它的创始人现在个个身家50亿美元：Uber最真实的创业史

    康拉德•惠兰此前一直在他的家乡加拿大卡尔加里市的科技领域工作。加勒特•坎普也是加拿大人，他们二人相识多年。一次令人眼界大开的旅行和一通电话改变了一切。

    2010年1月，我进行了一次疯狂的横穿欧洲自驾之旅。在穿越西班牙和葡萄牙之后，我认识到，外面的世界原来这么大，我必须走出卡尔加里。但当时我并不想再去另一家创业公司，而是想休息一阵子。有一天，我顺手给加勒特打了个电话，想知道他最近过得怎么样。当他发现我正好闲着，并且准备搬家时，他差不多就等于向我下达了录用通知，要求我来旧金山帮助他一起启动Uber。

    惠兰是Uber的首位工程师。

    我刚加盟公司的时候，那款产品还没法接受注册，只是预约车辆的一种途径而已。所以我构建了一个需要信用卡，能够生成用户账号的注册流程。等这些做完，我们就能正式发布产品了。当时是2010年的6月1日，距离我加盟Uber正好两个月。

    我做的下一件事就是优化Uber的调度算法，以避免司机错过一次车辆分派任务。这个过程大概持续了3年左右，这事儿挺酷的。

    Conrad Whelan had been working in technology his native Calgary. He’d known Garrett Camp, a fellow Canadian, for years. An eye-opening trip and a phone call changed everything.

    I did a crazy road trip across Europe, across Spain and Portugal in January of 2010 and realized: There’s a whole world out there. I’ve got to get my stuff together and get out of Calgary. I wasn’t actually really intending doing another startup at that point. I was actually planning on taking some time off, but I just happened to give Garrett a call to see how he’s doing. When he found out I was sort of free and ready to move, he basically told me I was hired and to move to San Francisco and help him get Uber Cab started.

    Whelan was Uber’s first engineer.

    When I joined the company, you couldn’t actually sign up for the product. It was just a way to order the car. So I built the sign-up flows that would take a credit card and make user accounts. So as soon as we did that, we could officially launch, which was June 1st, 2010, two months after I started.

    I think the next thing I did, which I really enjoyed, was optimize the dispatch algorithms to take into account drivers that might miss a dispatch. That lasted like three years, or something like that, which is pretty cool.