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FailCon 2011 - Uber Case Study

BAMM.TV · 114K views · 2011-11-04 · 26:19

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Overview

Travis Kalanick's talk at FailCon 2011 about his earlier failed startups, given as a case study before Uber's rise. It describes lessons from those ventures.

On Hacker News

HN commenters recommend it for insight into Kalanick's background and how his past failures shaped his mindset at Uber.

Recommended by 3 HN people across 3 months · HN mentions 2012–2017

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What people said

sbuccini · 2017-06 · Strong recommendation

I would really recommend watching this talk[1] TK gave at Failcon back in 2011. It's a great insight into Travis's background and the mindset that he imbued into Uber in the early days. [1] [VIDEO]

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gojomo · 2012-10 · Strong recommendation

This is a valid criticism, but is mitigated a little by the fact that some of these success stories include within them wisdom from preceding (or competitive-contemporaneous) failures. This is even the case, indirectly, where the Startup School presentation can't fit the speaker's whole story. For example, I think the Travis Kalanick presentation about Uber at Startup School was great. (I'd love to see the time-unconstrained 'two-hour' version of the same talk.) But, it was just about Uber: a current big success. Kalanick also did a shorter -- and perhaps even better -- talk about his previous ventures at the 2011 FailCon: [VIDEO] Combined with the SS12 Uber presentation -- indeed, perhaps best viewed just before -- it provides real context, and a much better idea of the range of outcomes and challenges startups face. And, of the entrepreneurial qualities that gave Kalanick repeated chances at Uber-like success.

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flunhat · 2017-08 · Recommendation

I've found this video from 2011 to be kind of interesting in terms of illuminating how his history as an entrepreneur has shaped his attitude running Uber today (TL;DR - he failed and got screwed over a lot). [VIDEO]

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Video by BAMM.TV, played through YouTube.

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