The challenges in Indian market as well as the competition made Uber Technologies Inc, the car-sharing service that lets people order transportation via a smartphone, change many of its strategies, said a top Uber executive at the Startup India event.
Travis Kalanick, co-founder and chief executive of Uber said payments which is different in India has been a big area of change for the company. The firm also had to empower local teams in different cities to build the transportation system.
"At end of the day competition is good," Mr. Kalanick told the audience which comprised of his rival Bhavish Aggarwal, cofounder of home-grown taxi aggregator, Ola Cabs and top investors like billionaire Masayoshi Son, the founder of Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp.
About 1,500 startup founders across the country convened at Vigyan Bhavan in New Delhi, as part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ambitious Startup India mission.
"Fear is the disease and hustle is the antidote. Always be Jugaading" said Mr.Kalanick, referring to Jugaad, a Hindi word for finding a low-cost solution to any problem in an intelligent way.
Uber which was last valued at $62.5 billion (Rs 4.2 lakh crore), is the world's most highly valued start-up. Giving a pep talk to start-up founders, Mr.Kalanick said entrepreneurs need to find a problem that they are passionate about. When he and his cofounder couldn't get a taxi in Paris, they decided to launch a company like Uber which could provide cab service with the push of a button. They launched the firm in a humble way but at the same time provided high end cars. The founders later realized that if they use low-cost cars lot of people would use their service.
"Cheaper products were more luxurious and going in to low end was transformation," he said.
At Uber, Mr.Kalanick refers himself as Problem-Solver-in-Chief. He said entrepreneurs need to be like math professors who can solve problems.
"If he has no problems, then he is a sad professor."
He is of the view that it is also important for entrepreneurs to keep innovating and adapt to the changing environment. Uber not only uses heat maps to detect how many people are opening their app but also use technology to predict the demand and supply way ahead consumers use their service. At a time when other big technology companies like Google, Apple and Tesla Motors are making driverless cars, Uber too is making efforts to be part of the future. Mr. Kalanick said that Uber is creating 3D models of streets so that the cars can move autonomously.
Quoting German-born theoretical physicist Albert Einstein, Mr. Kalanick said that "creativity is intelligence having fun." This is why sometimes Uber sends ice-cream trucks to its customers to capture their imagination and bring back the memories when they were eight years old.
At his earlier start-up, he made no salary for the first four years. The entrepreneur has to be resilient, when nobody believes about what she is talking about and everybody thinks that she is crazy. Quoting Mr. Einstein again, Mr. Kalanick said that "the man who follows the crowd will usually get no further than the crowd. The one who walks alone is likely to find himself in places no one has ever been before."
An entrepreneur also needs to see into the future way before everybody else. Mr. Kalanick displayed the diagram of Apple's iPhone which he said was the patent application given by Apple cofounder Steve Jobs way back in 2006. "It looks like my phone ten years later," he said.
He mentioned that entrepreneurs need to seek adventure, because they can work from anywhere. That is why ten years ago when he had another start-up, he and his team flew Thiruvananthapuram, took a bus to a beach and did coding from there. He said that research and development and innovation is now about three areas in the world-Bay Area, Beijing and Bengaluru. Mr. Kalanick's concept of adventure is not about innovation for a city but thinking global.
"We are at that inflection point in India, where innovation will start to go global and that is adventurous," he said.
