Why Uber will win the scooter wars

On this episode of Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher, Kara sits downs with Sunil Paul, the co-founder of Sidecar who recently penned a popular post for this site, "The scooter wars will be a bloodbath, and Uber will win." In this podcast, he elaborates on why that is and shares his thoughts about the broader transportation industry, including self-driving cars, bike-sharing and vertical lift and take-off vehicles like Larry Page's Kitty Hawk "flying car." Now primarily an investor, Paul also talks about why Sidecar couldn't compete with Uber and Lyft -- even though it created ride-hailing features that are now popular parts of their products. You can listen to Recode Decode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts, Overcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. Below, we've shared a lightly edited transcript of Kara's full conversation with Paul. Sunil Paul: Great to be here. Let's do a little background. You and I have known each other for ... A dog's age, as they say, like since D.C., in the early 90s. Can you explain how you were lucky enough to meet me then? Well, I think I first met you when I was AOL's internet product manager. And then, I started a company. I think you were the demo boy. That's what I think you were, weren't you? You showed me some demos. I think I was a demo boy. I recall demo boy-ing for Steve Case. You were working at AOL. What products did you work on there? How did you get there? What were you doing in D.C.? I came to D.C. to work on a space station. My early career I was an engineer. I helped do the early design for a space station. Then I got really interested in policy because Congress kept mucking around with the space station. I went, spent several years as a policy analyst on the Hill for [the] Office of Technology Assessment. While I was there, I started mucking around with this new thing, that was the early '90s, I started mucking around with this new thing called the internet and that ... Why did you pick AOL?