它的創始人現在個個身家50億美元：Uber最真實的創業史

????康拉德?惠蘭此前一直在他的家鄉加拿大卡爾加里市的科技領域工作。加勒特?坎普也是加拿大人，他們二人相識多年。一次令人眼界大開的旅行和一通電話改變了一切。

????2010年1月，我進行了一次瘋狂的橫穿歐洲自駕之旅。在穿越西班牙和葡萄牙之后，我認識到，外面的世界原來這么大，我必須走出卡爾加里。但當時我并不想再去另一家創業公司，而是想休息一陣子。有一天，我順手給加勒特打了個電話，想知道他最近過得怎么樣。當他發現我正好閑著，并且準備搬家時，他差不多就等于向我下達了錄用通知，要求我來舊金山幫助他一起啟動Uber。

????惠蘭是Uber的首位工程師。

????我剛加盟公司的時候，那款產品還沒法接受注冊，只是預約車輛的一種途徑而已。所以我構建了一個需要信用卡，能夠生成用戶賬號的注冊流程。等這些做完，我們就能正式發布產品了。當時是2010年的6月1日，距離我加盟Uber正好兩個月。

????我做的下一件事就是優化Uber的調度算法，以避免司機錯過一次車輛分派任務。這個過程大概持續了3年左右，這事兒挺酷的。

????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.