I'm Brad Stone, author of THE EVERYTHING STORE and my latest, THE UPSTARTS, a book about the controversial rise of Uber, Airbnb, and the "Killer Companies" of Silicon Valley.

Inspiration often comes from a personal need. The Airbnb guys were looking for ways to earn extra money during a design conference in late 2007. Uber inventor Garrett Camp didn't like driving in San Francisco and felt the local yellow taxi fleets weren't particularly reliable. In both cases, you also had entrepreneurs who were looking to start businesses and identified a larger opportunity in their personal situation.

And sometimes the ideas are simply born from analysis. Back in 1993, Jeff Bezos and his colleagues at an investment bank were looking for a good business idea on a booming new platform called the World Wide Web. Bezos made a list of all the things that could be sold online and ended up deciding books were the most promising. Thus Amazon.com was born.

There are things I could point to in my Amazon book or in The Upstarts. But generally I'd just point out that most companies, particularly technology ones, spin a mythology. This is not necessarily disingenuous - it can be necessary to simplify a messy origin story, and to shape it to reinforce the values they want to instill in potential employees and investors.

The most gratifying thing in my research is always teasing apart the mythology to find the real stories. So for example Uber's origin; it preceded by several years the supposed epiphany that Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick had at the Eiffel Tower (the official story.) Camp was inspired to create Uber in part by a scene in the movie Casino Royale. And the Airbnb story - yeah, they were looking for a way to make money. But they were also young entrepreneurs who idolized Mark Zuckerberg and the Youtube founders. They wanted to get into the Silicon Valley game and thought that home-sharing could be their ticket.

Ha ha, no, I did not. There are plenty of reasons to criticize Uber, but the supposed connection between the company and the Trump admin was not based on facts or logic. Critics of Trump believed Uber was 'breaking a strike' at JFK airport. In fact all the ridesharing services were operating there and drivers were free to join the protests. Then there was the matter of Travis Kalanick's spot on Trump's advisory counsel. Sitting on that counsel was not an endorsement of the president or his executive order on immigration, which Travis had criticized. In fact I thought it was a shame that Travis eventually had to leave the counsel. It would good to have more pragmatic voices around the President, not fewer.

Beef up your coding skills? Intern at a company with a vibrant entrepreneurial culture? Find a good mentor? I'm not the person to answer this one. But I can say this with authority: Stay out of journalism.

Both CEOs have had to deal frequently with regulators and lawmakers in each city they entered. Talking to members of the California Public Utilities Commission, which was the first regulatory body to examine ridesharing, was amusing- they each had a favorite Travis story. A few of them said that when Travis first came in to meet with them in 2012, he deliberately angled his chair in the other direction, so that his back was to them. It was a power move. He felt they were ill-equipped to understand how technology was impacting transportation.

Chesky purposefully casts a warmer and more cooperative image. I remember watching him on stage with President Obama in Nairobi Kenya in 2015, talking about entrepreneurship, waxing inspiration-ally about the Airbnb founding story. But ultimately, as you'll see in the book, I was left wondering if his company's approach was all that different than Uber's.

I've followed the lawsuits around the employment status of drivers more closely in the U.S. than in Europe. In both cases, it seems a small subset of drivers won their first rounds in court. Then, in the U.S., the case was settled but then the settlement was thrown out by an appeals court. As you say, Uber is appealing in the UK as well and we'll have to see how that goes.

But let's separate the legal procedures from the larger principles here. My feeling is that many Uber drivers do appreciate the flexibility that stems from their contractual (non-employee) status. For drivers that work full time, it would be good to see the ridesharing companies embrace some of the responsibility that comes with their efforts. However modern employment law seems to be moving in the opposite direction, giving companies more leverage over their workers and unions, not less.

yes, he thought he could cheat death. and then ironically was felled trying to get through the prequels.