And if you had asked your non-tech/internet obsessed friends what they thought of Uber a few years ago you would have gotten equally blank 'wtf is Uber?' stares

And if you had asked your non-tech/internet obsessed friends what they thought of Uber a few years ago you would have gotten equally blank 'wtf is Uber?' stares. You may think that having the tech industry filled with antipathy towards Uber does not matter much, but those same techies are the ones who make decisions like 'what companies should we support via an API call in our app' or 'who should we partner with on our new service', and more importantly the 'whose recruiting offer should I consider' question. With Uber bleeding money from its unlicensed taxi business it needs to find any other opportunity it can, and having those doors just a little bit harder to open for the Uber bizdev & recruiting people will matter a lot more in the long-run than whether or not a non-techie decides to take an Uber home in middle America.