Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber

by Mike Isaac

“They’re breaking the law!”

Though Sunil Paul’s efforts with Sidecar weren’t taking off, Lyft was gaining traction quickly. People loved the stupid pink mustaches.

But as one Uber employee competing with Lyft at the time said, “The law isn’t what is written. It’s what is enforced.”

Most people who know Travis Kalanick remark on one thing: in every game he plays, every race he enters, in anything where he’s asked to compete against others, he seeks nothing less than utter domination.

There wasn’t enough room for Uber and Lyft to coexist, he believed. The game was zero-sum.

“He wasn’t satisfied with winning,”

Each Uber employee had a referral code printed on the back of their T-shirt. The codes were for Lyft drivers to enter when they signed up for Uber, earning them a bonus.

“Shave the ’Stache.”

Drivers wouldn’t work for Uber unless there was enough demand from riders. And new riders wouldn’t sign up or return unless there was a critical mass of available drivers.

The pharmacist’s son had something Kalanick lacked; he had the emotional intelligence to adapt to any situation. Kalanick could be pigheaded.

Kalanick took to Michael immediately. Michael was hired on as Kalanick’s second in command of sorts, officially Uber’s “Chief Business Officer.” The title was akin to a chief operating officer, though in practice he became “dealmaker in chief.”

Uber was Travis Kalanick’s company—and if you were lucky, he would let you invest.

They vowed to give Uber all kinds of support, be it by helping to recruit talented executives from GV’s vast network, or offering GV’s deep strategic experience.

But this Uber scenario was different. Google Ventures was being asked to write a quarter-billion-dollar check—a substantial chunk of the capital in the entire fund—to just one company.

After helping Google raise some of the company’s first investment rounds and bonding with the co-founders, Drummond joined Google full-time in 2002 to help lead the company through its eventual IPO.

as a “BFD”—a big freakin’ deal.

Anyone who has met Larry Page knows that he is not a personable guy, and the furthest thing from anyone’s “big brother.”

“Ghostrider,”

At the time Levandowski worked there, Google encouraged employees to embrace the company’s “20 percent time” initiative. That meant 80 percent of your work at Google was meant to focus on your job, but you could spend 20 percent of your time working on other interests.

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.

The $20 million windfall was good, too.

Growth became Kalanick’s mantra.

He lived by the numbers.

A job at Uber wasn’t just a job, after all—it was a mission, a calling.

That simple concept destroyed Big Taxi’s barrier-to-entry system, sending the price of medallions plummeting.

Taxi drivers who didn’t give in to despair, however, fought back. Some tried to beat Uber at its own game by forming taxi alliances and creating their own apps like iRide, Arro, Curb, and others.

algorithm

Over the course of a single Uber ride, the police would obtain a report from a credit card company, call the driver of the vehicle and tell them to pull over, then arrest the rider on a number of charges, including credit card fraud, possession of narcotics, prostitution, and so on.

Dara Khosrowshahi.