Travis Kalanick at Startup School 2012

Wow, this is awesome! Okay, this place is full. All right, so good to meet all of you. My name is Travis Kalanick, co-founder and CEO of Uber.

Let's see, so I do a lot of speaking because we are a technology company that is, we're in the trenches, we're in the cities. You know, more than half of our employees are not in San Francisco. I almost, I don't even remember the last time I spoke in San Francisco in front of an audience. Every time I go to speak somewhere, right, I look, I go on Google and I look at the roads, I look at architecture, I look at cool pictures I can put that are iconic.

I'm going to speak in Silicon Valley, and I'm searching Google Images, and I can't find anything. And so, yeah, there you go, it's good to be here. Anyways, I found a little something.

All right, so guys, I'm guessing most people here at least know what Uber is, but for those of you who don't, I'm gonna go do a sort of a basic tour, just really quick. It's an app on your iPhone that helps you get a car. Our motto is "everyone's private driver."

So you open up the app and you see a bunch of cars that are near you. This is one of the San Francisco cars, three minutes away, and Jim will arrive in two minutes. He's rated at four point eight, and this is of course, all screenshots from your app. When he arrives, you're told, you're notified. You can call the driver, of course, and if you're lucky, he'll open the door for you when you're done.

This is a short trip, $15. That's our minimum in San Francisco. Of course, we have lower-cost options. Now we have something called Uber X. A couple days ago, we launched taxi in San Francisco. For a lot of folks, they're like, "You're doing taxi? You're the anti-taxi! What are you doing?" We know what we're doing, but we'll get to that in just a second.

All right, so some basics: launched in June 2010, so we're just over two years old. We don't own cars, we don't employ drivers. A lot of people don't know that about us. They think we have all these assets; they think that we employ lots of drivers. We don't. We have 120 employees, most of which are not in San Francisco. We don't have a marketing spend. We're deployed in 17 cities; for some reason, there are 16 here.

We actually just soft-launched in Sydney a couple days ago, actually yesterday. Amsterdam is coming very, very shortly, and I think Minneapolis isn't on here; we did that a couple weeks ago.

So quick numbers: hundreds of thousands of hours driven per week. A very interesting engagement figure: 50% of all the people who have ever ridden on Uber have ridden in the last 30 days. And remember, when you ride, you're paying. So think about commerce; think about a commerce site or a commerce app where 50% of the people who've ever paid have paid in the last 30 days.

The average person is paying about $105 a month in San Francisco, it's a bit higher than that. Prices are probably a bit too high, I know some of you have felt that sting. We're doing 26 percent month-over-month growth; that's an average over the last now 16, 17 months. You go, okay, well, if you start really low and you can grow really big, but we were pretty big 12 months ago.

And if you do 26 percent month-over-month growth, that means in 12 months, you're 16 times bigger than you were 12 months ago. So we're growing fast, and in fact, September over August was 29 percent month-over-month.

So I'm going to tell a little bit about our background, and then hopefully if I have enough time get into some of the regulatory stuff, which I know none of you guys want to hear about.

All right, so this you can't see really well because of all the lights, but it's a romantic shot from the Eiffel Tower between me and my co-founder Garrett Camp, whom you guys may know, he's the founder of StumbleUpon. It was in Paris at LeWeb where we came up with this idea.

Essentially, you know, he said, "Look, I just want to push a button and get a ride. You know, let's make it a classy ride," and that's kind of how we started. Paris in many ways is a sister city of San Francisco—impossible to get a cab there.

So this is something from the past. This is what we call hailing. I'm not sure if you guys have ever done that, but some...