The emergence of Uber X was really the most important pivot maybe in the history of Silicon Valley. It's a vast majority of Uber's revenues, and so that flexibility and the rapid growth and the fighting the battles, it's all Travis. You can't take any credit away from him.

The one thing that Airbnb had was, Brian and Joe were designers, and they did a great job. They also had Nate Blecharczyk, who was the CTO, who I describe his history as a high schooler and at Harvard as really a creator of tools for spammers.

A lot of the drawbacks, a lot of the difficulties that Uber has had, have been completely predictable, and they handled them poorly, so by their own standards they made a lot of mistakes, and I think that they would admit that.

Brad Stone Quotes