Juno Takes on Uber

The LaGuardia Plaza Hotel is a four-minute drive from LaGuardia Airport, in Queens, and on a recent August afternoon nearly every car parked in the hotel's lot was black. One after the other, men in shirtsleeves pulled up in Chevy Suburbans and GMC Yukon XLs and gleaming Lexus RS 300s with leather-trimmed seats, got out, then made their way across the marble lobby and up a flight of stairs. A brightly smiling woman approached them as they congregated around a registration desk. She jotted the letters onto a yellow sticky note and worked her way down the line. "Do you have an appointment? The men were black-car drivers, currently working for the ride-summoning companies Uber or Lyft, or both, and they were there, in all likelihood, because another driver had told them that they could get more money, and better treatment, if they signed up to drive for a new rival, Juno. New York City--which has no shortage of ways to get around, from pedicabs to one of the largest public-transportation systems in the world--is just one stage upon which a handful of companies are fighting to dominate the future of personal transportation. Juno has decided that the most effective way to do that is by being extra-nice to the drivers. After the men registered, they were ushered into a waiting room, where draped café tables had been set up with brochures: "How to Be a 5 Star Juno Driver." The drivers were soon called by name--"Khaleed?" "Julio?"--and brought into another room, where a Juno manager, Lucas Smith, was waiting for them with a laptop and an overhead projector. "Drive Your Future," the slogan on the screen urged. A pink-skinned forty-year-old in jeans with a bushy red beard and an intense gaze, Smith joined Juno last January. Like several of his colleagues, he was recruited from Apple's retail division, where he conducted training sessions for Apple-store employees, based on Apple's carefully designed protocols. In fact, many details of the drivers' experience had been modelled on the interactions that customers have when they enter an Apple store, from the "concierges" who greeted them to the low driver-to-employee ratio. At first, Smith was put off by the whiff of exploitation that he detected around rising Silicon Valley enterprises such as Instacart, where people buy your groceries for you, and TaskRabbit, where freelancers can underbid one another to take on errands and other jobs. In middle school, Smith told me, he was assigned a book by Ayn Rand. "I remember finishing it, and realizing that I wanted to be the opposite of everything that was in that book," he said. "Everything about the celebration of selfishness was just anathema." So he was initially skeptical about Juno. "I'm a super-progressive, and I have incredibly mixed feelings about the'sharing economy' and companies like Uber," he said. "Rather than creating wealth, they felt extractive.