Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber

by Mike Isaac

Silicon Valley is teeming with people with big ideas and empty bank accounts. It is a town where being first to an idea doesn’t always mean you’ll end up the winner.

It was important, Kalanick believed, that the leader of UberCab have complete say over his company’s path forward, which meant he should hold majority control. Kalanick didn’t care about his salary; he already had a taste of wealth after selling Red Swoosh. What he wanted was power.

Where nonbelievers might consider such a choice irrational, the “cult of the founder” suggests that no matter what the chief executive may decide, he was probably right because he was the right guy to begin with.

Survivorship bias

From the sidelines, what Gurley saw struck him like a lightning bolt. Uber wasn’t just fighting for a piece of the taxi and limousine market. It was competing against every mode of transportation in existence.

Friends who grew up with Kalanick said he was obsessed with being the best, be it running track in middle school against the teams from across the Central Valley or participating in debate competitions—something he did for fun—all in order to win.

Yes I would imagine it’s rare for a middle schooler racing track to want to win

For Levandowski, that meant building robots. He formed a startup outside of Google named 510 Systems—a nod to the Berkeley telephone area code—and with a group of other employees began building tech that could one day prove useful to Google. That included sensors and other software specifically for self-driving cars. Unbeknownst to Google, the search giant was soon buying much of its tech for the street-mapping project from one of its own employees, Levandowski, who sold the gear via a middleman.

smdh

But he was also shrewd. When Google bought 510 Systems, Levandowski sold it for just under the amount that would have required him to share the profits with the fifty or so employees under him, depriving dozens of his colleagues of a rich payday. Even worse, Google hired less than half of 510 Systems’ staff. The rest had little to show for their time spent working on Levandowski’s robots.

“When the industry started in 1981, I averaged 40–50 hours,” Schifter wrote in a final post to his Facebook page. “I cannot survive any longer with working 120 hours! I am not a Slave and I refuse to be one.” From Uber’s early days up through 2018, more than a dozen other taxi drivers in New York and other major metropolitan areas also took their own lives.

Travis Kalanick couldn’t figure out why everyone hated his guts.

This sums up the book in one sentence

Every time someone cited Uber’s belligerence, they cited Kalanick’s attitude toward Lyft, Uber’s closest US competitors.

Did this book not have a copy editor?

The only thing that worried Kalanick more than China’s Big Brother–esque government was another “brother,” this one a startup: Didi Chuxing. Roughly translated, it meant “Brother Travel.” Colloquially, it was “honk honk taxi”: “DiDi” mimicked the sound of a car’s horn in Chinese.

One of DiDi’s preferred tactics was to send new recruits over to Uber to join as engineers. As soon as they were hired they acted as moles, feeding proprietary Uber information back to DiDi and carrying out corporate sabotage on some of Uber’s internal systems.

Southeast Asia was another debacle. Grab, the predominant ride-hailing company in the region, was a tenacious competitor. Uber would spend nearly $1 billion fighting Grab. The result was an astonishing loss of nearly 50 percent of their market. After just four years, Uber held just 25 percent of the Southeast Asian market. Years later, Uber would have to sell off its Southeast Asia business for a 27.5 percent stake in Grab.

Kalanick reminded his employees. On occasion, when a sexual assault victim decided not to pursue litigation or if the evidence in a police report was not conclusive enough to prosecute, a round of cheers would ring out across the fifth floor of Uber HQ.

The best way, Sullivan knew, was to push the scammer toward a payment system. For digital detectives like Sullivan, online payments often provided the best chance at finding clues to an attacker’s identity. Certain banks, for instance, would block attempts at money transfers to specific areas, which narrowed down the list of potential countries where the scammer could be located.

(Uber’s cultural value wasn’t “sometimes be hustlin’.” It was always.)

This style of writing...

Where once wearing Uber black had been a point of pride—like Facebook blue—now,

Sorry but wearing Facebook blue has never made you look cool at parties

During the Monday morning meeting with Kalanick and the rest of the leadership team, Whetstone offered advice Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, had told her years ago: “Once you bring in outsiders, it’s the fastest way to lose control.”

With this lawsuit, Waymo was sending a message—to Levandowski and to the rest of Silicon Valley. No one steals from Larry Page and gets away with it.

all it took was the addition of a short piece of code—the word “Greyball” and a string of numbers—to blind that account to Uber’s activities. It worked extremely well; the Philadelphia Parking Authority never noticed the deception and car impound rates plummeted.

Huffington soon began to assume a larger leadership role in the brand rehab campaign. She sensed a power vacuum, a crisis of leadership in the corporation and a personal crisis—of Kalanick’s ability to trust the people around him. She owned shares in the company, yes, but there was a special status and power being the person to help right the ship in a time of crisis—especially if that ship was a $69-billion Titanic like Uber.

Another entity, the Strategic Services Group, the SSG for short, employed the most clandestine tactics of the bunch. It was made up of ex-CIA, Secret Service, and FBI operatives, and hired subcontractors on special anonymous contracts with Uber so that their names couldn’t be traced back to the company. This outfit of black-hat spies engaged in a wide range of activities, some of which eventually spun out of Uber’s control.

Sullivan’s new law enforcement outreach division helped police investigate threats against Uber drivers, and fraud had fallen by more than thirty-two basis points, an enormous drop.

This is 0.32%...

Employees were unnerved by mass deletion of internal emails, group chats, and company data, carried out under an internal initiative to “eliminate data waste” throughout all levels of the company. Internally, many believed executives wanted to cover Uber’s tracks, anticipating a subpoena for some unknown future court case.

Legally, Kalanick’s position was indefensible; investors who owned a high percentage of a company had rights to information about that company. His response, according to at least one investor, was to call their bluff: “So sue me,” he told this person. “What’s your rep going to be in this industry if you sue your own company?” He was right.

Often, the VCs knew, when executives were replaced or demoted from the companies they helmed, there was usually a bit of Kabuki theater and posturing on the announcement. A half-truth like “I’m stepping back to be an advisor,” or “I’ve decided to step down to spend more time with my loved ones”—these were the platitudes of corporate coups d’etat.

When not working on his startup, Levandowski was busy founding his own religion: a church devoted to Artificial Intelligence as a godhead. It was called the “Way of the Future.”

Jfc

As one former employee put it: “Is Uber going to be an Amazon, a company that dominates in every sector it branches into? Or are we going to be another eBay?”