Montero Hill was sitting in a college math class when he had a thoughtful idea. A soft-spoken class clown with an influential Twitter following, the 19-year-old was in an unenviable position. He didn’t love his college experience. His social life at the University of West Georgia was lacking. A strong student, Hill’s grades fell below his own expectations. And fearful of the work that it would take to recover, he didn’t want to go home to the Bankhead Court housing projects. It was there where he lived with his mother since her split from Hill’s father. Montero’s solution was unique in a way. Away from his day job at Zaxby’s, a fast casual restaurant in Suburban Atlanta, he began the informal study of music production. It was common for him to publish a song every other day. Within three months of this practice, he would complete and publish a short song with some serious potential. Columbia student Jeremy Giffon on Hill:
You’re in Austin for a business trip, and you need to make a last-minute reservation near Sixth Street for a few colleagues. In the old days, that would have involved a phone call and some light negotiation. Today, it’s one of the foremost examples of the digitization of physical retail.
In March of 2009, Uber launched in San Francisco to great fanfare. At the time, the mobility company’s Chief Executive, Travis Kalanick, had a goal that seemed simple enough: first attract the higher rungs of society and then dominate the world by capturing marketshare. Except, to do so, he’d have to adjust the prices. Uber was too expensive for everyday users. Over the next decade, Uber would employ a tactic that has been popular throughout Silicon Valley circles — deploying hundreds of millions in venture capital to subsidize the cost of the product, which in Uber’s case is rides.
