In a romantic comedy, Uber would be the guy that messes up over and over but still gets the girl in the end.

The ride-hailing company often finds itself in the news for all the wrong reasons, yet its stock continues to rise at an extraordinary rate. Uber CEO Travis Kalanick recently announced plans to create 50,000 new jobs this year across Europe and the company’s last value estimation landed around $40 billion, according to a Jan. 19 Business Insider article.

Uber’s success despite having a tarnished reputation proves that public perception doesn’t always matter, especially in the tech world.

Sabotaging competitors’ sales, abducting customers and multiple accidents involving Uber drivers are just a few of the digital taxi service’s past blunders. Media attention is usually the driving force for success in a new company, but in this case, Uber’s extremely large value makes outside opinions less notable.

Uber brings in more than triple the amount revenue of a normal taxi service in San Francisco, the city in which it was founded, and now the trend is now spreading to other major cities. Past history has shown that once a product or service becomes integrated into peoples’ lives, it takes more than a few PR mishaps for users to jump ship.

The bad boy reputation is somewhat common in technology. Uber’s situation is comparable to Time Warner Cable and Comcast’s monopoly of digital cable television. Even Mark Zuckerberg faced his share of backlash for his methods while creating Facebook.

These products and services survived not because everyone agreed with these practices, but because they became a necessity. Investors understand that Uber has captured the hearts of millennials and is on its way to becoming the taxi of the future. Nothing anyone in the media writes can change that.

Uber executives deserve some credit for handling the speedy expansion of the company in just four short years. No one could have predicted that Uber would have such a high value so quickly. As a result, most of the company’s decisions and adjustments have been done on the fly. Even companies that have been in existence for decades make mistakes and the media should cut Uber some slack while it learns the ropes.

With that being said, Uber should make an attempt to clean up its image as well. This would raise its value even higher and, more importantly, form partnerships with even bigger brands. Standards and regulations need to be put in place that ensure the safety of the riders, and Uber should implement a harder screening process when hiring drivers. Accommodations for handicapped customers would also be a step in the right direction.

Uber’s success is a reminder that even bad publicity can’t stop a movement once it gets rolling. The sexy taxi service should hope to have a better PR year in 2015, but it’s probably not too high on its priority list.

Forty billion dollars will certainly inflate anyone’s ego, and it will make you a little less concerned with what people think of you.

Aarick Knighton is a junior information management and technology major. His column appears weekly. He can be reached at adknight@syr.edu and followed on Twitter @aarickurban.

Published on January 21, 2015 at 1:52 am