That's OK. It just doesn't belong in Silicon Valley. Ship it out to XYZ Valley/Alley/Prairie.

I'm also a fan of punctuated equilibrium and cladogenesis as opposed to evolution over millenia. But maybe that's just me.

Black-Scholes heavily influenced their model. Read the book. Talk with people who were involved. You'll see how firmly they believed in their incorrect formulas and algorithms. Even up to the morning that they were insolvent, they were trying to raise money and double down on their bets. They absolutely failed at running a business. They had a bad idea and let it run wild rather than calling it quits early on. You can blame it on the Russian or Asian debt crises all you want, but they were going to get hit hard sooner or later. When the fecal matter hits the fan, the correlation of everything goes to 1. If you can't grasp that, you haven't learned the LTCM lesson and no equation or formula will save you.

That said, this post is about people in the Valley making big bets. Not finance people thinking that they can build a better mouse trap for 12 basis points.

By "it created" you mean it's a first globally recognizable brand (part of the recognition obviously comes from their blatant violation of local laws). We had lots of similar companies in Europe; as far as I can tell, they even had apps first. They just weren't sexy.

I'm not trying to diminish the effect (for better or worse) Uber is having on transportation market. It's big and it's because of them. But it's not because they were innovative in some way.