Uber did not solve a serious problem. They built a very convenient and useful app that let you call a cab. Which you could do before, but you had to talk to a real person and take a minute to give your credit card info and now you don&#x27;t.<p>And they did live in the world. The world of people who rely on cabs&#x2F;transport. And found it wanting, the primary motivation for starting their company. Then they learned about the industry and tried to fix it and it took years of hard work.<p>Airbnb hosted a nicer-looking craigslist specialized to make it really easy for people worldwide to conspire with each other to violate the terms of their leases to make a couple extra dollars while breaking a law that is hard to enforce.<p>And I think you&#x27;ll find the founders didn&#x27;t just come up with this idea out of nothing. They solved a problem that came up in their real lives.<p>Either way, it&#x27;s entirely predictable for someone in the tech community though gross to compare these silly cash grabs to solving real cultural, social, and political problems that actually effect people in a serious way like FGM, clean drinking water in the third world, mass incarceration.