Talmon Marco was slouching in the corner of an elevator inside One World Trade Center, the tallest building in Manhattan, sliding his hands in his pockets. He is slight and soft-spoken, with a lilt in his accent and the coloring of someone who grew up on the Mediterranean. He smiles most of the time when he talks, in the way someone does when they are aware they are charming and believe they are the smartest person in the room. The technology industry is filled with wonky tough guys, and Marco is the apotheosis of this duality: he is a former C.I.O. of the Israeli Defense Force and a founder of Viber, a messaging and voice app that he sold for $900 million. Now he has funneled a chunk of that money to underwrite his most audacious act yet: Juno, a ride-sharing service that aims to go head-to-head with Uber and Lyft and their collective $65.5 billion valuation.

Marco is not without confidence. For Juno’s headquarters, he selected an office on the 84th floor of the world’s most famous building, though he is slumming it in a makeshift room on the 47th floor as construction crews ready the 10,000-square-foot space. After showing me around his office, Marco asked if he could see *Vanity Fair’*s headquarters, a few floors down. The twentysomething handling press for Juno asked if I ever saw Vogue editor Anna Wintour around the building. (Both Vogue and Vanity Fair are owned by parent company Condé Nast.) “Who’s Anna Wintour,” Marco asked, to awkward silence. “Oh, that’s who they say The Devil Wears Prada is based on, right?” he asked again, to silence.

“I’m kind of The Devil Wears Prada,” he said, looking down past his hoodie and jeans to his tan leather Prada sneakers. Mercifully, the elevator doors opened.

Juno is actually predicated on the exact opposite symbols of status. The company is designed as an antidote to Uber’s notorious worker problem—the company’s designation of its workers as independent contractors rather than employees; its relentless slashing of fare prices; and its insistence that drivers are partners when they are left to cover their own fuel costs, insurance rates, and maintenance fees, among other pointed issues. Juno, however, will give its drivers the option of being employees so long as they agree to work exclusively for its service; whereas Uber skims 20 to 25 percent off the top of each fare, Juno will take 10 percent. And Juno patrons will have the ability to tip their drivers if they do choose.

Most notably, Juno is offering everyone who signs up to drive for the service equity in the company, as long as they stay active with the company for two years. In fact, Marco said it is setting aside half of the founding shares to give to drivers over the next decade.

“We do this because it’s the right thing to do. You get better people when you do this. There’s no reason not to treat them right,” Marco told me as we entered the company’s office. “The bottom line is you have to treat people right. I think what Uber is doing is wrong from a business standpoint and wrong from a moral standpoint, and not necessarily in that order.”

At that point, Marco paused and beamed. Before us were a dozen or so cab drivers, many of them currently driving for Uber and Lyft, crowding around the round tables scattered across the room, rummaging through bags branded with the Juno logo. (Each one had a Prada scarf in it, Marco teased.) “Look at these faces,” he said. Some peered out the floor-to-ceiling windows, looking down across all of Manhattan; another group gathered in a glass-walled conference room for one of the two afternoon training sessions. Many of them were trying to figure out, I presumed, if what they were hearing was a good deal, or simply too good to be true.

Juno is positioning itself as a white knight in the ever-expanding population of riders forgoing traditional taxis, car services, and personal automobiles for the ride-sharing game. But it wasn’t an entirely altruistic decision. In 2014, when Marco began mulling the idea of a ride-sharing company, various conversations with Uber drivers convinced him that this angle was the only way in. “They all really disliked Uber. They were unhappy about the fact that Uber was calling them a partner, but they were really much closer to slaves in a way,” he said in the office, as Chicago’s “If You Leave Me Now” blared on the speakers. After those meetings, he said he started getting calls from drivers who wanted to join his putative service. “They told us there has to be a service. ‘You have to build it,’” he relayed.

So, Marco said, he and his partners dove in headlong. But Juno remains very much a work in progress, ready to launch once they work out some kinks. At the time of our interview, it had yet to pick up a single rider. Marco had not raised a single dollar in an institutional round, and was running off a nebulous “eight-digit” number made up from a mix of his own money, part of the Viber windfall, and some more from his family and friends. Juno said it has not spent a dime on advertising or driver recruitment. And yet, every day, there are dozens of usually men milling about the lobby of One World Trade with their Juno bags. Juno banks on saving the millions of dollars Uber spends recruiting, hiring, training, re-training, rehiring, and recruiting again by treating its workers well enough that they will not want to leave. It hopes that good favor will turn into good word of mouth, for both drivers and riders, which will keep the cycle of free referrals rolling without any recruitment costs. Less money may come in on each ride, then, but far less money will have to go out to marketing. Before it has even launched, before it has even made a push for workers or riders or even a real media blitz, Marco said it has signed up many thousands of workers.

It also hopes that it can learn from its competitors. Packed inside those Juno bags, after all, are ZTE smartphones that drivers get paid $50 per week to simply turn on as they drive their Uber or Lyft routes. The idea is that the phones will capture the data, arming Juno with a trove of invaluable information on the most trafficked routes. Marco is hardly concealing the fact that he is siphoning off data from his competitors for his service’s benefit. One of the first things you see when you walk into the Juno office is a big flat-screen with a real-time map with hundreds of tiny cars moving around the city, showing where all of the Juno-connected drivers are at any given moment and whether or not they have customers. He defended it by saying that it gives Juno a strategy they can test in advance, a leg up on where his competitors were when they first started, and that they will launch a service with a better understanding of the market.

“The advantage to being second-to-market is that you can look at the guy who was there before you and learn from their past mistakes. Everybody makes mistakes, especially the guys who founded this market,” he said. Apple entered a crowded space but it was differentiated, he explained. So did Virgin America. Google entered a market dominated by Yahoo, Facebook entered another ruled by MySpace. Viber, his first company, came in after Skype. Investors would ask him, “You’re actually going to fight Skype with this?” They ended up selling the company for nearly $1 billion.

Juno isn’t the first competitor trying to to take on Uber and Lyft. There are others in the space, too—Via, Gett, even the taxi-based version Arro. But Uber dwarfs them all, in no small part because its massive scale allows it to continuously cut prices, which helps it stay competitive and lure riders even in its slower seasons, like after the holidays, as it did once again in New York in January. (Uber, of course, already seems to have moved its focus well beyond taxi services to conquering the greater delivery and logistics businesses).

But this, its greatest strength, has also created its greatest weakness, cracking the foundation on which Uber’s business is built. Three things happen when Uber cuts its price by 15 percent, as it did in cities nationwide in January. Lyft, which had held off reducing its prices, finally caved. And while the cheaper fares may have created a stimulus for riders, it inevitably screwed the drivers. When Uber and Lyft lower their prices for drivers, they still skim the same 20 or 25 percent off the top of each fare. For drivers, who have a fixed set of costs—gas, car insurance, maintenance—the slashed fares eat away at their take-homes, while the companies get to celebrate expanding their user bases. (Uber and Lyft have both said drivers end up benefiting from the cuts, because they do more business and end up earning more money.)

By taking care of its drivers, Juno hopes to compete on quality rather than price. Marco refuses to participate in any pricing war, and says the company will offer every driver the opportunity to become full employees if they choose to give up driving for its competitors, affording drivers all the protections under employment law. “If you’re working for one company, your livelihood is coming from one source, and we’re setting the prices, we’re telling you what you can and cannot do, you work only for us, you make money only for us, you’re not an independent contractor,” Marco said. (If a driver wants to continue working for other ride-share services, they will be classified as independent contractors.)

Shannon Liss-Riordan, an attorney who represents Uber drivers in an ongoing class-action suit over drivers’ employment classification, said she is glad Juno is headed in this direction. “I’m hopeful that this can be an example for a so-called on-demand car service that can make it work using drivers as employees,” she said. “It’s great when companies value their employees and recognize that they are often the backbone of the company, providing the service the company is building its business on. The fact that you have a company thinking about what would be good for my workforce is heartening.”

Lyft is of the mind that it already does think about how to do this, and has been doing it from the start. “Since founding Lyft three years ago, we have treated our 315,000 active drivers better by giving them the best earning potential, and the best experience,” Logan Green, Lyft’s co-founder and C.E.O. said in a statement to Vanity Fair. A spokesperson for Uber also said that driver needs are at the forefront of its priorities. “Our teams are focused on making the Uber experience as rewarding as possible for drivers, including working to get more riders into cars more efficiently—and that translates into less downtime and more money in the pockets of entrepreneurs, artists, teachers and the other million-plus drivers with Uber around the world,” this spokesperson said.

Both companies highlighted the myriad ways they take care of their drivers—bonus programs for drivers who log a certain number of hours, discounts on cars and maintenance costs, technology that allows drivers to pick up as many riders as possible.

Those perks have not gone far enough to quiet the growing concern among drivers that they deserve better. But improving driver conditions, alone, seems like a challenging strategy. Uber’s and Lyft’s cost-cutting strategies have allowed them to amass scale—in both driver and riders—that is nearly impossible to replicate. Without enough drivers, riders end up with wait times too long for them to stick around, sending them right back to Uber or Lyft. With too many drivers and not enough riders, drivers don’t end up with enough fares to make ends meet, rendering any employment status or equity benefit meaningless.

It is also particularly difficult to enter a maturing market after years of cascading funding in Silicon Valley. “I think we’re in the midst of starting to see the signs of a pullback and I think that was completely expected. We cannot continue to see ever-increasing amounts of capital deployed,” said Jeffrey Grabow, the U.S. venture-capital leader for Ernst & Young. “Certain sectors and stages have become overheated and we’re moving to a time of big funding to execution.”

Without a big fund-raising round under its belt, Juno is heading straight to the execution phase, hoping that the second-to-market data it gathers from its drivers will prove meaningful. It is a big assumption to make, that a lot of information can trump a tremendous amount of cash and years of built-up experience and brand recognition. But it’s also not a completely unfounded supposition to make, either. “Being second-to-market is really based upon excellence of execution,” Grabow said. “I can create a strong case for ‘Go find the land mine, I’m right after you.’ Maybe something has shifted and maybe taking a different approach to a market is the flip side to first-mover advantage.”

What is clear for Juno, and all of the players in the ride-sharing space, is that on-demand car services are not the end game. Uber has already spread itself into a full-scale, diversified delivery service with thinly veiled designs to conquer the global logistics business. From virtually its inception, Lyft has said it wants to fundamentally change the idea of personal automobile ownership. Indeed, a car is the second-biggest purchase that most Americans make. If people stop buying cars in the near future—if people stop needing to drive cars in the near future—then the roughly 17 percent of an average household’s yearly expenditures are up for grabs. That’s the big picture here. These companies may be jockeying for riders in the short term, but they are really positioning themselves for a greater share of that potential windfall in the future.

Yet this future, however inevitable, is rather dystopian for drivers. As collaboration between Silicon Valley and Detroit continues, and automation advances, we will one day live in a world in which there is an ever-growing Uber with ever-fewer Uber drivers. Marco is not shy about this fact, but he proffers it as yet another positive for Juno. “There’s no doubt that we are all going toward driverless cars,” he said. “When cars do become driverless, Uber drivers are just going to go home. Our drivers are going to go home happy, because they’re shareholders and they will own a piece of every one of the self-driving cars we’re going to put on the road.”

On a superficial level, there is an element of truth to Marco’s point. Ever since the industrial revolution, workers have been replaced by machines, and in the vast majority of cases, those workers leave empty-handed, unemployed, and without the skill set for any sort of real second act. Having a piece of the future of a company, even one an employee would no longer have a day-to-day part in, is a silver lining.

But it also raises the question of how benevolent it is to bring thousands of workers into a business that inevitably intends to replace them. Perhaps the most altruistic thing Marco and his peers could do for their drivers is tell them to learn a new trade. And even that logic is predicated on Juno—a company that has still yet to launch—becoming a big success that either raises rounds of private capital, goes public, or is gobbled by a competitor. In the meantime, though, it’s just a start-up on the 47th floor of a skyscraper run by an ambitious owner in Prada shoes.

But then again, who is to say who calls the shots for the emerging class of rights-deprived drivers? A day after our first meeting, I got in the back of a Toyota Sienna just a few blocks from Marco’s office. Unsolicited, the driver, M.D., struck up a conversation about how hard it is to make money since Uber dropped its prices.

I asked if he’d heard of Juno, and explained how the service will work and what it plans to offer its drivers.

“I heard about that,” he said, excitedly. “But you know, I wasn’t sure if it was just a rumor. Who knows if it is going to turn into a real thing.”