Curb CEO on how the app is competing with Lyft and Uber
Amos Tamam, Curb CEO, joins The Final Round to discuss how Curb is working to connect riders to taxis in major cities and how the cab industry is fairing during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Video Transcript
SEANA SMITH: Welcome back to "The Final Round." Uber and Lyft shut down and California is on pause, but their uncertainty in the state is prompting several competitors to accelerate plans to enter the market. And with that, I want to bring in our next guest. We have Amos Tamam. He's the CEO of Curb, a platform that connects riders with licensed taxis. And Amos, when we talk about taxis and how they've been able to compete with ride-sharing, I think a lot of taxis have struggled in a lot of the major cities. So given the challenges that we're seeing and the uncertainty with Uber and Lyft, how are you using this as an opportunity to increase your market share?
AMOS TAMAM: Yeah, I think that, well, first of all, thank you for inviting me on the show. We've seen, for the past few years, we've seen tremendous change in the taxi cab attitude toward the technology and customer service. And that's where we began to fill the gap for them. By providing them the Curb mobility technology, we're enabling the riders to book and pay easily in cabs. The fact that it's easier to connect to the cab, bring back some trips to the Yellow Cab, so in general, to the cab industry nationwide.
These are tremendous effort on our end to try to fill for some of the trips that lost during the last few years to the ride-share companies by connecting cabs to verticals or businesses that never used cabs before, and that's including government partnership, like Metropolitan Transit Authority or MTA of New York, private partnership with the corporations and non-emergency transportations.
SEANA SMITH: Amos, when you compare the numbers of the number of rides taxi drivers were doing before they adopted your technology and what they're doing now, how significant of an increase have they seen in their businesses?
AMOS TAMAM: So pre-COVID overall, I think for the last two years, the industry had lost about 20% to 25% of the volume. Last year in 2019, we generated over $120 million dollars or about a million trips a month to the industry in New York alone through this partnership, like the MTA hospital in non-emergency and the Curb mobile platform.
RICK NEWMAN: Hey, Amos, Rick Newman here. One of the things that people like about Uber and Lyft, other than the technology, is the cars themselves. I mean, they are typically the driver's personal vehicle. In most cases, they're much nicer than a taxi cab. I mean, taxis can be kind of gross, especially in New York City. Is there anything afoot to actually improve the vehicles the taxi drivers drive?
AMOS TAMAM: Yeah, so absolutely. I think it's been an issue for years. I just think that as you see cabs coming back on the road now, a lot of them retired because of age. But there's a general attitude in the industry, not only in New York, is that look, if we want to compete, we need to up the game, to up our game, and that's including better quality vehicles, drivers getting better trained. A lot drivers by us, for example, are being trained and licensed for drug and alcohol tests. But the general attitude in cabs is to up the game, including better vehicles, cleaner vehicles, to answer.
SEANA SMITH: All right, Amos, great to have you on. Amos Tamam, CEO of Curb. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us today.
AMOS TAMAM: Thank you very much.
