A few months later, I told a partner at the firm about my idea. He was great; he agreed to be my first client and even invested a little. It was a little nuts. For the first several years, we were only focused on enterprises, not individual consumers. Sometimes I would stay up all night just in case people called.
Eventually, we hired someone to work nights. It was a pretty slow slog. Too many to mention, but here are two big ones: First, we were onboarding a major investment bank when we accidentally sent a test email to every single employee at the bank—we are talking tens of thousands. I got the call from my engineer at 2 a. But, thankfully, the bank gave us another chance after we apologized and promised it would never happen again. Another one was in We had no money coming in and I remember putting payroll on my credit card.
We were very close to going out of business. Things got better around when we focused on launching our consumer offering. By then, people were getting more comfortable using personal credit cards online. I especially enjoy the stage of idea to pre-revenue to immediately after post-revenue. The next step was expanding to a second city. We tried to raise venture capital to do that, but it was taking too long.
VCs are slow to say yes, but they'll never say no. The longer they can push you off, the more options they keep open. So we said, "Screw it! We're going to do it anyway. We bootstrapped, and it paid off. The restaurants were really receptive, and the orders started coming in aggressively. People in San Francisco loved it, and investors noticed. We opened in San Francisco in October and closed our first capital round that November. Still, expanding to a second market was really difficult, because we weren't living there.
This business is hyperlocal. We didn't know the neighborhoods the way we do in Chicago. We wanted to be a national company, but we couldn't afford to put an office in every city in the U. So we had to figure out a way to build a market, drive awareness, and sign up restaurants without having to pay rent.
We ultimately hired a San Francisco manager who physically went to restaurants, signed them up, and built our network. These days, instead of having managers in each place, we just have people on the ground in our top 10 markets. The rest of our sales team is in Chicago and New York City. We're one of the few consumer internet companies for which offline advertising works really well--specifically, at transit hubs. People coming home from work around 6 p.
We figured this out when we advertised on mass transit in Chicago. We had noticed that the person managing the outdoor ads was really bad at taking them down, so we knew if we bought a month of space, we'd get five. That placement worked very well. It has been a staple of our advertising ever since.
In New York City, you'll see Seamless ads plastered on the subways and buses. Before the merger, Seamless was our biggest competitor, so I was very aware of what it was doing. I would have been loath to say it before we merged, but the companies were similar--we were solving the same problems but in different geographies. This assumption underlies much that we receive through our news media. We often hear that computers will change our work patterns, that western television will determine attitudes toward capitalism in Eastern Europe, and that nuclear weapons will maintain a lasting peace.
Since World War II, it has been forecast that there would be numerous technological revolutions—among them atomic energy, the computer, and the information revolutions—followed by dramatic social changes.
Even our scholarly histories still pretend to show how the Industrial Revolution in Britain ushered in modern times. One of the tenets of vulgar Marxism is a dogmatic insistence that technological change brings social change.
Only rarely do we read or hear that values or social changes shape technology. When I was in engineering school, I often heard my professors dismiss politics as irrational and irrelevant, and identify technology as the root cause of all social improvement. A History of Technology, published by Oxford University Press in the mids, clearly exemplifies the internalist genre in the field of history Singer et al.
Massively informative, painstakingly organized, and copiously illustrated, the five volumes covering the history until survey technological and applied science developments chronologically. The authors contributed chapters defined by engineering and industrial categories. Magnetoelectric generators, for instance, give way to self-excited dynamos, and those supplying simple direct current to ones generating polyphase current.
Such an approach leads the reader to conclude that technological change is essentially the progressive application of science to solve technical problems, which in turn results in an increasing variety of technical devices and processes of ever-increasing efficiency.
Technological development thus takes place in a hermetically sealed world of invention, engineering, and science until the fruit of thought and. One might dismiss this history as well-intentioned and harmless, but this is to overlook the probability that young engineers who are persuaded by the information and interpretation of A History of Technology are not likely to consider political and social factors as they design technology or aspire to preside over it.
Another salient characteristic of the internalist approach assumes that modern technology is mostly applied science. This interpretation is congruent with the argument often advanced in the past by science policy advisers that technological application will emerge willy-nilly from our support of pure science. For this reason, internalist history was and is usable history for those seeking support for pure science.
History used in this way, however, leads to a misunderstanding of the nature of technological change, and perhaps, in the long run, to ineffective science policy.
Today, the new history of technology offers a far more complex interpretation of the relation of science and technology and one far more in accord with the experience of engineers and industrial scientists. As we have noted, internalist history of technology reinforces disciplinary and industrial category boundaries, taxonomies used often in engineering.
For instance, chapters in the A History of Technology cover bridges and tunnels, the internal combustion engine, petroleum, machine tools, rubber, and mechanical road transport, to name only a few of the categories. Such organization facilitates the writing of a simple, clear narrative of technical developments but at the same time frustrates the presentation of the interconnections that transcend specialist categories.
Using technological categories, for instance, precludes showing the interconnections among the internal combustion engine, petroleum engineering, and mechanical road transport and how such interactions like these helped bring about the modern, or second, industrial revolution.
The internalist mode assigns plows to the category of food production and ignores social institutions like the medieval manor, so major sociotechnical changes such as the agricultural revolution of the early Middle Ages are overlooked.
Our effort to understand technological change and to convey this understanding to others will continue to be severely handicapped if we employ only the internalist mode with its emphasis on individual artifacts evolving outside functional relationships to other artifacts and to social institutions. When Lynn White, Jr. He offered a viable alternative to an essential aspect of the internalist approach and new insights into the nature of technological change. He writes in a determinist mode, but his identification.
As a result, his history portrays complex and encompassing social change caused by evolving, interacting technology components such as plows, ox teams, and harnesses Figure 1. White argues that during an era when nine-tenths of the population of medieval Europe was involved in tillage, changes in the mode of plowing modified population, wealth, political relationships, leisure, and cultural expression White, , p.
He also. We sample White's approach in more detail in his portrayal of the agricultural revolution of the Middle Ages, where he poses a problem familiar to engineers —that of transferring technology from one material and cultural environment to another.
In late Roman and early medieval times, as people moved northward from the Italian peninsula, the peasant left the dry sandy earth and relatively dry climate to encounter the heavy alluvial soil of the river valleys and wet weather of northern Europe. In the south had evolved a technological system involving the scratch-plow with two oxen, shallow cross-plowing in easily pulverized, moisture-retaining solid, and square fields. After encountering the heavy, moisture-laden soil of the north, the tiller of the soil adopted a different system.
The interacting components invented and developed included the wheeled heavy plow, with a coulter to cut vertically into the sod; a plowshare to slash the earth horizontally at the grass roots; and a mouldboard to turn the slice of earth to right or left.
This heavier plow required eight yoked oxen to pull it. Because no cross-plowing was needed, the fields became long and narrow rather than square. This system substituted efficiently applied animal power for human energy and time and illustrates the sequential substitution of new components in a system of agriculture.
Communal decisions were made by a powerful village council of peasants. Thus did the characteristic manorial economy, a sociotechnical system, emerge. Engineers, industrial scientists, and managers who preside over technological change today will also find congenial White's presentation of the dynamics of systems evolving.
The introduction of the heavy plow, he reasoned, was only the first critical technological event of an extended sequence of innovations during the agricultural revolution of the early Middle Ages. Take for example the gradual substitution of the horse for the ox as draft animal. The introduction of a new harness and a nailed shoe made the horse an economic as well as military asset. His circle of reasoning closes as he asserts that the new three-field system of crop rotation, stimulated by the introduction of the heavy plow, brought the cultivation of oats for the horse, and legumes for humans.
With the cost of horse feed thus made lower than that of ox feed, the. White summarizes his account of systems evolving and revolutions transpiring as follows:. It is not merely the new quantity of food produced by improved agricultural methods, but the new type of food supply which goes far towards explaining, for northern Europe at least, the startling expansion of population, the growth and multiplication of cities, the rise in industrial production, the outreach of commerce, and the new exuberance of spirits which enlivened that age.
In the full sense of the vernacular, the Middle Ages, from the tenth century onward, were full of beans White, , p. In history, as in science and technology, articulating patterns of change helps us see our world in new ways. White showed us systems of technological relationships, and other historians soon after explicitly identified technological systems in the historical events and structures they studied.
Relationships and connections that had been previously overlooked in the source materials now emerged as historians pushed in new directions the idea of technology as evolving systems. When I began writing a biography of Elmer Sperry, the biographical material published about his invention of the gyrocompass presented it as an isolated event in a series of seemingly unrelated inventive acts spread over his lifetime Hughes, Internalist accounts of the invention only described the complex device and noted the substantial contribution made to navigation.
If we consider the gyrocompass as a component and the ship as a system, however, then exciting insights into Sperry's invention of the compass follow. Since the mid-nineteenth century, steam engines displaced sails, wooden hulls gave way to iron ones, and electric motors and lights replaced steam-powered and petroleum-illuminated devices.
An unintended consequence of the alteration of these components was the effect on other ship components. Changes cascaded through the system. For example, the ship was now filled with magnetic flux from the newly introduced iron hull, and electromagnetic fields generated by its electric motors, which affected the magnetic compass used to guide the wooden ship.
Now the magnetic compass responded to these fields in addition to the magnetic field of the earth. Because of the improvement in gunnery and gunpowders, this malfunction became especially troublesome. With longer firing ranges possible, gunfire errors from flawed compass readings were magnified. Sperry and other inventors learned of this reverse salient in the evolving ship system and concentrated their creative talents on the solution of the problem Figure 2.
Research and development funds available because of an intensifying armaments race supported their inventive activities. By the eve of World War I, several inventors, including Sperry, had introduced the gyrocompass, a device unaffected by the irregularities of magnetic fields, but. In this case, the inventorsresponded to a system undergoing dynamic change. Based on my research on the development of the gyrocompass as a complex of systematic relationships, I then developed a model of technological systems evolving in which purposeful changes in some components in a technological system often lead to unintended malfunctions in others.
Thus, alert inventors who monitor these omnipresent modern technological systems as they expand can then concentrate on inventions that solve the problems of the malfunctioning components.
Once the system is in equilibrium, the opportunities for invention disappear, but as long as so-called improvements are being made, the cascading effect keeps inventors, industrial researchers, and others busy. This Sperry episode, however, presumes too narrow a model of technological systems.
Sperry also extended his horizons to encompass a sociotechnical system with nontechnical as well as technical components. Early in his career as an inventor, he found that new technology, including the gyrocompass, was rarely developed by existing institutions. Only infrequently did he locate an established manufacturing firm willing to abandon a line of products in which it had heavily invested skill, knowledge, and capital in order to develop a new innovation unrelated to its investment.
So, on numerous occasions he, the inventor-entrepreneur, had to invent not only a device but an institution for manufacturing and marketing as well. Perusing his papers, one realizes that he drew no distinctions among the technical, the economic, and the institutional. The proposition that creativity is holistic can be grounded in empirical evidence. As he invented, Sperry wove a seamless web of technology and institutional change.
It was Alfred D. Chandler who further enlarged our historical horizons with his Pulitzer prize-winning volume, The Visible Hand , in which he stresses the interaction of technology and institutions, especially the means of production and the business corporations that managed these. Not unlike White, Chandler tends to technological determinism. He argues that modern management practices make it possible for us to enter the doors that technology opens.
He is especially adept at showing how modern management used the infrastructure of communication and transportation to coordinate and control the interacting means of production and distribution.
Using examples from the period of about to , when the market for goods in the United States was expanding, Chandler shows how the visible hand of management ensures the smooth flow of materials and energy through the stages of production and distribution, which continuously evolve because of technological innovation.
From Chandler, we learn to understand technological change better if we take into consideration the role of the manager and the firm. White's insistence that the multioxen team and deep plow brought about the institution of the manor, which in turn presided over the new technology, finds a counterpart in Chandler's argument that modern large-scale, capital-intensive technology paves the way for the multidivisional corporation which then rationalizes production through management.
Chandler demonstrates that the implications of the technology revolution that transpired from about to —the Second Industrial Revolution —would not have been realized without managerial, or organizational, innovations. In other words, the introduction of modern multidivisional business corporations contributed as much to increased production and productivity during the Second Industrial Revolution as did, say, the electric power system.
Historians of technology attempting to explain the Second. Industrial Revolution now realize that, in addition to lectures on machine tools, steel production, and petroleum refining, they must include the rise of modern scientific management among their lecture topics. In his new book, Scale and Scope, Chandler gives an example of how modern corporations realize the implications of technological change. After , in order to maximize the flow of materials from well to consumer, managers of the Standard Oil Trust integrated new modes of petroleum refining and highly developed means of transportation and communication.
Muckraking historians have characterized the formation of such trusts as efforts to establish profit-gouging enterprises. Chandler, by contrast, explains how the Standard Oil Trust provided a legal instrument to exploit the potential of modern technology. The management of the trust, through stock interchanges and other financial devices, controlled a loose federation of 40 companies, which owned oil fields, refineries, and transportation networks.
Afterward, rationalization concentrated about a quarter of the world's kerosene production into three large and technically efficient refineries. As a result, economies of scale drastically lowered the cost of producing kerosene Chandler, , p. Although more sophisticated and subtle in their interpretations of technological change than the internalists, White and Chandler are, as we have noted, technological determinists. It was left to other historians to successfully attack the citadel of technological determinism and provide fresh understanding of the nature of technological change.
Several decades before White and Chandler, Louis Hunter, an American economic historian, wrote vividly and concretely about the way in which geographic forces shape technology. Considering the persuasiveness of Hunter's monograph, one is surprised that internalist, technological-determinist history continued to prevail.
Perhaps this is because Hunter was an economic historian, considered outside the mainstream of the historians of technology in his time. Hunter's seminal work bears the memorable title Steamboats on the West ern Rivers It is a marvelous example of comparative history on why steamboats navigating eastern coastal waters and rivers differed in technical detail from those on the Mississippi and it tributaries.
After reading Hunter, it is difficult to argue that there is one best way to do technology, regardless of place.
Hunter takes an ecological approach by placing technology in a geographic setting and showing how the technical characteristics mirror geographical features. After successfully introducing steamboat transportation along the Hudson river, he obtained a monopoly to provide steamboat transportation along the Mississippi. He persuaded Nicholas Roosevelt, a New Jersey steam-engine builder, and workmen from New York to set up a factory in Pittsburgh to build steamboats much like those used on the Hudson and eastern coastal waters.
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