> Honest question: Who or what was "really instrumental to Uber's early success"?

Using VC funding to bankroll an unprofitable business model, undercutting existing industry players who didn't have multiple billion dollar rocket boosters, mostly. Ignoring laws and other unethical practices no doubt helped.

To be fair, most people wouldn’t be able to pull all of that off but Travis did.

Yeah, people should give him more credit for being as good a con-man as he is!

For non techy startup nerds, it was probably the fact that the Taxi industry was almost universally loathed, expensive, and unreliable.

The on-demand rides industry (Lyft, Uber, et al) managed to not only lower pricing, but also bring Karma (bi-lateral user ratings) to the whole industry so that a driver can't just say "fuck you" to a passenger without consequence (nor could the passenger to the driver). If this didn't improve the world, I'm not sure what does.

Don’t forget the industrial scale tax evasion

From my experience, singing Travis Kalanick's praises (at least on HN) has generally been met with resistance. I remember everyone piling on him about that (what I thought was a relatively innocuous) company retreat memo a few years ago.

There's a big difference between admiring Kalanick as a person, and admitting he created the über startup. (I think) most people on HN realize that questionable ethics are strongly correlated with success.