UBER'S Wild Ride

There is an ongoing debate in the world of sports, as to whether marketing and success is about the team, or about the celebrity power of individual star athletes. Years ago the NFL made the decision it was about the team. The NBA very consciously made the opposite decision. That individual stars were the key to success.

Without collusion or even a formal meeting, it certainly appears that Silicon Valley, long ago, made the decision that companies often rise or fall on individual celebrities, and their power to sell, market and capture the public imagination.

Steve Jobs of course remains the penultimate example. So to is Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and the founder of Uber, Travis Kalanick. The problem is that in the case of Kalanick, that image is tarnished. This is the world we are going to look at with the executive editor of Fortune, Adam Lashinsky.  He's just written Wild Ride: Inside Uber's Quest for World Domination.

My conversation with Adam Lashinsky:

These are the Guys Who Are Changing the World

It’s kind of amazing that we spent a whole Presidential campaign talking about jobs and outsourcing and immigration, when the fact is that all of that is yesterday’s news.

The real impact on future jobs, income and how we conduct our lives is not coming from Mexico or China, but from Silicon Valley and from that 7 oz rectangular piece of glass in your back pocket.

We’ve already watched the disruption of the music business, the travel business and the retail business. Today disrupters like Brian Chesky and Travis Kalanick have disrupted transportation and hospitality in ways no one could have imagined as recently as just eight years ago.

But disruption has a price; for the disrupter, for society and for those that stand in the way by defending the status quo.

When that happens, it’s always a good story. And that's the story that my guest Brad Stone tells in The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World

My conversation with Brad Stone: