What have Airbnb, Google and Uber done to dominate the market?

In this digital era we live in, where technology advances very rapidly, it is vital for companies to play by the rules of exponential firms.

Have you ever wondered... How is it that some digital companies achieve so much with so few resources and in much less time? How did Uber become the largest taxi company in the world, valued at 41.2 billion dollars, more than Hertz ($9.44 billion) and Avis ($5.79 billion) combined, without owning any cars or having any drivers on their payroll? How did Google become the most recognized brand in the world, surpassing Coca-Cola? How did Alibaba surpass Walmart in market cap value in October 2014, without having any inventory? Or, how did Airbnb become the company with the most lodging rooms in the world, surpassing chains like Hilton and Hyatt, without owning any property? How did they achieve it? The answer is that these companies are... exponential.

Salim Ismael, CEO of Singularity University; Michael S. Malone, and Yuri Van Geest spent 3 years studying what was behind companies like Google, Facebook, Uber, Quirky, etc., publishing "Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are 10 times better, faster, and cheaper than yours (and what to do about it)", which became the book of the year according to Frost & Sullivan GIL 2014. This book describes the secrets of billion-dollar companies or "unicorns" (as they are called in Silicon Valley), detailing how they operate and work their magic, highlighting methods for scaling a company using digital tools. Most interestingly, they recently published a list of the 100 most exponential companies in the world, where names like: 1. GitHub / 2. Airbnb / 3. Uber / 4. Indiegogo / 5. Google / 6. Pinterest / 7. Kaggle / 8. Tumblr / 9. Quirky / 10. Shapeways stand out. In this digital era we live in, where technology advances very rapidly, it is vital for companies to play by the rules of exponential firms and to take advantage of this technological wave, which will soon change any industry.