The audience of this letter is Uber employees, and the context is that the faceless VC who just pushed out their CEO is trying to gain their trust. I think a little flattery here is in Benchmark's interest, true or not.
FWIW, Uber is very far from the most important and promising company of our generation in my mind.
It's probably the company that has had the most concrete impact on my life and the lives of my friends of this generation (depending on how you define generation).
I'll reiterate my point: if getting to the airport a little bit faster or not having to drive home after getting drunk is the most important thing that happened to our generation, well then that's a problem.
first, I would push back against the idea that Uber has vastly increased mobility. It's made mobility slightly less annoying in certain places for certain groups of people. But most parts of the world have had taxis for a long time. You've been able to schedule a taxi for decades, something which Uber just recently added. Prices are a bit better with Uber, but it's unclear if the VC subsidized pricing is sustainable. In places like Cuba and Cambodia the taxis and tuk-tuks have been excellent and painless methods of transportation for generations and often require zero wait and have zero barrier to entry other than the price of the transportation, that is; it requires to smart phone, no data plan, no credit card.
I don't perceive Uber as having done anything other than contribute a level of convenience to transportation. I don't feel as though it's provided mobility to anyone who didn't have it before, it hasn't decreased congestion or pollution. How many lives has it saved? How many people who desperately lacked needed resources has it helped? How much has it decreased dependency on non-renewable resources?
I think companies that provide life-saving resources to people or companies that increase equality are much more important. Creating the technology to get everyone access to clean water or drought resistant crops are some ideas that come to mind.
I'm guessing you don't live in San Francisco, or at least didn't before Uber.
I can recall a number of times waiting on street corners trying to flag a cab for an hour, only to give up and walk home. Calling the taxi company on a busy night was a joke.
At least in this city, transportation was broken. Clean water and draught resistant crops are great in general, but on a personal level I'm still drinking and eating more or less like I was five or ten years ago.
I admit to nitpicking at this point, but my OP was mostly to trying to say that for a company to be called the most important of our generation the value judgement needs to look past the personal level of affluent people who already have their basic life necessities met. Personally, I think the criteria for the greatest company needs to account for all classes of people. If poor people are replacing broken or otherwise overly expensive transportation systems with Uber and those pricing models are sustainable then I'll admit to not giving them enough credit.
Also, Bart allows bikes, San Francisco is always pretty pleasant riding weather, the busses are robust and have provisions for bikes, there's an assistance program for public transit in the bay. But damnit Bart why can't you have 24 hour trains.
I don't know much about lifestraw, but they seem to have made a dent in access to clean water. Do non-profits count? Kiva seems like it does good work and really helped popularized a new idea to help individual aquire loans. As far as transportation, Global Electric Transportation and Pangea Motors created crazy cheap electric busses to replace the outdated busses in the Philippines.
One counter-anectode to your examples (and your condescending "point"):
I spent six months (Nov '16 - May '17) with my license yanked away after a seizure. Uber (and Lyft) changed my life at that time. The last time I was in a similar position I depended on friends' charity. There were taxis that you could call by phone, but around an hour away. I was in a large city then too (Atlanta).
You shouldn't be downvoted but, by contrast, even as someone who have travels a lot I've maybe taken five Uber rides and I'd have been pretty much indifferent to taking taxis instead. But then I don't live in a city.
Before Uber, getting around the city was a huge, huge pain in the ass and the logistics of it often curtailed plans before they got off the ground, or added tons of friction and wasted time.
Now there is an easy, cheap, fast, and reliable way to get anywhere in the city, any time I want, without planning ahead. That bar my friends are meeting at that was two busses away and not worth the hassle on a Tuesday? I'll be there in fifteen minutes for the price of my first beer. For those who drive: no more worrying about parking or how many drinks you had.
Ranking companies which had less impact on my life than Uber seems like a strange exercise.
More impactful companies, both direct and indirect, include any company that produces food, oil, or computers, especially cloud computing or mainframes for enterprises.
Beyond that, Uber's usefulness really depends on locality. There are some places in the world that actually have functioning, acceptable taxi systems, like Seoul, where the prices are reasonable and the drivers are generally fair.
The upcoming and currently unfolding autonomous transportation revolution (self driving cars + drones) is definitely a "shit your pants big" shift that's going to change absoloutely everything in our economy. It's the internet scale shift of this era. Uber may or may not be of the many companies to capitalize on this shift, but his statement makes sense to me on that level.
Even at it's most absurdly promising, it's a relatively minor change in how we move and transport people and goods. Maybe fewer people required, maybe cheaper.
To compare that to "the internet" -- a technology that eliminated and created entire classes of industries, fundamentally changed the way we interact at almost every level, how society operates, how economies are built and run? No. Not even close. Not even in the same order of magnitude of significance.
I just figured I am a part of a different generation. Über doesn't even service my area and I've never used their service while traveling. So, they didn't impact me at all. I'm a member of an older generation.
It is the most important company in their portfolio and they are afraid that should their investment in Uber not payoff int he most spectacular fashion, they themselves would find out just how difficult it is to raise money after being labeled as a failure.
[edit: Payoff in a most spectacular fashion here means "exited at nearly the top of the valuation"]
If that's true, I'm scared.