Idea That Changed The Way We Travel And Rent A Room

I live in the city of Mumbai. Everyday while going to my office, I used to observe that most of the cars on the road were having only one person and the roads were over-crowded with cars. During peak business hours due to traffic congestion, the cars usually move at the most at the speed of 15 to 20 km per hour! It was somewhere around 2007, an idea came in my mind, simple idea  that if instead of one person per car four person travel together than the number of cars on the road will be reduced to one fourth. This reduction of cars on the road  will not only increase the ease of travel by cutting travel time but also save millions of rupees in our oil imports every week. Not only that it will drastically reduce the air pollution. With that thought idea of an NGO 'Share a vehicle Save the planet' was born. I share this idea with a friend of mine. We sat together three consecutive evenings and prepared blue print. We met with Executive Directors of four top corporate viz., Indian Oil Corporations, Hindustan Petroleum  per month , Oil & Natural Gas Commission (ONGC) and Hindustan Lever, narrated our idea.Each one of them saw our presentation and also listened us passionately. At the end surprisingly the answer was same, 'Idea is brilliant but fraught with big risk as each time four strangers share the vehicle it will pose safety and security problem. Felt disheartened , we left the project.

But success of two starups viz. Uber and Airbnb shows altogether a different story. Emergence of smart technology made idea of getting into a stranger's car or staying overnight in a stranger's home possible. Our idea of sharing a car with strangers to save fuel, road congestion as well as pollution could not convince four smart corporate heads but the same bizarre and dangerous idea has become beginning of brilliant business success stories of our time.

Yes, the daring entrepreneurs upended two of the worlds most established hotel and transportation industries world wide. Led by Travis Kalanicks of Uber and Brian Cheskey of Airbnb, these upstarts of changed the way we commute and stay overnight. 

Precisely nine and half years back, something remarkable happened. It was around 19th January 2009, nearly two million people poured into Capital city Washington DC of America,  for the swearing in ceremony of President Barrack Obama, but not every one there was just bearing witness. Among the throngs that gathered to brave the mid-Atlantic-winter chill, two groups of young entrepreneurs from San Francisco were on the verge of not just watching history but making it. The three founders of a little known website called Airbedandbreakfast.com decided to attend at the last minute, Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, and Nathan Blecharczyk finally convinced a common friend, Michael Seibel, the CEO of Justin.tv, a streaming video site, to go with them. They were all in their mid-twenties and had no tickets to the festivities, or winter clothes, or even firm grasp of the week's schedule. But they saw an opportunity, their company had limped along for over a year with little to show for it. Now, the eyes of the world would be on the USA's capital and they wanted to take advantage. They found a cheap crash pad in DC, an apartment in a drafty three floor house near Howard University that, like so many other homes during that desperate time was in foreclosure. The rooms were furnished save a pullout sofa which the three founders gave to Seibel. At night, they crowded onto the hardwood floor on the airbeds along with their host, the manager of a local restaurant. Sensing the promotional opportunity, Chesky e-mailed to Good Morning America, and a producer promptly included it in a roundup of unusual accommodation for inauguration. That was the baby step to the billion dollar business that had later shaken foundation of established players of hospitality industry. 

Almost similar story of Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick, they also attended the festivities of that week in Washington DC, their experience was nearly as ignominious. A common friend of them investor Chris Sacca, who was on the inaugural convinced them to come. Kalanick, basically from Los Angels sold his startup to the web infrastructure company Akamai, made $25,000 towards donation to the inaugural committee. Both were in their early thirties, full of optimism about the coming transformative effects of technology despite the meltdown of the global economy. The night before the inauguration, they ended up stranded in a line outside the Nuseum (Museum of News), trying to get into party hosted by Huffington Post. That was the crowded space, it was difficult to reach to a taxi so Kalanick excited about the business idea that would allow anyone with smartphone to call a black town-car with a click of button. So the seed were sown for Uber.

So to cut the long story short, Uber and Airbnb, these two San Francisco based companies, their headquarters only a mile apart, started at the same time, created great business by using mobile application, mapping tools and power of social media platforms. The common thing is despite their great business turnover, their businesses own little in the way of physical assets. Airbnb can be considered the biggest hotel company on the planet, yet it possesses no actual hotel rooms. Similarly, Uber is among the world's largest car service, yet it does not employ any professional drivers or own any vehicles. They are the ultimate twenty-first century internet businesses, bringing not only new opportunities but new kinds of risks, often poorly understood, to those who provide and utilize their services.

Uber, as the world well knows, allows anyone to summon a vehicle with ease, track its progress on a virtual map, and then ride with a driver whose reliability is illustrated by a one to five star ratings based on customer feedback. The rider pays without awkward exchange of cash or time consuming swipe of credit card. The brilliance of this seamless transaction is so widely accepted in the LCD lit halls of Silicon Valley that it inspired surge of similar businesses in the fields of food delivery, package pickups, babaysitting services and the list is endless.

Airbnb has extended the experience of traveling abroad well beyond manicured realm of the hotel and the central tourism district. The concept is so simple. Allow anyone to make a spare couch, unused bedroom, vacant in law apartment, or empty second home available to a traveler on a short term basis. Though the idea is not unique, but the elegance of the solution is unrivaled. Carefully selected pics and reviews from previous transactions introduce the host and the guest to each other before they meet in person. Like Uber, cash is deleted from the equation. Airbnb collects the transaction fees from the guest when the lodging is booked and remit it to the host, minus its cut, after the stay is complete.  So simple. 

Creating two multi billion dollar companies in a short span of eight-nine year is a subject of case study, but this supersonic rise is not without controversy. Travis Kalanick of Uber came in media limelight due to many wrong reasons, the controversies were so strong that Travis Kalanick had no choice but to vacate the post of CEO and former GE chief Jeffrey Immelt took over.