Tom Foster - Reimagine the entire industry
But perhaps the most important thing in this building is on Arison’s computer. It’s a document that lists everything he learned from his experience with Taxi Magic, which he’s now applying to Shift.
This might be the biggest Uber lesson of all, and one that Arison hasn’t yet internalized: If you want to build a transformative company, you have to reimagine an industry, or create a new one, not buff up an old one. That’s why Uber succeeded where Taxi Magic failed. It didn’t try to improve taxis; it replaced them.
Depasquale, Arison’s former mentor, has some ideas of what a truly disruptive business model might look like for Shift. “Why not think about ways to aggregate people who live near one another who might want to share a car,” he says, “and maybe work on selling shared cars, where people pool money and you manage the title and the booking system for them?” In other words, reimagine the way things have always been done.
— Tom Foster