Simple Reason to Exist Wins

“And you know what utterly beat us? Palm. Because Palm PDAs let you put the phone numbers you kept on scraps of paper or on your desktop computer into a device that you could carry with you. That’s it. That simple. You couldn’t jam a Rolodex into your pocket or purse, so Palm was the right solution for the time. It made sense. It had a reason to exist.”

“The founders started with a customer problem—a problem they experienced in their daily lives—then applied technology. The problem was simple: finding a cab in Paris was next to impossible and hiring private drivers was expensive and took forever. In the days before smartphones, the solution might have been to simply start a new kind of taxi or limo business. But the company’s timing was perfect—the sudden ubiquity of smartphones provided Uber with a platform and put customers into the right mindset to accept their solution. If I can order a toaster with an app on my phone, why shouldn’t I hail a car? That combination of a real problem, the right timing, and innovative technology allowed Uber to shift the paradigm—to create something that traditional cab companies couldn’t even dream of, never mind compete with.”