In the winter of 2008, Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp were at a tech conference in Paris. At the end of a snowy evening, they tried to hail a taxi and couldn’t get one. It led the pair to wonder: What if you could simply request a ride using your phone? They didn’t pursue the idea right away, but Camp kept thinking about the question and bought the domain name UberCab.com.
A year later, he and Kalanick reunited and began creating a smartphone app that could be used to order cars—the idea was that with a tap of a button, GPS would identify the user’s location and the app would connect users with available drivers in the area; when the ride was completed, the fare would automatically be charged to the user’s account. Camp and Kalanick first tested the app with an initial fleet that consisted of only three cars. By 2022, the company Uber reported a total of 7.6 billion trips.
