Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber

by Mike Isaac

In the eyes of Travis Kalanick, Uber’s co-founder and chief executive, the entire system was rigged against startups like his. Like many in Silicon Valley, he believed in the transformative power of technology. His service harnessed the incredible powers of code—smartphones, data analysis, real-time GPS readings—to improve people’s lives, to make services more efficient, to connect people who wanted to buy things with people who wanted to sell them, to make society a better place.

This is about one company thinking it is above the law.”

What England didn’t know was that Uber’s general managers, engineers, and security professionals had developed a sophisticated system, perfected over months, designed to help every city strike team—including the one in Portland—identify would-be regulators, surveil them, and secretly prohibit them from ordering and catching Ubers by deploying a line of code in the app. The effect: Uber’s drivers would evade capture as they carried out their duties. Officers like England could not “see” the shady activity, and could never prove it was happening.

Greyball was a snippet of code affixed to a user’s Uber account, a tag that identified that person as a threat to the company.

Having been Greyballed, England and his fellow officers were served up a fake version of the Uber app, populated with ghost cars.

Kalanick and his team had violated local transportation laws, and instead of being exiled, they had found enormous, game-changing success.

Greyball was consistent with one of Uber’s fourteen company values: Principled Confrontation.

Concepts like “breaking the law” weren’t applicable, they believed, when the laws were bullshit in the first place.

Travis loved efficiency and hated waste. He appreciated how the rise of software and the internet allowed old, ineffectual, and broken systems to be overturned and rebuilt anew. Code and programming enabled anyone willing to learn and work hard a chance to change the system—to change the world.

San Francisco adage that it’s better to sell shovels during a gold rush than to actually prospect for gold).

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

Uber had what was called “negative churn”—a term often used to describe software as a service, or SaaS, companies. Having negative churn meant that once customers used the product, they were more likely to keep using it regularly thereafter.

Mark Zuckerberg spent $1 billion on Instagram when the company had just thirteen employees.

A hundred unicorns suggested to Gurley that some would turn out to be ponies with papier-mâché horns.

If Silicon Valley was defined by “the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels and the troublemakers,” a rising countercultural force of hackers and techno-revolutionaries described in Apple’s “Think Different” advertising campaign, then the post-recession era of the Valley was shaped by a different force: the rise of the MBA grads.

By 2015, some 16 percent of MBA grads went into the technology sector,

of the more than 150 “unicorns” in the Valley by then, nearly a quarter of them were founded by business school graduates.

More than most other tech companies, Uber prized the almighty Masters of Business Administration, a degree that signaled business acumen and, often, an alpha male mindset. Not every MBA grad was an asshole, by any means. It just seemed that many of the ones who were assholes tended to feel at home joining Uber.

Even during recruiting, prospective employees were treated poorly. The company had designed an algorithm that determined the lowest possible salary a candidate might accept before making an offer to them, a ruthlessly efficient technique that saved Uber millions of dollars in equity grants.

Until 2014, that is, when one executive had the brilliant idea of introducing the “Safe Rides Fee,” a new charge that added $1 to the cost of each trip. At the time Uber billed it as necessary for passengers: “This Safe Rides Fee supports our continued efforts to ensure the safest possible platform for Uber riders and drivers, including an industry-leading background check process, regular motor vehicle checks, driver safety education, development of safety features in the app, and insurance,” went the company’s blog post. If riders noticed the fee, they rarely complained. Many assumed it would just make their rides safer somehow. The reality was much less noble. As Uber’s insurance costs grew exponentially, the “Safe Rides Fee” was devised to add $1 of pure margin to each trip, according to employees who worked on the addition. That meant for each trip taken in the United States, Uber took in an extra dollar in cash. The drivers, of course, got no share of the extra buck. That number added up to hundreds of millions of dollars over years of operation, a sizeable new line of income. After the money was collected it was never earmarked specifically for improving safety. “Driver safety education” consisted of little more than a short, online video course. In-app safety features weren’t a priority until years later. “We boosted our margins saying our rides were safer,” one former employee said. “It was obscene.”

the company would create its own taxonomy of twenty-one different classifications of sexual misconduct and assault in order to properly organize the sheer number of annual incidents reported.

Levandowski made his feelings clear in a final email he sent to Page: “I want to be in the driver seat, not the passenger seat, and right now [it] feels like I’m in the trunk.”

Inside Otto, engineers printed out orange-colored stickers and pasted them around the San Francisco headquarters with a message they knew Levandowski would love: “Safety Third.”

“Workation” was an annual Uber tradition: instead of spending two weeks in December relaxing, employees would volunteer to spend two weeks working on any kind of project they wanted.

But Uber took the neglect one step further. Kalanick treated user privacy as an afterthought. At one point, Kalanick changed Uber’s settings so the app could track people even after they had ended their ride. Customers protested and demanded tighter privacy settings, but Kalanick wouldn’t acquiesce for years; he wanted to gain insight into user behavior by seeing where people went after getting dropped off.

But Jones wasn’t going to let his former boss trash him without a fight. After Uber’s statement, he sent an on-the-record comment to Recode, in which he directly blamed the company’s leadership culture for his departure: I joined Uber because of its Mission, and the challenge to build global capabilities that would help the company mature and thrive long-term. It is now clear, however, that the beliefs and approach to leadership that have guided my career are inconsistent with what I saw and experienced at Uber, and I can no longer continue as president of the ride sharing business. There are thousands of amazing people at the company, and I truly wish everyone well.

Over the last seven years, our company has grown a lot—but it hasn’t grown up.

“There’s a lot of data that shows when there’s one woman on the board, it is much more likely there will be another on the board,” Huffington said. From her side, David Bonderman piped up. Until that moment, he and Gurley had been quiet, letting Huffington present her section of the report. But a thought popped into his head. “I’ll tell you what it shows,” Bonderman said. “It’s that it’s much likelier to be more talking on the board.”