What is Uber? Why is it a $70-billion-or-whatever company?
You could tell a bunch of stories -- it is an app company, a taxi company, a driverless-car company -- but one possibility is that it is a regulatory-evasion company.
I am a finance guy, and I think a lot about "regulatory arbitrage" as a source of value, and it seems to me that a lot of Uber's value comes from a form of regulatory arbitrage.
But it is not the form of regulatory arbitrage that I am familiar with, where you carefully analyze the rules in order to build products that get the best possible treatment under different regulatory regimes.
It is more just "hey a good arbitrage would be to ignore these regulations."
If that is the core idea that made your company successful, it is going to pervade a lot of your decisions, not just the ones about taxi licensing. And it's going to be hard to pivot away from it.
You could tell a bunch of stories -- it is an app company, a taxi company, a driverless-car company -- but one possibility is that it is a regulatory-evasion company.
I am a finance guy, and I think a lot about "regulatory arbitrage" as a source of value, and it seems to me that a lot of Uber's value comes from a form of regulatory arbitrage.
But it is not the form of regulatory arbitrage that I am familiar with, where you carefully analyze the rules in order to build products that get the best possible treatment under different regulatory regimes.
It is more just "hey a good arbitrage would be to ignore these regulations."
If that is the core idea that made your company successful, it is going to pervade a lot of your decisions, not just the ones about taxi licensing. And it's going to be hard to pivot away from it.