Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber

by Mike Isaac

Tens of thousands of dollars in iPhones lined the walls of UberCab’s offices, stacked like white bricks.

Kalanick and Michael created a system built around scarcity. Uber would hold only three meetings with bankers per day for the span of a week, and the investment firms would have to jockey for a time slot.

Kalanick rarely told someone directly to get lost. It was a slow, subtle frost. The person’s name would start to drop off the email list for important strategy and planning meetings. Maybe they wouldn’t get invited on as many walk and talks. Suddenly, the person wouldn’t be on the “A-Team” anymore—Kalanick’s cadre of top lieutenants. When “TK” fell out of love with someone, everyone knew it.

Tucked away on Bank Street, a quiet, tree-lined road in hip Greenwich Village, The Waverly Inn was a storied institution for New York media, made famous by Graydon Carter, the longtime head of Vanity Fair, who used the restaurant to host exclusive evenings with Manhattan society. On summer evenings passersby would notice celebrities dining outside on the ivy-lined front patio. Dinner at the Waverly meant something.

Guests were seated in a private room in the back of the Waverly, away from the common dining area. After cocktails, the diners were asked to sit at a long, skinny wood table—almost too skinny to eat over.

One incident involved an Indian man who arrived at an Uber outpost in hysterics, upset that Uber had yet again slashed prices. The man took out a canister, doused his body in gasoline and then brandished a lighter, threatening to set himself ablaze unless Uber raised its rates again. Security guards tackled the man, wrestled him to the ground, and stripped the lighter from his hands. This was not the only occurrence; a rash of suicides by self-immolation would soon follow.

My reporter trick is to play dumb and friendly; dumb and friendly is always more approachable than eager and prodding.

My sources told me he was working just as hard—if not harder—at his new company, cracking the whip on his employees as much as he did at Uber. And to build it, he was recruiting many of the employees he had fired from Uber—the employees who were forced out because of the Holder report.