Summary of The Upstarts
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Qualities
- Background
- Engaging
Recommendation
Silicon Valley journalist Brad Stone charts the story of two history-making start-ups, Airbnb and Uber. He traces their path starting with Airbnb’s first guests and the moment at the LeWeb conference in Paris when Uber’s founders decided to start an on-demand, iPhone-based ride service to take on the taxi industry. Stone continues through these companies’ first efforts to attract serious investors. His entertaining narrative’s two most compelling aspects are his description of how these small San Francisco start-ups expanded to become major international businesses, and how they dealt with resistance from local industries and regulators whose models they disrupted. Stone recounts their problems, failures and triumphs. While the wealth of the founders and their investors seems to impress Stone a bit too easily, getAbstract recommends his lively book to entrepreneurs, start-up investors and anyone interested in how digital technologies have transformed cities worldwide.
About the Author
Brad Stone, senior executive editor at Bloomberg News, has covered Silicon Valley for more than 15 years. He also wrote The Everything Store, about Jeff Bezos and Amazon.