This morning a friend reminds of a Paul Graham article from 2008 titled Cities and Ambition. It’s excellent. For those of you who don’t know, Paul is the outspoken founder of Y Combinator—a prominent early-stage startup investor in Silicon Valley.
The general thesis of Paul’s article is simple yet elegant. Cities speak to us. They influence our behavior. They shape who we are. It matters where you live. A lot I would argue.
The last year has been rough for ridesharing app Uber, what with a litany of regulatory challenges, lawsuits over intellectual property infringement, and questions about gender relations in the workplace. The new year even brought a Twitter-driven #DeleteUber campaign.
So, how’s the business of ridesharing doing? Well, we don’t have good government statistics for 2016 yet, but we do now have such data for 2015, and these show that the hyper-growth of ridesharing that we documented last year is, if anything, accelerating. In fact, just-released data from the U.S. Census Bureau on “nonemployer firms,” which tracks the activity of freelancers (as in the gig economy), shows that 2015 saw the strongest growth of ridesharing yet. Ridesharing through Uber, Lyft, and other apps showed no signs of plateauing in 2015, and instead, the evolving industry spread—including into new metropolitan areas.