CNN highlights the efficiencies of getting around in Uber

CBS covers the recent news about Uber’s C&D’s

Super excited to have the chance to come down to New Orleans (even in the midst of quite the crazy week at Uber) to talk at TribeCon. This is my maiden voyage as far as conference speaking gigs goes so, yes I’m a bit nervous that I can entertain, but I’m pumped to make people think a bit. With Baratunde, Micki, and Ben as features speakers the expectations are quite high… they’re all pretty rad.

Either way, I’m going to be sharing a few take aways on problems. I’ve found that startups are really centered around problems. Without them *probs* innovative solutions couldn’t exist, and without them you wouldn’t be a startup, because no startup road is smooth. So, how do we deal with problems? What do you do with problems? How do you empower problems to work in your favor? That’s what I’m going to provide a teeny tiny bit of my experience in breaking down.

Further, real estate agents and investors talk about location as their must. I fully believe that problems, are the startup equivalent to real estates, location. Thinking through problems and making decisions on how to solve, resolve, and dominate is the life blood of a startup. Being as this conf is about communities I’m going to share how I’ve found problems to be a driving force in rallying communities. I may not be a community expert, but I’ve seen a few problems recently.

Last week TechCrunch ran an article leaking the news that UberCab had closed our Seed round of funding. Our initial hope was to hold that news off until we could launch a new site (coming soon) along with the funding announcement. We had hoped to completely own the telling of that story, but as we realized, this wasn’t going to be the case, so we had a decision to make. Option 1: Keep quiet and let the journalist fill in the facts of the story, or Option 2: Provide the details and influence the story to be told accurately. We would have loved to keep control, but we had to embrace reality and influence the outcome as best we could.

So, what can you do about it? Sometimes nothing. But, my gut tells me that when things get out of control, or out of your control (big difference), you should guide the situation where possible. So, when we got news that the funding announcement was leaking whether we liked it or not, we decided to provide all the information that would be needed in order for the story to be correct. We decided to provide details and keep some influence. We confirmed funding amounts and investors involved. We opted to provide the journalist, who’s job it is to post this type of information when they have  access to it (gotta love them for it), all of the details in order to report accurately.

In the end it turned out to be the right decision. While the attention we’re getting for raising money is not something that we necessarily wanted this early, it’s helped awareness of our product and the problems that we’re solving for YOU our users, which is a win. Now however, there are entities and “ankle biting” competition that will inevitably pop up. Now that the story was told pretty accurately, it’s time for us to getting back to things we can control.

This is going to be a short post, because the reality is that I don’t know a ton about this topic. But I’m right down in the mix of it and I’ve got a few first lessons that I think might be valuable for the folks who are as fresh as I am. I don’t mean to discredit what I’ve learned and I don’t mean to state this as gosspil or any kind of genius, it’s just real and from the trenches.

Title does matter.

In posting a job, it’s absolutely critical that you get the job title correct. It matters for the company to guide the structure of the team, it matters for the individual to provide clarity on what her responsibilities may be, and it matters for marketing and getting people interested in applying for the job. It needs to be clear and descriptive enough that in one glance the persons applying will have a solid idea of the work they will be doing. Similarly, it helps to have enough buzz words that it’s at least some what appealing to an applicant…if not sexy. There’s trends in job titles and as an executive hiring for those roles it’s pretty darn important to understand those trends.

UberCab is currently hiring for an awesome business side startup role that will be responsible for huge growth of our company if executed on correctly. The job started out as ‘City Manager’, thinking that this person would own the overall operations of a city. We thought the generality of the title would imply great responsibility and opportunity, I was wrong. We realized that nobody understands what the hell a City Manger would do. The title had to change.

We rewrote the job post and title to read ‘Operations Mgr’. This seemed closer to what we needed but soon realized that Operations Mgr was attracting a type of person that’s was way off from what we needed. It attracted an older crown who had “operations” experience doing projects with construction companies and the like. Not our target. Operations Mgr could also be misread in the startup world for a technical operations role, which this role is not.

Finally, we’re on Business Operations Analyst, first because it captures the unique business side startup opportunity that we’re offering. Second, the role is heavily operational in that there will be management of our fleets on a day to day basis. And third, the title of analyst implies someone that may be a bit junior but will be data driven and work their ASS off. In the consulting world analysts are the grunts, well in the startup world we’re all the grunts. Our understanding of this role and the title that we’ve chosen to recruit for it are optimized and iterated upon and now we’re really starting to see the type of resumes we originally setup for.

I’ll keep this post update with our hiring status & you can apply here > http://ubercab.com/jobs

There are many beneficial factors I could write about when it comes to why Silicon Valley (or more specifically, San Francisco) is awesome for starting a company. The reality is that there are very specific business benefits that I’ve experienced over the past 5 months in launching a business and seemingly popular product in SF. The strongest of all of those benefits is the value of customer forgiveness.

In the first 2 months of UberCab being live in the app store, we’ve seen tremendous *but early* growth. We went from doing 5 rides in a single night, to nearly 50 rides in a single night. Bam! We’ve gotten here quickly because we’ve made our product easy to use and awesome to talk about, and the organic word of mouth that everyone covets so dearly is exactly what has driven our growth. But greater than the value of social web word of mouth is the fact that customers are using these channels to help us improve, and we’re listening.

About a month ago we went through a relatively small stretch (a few days) of wacky billing. 1 of 3 trips had a completely wrong total fare and we decided, because we’re a lean & scrappy team that we were going to go face down on fixing the issue and combat the potential bad press with PHAT customer service. It worked. We found that if approached head on, the problems of inaccurate fares were actually an opportunity to expose ourselves to our surprisingly forgiving customers in our most vulnerable state. For that, they loved us. We solidified a number of customers that I suspect we’ll have for a long time to come just because we honestly explained our error, hooked them up with Uber credits, and sincerely said, Thank you.

Launching products in New York, Chicago, or wherever else, I’m convinced that you wouldn’t have the same customer forgiveness as you’d see in the Valley. People here understand product infancy, they understand under resourced teams and they generally respect the sheer man hours and passion that goes into making a product work even half the time. It’s truly been mind boggling the amount of love, forgiveness, and sharing we’ve seen around UberCab over the past 2 months being live.

All I can say now is, thank you dear clients for sticking with us. We won’t stop busting our ass, being PHAT on customer service, and generally working hard so that you keep saying, WOW…and forgive us from time to time.

**value of customer forgiveness might be coin-able, if so feel free to quote ;)

In hind site it’s really too bad that these interviews didn’t come with any equity exchange because our third interview was with now CEO of Groupon, Andrew Mason. Andrew shared his ideas for his startup ThePoint.com, which transformed from an idea to bring people together for collective action, to a company focused on bringing people together for collective purchase, Groupon.com. Both brilliant ideas but the latter turned out to be incredibly profitable.

In the interview Andrew talks a bit about how ThePoint secured their first funding and how and where the team worked. It’s always fascinating to see the origins of startups and I’m super happy for Andrews incredible successes over the last couple of years.

Also, please excuse the amateur nature of the intro. We were Gary V inspired and really excited about ActionsTalk :)

So a few weeks ago Zappos sent me a couple books for free :) …

Then on the flight back from SF last week, where/when I do most of my reading, I wrapped up ‘Delivering Happiness‘ by Tony Hsieh of @Zappos. I got the books as a part of their blogger out reach campaign. As far as I know it’s worked really well. I’ve seen a ton of posts around the interwebs today…

In short the book made me really happy, seriously. It was a cool mix of personal stories from Tony’s young entrepreneurial endeavors, all the way up to the sale (or marriage as he calls it) of Zappos to Amazon for $1.2B. His accomplishments are freakin amazing… let’s do some quick math…

He started a company called LinkExchange in 1997-ish and solid it after 2.5 years for $260 million dollars. Then he joined Zappos in 2000 and sold it to Amazon for $1.2B 10 years later. This means that each year he’s with a company, over his career he’s added $100 million / year of value to those companies.

Show me another entrepreneur with that track record!

The book starts out with Tony’s first venture, a worm farm. And in his pursuits for profit he learns he must have a passion for his work in order to succeed. Then with Zappos, a truly brilliant company, he’s realized that a purpose must back that passion in order to create LONG TERM sustainability. The book details the 10-Core-Values of Zappos’ culture and provides indepth letters from employees about how that culture and the Core values have impacted their lives and experiences at Zappos.

Tony is a brilliant entrepreneur and someone I really look forward to meeting someday soon.

Thanks Tony & Zappos for the books! I’ll surely be passing them along.

Our goal for all UberCab users, called clients, is for you to feel like a baller every time you use UberCab. We want you to not only arrive at your destination safely, simply, and efficiently, but we want you to arrive in STYLE.

UberCab clients typically use their iPhone application (also works via SMS) to request a black car limo service within a matter of minutes.

As an UberCab client you’ll get:

• one click iPhone requests
• location based dispatch
• on demand limo service
• in app billing – no cash needed

For Drivers

Drivers working with UberCab are able to turn down time into profit. Simply, we’ll keep you busy and making money.

UberCab operates as a lead generation service for limo companies. By using our iPhone application drivers become available for client requests that are designed to come from clients closest to you.

As an UberCab driver you’ll get:

• immediate ride requests
• never worry about billing
• direct client communication
• a supplement to your existing business

For Partners

There are huge benefits to being an UberCab partner. These are the companies that have multiple cars in their fleet and want to join/partner with UberCab with multiple cars.

When you have multiple cars driving on the UberCab platform you’ll receive actionable analytics about your cars and the trips they’re taking. Better analytics and visibility means better management and more profit!

As an UberCab partner you’ll get:

• real time fleet analytics
• detailed trip logs
• direct customer feedback on ALL trips
• simple billing solutions for fleets

For more information on UberCab or the UberCab team check out our About page, or follow us on Twitter and our blog. Our app will be in the iPhone app store VERY soon too, so keep an eye out!

Summary: UberCab is looking for our first full time engineer. This is a ground floor opportunity with salary + equity in a soon to be high profile SF startup. We have a working product, amazing angel investor list & top-tier hands on advisors such as Garrett Camp (CEO-StumbleUpon), Travis Kalanick (sold RedSwoosh), Tim Ferriss (author of ’4 Hour Work Week’). Read our post…

Hello, we are UberCab, a San Francisco startup with big ambitions to re-engineer the transportation industry with mobile location based services & applications. We’re looking for a developer who is Uber enough to help us take on that challenge.

The ugly reality in the car services business is that if you need a ride to be on demand, you’re screwed. Your option is a taxi that you can’t find, is unreliable if you try to call, and takes too long if and when it actually arrives. In many cities across America, when you need a taxi, you come to terms with the possibility of being stranded. This industry is technologically challenged, and has been propped up by a corrupt partnership between Taxi companies and local governments. This pain is our Uber opportunity!

We’ve created a system that will revolutionize the way city-dwellers will get from point A to B. Through a coordinated network of mobile devices we’re providing real-time booking and billing and immediate automated dispatch. No more concern about whether or not your driver arrives or how long it will take. Now you can request, monitor, and pay with complete ease and confidence.

Currently, the platform is in Alpha and we have a few cars on the road, but we need killer tech-talent to blow it out to hundreds of cities and 10’s of thousands of cars around the world. We’re hoping you see a game changer here, we certainly do.

We’re looking for a jack-of-all-trades, a passionate technologist who isn’t afraid of new technologies or new challenges. We want someone who works hard because they enjoy their work and thrives on new challenges. We’re building a complex location based service where pricing, analytics and logistics algorithms that you create will be coordinating billions of dollars in transportation assets, i.e. cars :)

Ideally you’re excited to get your hands in all parts of the system, from mobile app development (iPhone, Android, BBerry, SMS), to backend scaling of location awareness and analytics. You’re an all-important hire for us as you’ll be one of our first full-time developers, which means a significant stake in our success and a ground floor opportunity in a San Francisco startup.

Most application processes suck as bad as the car services industry so we won’t ask you to submit a resume or tell us what kitchen appliance you most resemble (yes, I got that one once). Just answer honestly the questions below and I’ll personally be responding the same day.

1.    What kinds of technology-related side projects or hobbies are you working on?

2.    What’s your coding background? Why did you start and where has it taken you?

3.    What languages/tools are you expert or competent in?  What languages/tools would you like to get to know better?

4.    Give an example of the hardest bit of debugging you’ve had to do, perhaps where it took hours / days to solve a non-obvious problem.  What approaches did you use?  What eventually led to the fix?

5.    What, in your opinion, is the purpose of code documentation, and what constitutes good documentation, in your opinion?

6.    What’s the difference between <?php  ?> and <? phpinfo(); ?> and <?= ?>

7.    When would you use an include() directive over a require()?

8.    What’s the output of the following script:

<?php

$var = 33;

function printer($num) {

echo ‘The variable is ‘.$var.’<br />’;

echo ‘The other variable is ‘.$num.’<br />’;

}

printer($var);

?>

9.    What’s the coolest tech project you’ve worked on, and what was your role and responsibility on it?

10. Tell us your most frustrating, adventurous, or wacky experience getting or riding in a cab. LOLz get bonus points.

We believe whole-heartedly that in hiring it’s talent first, then we work out the details. So if UberCab sounds interesting to you and you think you’re the right fit for us, please reach out, and you’ll be hearing from me.

Cheers,

Ryan

ryan@ubercab.com