UberCab is the easiest, fastest way to get a black car in San Francisco. One tap dispatches the nearest driver. Fare is charged to the card on file. No cash, no tip, no waiting on hold with a dispatcher. Launching private beta with Bay Area tech leaders.
The Problem
Booking a town car means a phone tree, a hold queue, and a promise the driver "should be there in 30 minutes." Half the time they aren't. No ETA, no visibility, no way to cancel and move on.
Town car firms quote "$65–110 ish" and reveal the number at drop-off. Taxis hit you with a meter. Every trip ends with a small negotiation nobody signed up for.
San Francisco issues 1,500 medallions for a city of 800,000. At 8pm on a Friday the math doesn't work. You stand on Market Street waving while three empty drivers refuse short fares.
Why Now
Three ingredients we needed didn't exist two years ago: GPS in every rider's hand, a distribution channel that reaches riders in one tap, and payment APIs that let us charge a card without a terminal. All three arrived between 2008 and 2009. We're the first marketplace built assuming they're all present.
iPhone 3G (2008) and 3GS (2009) ship with assisted GPS and a persistent data connection. By Jan 2010 there are 21M iPhones in the US. Knowing where a rider and a car both are — in real time — is finally free.
The App Store opened July 2008 and crossed 3B downloads by Jan 2010. A black-car company no longer advertises in SkyMall. It ships a download link and rides the store's ranking algorithm into every commuter's pocket.
Braintree (2007) and the new PCI-compliant tokenization stack mean a card entered once becomes a token we charge silently at drop-off. No signatures. No paper receipts. The ride ends when the rider steps out.
The Solution
UberCab puts licensed town-car drivers on a live map. A rider taps once, sees the nearest car, and a driver is dispatched. The fare is the meter plus 50% — priced upfront, charged to the card on file. Faster than a taxi, cheaper than calling a limo, more reliable than both.
Open the app. Tap "Pick Me Up." We find the nearest TCP-licensed town car and dispatch it. No phone calls, no hold queue, no giving out your cross streets to a dispatcher who asks twice.
Name, photo, car make, license plate, and live position on a map. You walk out when they're two minutes away. You know which car is yours before it pulls up.
Priced upfront, no surprises. You pay more than a cab — that's the trade for a black car, a professional driver, and reliable pickup. A 5-mile SF ride is $24, not $78.
Enter your card once on signup. Tip is built in. At drop-off you step out and walk away. The receipt is already in your inbox.
Our average driver runs 50–70% utilization vs. the 30% they see on phone dispatch. We keep 20% and pay the rest to them, netted weekly. No medallion lease. No idle time waiting on a dispatcher.
How It Works
Everything difficult runs on the back end — GPS dispatch, driver routing, card tokenization, fare calc. The rider sees three screens. So does the driver.
Tap "Pick Me Up." GPS pins your location. Enter a destination or leave it blank. Confirm. You see the fare estimate — metered rate × 1.5 — before a car is even assigned.
Our dispatch engine finds the nearest available TCP-licensed town car and assigns it in under 15 seconds. Rider sees driver name, photo, car model, plate, and live ETA on the map.
Driver arrives. Rider steps in. Rider steps out. The tokenized card is auto-charged — fare + tip + tolls in one line. Email receipt. Rating prompt. Done.
Try the flow a rider sees. Pick your car, hit Confirm, and watch the town car dispatch across San Francisco.
Market
Black-car service in the US is a sleepy industry. Thousands of licensed drivers, no software, no consumer brand. The taxi industry sits next to it, also broken. Smartphone riders are looking for a third option — and there isn't one yet.
Annual consumer spend on taxis, town cars, and limousine service in the US (IBISWorld 2009). Globally the number is $11B+. We are not counting public transit, ride-shares, or rental cars.
NYC, SF, LA, Chicago, Boston, DC, Seattle, Miami, Philly, Atlanta. iPhone penetration above 30%, licensed TCP/livery supply above 2,000 drivers, ride culture already exists.
Win SF (Yr 1), NYC (Yr 2), then LA + Chicago (Yr 3). 8% share in our launch city gets us ~$20M of the $250M SF car-service spend. Repeat in NYC. Repeat again.
Corporate ground transportation (the $2B B2B limo market). Airport fleet partnerships. Intra-city courier delivery. Every one opens up once we have a trusted dispatch network in a city.
Business Model
A typical Bay Area town-car driver earns $22–28/hour on phone dispatch, idling 40%+ of their shift. Our utilization closes that gap — that's why drivers sign up inside a week of hearing about us.
Traction
We've been running a closed beta with the Bay Area tech community. No advertising, no press — invites passed hand-to-hand. The numbers are small, but the signal is loud: every rider who took a first trip took a second trip within 10 days.
Competition
Moat
Dispatch is a physics problem, not a marketing problem. The operator with the most drivers in a given city delivers the shortest pickup time. Short pickups win riders. More riders pull in more drivers. Once that flywheel is running, you can't be out-spent — you can only be out-founded, and we intend to be that founder in every city we enter.
Pickup time is the only metric that matters. More drivers → shorter ETAs → more riders → more trips per driver → more drivers want in. Each city has its own flywheel. Once we hit 8-minute median pickup, the second-place operator in that city stops being a threat.
Every trip teaches our model where demand surges, when, and for how long. After six months we can position drivers 10 minutes ahead of demand — something no cold-start competitor can match without riding our coattails for a year.
Taxis and limo dispatch have decades of accumulated rider distrust. A clean-sheet brand built on "one tap, known price, vetted driver" becomes the default the moment the category wakes up — and the word "UberCab" starts replacing "call a car."
By our fourth launch we expect a 60-day template: driver outreach script, regulatory filings, press hit-list, launch-party spend. Each new city gets cheaper and faster. Year 3 is an operational exercise, not an innovation one.
Go-to-Market
We are not trying to solve global transportation in Year 1. We are trying to become the default way to get a black car in one specific city — San Francisco — then do it again, better and faster, in the next city. Cities are the unit of expansion.
Direct outreach to TCP-licensed town-car drivers and small fleet operators. Pitch is simple: higher utilization, weekly settlement, no medallion lease. Target 200 active drivers in SF before public launch.
The Sacca, Ravikant, Shervin seed network. Demos at SXSW and LeWeb. Referral credit ($10 both sides). Zero paid media in Year 1. Our first 1,000 riders become our investor list.
Every city launch is a TechCrunch story. Local papers (NYT Metro, SF Chronicle) cover the regulatory angle for free. We spend zero on CAC in launch week; we just answer the phone.
Each city gets one dedicated GM running driver acquisition, regulatory, and ops on the ground — a template we will replicate. Ryan Graves is running SF now. Hiring two more GMs with the seed.
Team
A repeat-founder CEO, a repeat-founder operator, and the engineer who wrote the dispatcher. The right four people to build a location-native, real-time marketplace — and the only team that's been obsessing over the problem since the iPhone 3G shipped.
The Ask