Uber's true entrepreneurial history: Each of its founders is now worth $5 billion

Uber is already 5 years old. For many users, the days when they could only rely on taxis or call for a car to go out seem to have become an unimaginable history. Uber has certainly grown up, even if it has not yet grown into a giant company. Currently, Uber has entered 311 cities in 58 countries around the world. To mark its fifth anniversary, Uber is hosting a series of promotional events in its hometown and first market, San Francisco. The company's CEO Travis Kalanick will deliver a speech to Uber employees, drivers and various VIP guests. Topics included challenges facing big cities (e.g., how to make roads safer, how to deal with traffic congestion, how to increase economic growth opportunities, etc.) and how Uber plans to respond. In addition, Uber employees in San Francisco will also travel to various parts of the city this week to volunteer to participate in some municipal construction projects. "Some Things about the Internet" recommends this article.

To mark its fifth anniversary, Uber recently allowed five of the company's earliest employees to be interviewed by the media to talk about how they came to Uber and what their earliest tasks were. Their stories all share some common themes, such as accidentally joining a company that seemed insignificant at first, then working hard to innovate, using Twitter to job seek, and keeping up with important technological developments. The following is the interview transcript.

Ryan Graves and Austin Gates in the company's early days.

In 2009, Ryan Graves was still working for General Electric and he felt he needed a change.

I said, “I can’t be a general person.” I want to be in the entrepreneurial world. So I followed a lot of people in New York on Twitter, as well as angel investors around the country, because I figured angel investors knew what the next big thing was.

I want to know about the next innovation. I went to meet the people at Foursquare (a mobile service website based on user location information). At the time, there were only four or five of them and they didn't offer any internship opportunities or business positions, but I still went to Chicago and actually started working for Foursquare. I was doing this for about 3 months when I saw a tweet from Travis through the Twitter account of an angel investor I followed. He talked about Uber's investment from big institutions and support from big names. I think that sounds very interesting.

So I sent him a private message and wrote a few paragraphs introducing myself. We talked for two hours, until one in the morning. Then I woke up my wife in the middle of the night and said, "Hey, how about we move to San Francisco?" We were living in Chicago at the time. She said, "If you feel good about it, I support you."

Graves moved to San Francisco in February 2010. The new company had a lot of work to do, especially continuing to refine the products developed by Uber co-founder Garrett Camp.

Garrett had a prototype, but it didn't work very well. So the first thing we did was to find a company to restructure it before entering the Apple App Store. That company was called Mobley, and it was later acquired by the group-buying site Groupon. We then designed the UberCab.com website. We also refined the registration process and integrated the credit card payment system. All the most basic business frameworks need to be built. At the time, we would often meet a driver in a coffee shop and ask him questions to see if our ideas would be accepted in the real world.

Conrad Whelan had previously worked in the technology sector in his hometown of Calgary, Canada. Garrett Kemp is also Canadian, and the two have known each other for many years. An eye-opening trip and a phone call changed everything.

In January 2010, I went on a crazy road trip across Europe. After traveling through Spain and Portugal, I realized there was a big world out there and I had to get out of Calgary. But at that time, I didn't want to go to another startup, I just wanted to take a break. One day, I gave Garrett a call to see how he was doing. When he found out I was free and about to move, he pretty much offered me a job to come to San Francisco and help him start Uber.

Whelan was Uber's first engineer.

When I first joined the company, the product was not yet available for registration and was just a way to reserve a vehicle. So I built a signup flow that requires a credit card and generates a user account. Once this is done, we can officially release the product. It was June 1, 2010, exactly two months after I joined Uber.

The next thing I did was to optimize Uber’s dispatch algorithm to avoid drivers missing a vehicle dispatch task. This process lasted about three years, which was pretty cool.

Ryan McKillen was Uber's second engineer. He had learned about the company from Gravis. Like him, Gravis graduated from Miami University in Ohio, and the two met in San Francisco. At the time, Uber was renting a small office space from another startup called Zozi.

In the end, we rented a small conference room in their office, the kind that was separated by a glass wall. The table is almost as big as the room. I still remember the first morning at the company, as soon as I stepped through the threshold, I noticed a pile of books on the table, all about computer science, programming, and databases. They are all original, even the covers are intact. There was also a tattered book that looked like it had been read countless times. The first thing I said was, “Hey, Conrad, why is there a Spanish dictionary on your desk?” He looked at me and said, “Because the code is in Spanish. Welcome to Uber.”

Austin Gates joined Uber as an intern. She ended up doing so many jobs that she became an expert on how to write the script for Uber to open new markets.

At that time, I had just graduated from school and was looking for a job, and the economic environment was also very bad. I follow a bunch of random people in tech on Twitter. Then I saw a few tweets about Uber, probably from Jason Calacanis, that looked interesting. I heard they were looking for interns, so I reached out to Ryan Graves, who was then the CEO of Uber. I said to him, “You have to give me a chance.”

That was August 2010. Soon he called me and said, "Answer a few questions first." I tried to give my own answers. I like looking at what Uber is today. And then he quickly said, “Why don’t you come over?” And I went to meet them.

At the time, they were using Zozi's office, and space was tight. I went to meet them. I don’t remember what we talked about, but it was a very casual atmosphere, which I liked. I remember I was dressed very formally that day, but they all looked nerdy.

I thought to myself, "These guys are really cool, they're really passionate about what they do, and their product is really interesting." So I asked Graves to give me a chance, and he said yes. To be honest, I'm not very qualified. The first few months were tough, and I didn’t do very well. But even when I was still relatively new, they did not give up on me until I gradually became familiar with the business.

I'm an intern, so my job is not very stable. I remember handing out flyers outside the Moscone Center, but no one wanted to take them. I also cold-call a lot of drivers on Yelp. Later the first driver who supported us came. I was like, “I can do this.” We had tried phone support early on, and those calls went straight to my phone. If I didn't pick up, it would go to Gravis's phone. If Gravis doesn't answer either, the call will be transferred to Travis's cell phone. But then, someone called at three in the morning and said, "I can't get a car." So we turned off phone support. In the beginning, that was the contribution I could make.

Since I was a fresh graduate at the time, I felt that I couldn't write a decent email. And I quickly realized, “Oh, everybody just writes whatever comes to mind.” In a startup, nobody knows what they’re doing. Once I gained confidence in this, my work quickly became easier.

Once we started getting support from users, I thought, "Okay, I'm going to do all the support." I took on the blog community management side of things and a lot of the grunt work. Then our person in charge of driver operations left the company. They said, “Austin, can you take on this as well?” I said, “Of course.” So from that point on, I was responsible for managing the relationships with the partners.

At that time, we were only engaged in the business of concierge cars. One time I was meeting a client and I was walking out with him when I saw him get into a pink Chrysler Caravan. I thought: "Let's finally do a vehicle inspection in advance later."

Every time I did a promotion in a city, I took notes on everything I did, and that was our initial, very rough "script." Later, every time I arrived in a city, I would modify the "script" to make it more efficient. They said, "Why don't you hire some marketing people?" I ended up hiring about 50 people. My attitude was: "Seek forgiveness." I was responsible for this great expansion.

Rachel Holt moved to Washington to be with her boyfriend, who is now her husband. She responded to an Uber job posting and began promoting Uber in the nation’s capital.

I arrived in Washington on November 8, 2011. We made our first order on November 18th. So for 10 days, we kind of put everything behind us. At first it was just me and another promotion team, and they started about two weeks after me. I felt like a blind man riding a blind horse.

Washington was the first market where we encountered regulatory challenges. The irony is that when I first arrived in Washington, I said I didn't want to do anything even remotely political. We officially launched the product on December 15, 2011.

I remember it was January 11, 2012, less than a month before our official launch. I had just returned to Washington from San Francisco, but Uber was already very popular in Washington. From a corporate perspective, Uber has done very well. I met with Travis and Bill Gurley in San Francisco, who were both in their offices. We worked really hard and the whole team was busy every day.

As soon as I got back to Washington, news popped up on Twitter that the taxi regulator had declared Uber illegal in Washington. We tried every possible way to solve this problem. Of course, since this is Washington, everyone is interested in regulatory stories, so the Washington Post and many blogs are commenting on this. It was discovered that an official from the taxi management department asserted that "it was illegal" without citing any regulations. Just a few words made everyone go crazy and anxious for two days. Then I got a call: "The taxi officer wants to test drive us, what should we do?" I said, "Let him take a test drive, we didn't do anything wrong." He stopped the car at the Mayflower Hotel, called in the media, impounded the driver's car, and wrote him a $2,000 ticket.

That day I called each of our partners one by one and told them, "Now that this has happened, we support you 100%. If something like this happens again, no matter what the ticket or citation is, we will compensate you at the full price. We support you." We called every driver. We had more drivers on the road that night than before this incident.