In praise of friction

“Tap a button, get a ride.” We repeated it like a mantra in the early days at Uber. Every metric we obsessed over was in service of that sentence: cancellation rates, two-minute ETAs, requests-to-completed-trips. On promo days, you could tap the button and get kittens. It felt like magic, which was the point. And like all magic, it required an enormous amount of unglamorous labor arranged just out of frame: engineers, drivers, ops people, all making sure the car came. And if we could deliv...