Juno’s business model centers on getting drivers to defect from rival services. Illustration by Sébastien Plassard

The LaGuardia Plaza Hotel is a four-minute drive from LaGuardia Airport, in Queens, and on a recent August afternoon nearly every car parked in the hotel’s lot was black. One after the other, men in shirtsleeves pulled up in Chevy Suburbans and GMC Yukon XLs and gleaming Lexus RS 300s with leather-trimmed seats, got out, then made their way across the marble lobby and up a flight of stairs. A brightly smiling woman approached them as they congregated around a registration desk. “How are you?” she asked each one. “What’s your first name?” She jotted the letters onto a yellow sticky note and worked her way down the line. “Do you have an appointment? Awesome!”

The men were black-car drivers, currently working for the ride-summoning companies Uber or Lyft, or both, and they were there, in all likelihood, because another driver had told them that they could get more money, and better treatment, if they signed up to drive for a new rival, Juno. New York City—which has no shortage of ways to get around, from pedicabs to one of the largest public-transportation systems in the world—is just one stage upon which a handful of companies are fighting to dominate the future of personal transportation. Juno has decided that the most effective way to do that is by being extra-nice to the drivers.

After the men registered, they were ushered into a waiting room, where draped café tables had been set up with brochures: “How to Be a 5 Star Juno Driver.” Club music was playing. A handful of young Juno employees glided around, speaking in soothing tones.

The drivers were soon called by name—“Khaleed?” “Mamadou?” “Julio?”—and brought into another room, where a Juno manager, Lucas Smith, was waiting for them with a laptop and an overhead projector. “Drive Your Future,” the slogan on the screen urged. A pink-skinned forty-year-old in jeans with a bushy red beard and an intense gaze, Smith joined Juno last January. Like several of his colleagues, he was recruited from Apple’s retail division, where he conducted training sessions for Apple-store employees, based on Apple’s carefully designed protocols. In fact, many details of the drivers’ experience had been modelled on the interactions that customers have when they enter an Apple store, from the “concierges” who greeted them to the low driver-to-employee ratio.

At first, Smith was put off by the whiff of exploitation that he detected around rising Silicon Valley enterprises such as Instacart, where people buy your groceries for you, and TaskRabbit, where freelancers can underbid one another to take on errands and other jobs. In middle school, Smith told me, he was assigned a book by Ayn Rand. “I remember finishing it, and realizing that I wanted to be the opposite of everything that was in that book,” he said. “Everything about the celebration of selfishness was just anathema.”

So he was initially skeptical about Juno. “I’m a super-progressive, and I have incredibly mixed feelings about the ‘sharing economy’ and companies like Uber,” he said. “Rather than creating wealth, they felt extractive. The kind of thing that happens when there’s a bad job market and people don’t have good choices. I try not to talk about our competitors, particularly, but the contrast for all these drivers is a powerful thing. They feel like they helped build other companies in New York, and, you know, as a reward for that, their rates kept getting lower.”

The reference to “other companies in New York”—a.k.a. Uber—isn’t incidental. Juno’s business model is to take what Uber has created and appropriate it. Most of what Juno does is predicated on the fact that many drivers feel mistreated by Uber. (Lyft, for various reasons, seems to be less of a target of driver resentment, and is also a less powerful competitor.) If Uber seems cold and impersonal, Juno will smother its drivers with attention. If Uber has raised its commission—the part of each fare that the company keeps—Juno will set a much lower one.

From Uber’s perspective, Juno must seem like a hermit crab, taking up residence in a home built by others. In many cases, Uber paid drivers a thousand-dollar bonus to sign up, and gave a thousand-dollar bounty to the driver who referred them. It helped the drivers get their taxi licenses. It built an app, trained consumers to download and use it, and battled regulators across the country. All Juno has had to do is come up with an app that looks and functions just like Uber’s, and hire people like Lucas Smith to persuade those drivers to defect.

It was shortly after 3 P.M., and five men entered the room and sat down in a semicircle. Their cell phones were tucked away in their pockets; Smith had their full attention. “The fact that you’re in this room, well, means that you’re a professional,” Smith said. To have been invited, in fact, all of them had to have an Uber rating higher than 4.65 (or a Lyft rating higher than 4.7). “So I don’t need to talk about the basics. When it comes to what makes Juno different, the biggest thing is our focus. That’s behind everything we do. And that’s that Juno is for drivers.” He paused to fiddle with the lights. “We built this company with the idea that listening to the drivers and building a business that puts drivers first isn’t just the right thing to do—although we think it is—and it doesn’t just mean that we’re nice, although I think we are, but that it’s also good business.”

Smith moved through his slides and his talking points. The drivers learned that Juno’s commission was ten per cent, “guaranteed for our first twenty-four months.” (Uber typically charges twenty-five per cent or more.) On a slide titled “Example Fare,” a bar chart showed a comparison between an Uber driver and a Juno driver on a thirty-dollar ride: the Uber driver, after commission and taxes and fees, would keep $19.11, while the Juno driver would get $23.61. “For literally the same amount of work, you’re taking home four dollars more,” Smith said. “And that’s on one ride. Think about it on ten, over twenty.” Juno was also offering twenty-four-hour support for its drivers, with a promise that you could always reach a real person on the phone, “not a robot.” Finally, Juno drivers could earn an ownership stake in the company, in the form of restricted stock units. “I think this is a huge deal,” Smith said. “And it’s totally unique.”

To qualify, a driver had to drive for at least a hundred and twenty hours a month—approximately thirty hours a week—for twenty-four months out of thirty. The twist was that Juno was offering to count toward this goal the hours that its drivers were working for Uber and other companies, all of it clocked on their dashboard phones. Half of the two billion founding shares of the company had been set aside for this purpose, although they weren’t going to be worth anything unless Juno was bought out by a larger company or had an I.P.O.

Smith went on, “Now, once Juno goes public? And is traded on the stock exchange? You’re an owner. You profit from that. You can sell your shares, you can hang on to them. But you’ll profit from the growth of this company.” There were some murmurs of approval among the drivers.

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After the presentation, the drivers stood up and looked around. In a few moments, they would be collected by Juno staff members and given new Android phones with the Juno app, and then escorted to their cars, prepared to take Juno rides right away.