Uber: We want transportation be as reliable as running water

Despite fighting federal agencies and consumer advocate groups from its Bay Area home base to Paris (where CEO Travis Kalanick has said he was inspired to launch Uber after not being able to find a cab at night), the company founder defended Uber’s contributions at Salesforce.com’s annual expo on Wednesday morning.

“There are always a list of challenges”.

In some cities, more than 100,000 people a week are using Uberpool, he said.

“There wasn’t a dry eye in the house, NFL Hall of Famers were tearing up”, Kalanick said, who confessed he was extremely nervous about being on the talk show. You’re not telling your story. Uber was plagued with legal problems in 2014 and has received governmental pushback in cities where taxis are the primary mode of ride-hailing.

But Benioff, 50, did come off as an elder statesman challenging the next generation to do good with its billions. “I’m quite jealous. It’s incredible what you can do for the world”, he said.

Looking a decade or more into the future might seem ambitious for any other five-year-old company, but Uber has had an unusually meteoric rise.

That new thing could be shorter work weeks or different jobs, though Kalanick did not specify what kind.

Kalanick isn’t just some overzealous Silicon Valley executive. However, as more drivers target parts of a city with high demand, this removes part of the demand, and what we have left is residual demand.

Benioff: “How do I know Uber has a heart?”

“I think that’s half fair”.

Kalanick wants Uber to compete not only with the taxi companies, but delivery apps such as Instacart and Grubhub. “If every vehicle in San Francisco is Uber, there’d be no traffic”, he said. “You help pollution”. Kalanick also noted that 30,000 people die in auto accidents on a yearly basis.

Kalanick today spoke of the safety and congestion benefits that driverless cars stand to bring but it’s worth noting that they could also save Uber a lot of money in the long run due to the fact that robots won’t need paying.

Kalanick said he hopes UberPool takes off “to further reduce the number of cars on the road”, but added that cities would likely be far safer and less congested “if we had algorithms driving cars instead of people”.

Benioff says he got to share his ride with a young man working for Goldman Sachs.

“Maybe they have a normal job outside of Uber, but this is a way to fill the gaps, to put food on the table”, Kalanick opined.

Seizing on an idea Benioff suggested for a new UberTour app, Kalanick said he remains shocked by the staggering and rapid success of his company. “You get on and you get off”, Benioff quipped, leading the two company leaders to debate about whether life is about the destination or the journey.

“I keep coming back to the same thing, OK what’s the transition?”