Uber's Spanish Code Origins
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A story about how Uber's early development violated many startup "rules" and included Spanish language code from their early Mexican developers.
"I've got friends that were early at Uber and friends that are still at Uber. A lot of people don't know this, but one of the first or second employees was this Mexican guy. The early versions of Uber were written with a ton of Spanish in the code.
The Uber founders Travis and Garrett didn't work on it full time. They just literally tweeted out 'Hey we need a general manager' and random guy named Ryan Graves was like 'I'm a hustler, I'll do it.' They delegated the CEO job. They didn't have a super strong technical team or technical cofounder who could write the code - they used a 3rd party dev shop to build the first version of the app.
Most investors who invested in Uber would tell you if you're a product guy and say 'Yeah I'm gonna just use an agency to write the code for the app' they'd be like 'No, go.' Then they literally broke actual laws - they got a cease and desist from San Francisco saying 'Hey for every day you're operational you owe us $5,000 per day' and they just kept going.
At the time when Uber first came out, I talked to our investor and asked if we should be doing a product like this. He said 'No, bits not atoms' - that was a common phrase in Silicon Valley. You want to do startups that are software-based because they can scale and have profit margins. With real world cars and homes and t-shirts, that stuff is super hard to scale and ends up being super low margin. But the founders and investors in Uber did fantastically well scaling this thing up."
Sam Parr
Host of MFM and fitness influencer
Sam Parr is a serial entrepreneur and business media pioneer.
In 2016, he founded The Hustle, a business news media company that started in his kitchen with just $12 and grew to eight figures in revenue.
Sam led the charge in making newsletters popular when few believed in their potential.
After four successful years, he sold The Hustle to HubSpot, a publicly traded company. Now operating as HubSpot Media, The Hustle reaches 3 million readers daily, employs a team of nearly 100, and has been the launchpad for dozens of its staff to found their own media companies and newsletters.
Sam remains the host of the popular business podcast, My First Million, and continues to start and sell companies. He also co-founded Hampton, a highly vetted community for entrepreneurs, founders, and CEOs, and teaches people to write better through his platform, Copy That.