I lived in New York for 10 years, from 2000 to 2010. And I worked in New York City for a good part of those 10 years. And while working in the city, I occasionally had to go to offsite meetings in a different part of the city, I went to office parties after work, got together with friends and colleagues for a couple of drinks on Fridays, I went to some entrepreneur and tech meetups, I even spoke at a couple of those meetups, and every single time, after the evening ended, I dreaded one thing and one thing only: Trying to get a cab to go back to Grand Central station, from where I would then take the Metro to go back to Ossining, where I lived at the time.
If you've ever lived or worked in a crowded city like New York city, you know how ridiculously hard it was as recently as barely 10 years ago to get a cab.
And if it was rush hour, just fuhgeddaboudit. Also, around 8 or 9 PM when people were exiting concerts and sports events and parties, it was darn near impossible to get a yellow cab, because every single cab was either already taken, or they were not available, and if they were available, you were probably competing with 20 other people all spread out on the street, all with their arms extended, trying to get the attention of the lone cab with the light at the top. And then it came down to who the cab driver saw first, and it always felt like people who looked more wall-streety, more attractive, with formal or fancy clothes, somehow always seemed to get the cab ahead of me.
And this was a problem literally every day, for literally tens of thousands of people who were at a party or meeting or event, or simply were too tired to take the subway.
And I can guarantee you, 99% of them, at some point, wished so badly that they could press a button on their phone and get a cab. Guess what? Someone did make it happen. And it was called...
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