年度人物 | Uber之父卡兰尼克
By Rana Foroohar
The avatar you see when Travis Kalanick tweets doesn’t depict the 39-year-old’s puckish grin but an engraving of Alexander Hamilton.
特拉维斯·卡兰尼克的推特头像不是39岁一脸坏笑的他自己，而是美国国父亚历山大·汉密尔顿的雕像。
The CEO and co-founder of ride-hailing service Uber became interested in the Founding Fathers several years ago and “went deep,” consuming everything he could on Washington, Adams and Madison as well as numerous tomes on the first U.S. Treasury Secretary.
叫车软件Uber的首席执行官和创始人几年前迷上了国父，他“玩得很深”，买华盛顿、亚当斯和麦迪逊的各式老物件，甚至还收藏有不少美国第一任财长汉密尔顿的账簿。
“Hamilton is my favorite political entrepreneur,” says Kalanick of the tough, self-made—some might say self-serving—man who helped establish the country’s financial system despite vicious opposition.
“汉密尔顿是我最喜爱的政治创业者”，卡兰尼克如是说。汉密尔顿是个强硬、自立的人——有人甚至说是自私，尽管遭到恶毒的反对，他草创了美国的金融体系。
“Hamilton could see the future. But he also understood how to connect it to the practical reality on the ground. He was a great orator too. Maybe too good. Maybe he spoke too much.”
“汉密尔顿能看到未来，但他也明白如何把未来和实际连接起来。他还是个演说家，兴许太能讲了，讲的太多。”
The same has been said of Kalanick during the five years in which Uber shot from being a two-car operation in San Francisco to delivering 3 million rides a day in 66 countries. He has been called a visionary, a disrupter, a genius and a jerk.
对卡兰尼克的评价亦如是，五年间，Uber从旧金山只有两辆车使用，发展到66个国家每天300万次运营。他被称为梦想家、破坏者、天才和怪咖。
One thing is certain: his company is unlike anything the world has seen before. Uber is likely the fastest-growing startup in history and definitely the most valuable at $62.5 billion, a figure that is quickly approaching the market capitalization of Volkswagen, the largest automaker on earth.
有一点是肯定的：他的公司和以往的都不一样。Uber可能是历史上增长最迅速的初创企业，也肯定是估值最高的，达625亿美元，市值迅速接近地球上最大的汽车制造商德国大众公司。
It has 1.1 million active drivers (which it defines as independent contractors who have offered at least one trip in the past week) in 361 cities—nearly 100 of which Uber expanded to in 2015.
361个城市中的110万活跃司机是Uber的独立合同商，过去一周他们至少提供一次服务，其中100个城市是2015年新拓展的。
Not only has Uber become a verb, as Google did, it has created an industry, sending countless entrepreneurs into boardrooms to pitch the “Uber of …”
Uber和Google一样成了动词，它还开创了一个产业，将不计其数的企业家送进董事会，建立“何处的Uber”。
And Kalanick’s own ambition ranges far beyond rides: in France, Uber can get you a helicopter. In San Francisco, UberEATS will bring takeout to your door in under 10 minutes.
卡兰尼克的野心不限于叫车：在法国，Uber可以开来一架直升机。在旧金山，UberEATS不到十分钟就能把外卖送到门口。
As Kalanick puts it, rather open-endedly, “If something is moving from one place to another in a city—that’s our jam.”
如卡拉尼克所言，“如果有什么要从城市的一个的地方到另一个地方去，这就是我们干的。”这是非常开放的定义。
But Uber is much more than a blockbuster business. In 2015, it cemented its role as the most prolific and pugnacious among companies creating the “gig economy,” including Airbnb, TaskRabbit and dozens more.
可Uber又不只是个一时轰动的产业。2015年，相比创造了“分享经济”的Airbnb、TaskRabbit等众多公司，它确立了自己最多元、最先锐的地位。
They are all emblematic of accelerating transformations in the way we work—at will, directed by technology.
他们都标志着在技术上的指引下，我们向随性工作方式的加速转变。
On the one hand, there is something magical about the way they allow people to monetize resources they already possess. On the other, they suggest a slippery slope that, many argue, ends with workers being taken advantage of.
一方面，他们让人们把自己拥有资源货币化的方式很魔性。另一方面，他们造成了一种工人最终被利用的斜坡谬误。
This year, as Kalanick pressed forward into more and more cities, these questions have attained deep significance for workers—and entire national economies—around the world.
今年，随着卡兰尼克扩张到更多的城市，这些问题对工人影响日深，对全世界各国的整体国民经济。
This has made Uber and its ilk a political litmus test that is likely to endure through the U.S. presidential election next year.
这让Uber和其产品成为明年整个美国总统大选的政治试纸。
Seen as a symbol for the excesses of the rich in some parts of the world, Uber’s expansion sparked violent protests in places such as Mexico City and Paris.
在世界一些地区被视为财富国度的象征，Uber的扩张在墨西哥城和巴黎等地方引发暴力抗议。
Kalanick, who is known for both his detailed grasp of regulatory barriers and the zeal with which he’s willing to take them on, is unfazed.
卡兰尼克不担心，他精通当地的监管法规，并不懈去突破限制。
“There are a lot of rules in cities that were designed to protect a particular incumbent, but not to move a city’s constituents, a city’s citizens, and the city itself, forward. And that’s a problem,” he says. “We need to figure out how to merge political progress with actual progress.”
“城市有许多旨在保护既得利益群体的规定，可这些规定不能让城市的选民、公民和城市自己得以进步，这是个问题。我们需要找出如何把真正的进步融入政治进步之中。”
Kalanick’s idea of progress is simple and sweeping: transportation as ubiquitous and reliable as running water, everywhere, for everyone. And as part of that vision, he expects to change the way cities operate.
卡兰尼克的进步观简单彻底：运输像流水一样无所不在和值得信赖，对所有人都一样。这种观念促使他改变城市运转的方式。
On a rainy December day in Boston, speaking to local business leaders, he proclaims, “I see a world in which there is no more traffic in Boston in five years.”
12月在波士顿某个下雨天，他对当地的商界领袖说，“未来五年，波士顿无交通。”
The crowd chuckles at the hyperbole. Kalanick smiles indulgently but presses the point, and later raises the goal in meetings with his local staff.
如此夸张引众人发笑。卡兰尼克一脸笑意暂且按下不表，可过一会有在和当地雇员的会议中提出了这一目标。
This time nobody is laughing. Something about his personality makes you feel that an idea previously impossible is becoming probable.
这次没有人发笑。他个性中的某种东西让你觉得以前不可能的想法正在成为可能。
Kalanick was born in Los Angeles and studied engineering at UCLA before dropping out in 1998 to help found his first company. Scour, a file-sharing service not unlike Napster, ended in disaster when some of the world’s biggest media companies sued it for $250 billion in damages, forcing Kalanick to take the firm into Chapter 11.
卡兰尼克出生在洛杉矶，就读于加州大学洛杉矶分校工程学系，1998年辍学创办了第一家工资。Scour是一个和Napster差不多的文件共享服务，最后因为某些世界大牌媒体公司起诉索赔2500亿美元赔偿而倒闭，并申请破产保护。
注：Chapter 11，联邦破产法关于破产保护的内容。
He slept in his childhood bedroom while starting Red Swoosh, a file-sharing technology he called a “revenge firm,” because its customers were some of the same corporations that had previously put him out of business.
他就在儿时的卧室里吃住，并开发了Red Swoosh——被他成为“复仇公司”的文件分享技术。所谓复仇，因为产品的客户就是那些曾经把他踢出业界的某些公司。
He eventually sold it for $18.7 million, though it had only eight employees. Uber came next.
尽管只有八名雇员，最终他以1870万美元出售。接下来才有了Uber。
“The thing you have to understand about Travis,” says Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Alphabet, formerly Google, which is an Uber investor, “is that he is the definition of a serial entrepreneur in its purest form, with all the strengths and weaknesses that comes with.
Alphabet（前谷歌）执行董事长、Uber的投资人Eric Schmidt说：“你应该了他的是他是纯粹意义上的连环企业家的代表，他有后者所有的长项和弱势。”
He’s a fighter. He is against institutional structures. He has to get up every day and make something. He can be disagreeable in that sense that, well, he disagrees.”
他是一个斗士。他反对现有的体制。他每天爬起来必须干点什么。他为不同意而不同意，让人感到不快。
Consider New York City, in many ways the best place to observe the evolution of Kalanick’s vision. Officials had kept the number of taxi medallions, which drivers must either buy or rent to stay on the road, static for 20 years, despite the fact that the city itself had grown by a million people.
想想纽约市，这里最适合观察卡拉尼克梦想的发达。当官的管理者出租车牌照的数量，司机或买或租才能上路，二十年一贯如此，即使这个城市增加了100万人口也毫无变化。
The aim was to avoid more car traffic. But the result was both numerous unsanctioned cab services and medallion prices close to $1 million.
这一制度的目的是避免交通堵塞，可结果是黑车多多，合法牌照许可费竟涨到近100万美元。
Now that Uber, which has waged regulatory battles in New York and other cities it has launched in, is on the road, those prices have dropped, leaving taxi drivers who paid huge amounts for medallions holding a declining asset—or making the switch to work for Uber.
现在Uber上路了，在纽约和其他城市向监管体系发起战斗，牌照费降下来了，这让出巨资买牌照的出租车司机资产缩水，或者转而投奔Uber。
With Uber, drivers set their own hours and are their own boss, something Kalanick believes is highly empowering. “There is a core independence and dignity you get when you control your own time,” he says.
用了Uber，司机可以自己决定何时上班，他们是自己的老板，卡兰尼克认为这是一种赋权。“你能控制自己的时间，这是一种核心的独立和尊严。”
But Uber drivers aren’t in control of everything. They have to cope with the company’s pricing, which changes regularly depending on the level of demand and is often focused on driving down cost to get more people into Uber cars. It also means that drivers have to take whatever price is on offer.
但Uber司机并非控制了一切。他们必须服从公司定价，定价随需求水平不断调整，常常降价揽客。这也意味着司机不得不接单，不论赚不赚钱。
That’s sad for incumbent taxi drivers, but also a fairly typical example of what disruptive technology can do to labor. From English textile workers to travel agents, new technology destroys job categories at the same time as it creates them.
这对现有的出租车司机是个坏消息，可也是破坏性创新科技对劳动力的产生影响的典型案例。从英国纺织工人到旅行社导游，新科技创造工作的同时也消灭了工作。
That’s one of the big existential worries that Uber creates in many people, even as they enjoy the huge convenience and cost savings it provides. Companies want people to act as entrepreneurs—work hard, 24/7—without necessarily rewarding them that way, with a piece of equity or a higher salary.
这是Uber给人们带来最大的存在主义困惑之一，虽说人们享受了软件带来的巨大便利和成本节省。公司要让人们像企业家一样行事，一周七天24小时努力工作，没有股权，没有高薪。
Taken to logical conclusion, it’s hard to imagine why any number of jobs couldn’t be Uberized. Many have been already, from handymen to radiologists. But with everyone working on demand, with no safety net, constantly graded up or down, the labor market starts to feel exhaustingly Darwinian.
逻辑上，很难想象有什么工作不能被Uber化。许多已经开始了，从杂物工到放射线研究者。可每个人按需工作，没有安全网，永远为评分奋斗，劳动市场让人觉得“物竞天择”。
“This is what has people so agitated about Uber,” says John Battelle, co-founder of Wired magazine, who now runs a conference and events business called NewCo. “It’s not a tech story, it’s a social story—it’s about how we are going to adapt to new possibilities. It’s about what the social compact between corporations, government and society is going to be.”
连线杂志创始人、会议和活动公司New Co.创始人John Battlelle说：“这是Uber让人们不快的地方。这不是一个技术故事，是一个社会故事，有关我们如何适应新的可能性。有关公司、政府和未来社会间的社会契约。”
On the upside, Uber plays to people’s hopes about the future of labor; most millennials say they want to be their own boss, and any Uber driver will tell you that having flexible hours is the best part of the gig.
从好的一面说，Uber应和了人们对未来劳动者的期望，大多数百万富翁都表示他们想做自己的老板，所有Uber司机都会告诉你弹性工作制是分享经济最棒的地方。
But the company also captures the wider fear of a broken social compact. Uber drivers get no pension, health care or worker-rights protection, and work at the mercy of metrics.
可公司也导致对社会契约破裂产生的广泛恐慌。Uber司机没有养老金、没有社会保险或员工权力保护，他们靠着里程表的怜悯过活。
“You’ve got a labor market that looks increasingly like a feudal agricultural hiring fair in which the lord shows up and says, ‘I’ll take you, and you, and you today,’” says Adair Turner, chairman of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, one of many nonprofit groups studying the effect of companies like Uber on local economies.
“你的劳动市场就好像在封建农贸集市上，老爷们出来说，‘今天我要你，你，还有你。’”新经济思维学会主席Adair Turner说。这是众多研究Uber之类的公司对当地经济影响的非盈利机构之一。
Turner’s conclusion: the gig economy reduces friction in labor markets, but it also creates fragmentation that tends to work better for employers, who can leverage superior technology and information, than for workers.
Turner的结论：分享经济降低了劳动市场的摩擦，却也产生了断裂，这种断裂对可以撬动先进技术和信息的雇主更有利，对工人则相反。
A study done by another nonprofit group, the Data & Society Research Institute, found that Uber’s driver-monitoring practices “produce significant information asymmetries between the corporate entity and individual drivers.”
另一家非盈利组织数据与社会研究会的研究发现，Uber的司机监测“在公司和个体司机间制造了巨大的信息不对称。”
Drivers risk “deactivation” for canceling unprofitable fares and absorb the risk of unknown fares, “even though Uber promotes the idea that they are entrepreneurs who are knowingly investing in such risk.”
司机取消不赚钱的单子可能被定为不活跃，他们必须接受车费未知的单子，“即便Uber宣扬他们是企业家，应该知道投资有风险。”
Kalanick’s self-presentation is a work in progress. Like many of Silicon Valley’s anointed, he comes off younger than his 39 years.
卡兰尼克的自我定位是在进步中工作。和许多硅谷大咖一样，他看起来比实际年龄年轻。
His speech is sprinkled with acronyms (“TLDR”—too long, didn’t read) and bro phrases; he’s “down with” or “up for” any number of things, including all-night brainstorming sessions at his “jam pad” (read: home, in San Francisco, which he shares with his violinist girlfriend Gabi Holzwarth) and flying to China to expand Uber into a new city. (Guangzhou is the company’s top market worldwide in number of trips.)
他说话不时冒出缩略语（如TLDR）和俏皮话，他对所有事物或“赞”或“踩”，包括在他的“jam pad”（他和拉小提琴的女友Gabi Halzwarth在旧金山的家）里彻夜头脑风暴时，以及飞往一个中国城市拓展新业务。（广州是公司在世界上的顶级市场。）
He isn’t terribly comfortable with the press and can quickly flip into fight mode if you get him on a contentious topic. His body language shifts and his eyes narrow when I ask about critiques within the Valley that he’s too much the rapacious businessman and not enough a “don’t be evil” type.
他和媒体关系不佳，如果被问到争议话题，他会迅速进入战斗模式。我问硅谷的批评者说他太贪婪，不像谷歌那样“不做坏事”时，他的身体语言丰富，眯起双眼说：
“Those people don’t know me,” he says. “What drives me is a hard problem that hasn’t been solved, that has a really interesting and impactful solution. And for me it doesn’t even matter what the problem is. I just gravitate towards it. Maybe that results in a style that’s a little different,” he adds.
“那些人不懂我。让我奋进的是一个还没有解决的难题，这个问题会有非常有趣和影响深远的解决方案。对我而言这个问题是什么不重要，我只是努力克服它，可能造成的结果有点不一样。”
“I’m learning how to be as passionate as I am but understand that when you get bigger, you have to listen more and be more welcoming. And step on toes more lightly.”
“我正在学会在保持热情的同时，也明白当你越来越大后，必须多听，更宽容，要如履薄冰。”
To help, he enlisted David Plouffe, the man who helped Barack Obama reach the White House, to run Uber’s communications and political work. “There are actually some similarities between the two,” says Plouffe.
他把David Plouffe招入麾下做公关和政治工作，后者曾力保奥巴马入住白宫。Plouffe说“两人之间有些相似之处”。
“Obama would always ask a lot of questions and say, ‘Why did you do it like this? Maybe the opposition has a point?’ Travis does that too.”
“奥巴马总是问很多问题，然后说‘为什么不这样做？或许反对者也有道理？’特拉维斯也这么说。”
Following Plouffe’s hiring, Uber got better lobbyists, academic research to back up its positions and endorsements from groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving.
雇佣Plouffe后，Uber有了更棒的游说团队和学术研究团体以支持其地位，并获得注入“反对酒驾的母亲”等团体的认可。
Plouffe argues that Uber is less a replacement of full-time employment than a way of bolstering stagnant wages, since “50% of the drivers work 10 hours a week or less, and hours are falling as new drivers use the app,” from soccer moms looking to pick up a few bucks to redo their kitchens to teachers who want to make extra money during summer vacation.
Plouffe称Uber并不是替代了全职工作，而是一种增加收入的办法，因为“50%的司机每周工作是小时甚至更少，新司机使用软件后，工作时间更少”，开车送小孩踢足球的妈妈可以赚点零花钱装修厨房，老师在暑假里捞点外快。
“People around the country have two major complaints: that they have too little time, and too little money. Uber is a huge advantage for people struggling with both.”
“人们的不满有两种：没时间，没钱。Uber让人们解决这两个问题。”
Back in Boston, Kalanick conducts a Q&A meeting with full-time staffers—Uber has about 5,000 around the world. He is peppered with questions about whether the company would ever consider handing out perks like subsidized MBAs, as other larger tech firms do.
回到波士顿，卡兰尼克和全职员工进行问答会，Uber在全世界有5000名全职员工。他抛出问题，公司是否要考虑和其他大型技术公司一样，拿出经费来资助员工读MBA。
“Oooh, it’s getting hot in here,” he quips, to laughs. “I think we have to keep working to make Uber feel small. It’s when it feels big and you aren’t learning or being inspired anymore that you have to give out free MBAs or massages or whatever.”
“哇，这里很热。我想我们要让Uber感觉自己很小。如果觉得自己很大，你就不再学习了，泄气了，觉得自己不用去读免费的MBA或者什么玩意了。”
In another session, this time with drivers who are not traditional employees, one of the most frequently asked questions about Uber comes up: When will the company go public—and will contractors share the wealth? Kalanick speaks more carefully now. “It’s something that’s on our minds,” he says.
另一次卡兰尼克和非传统的雇员司机们开会，他遇到一个最常被问起的问题：公司何时上市，司机能分享财富吗？卡兰尼克这次回答得很小心。“我们正在考虑这个问题。”
“We have to be careful from a regulatory standpoint. There’s a lot of bureaucracy in being a public company.” He trails off, perhaps knowing that offering shares to drivers would be tantamount to admitting they really are employees.
“我们必须从监管的角度小心从事，上市公司会变得官僚化。”他这次有点泄气，可能知道把股份分给司机就相当于承认他们是真正的雇员。
Later, his attempt to justify Uber’s no-tips rule by saying that industries that allow tipping tend to underpay employees doesn’t go over well, despite being backed up by empirical proof. “That’s ridiculous,” mutters one middle-aged female driver.
后来，他试图为Uber的无小费准则辩护，他说允许付小费的产业会让雇员拿不到应得的钱，这样的产业发展不好，尽管这全凭他个人经验。“太可笑了”，一个中年女司机喃喃道。
Uber didn’t cause the seismic economic changes roiling the lives of workers everywhere. But, for better or worse, it is benefiting from them. Kalanick says he sometimes feels like he is “driving in the fog. I’ve got my hands on the wheel and I’m going too fast to look behind me, but I can’t see very far in front, either.”
Uber名没有带来地震般的经济变革，并未惹恼各处的工人。可或好或坏，Uber从他们中间获益。卡兰尼克说他有时觉得“自己在雾中开车，我把手放在方向盘上，我开的太快看不到我后面的东西，可我也看不远。”
As he navigates, he is focused on rollouts of new services like UberPool, which encourages carpooling, and the development of driverless cars. (Uber recently plucked researchers from Carnegie Mellon to get into that race along with other firms like Google, Tesla and Ford.)
他专注于新服务的推出，如鼓励合乘汽车的UberPool，开发无人驾驶汽车。最近Uber从卡耐基梅隆大学挖来研究者，加入和谷歌、特斯拉和福特的竞赛。
He’s also thinking about his next big disruptive idea, which could take on the deeply entrenched real estate industry.
他还在思考下一次破坏性创新，可能进军树大根深的房地产业。
Lately he’s gotten interested in another period of history: the late 1800s, better known as the Gilded Age. Appropriately, the volume on his nightstand at the moment is Hamilton biographer Ron Chernow’s book on John D.
不久前，他对另一段历史产生兴趣，19世纪末的镀金时代。此时床头柜上的书是汉密尔顿传记作者Ron Chernow写的洛克菲勒的传记。
Rockefeller, Titan. Rockefeller was, like Kalanick, a self-made man who eventually created the world’s largest and most powerful monopoly, Standard Oil, battling regulators, unions and political officials in the process.
大亨洛克菲勒和卡兰尼克一样，一个白手起家的人，他最后缔造世界上最大最有权势的垄断巨头。在这一过程中，标准石油公司不断与监管者、工会、和政治官员斗争。
The inspiration Kalanick takes from it may affect much more than the price of your next cab ride.
卡兰尼克从中获得的启示可能比你下一次的打车费用深远的多。