognised as the full-time employees of that company. Also, under
the rules of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), those
companies are not allowed to grant those drives a share of the
stocks, directly, in the company.
Although
many times several laws have been trying to put those drivers into
the full-time employee category, companies like Uber and Lyft regards
the drivers as individual contractors. Now the two companies are
planning to offer those drivers who have been a part of their team
for a longer time with rewards, such that they would be able to buy a
share of the stakes in the IPO of those companies, before shares to
begin trading on public stock exchanges.
According
to the reports, Lyft will be granting the drivers, who have completed
10,000 rides, with $1,000 and the driver who have completed over
20,000 rides will get $10,000. It will be the choice of the drivers
if they want to keep the money or put the money towards IPO-priced
shares.
On
the other hand, there is no hint from Uber over the amount of reward
money. Although there has been no confirmation from Lyft as well, and
the money value can be changed depending upon the situation.
Uber
had been talking about offering a part of the shares of the company
to its drivers since 2016, and last year, in May, the Uber CEO Dara
Khosrowshahi also announced that the company was planning to provide
extra benefits and rewards to its drivers. Uber has also started free
tuition fee and insurance programs for the drivers working for the
company.
Noticeably, both Lyft and Uber are ready to debut on the Nasdaq for their IPOs. It is expected that Lyft between $20 billion and $25 billion in its IPO, and Uber may reach $120 billion in the IPO. Lyft and Uber will be putting hundreds of millions of dollars toward the reward program for its drivers so that they would be able to invest during their IPOs.
Yashica is a Software Engineer turned Content Writer, who loves to write on social causes and expertise in writing technical stuff. She loves to watch movies and explore new places. She believes that you need to live once before you die. So experimenting with her life and career choices, she is trying to live her life to the fullest.
If you are skilled enough you are destined to achieve the goals you set even before you are a graduate. Garrett Camp, a Canadian entrepreneur, was still a student when he started his own business along with three of his college mates. The company gained popularity and within a year, bringing him into the spotlight and making him one of the Top Innovators under the age of 35.
Early Life
Garrett was born on October 4, 1978, in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, to an economist father and an artist mother. Later, his parents started a business of architecture. Garrett completed his high schooling from a local government school. Later, he joined the University of Calgary and received a degree in electrical engineering, in 1996. During his junior year, at the college, he went through an internship, in speech recognition technology from Nortel Networks, Montreal. After graduating from the University of Calgary, he enrolled in the Masters in Software Engineering, in the same University and researched on the collaborative systems, evolutionary algorithms and information retrieval.
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Founding StumbleUpon
Garrett was still in College when he came up with the idea of StumbleUpon. StumbleUpon was the first discovery engine, that was used to find web content for the users. Garrett founded StumbleUpon, with his friends at the University and established its office in San Francisco. The company received its first funding from the Silicon Valley’s Angels Investors. In 2007, eBay acquired StumbleUpon for $75 million. The company expanded its service to 25 million registered users in the next year. Camp re-acquired the company in 2015, as it went under debt, and helped the company recover its original status, once again. The company is still running its website successfully.
Other Ventures
In 2009, with Travis Kalanick, Garrett co-founded Uber, a transportation network company as UberCab. He made the initial funding for the project of $250K, himself. The idea behind Uber was to make the black taxis affordable for the people. Till mid-2012, Uber launched UberX and Uber SUV, making its way in the list of Forbes Top 10 Companies of 2012. Uber has become popular among the people as an affordable medium for travelling and is running its business in 500 cities across the globe.
In 2013, Garett started another venture named Expa that helps other startups financially, by raising funds from the major investors of Silicon Valley.
In 2007, Garrett was listed among the Top Innovators under the age of 35, at Technology Review’s Emerging Technologies Conference, at MIT and Bloomberg Businessweek named him one of Tech’s Best Young Entrepreneurs in 2008. He spoke at the Wireless Influencers and South by Southwest, many a time and attended the DEMO Mobile 2013, as the judge and the panel member. In 2015, his total wealth was estimated to be US$5.3 billion by Forbes.
Yashica is a Software Engineer turned Content Writer, who loves to write on social causes and expertise in writing technical stuff. She loves to watch movies and explore new places. She believes that you need to live once before you die. So experimenting with her life and career choices, she is trying to live her life to the fullest.
Uber, the taxi hailing app that also runs food delivery service named UberEATS in countries like Australia, UK, US etc. has launched UberEATS in India. Starting its business in the year 2014 in Los Angeles, UberEATS dominates food delivery space in 26 countries across the world and has a presence in total 78 cities, now including Mumbai as well. Uber has finally launched its food delivery app UberEATS in India starting with Mumbai city. They also announced their plans to expand further to six other major cities in India before the year ends.
Bhavik Rathore, appointed as the Head of UberEATS operations in India, said “Mumbai is home to a booming food industry with a vibrant food culture offering both global and local cuisines. The introduction of UberEats in India, with Mumbai as the first city, is a major step in our global expansion and showcases our commitment to the region”. With an experience of delivering food in 78 countries, the team claims to provide cultural food-variety delivered to doorsteps in just 35 minutes!
That’s all good, but one thing that UberEATS has to keep in mind is- they are not getting a clean slate to start with. Apps like Swiggy, Zomato, Just eat, Foodpanda and many more already have a rich customer base in Mumbai. The new entrant has to fight for its piece of cake. To this Kartik said “While Swiggy and Zomato currently have a strong presence in the market, they have, in effect, cleared the way for Uber by helping build a market that didn’t exist earlier.”
UberEATS brings along some unique features to the game as well. The app is going to provide food suggestions according to your location in the city, which means, interface will be different for every person. Suggestions will depend on availability of associated restaurants around your current location when you open your app. As of now, the brand has already signed deals with more than 200 restaurants including The Bohri Kitchen, Le15, Freahmenu and Chaayos. UberEATS is also interlinked with Uber ride app to provide seamless food delivery if you chose to order something during the ride.
India is evolving, and so does the opportunity to earn more in Indian market. Scaling to India is in every global firm’s checklist (except few like Snapchat). With a population of 20 million and being the third business hub in India, Mumbai becomes the target place to get started. And we hope, UberEATS does well in India utilizing the data from Uber ride and their three years of experience worldwide.
Anup Singh is a professional writer with a bachelors degree in Mechanical Engineering from NIT Durgapur. His love for content writing started 2 years back with writing articles and paper descriptions for college magazine. From then on, he has developed his skills as a technical content writer. He is also a passionate lyricist.
Letting an AI control your car while you are chilling in the back seat or making last moment changes in the final presentation sounds really great in every sense. Even better, who doesn’t want a quick nap in the rides back home after a tiring day at office. A bit scary! Believe it or not, but that’s how we are going to travel in near future. Autonomous driving or self-driving is the next big thing and with some successful implementations already on the road, it’s no more a sci-fi dream. Every auto manufacturer and tech firms like Google, Uber are working for a piece of the pie.
Few months back in last year, Uber launched its first fleet of self-driving Volvo XC90s in Pittsburgh. You could almost hear the auto industry’s collective jaw drop after that. Suddenly, a company providing taxi service was offering a vision of future autonomous transportation.
Following its almost perfect execution in Pittsburgh, Uber decided to expand its territory of self-driving taxis to Arizona. And that’s where things went wrong. On 24th March, one of the Uber’s self-driving car got involved in an accident in Tempe, Arizona. The news spread like wildfire accompanied by an image showing one of the Uber’s Volvo flipped on one side and a dented Honda CV-R. The authenticity of news and image was confirmed by an Uber spokesperson.
“We saw the [Honda] car, it was coming fine on her end, but the other person just wanted to beat the light and kept going,” a witness wrote in the police report. “All I want to say is it was good on the end of the [Honda] driving toward us, it was the other driver’s fault [Uber] for trying to beat the light and hitting the gas so hard.”
Was it actually the car’s fault? Surprisingly, no! It performed in the way it was programmed for the situation. It was cruising at 38mph as it should do over a Yellow signal when Honda’s driver decided to take a turn 3 lanes across shielded by a fleet of cars in 2 of the lanes blocking the sensors of Uber taxi. Although the Uber employ behind the wheels saw the car in last moments, but it was too late and the collision took place.
The whole incident raises an interesting thought: a real driver might have approached the yellow light differently seeing someone troubling with directions. He might have slowed down, way before, seeing a crowded road.
Joshua Brown was killed last year when his Tesla Model S in Autopilot mode collided with a truck. Although Tesla came out clean showing it was more of Brown’s fault for not using brakes although he had 7 seconds to do so. Probably, he grew confident about Autopilot’s ability.
That’s the problem here, the self-driving technology is not yet completely developed. At present, it’s more of an assistance than a completely reliable alternative to manual driving. But the major question still remains; will a computer ever be able to completely replace a seasoned driver?
Anup Singh is a professional writer with a bachelors degree in Mechanical Engineering from NIT Durgapur. His love for content writing started 2 years back with writing articles and paper descriptions for college magazine. From then on, he has developed his skills as a technical content writer. He is also a passionate lyricist.
Travis Kalanick, the man who today owns a $66 billion company, was once broke and faced a lawsuit of $250 billion which could have even landed him behind bars. It was his sheer determination and self-belief which gave him the power to rise up and shine on. He is the man behind the immensely successful company Uber. Uber, the taxi hailing app is a household name around the globe and has taken the transport industry by storm.
Travis Kalanick faced a lot of ups and downs in his life but despite the odds, with his skills and talent, he was able to start a worldwide ever-growing firm whose popularity stunned the world.
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Kalanick was born on August 6, 1976 in Los Angeles. He lived with his family, father, a Civil Engineer and his mother, a newspaper ad saleswoman, in Northridge, California. He did his graduation from Granada Hills High School Los Angeles, California. He had good interest in programming at a young age and started programming around seventh grade. From his childhood, he had skills necessary for being an entrepreneur which he used to hone by selling small items door to door.
After completing high school, he got admission in University of California, Los Angeles where he decided to pursue computer engineering to get a good job later but for a person, with high enough natural caliber of an entrepreneur like him, it was not supposed to last.
Dropping out of college and first startup failure
In University, he realized his true talent and the opportunities through College were insufficient for him to exercise his capabilities to their potential. In 1998, he made a risky yet bold decision to drop out of college with his friends. Travis Kalanick along with his friends Vince Busam and Michael Todd founded Scour Inc. and Scour Exchange which was a multimedia search engine and peer-to-peer file exchange service respectively. This was Kalanick’s debut into the corporate world.
The road to success is never easy and straightforward, so it was for Kalanick. He had to go through a lot of hardships and tough decisions to get to the point where he is today. Emerging in the corporate world with stunning pace it took him no time to get noticed by the big players of the industry.
Scour, the media search engine got very popular as it allowed people search and download videos, movies for free. This rising success of Travis Kalanick and his company was also seen as a threat to business by many other company owners of same niche. Soon Motion Picture Association of America and National Music Publisher Association along with more than 30 companies brought a copyright infringement lawsuit against Scour and sued Scour for a gigantic amount of $250 billion pushing Kalanick and his team to a corner.
With this lawsuit, his company was set to shut down. But, along with it, it could have also landed Kalanick and his team behind bars. But Travis Kalanick with his great presence of mind after considering various possibilities for future decided to save something than nothing and filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and avoided the fine as well as going to jail along with his team. However, as a result he had to shut down the company.
Sun rises but to set Again
This shutdown came as a shock to Kalanick but his persistence didn’t allow him to stop thinking new ideas. In 2001, considering previous incidents carefully along with the Scour’s engineering team he founded a new company called Red Swoosh which was also a peer-to-peer file sharing company that allowed users to exchange large multimedia files.
The idea of Kalanick with this company was to take on all the 33 companies who had sued Scour and turn them into Red Swoosh’s customers which he eventually did.
But things never go the way we want them to be. Soon the bandwidth prices declined and company lost its investments and they had to fire all their employees. But fate had more of it coming against Kalanick. IRS(Internal Revenue Service) ran a check on Red Swoosh and found that taxes were not being paid to the government completely, hence Kalanick’s company was asked to pay a fine of $110,000 or a jail term. Kalanick somehow managed to get the money as funding from Mark Cuban.
But this incident led to an internal dispute between Kalanick and Todd which eventually resulted in a falling out between the two and Travis took over the company. Thus, there was more pressure of work on him than he could handle, thinking about work all the time, he slowly lost all his friends and was left all alone in the end.
Later in 2007, things got completely out of hand and Travis had to sell the company to an American Corporation, Akamai Technologies, which bought Red Swoosh for $19 million.
“If someone can do it, then I can do it too”
With 2 such huge unsuccessful business startups at the age of 30, his life was in chaos, such circumstances could have broken down any human being but not Travis Kalanick. While trying his best to see through the current situation, he happened to see Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which is the work of a 70-year-old director. It instilled in him a thought process:
“If some old person can do something like that then I can still do much more than I have done yet”.
As a result, the diminished flame of perseverance to achieve the goal in his heart lit again and made him take another step in the corporate world. With his creativity and visionary thinking combined, he came up with a revolutionary idea of combining technology with everyday life.
Masterpiece: The Star-Lit Sky
In 2009, Travis regained the confidence of investors and managed to get a seed funding of $1.25 million and started Uber, which is a mobile application for hiring and ride-sharing vehicles. It works by connecting passengers and drivers of such available vehicles, and created a milestone in the history of both technology and corporate world by merging mobile technology with daily life in a creative yet very handy manner for common people.
Today, Uber is a well-known platform for hiring rides across the globe with just a tap. Just like many other products Uber has become a brand name for hiring rides. Being a convenient and easy to use application for mobile platform Uber was greeted by people with open hands. Since its launch in 2009, it has been able to increase its user base to more than 66 countries with the company’s net valuation to $66 billion, making Kalanick a Star Shining proudly in the Corporate World.
“The Lone Wolf”
Today being acknowledged as one of the world’s most renowned entrepreneurs, Kalanick is often invited to speak at various business events and conferences like LeWeb and Tech Cocktail to share his views on the present business matters being discussed worldwide.
It is Kalanick’s sheer determination and will power to reach greater heights with which he has gone against the tide from time to time to reach his goals. No matter how difficult a situation is, he always makes sure to work his way through it and see it to the end the way he wants.
Chasing his dreams with all he’s got did place him in Forbes’s List Of World Billionaires, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg compared to his achievements in life.
As Kalanick states:
“The entrepreneur community, there’s a certain kind of founder, they call them a ‘lone wolf.’ I probably fit in that category.”
Ikrant Kumar Bhatia is a Digital Marketing Enthusiast and is passionate about becoming an Entrepreneur. He is currently working as an Internet Marketer and planning to come up with his own Startup.
