Brad Stone is senior executive editor of the global technology group at Bloomberg News and senior writer for Bloomberg BusinessWeek for which he has written numerous in-depth cover stories on leading technology companies, including Apple, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo & Amazon.

In his book “The Upstarts” he writes about the inspirational & unusual journey of Airbnb and Uber and their charismatic, rule-breaking founders – new architects of the twenty-first century – Travis Kalanick and Brian Chesky. “The Upstarts” covers the eight-year period of exponential growth and life-threatening challenges of the two iconic companies, that starts with the owners attending Barak Obama’s first tenure inauguration to end of an era with the impending inauguration of the Trump presidency.

It starts with Travis and Brian and their co-founders in their “Trough of Sorrow”, working on “side-projects” and “marinating in dread over unfulfilled potential” to them shaping the start of the sharing or on-demand economy and ushering in a new culture-shift in degree of trust powered by ubiquitous internet access and smartphone penetration.   The parallel running stories of the “non-starters” i.e. SeeamlessWeb, Taxi Magic, Couchsurfing and Zimride offer useful lessons for start-ups.

The story of marketing minded engineers and the larger than life visions that inspire not just employees but the entire ecosystem of consumers and suppliers, builds up as the two upstarts set about conquering city by city and country by country. Moral questions about what is right and wrong and from whose perspective, are inter-spread through the growth stories. The perspectives of ‘right and wrong’ are especially interesting in the context of balancing demand & supply – the cornerstone of building a successful marketplace.

The narration of the fight with the regulators and special interest groups is thrilling in the way it provides an in-depth view and important take-aways, esp. the “Travis’s Law” i.e. the strategy of leveraging your large user base to influence the outcomes of these debates. Then there’s Brian’s realization that investment in customer service and customer safety is key for product and technology companies, which comes somewhere in the middle of the book.

Built on early mistakes of the two, the book offers amazing real life lessons on building teams around core values, need for sharp internal and external communication for perception management, building inroads into set government beliefs and harnessing your own user base to become ‘too big to regulate’. And above all the crystal-clear vision of what your product or service stands for and then building an experience around a customer desire.

“The Upstarts” is all about questioning and challenging deep rooted social and cultural beliefs. It’s about standing by your ambition and competing aggressively and not about thwarting competition by playing the regulations or the government. It’s about building an ideology and a global movement that leverages the power of accessible connectivity to create a multiplier effect, a “flywheel spinning ever faster” that builds “escape velocity” to break out of conventional laws to become so essential that people can live without them.

The book is interestingly presented with alternating stories of the inter-twining and yet separate emergence of Airbnb and Uber from the “conflagration of capital and conviction” and the contrasting personalities of Kalanick and Chesky who have the same underlying “warrior” characteristics of being persistent and having an unreal, passionate belief in the ideas they championed.

Towards the end of the book is the emergence of the Chinese Didi and it’s legendary fight with Uber, which is no less than any thriller.  And therein, from that fight, also starts the maturing of Uber as an organization and Travis as it’s leader.

Good ahead, read and learn about everything from the importance of pricing to supplier background checks to insurance to user agreement to having a diversity in the team that designs your products.

As big companies promise to change everything from traffic, employment, livability and experiences, the live customer experiences of both serious pain and overwhelming warmth are emotionally touching and hard reminders how consumer companies impact the lives of many.