The One That Got
IT’S A RAINY NIGHT. A man stands on the side of the road, pushes a button on his phone, an app pops open, he enters his location, and, voilà, the app tells him a car is coming to pick him up and shows him how far away it is. No searching for the local cab company’s phone number and waiting on hold, no stepping out into traffic to wave around, no need for cash. It’s 2008. Uber’s ridesharing service doesn’t exist. The app making this promise? Taxi Magic. If you don’t recognize the name, that’s because Uber came along and ate its lunch.
“What Uber did is incredible,” says George Arison, one of the founders of Taxi Magic, as we ride in the back of an Uber from San Francisco’s Castro district to two warehouses near the airport that belong to his new company, an online used-car marketplace called Shift. “They out-executed everyone. They were actually late to the game, but Travis [Kalanick] was willing to destroy his existing business with black cars to go for the peer-to-peer business. At Taxi Magic, we chose not to do that—which was a mistake.”
A RISON, 38, left Taxi Magic in 2010, three and a half years after it launched as a service meant for BlackBerry-using business travelers, and a year and a half after it appeared in Apple’s new App Store. (The company was later purchased by Verifone and operates today under the name Curb.) He eventually cashed out his shares and made a tidy sum, but his departure came after the company essentially forfeited its leadership position in the on-demand transportation revolution by not seizing one of the biggest prizes in recent business history. Uber is now the most successful startup in the world, with a valuation of more than $60 billion.
A garrulous man with a round, perpetually stubbly face and a
