Uber co-founder Travis Kalanik visited Moscow

For the first time in seven years of the existence of a private Uber taxi startup, the founder and head of the company Travis Kalanik visited Moscow. He spent a half-hour performance at the Strelka Institute on Red October, and then answered questions for another half hour.

Uber is an international company and an eponymous mobile application with which you can call and pay for private taxi services. Uber operates in dozens of countries, hundreds of cities and from month to month penetrates new markets. The popularity of the service is dictated by relatively low prices, including due to non-compliance with a number of regulations on the regulation of private carts. For the same reasons, in some countries conflicts arise with Uber.

Kalanik began the lecture with the weather: June, and in Moscow freezing. He mentioned that his college girl was Russian. Therefore, he knows a few words in Russian. This is not surprising: having seen Travis for the first time at a party, the girl’s father made her drink a glass for every Russian word she learned. But the word “traffic jams” (from the stage it sounded so, with an accent) the head of the transport startup remembered only in Moscow, on the way from the airport to the city.

In Russia, Uber operates in the capital and several million-plus cities. Uber still penetrates the new market, not all services are available. For example, there is no uberPOOL. This system combines passengers with similar directions, and then offers a joint trip. Each passenger only pays for his share of the journey. As Travis said , a critical mass of travel is required for uberPOOL. It is necessary to achieve a certain scale, and then it will be easy to find two people with similar standards. The rapid growth of Uber in the capital brings the volume to the desired goal. Kalanik said that uberPOOL will be launched in Moscow in less than a year.
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Photo by Anastasia Shvetsova

The head of Uber raised the outlook for road transport. The land in the city is expensive, and in the parking lots it goes from 15 to 30%. Automobile emissions in megacities contribute up to 20% of carbon dioxide emissions - one of the causes of the greenhouse effect. The mission of Uber is to “return the city to its inhabitants”. uberPOOL helps to reduce the load on the roads: in Los Angeles, thanks to the service, mileage decreased by 12.7 million kilometers, carbon dioxide emissions fell by 1,400 tons. In Chinese Shanghai and Chengdu, over 100 thousand people drive with uberPOOL every week.

Uber will not only help unload transport lines. Cashless payments, transfers to a bank account and cooperation with city authorities in matters of tax deductions are all part of the policy of returning the city to residents.

Photo by Olga Polishchuk

A number of companies show a keen interest in the development of robotic vehicles, vehicles that do not require human involvement for movement. Google has prototypes, Tesla Motors electric cars have autopilot functions, there are rumors about work at Apple and several other technogiants. Rumor has it that Uber is working on unmanned cars. But Kalanik said that Uber would not like to own a robo mobile park. However, the issue of management and ownership is only the future. Uber will follow the general trend: if robomobils become ubiquitous, then the company will work in this direction. But for now, the idea of ​​Uber is to serve people in private cars.

The head of Uber shared the following promising scheme: the person owns the car, but at the time when the vehicle is idle, the car can be sent to the flight. That is, you can rent your car in a taxi company or another company. There is a suitable time, because the most popular time for taxi drivers to leave in world capitals is midnight, when public transport stops working. On the other hand, Kalanik believes that specialized managers will most likely own robots.

Travis himself also sometimes uses the services of Uber. His rating as a passenger is 4.9.

Travis Kalanic founded Uber in 2009 in San Francisco. Several rounds of investment were followed by expansion to other cities in the United States, then the countries of Europe and the rest of the world. Last week, the company received a $ 3.5 billion investment from the sovereign fund of Saudi Arabia. The latest valuation of the company is about $ 68 billion.