Our CEO, Arsen Tomsky’s book Inner Drive: From Underdog to Global Company has made it to McKinsey’s 2024 list of recommended books – “the best books in business, technology, workplace culture, and more.” To celebrate, we thought we’d share with you an excerpt from the book: Here, Arsen tells inDrive’s origin story, dating back to a freezing winter in 2012…

Over the long New Year’s holiday of 2012, it was cold in Yakutsk, with temperatures reaching -40 to -50 ˚C. For residents of the city, this felt uncomfortably low in contrast with the milder temperatures of recent decades that were attributed to global warming. I remember the temperatures hitting -75 ˚F fairly often when I was in elementary and middle school. Classes would be canceled on those days due to the low temperatures—not that this prevented us from playing hockey all day in the courtyards of our apartment buildings, and taking breaks to eat ice cream.

Most taxi services in the city took advantage of the cold snap, and dramatically hiked their rates overnight. This clear collusion outraged the city. The different taxi services had collectively raised their rates before, but this immediate 50% increase was too high. Its timing during the cold snap also made the move look even more cynical. As it stood, their customer service was already deplorable. The dispatcher would promise you a car in “five minutes,” but they’d actually keep you waiting for half an hour more, before a beater with a rude driver and a smoky interior finally showed up. Or they might not send a car at all, telling you off in no uncertain, but definitely obscene, terms, and no longer answering your calls. So as far as the city residents could see, the only reason taxi services were raising their rates was simple, cynical greed.

Because all the main taxi services were in it together, customers had no choice but to either walk in the -50 ˚F temperatures, or accept and pay the new rate. At least, that’s what the taxi companies thought. But, unexpectedly, their move triggered a series of events that led to the disappearance of over 90% of the taxi services in Yakutsk within the next few years.

On the social network VK.com, popular in Russia, a 20-year-old college student named Alexander Pavlov created a small group, inviting his friends with cars, other students like himself, to join. They started offering rides to other members of the group at pre-increase taxi prices. It worked like this: The group administrator would create a new post titled something like “Rides for February 25, evening.” In the comments, passengers would write the details of their trips and offer a price. The bidding mechanism, price offers by the passengers, developed naturally. The drivers sat in their cars, constantly updating the browser on the screens of their smartphones, hoping to be the first to see a profitable request. After they selected a job, they had to quickly find the telephone number of the rider, copy it, enter it into their phone, and then call the passenger before the other drivers could. The agreement was concluded in that phone conversation. For lucrative jobs, other drivers might continue to call a passenger after a deal had been struck, only to discover that a driver had already been found. Pavlov called the group “The Association of Independent Drivers. Yakutsk,” or the Russian-language acronym SNV, for short.

In an unforeseen turn of events, without any advertising, thousands of users began joining the group. Moreover, people were registering with the social network just to use this service, both passengers and drivers. In a matter of months, the group had gained tens of thousands of members, generating a couple thousand rides a day. For Yakutsk, with its official population of 320,000, this group quickly became a noticeable and powerful social phenomenon.

Inner Drive: From Underdog to Global Company is available at indrive.com/book for free download.