An unusually gripping business book

published 10 February 2017

The Upstarts:

How Uber, Airbnb and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the Worldby Brad StonePublished by Bantam, £20(Buy at Amazon)

Depending on your view, Uber and Airbnb are either a liberating force, breaking down business cartels, or the thin end of a wedge, undermining laws that protect workers and consumers.But like them or loathe them, both are multi-billion-dollar companies that have changed entire industries. In The Upstarts, Brad Stone, examines how they emerged.

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The result is "a fun, briskly told narrative" that includes "one less well-known part of the story: the firms that lost the race", says Alex Tabarrok inThe Wall Street Journal. Several rivals offered similar services, but none became billion-dollar successes. Detailing these failures helps "highlight what it was that made Uber and Airbnb so different", says Leslie Hook in the Financial Times.

Another strength is the "vivid picture of [Travis] Kalanick", the driving force behind Uber, "particularly the years that he spent as a struggling and failing entrepreneur". Indeed, says Emma Duncan in The Times. It's the colourful characters as much as the "high stakes" that "make this an unusually gripping business book".

Matthew graduated from the University of Durham in 2004; he then gained an MSc, followed by a PhD at the London School of Economics.

He has previously written for a wide range of publications, including the Guardian and the Economist, and also helped to run a newsletter on terrorism. He has spent time at Lehman Brothers, Citigroup and the consultancy Lombard Street Research.

Matthew is the author of Superinvestors: Lessons from the greatest investors in history, published by Harriman House, which has been translated into several languages. His second book, Investing Explained: The Accessible Guide to Building an Investment Portfolio, is published by Kogan Page.

As senior writer, he writes the shares and politics & economics pages, as well as weekly Blowing It and Great Frauds in History columns He also writes a fortnightly reviews page and trading tips, as well as regular cover stories and multi-page investment focus features.

Follow Matthew on Twitter: @DrMatthewPartri