V fun read ( )

Well-written book about the rise of Airbnb and Uber, with mentions of Lyft and a short detour to China and Didi towards the end. I found it easy to follow as an audio book. What was most surprising to me was how Stone is able to lay out how all of these companies basically used the same strategies when it came to dealing with local laws/existing companies: ignore, fight, lobby, essentially do anything to allow their service to operate and thrive. This is what you'd expect from a corporation, but it was enlightening to see that the services were near-indistinguishable in terms of tactics. And yet, only Uber was caught in significant / long-lasting bad press (remember #deleteuber?), primarily because of the interactions Kalanick had with regulators and the press. Good lessons here around how people perceive a whole company based solely on the temperament of its founders. In this case, actions didn't speak louder than words. ( )

A really excellent book that gives you a flavour of the difficulties and opportunities of the entrepreneurial challenge as well as the force of will required to build successful companies. It is also an enjoyable story as well. ( )

Not as good as 'The Everything Store'. After reading that Stone had a another book coming I knew I had to read it. I loved 'The Everything Store', which is about the rise and dominance of Amazon.com and the man behind it, Jeff Bezos. Over the years I had become increasingly uneasy about the stories about the company, particularly about the working conditions in the warehouses. That book detailed how that mentality and the rise of people wanting their stuff immediately (if not now) has created a culture that is reflective of both the warehouse and right up to the top of the chain. 
 
So I was very excited to see what Stone would do about two sharing economy giants: Uber and Airbnb. Even though I haven't actually used either (tried UberEats a couple of times) it seemed like it could be a great book that would round out my knowledge from newspaper articles and stories. 
 
Honestly, it's not. The book reads like too little material stretched out into a book. And unlike 'Everything', which had multiple interviews/conversations with people who had a range of views (but they mostly agreed on the brutality of the demand and why people burned out), this seemed a little too insider-y. It could be that both companies are still relatively young (Amazon is too, but Amazon probably benefited from the dot com boom of the 90's) and are going through some rather interesting growing pains/legitimate criticisms of how the companies are run, the treatment of their employees, the responses to customers, etc. 
 
I'm not saying the book should have been slanted negatively but it just seems a bit too glossy and shiny and it's hard to tell (for me) exactly what plays into that. At times it just felt a bit too "Look at us! Look at our success! Ignore the negative stuff!" Like others I also found the Uber parts more interesting than the Airbnb sections but I'm not sure if this was the best way to present these two companies. 
 
Maybe I just expected a bit too much after enjoying 'The Everything Store' a lot. It's not terrible and if you have an interest in either company it might be a good read. But TES was the better book. Library borrow. ( )