36 Unicorns do Exist 37 People at a Billion-Dollar Scale 38 Advice from Billion-Dollar CEOs 39 Getting Acquired Notes Index About the Author
Acknowledgements I’d love to thank the following people for all their help, input, opinions and support throughout the process of creating this book: Tina Baker, Niqui Berkowski, Samar Chang, Brad Feld, Jay Bregman, Steve Brumwell, Poppy Hope, Michael Varley, Matthew Osborne, Dominika Dudziuk, Anthony Gell, and my editor Zoe Bohm.
It will share my insider’s view of this world with you – along with the interviews and conversations I have been so lucky to have with these amazing ‘mobile’ entrepreneurs
In early 2011, I had just completed the sale of my startup (a video-dating site called WooMe) and was relishing the chance to take a few months off in the sun, when I saw a cryptic post on a tech website from the entrepreneur Jay Bregman and couldn’t help but get in touch. I shot him an email, met him in person and found myself intrigued by his idea for a new mobile startup – an app that allowed passengers to hail a taxi from their smartphone. But his approach was fresh and disruptive (and in this book I’ll be using ‘disruptive’ to describe something that brings about a step change, shakes things up a bit). It directly solved the problem of how to build up a community of drivers before any passengers were using the app. From my very first conversation with Jay I realised that his vision for the company was global – an app that any person could use in any language to catch a taxi in any city in the world. I was sold. Jay needed someone with my experience to translate his great vision into a concrete business strategy, to refine the business model – and build the technology and software to turn it into an app. Continue reading “This book is the first step to making that happen”