Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber

by Mike Isaac

So Uber engineers, fraud team members and field operatives came up with about a dozen ways to spot authorities. One method involved “geofencing”—or drawing a digital perimeter around police stations in a city that Uber attempted to enter.

With Uber facing opposition in almost every market it entered, the VTOS playbook and Greyball seemed like a godsend. In South Korea, for instance, local police were paying civilians to report drivers. A similar bounty program was conducted in Utah. The use of Greyball spread so quickly that members of the fraud team had to call a summit—attended by Uber general managers from more than a dozen countries around the world—to explain best practices.

SSG operatives would carry out espionage and counterintelligence missions using virtual private networks, cheap laptops, and wireless hotspots paid for in cash. Undercover operations could include impersonating Uber drivers to gain access to closed WhatsApp group chats, hoping to gather intelligence on whether drivers were organizing or planning to strike against Uber.

The mission to photograph Jean Liu, the DiDi president, at the Code conference was an undertaking by the SSG. It was unclear how much of this intelligence was actionable or even valuable. Nevertheless, Kalanick okayed budgets that spun into the tens of millions for surveillance activity, global operations, and information collection.

Those who read the report in its entirety were shocked. It was hundreds of pages long, a winding, repetitive list of infractions that had occurred across Uber’s hundreds of global offices, including sexual assault and physical violence. The company had numerous outstanding lawsuits against it, and would likely face many more.

What’s more, over time Kalanick had amassed so-called “supervoting shares,” a more powerful class of stock that gave him more votes per share than the one-vote-per-share common stock most other investors held. Kalanick held an enormous amount of supervoting shares, a scenario he engineered in Uber’s earliest days, as did two of his allies, Garrett Camp and Ryan Graves. And his pile of common stock shares was only getting bigger by the day. If Uber employees wished to cash out some of their stock through an internal repurchase program, Kalanick required Uber employees to sell those shares back to him. With each passing day, as employees left or sold shares through normal turnover and attrition, Kalanick’s voting power grew stronger.

Kalanick trusted Huffington. But what he didn’t know was that Huffington was already helping prepare a draft of his resignation statement. As Kalanick’s world was crumbling down around him, Huffington jumped into a recording booth to tape a podcast with Ashton Kutcher.

what is this collection of words

It was Diane von Furstenberg, the luxury fashion designer, who suggested he recuperate on a faraway island. Her husband, Barry Diller—the Manhattan media mogul and chairman of InterActiveCorp—had space on his yacht in the South Pacific.

WTF

SoftBank would purchase $1.25 billion in additional, newly issued shares at Uber’s previous existing valuation of $68.5 billion. The premise was absurd; the secondary market clearly valued Uber’s shares at far lower than they were before Uber’s 2017 from hell. Yet in the eyes of the market, the maneuver worked; Uber’s valuation would remain at $68.5 billion.

The revocation of supervoting power, combined with additional board seats for neutral directors, finally gave the board the leverage it needed to unlock the death grip Kalanick had held on the company for nearly a decade.

One of the most meaningful changes was something Kalanick had personally prevented: the ability to tip drivers. After Kalanick was ousted, the feature was implemented, earning the company an enormous amount of goodwill.

Khosrowshahi then revamped Uber’s overarching philosophy. Uber’s fourteen values, once sacrosanct, were replaced with a list of eight simple maxims. Items like “super pumped” and “always be hustlin’ ”—values sprung from the mind of an arrogant young man—were discarded. Instead they were replaced with a set of fairly bland platitudes that touched on “customer obsession,” à la Jeff Bezos, and a celebration of employee differences.

RIP "super pumped"

When he wasn’t in Miami, he could be found aboard yacht parties in the French West Indies, or at one of his two houses in Los Angeles—one for both the East and West sides of LA, depending on where traffic kept him that day.

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He testified that when Uber began developing its own autonomous vehicle research, Google CEO Larry Page grew increasingly “unpumped”—the polar opposite of “super pumped.”

In just a few hours, Graves’s shares would be worth $1.6 billion, while Camp’s would net a cool $4.1 billion in value. Kalanick would be worth the most; after the bell, his stake in the company would be worth $5.4 billion. The three men who built Uber into what it was over the past decade were all billionaires. They also no longer happened to be on close speaking terms.