Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber

by Mike Isaac

He grew frustrated by people with cautious minds, who wanted to uphold old systems, old structures, old ways of thinking.

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.

Behind the scenes, Uber was hardly innocent. Recruiting ex-CIA, NSA, and FBI employees, the company had amassed a high-functioning corporate espionage force. Uber security personnel spied on government officials, looked deep into their digital lives, and at times followed them to their houses.

But most of all, it is a story about how blind worship of startup founders can go wildly wrong, and a cautionary tale that ends in spectacular disaster.

Their response to this was not to pause and marvel at their astonishing luck to work at a time and place where fortunes came gushing to twentysomethings via smartphone apps.

“Super pumpedness is all about moving the team forward, working long hours—pretty much a do-whatever-it-takes attitude to move the company in the right direction,”

She was Uber’s first city launcher, a made-up job that involved parachuting into new markets, setting up shop, and launching the service. She planned the earliest city launches meticulously, from finding office space and forging relationships with local black car companies, to items as granular as “buy a sheet cake for our team’s launch party.”

Throughout his career Gurley had been enamored with what he called “marketplaces,” a category of business that neither made new products nor sold others, but merely matched the desires of one side of a market with the products of the other side, and took a cut as the middleman.

Nearly every one of Gurley’s investments relied on one basic thesis: the internet had brought with it a profound capability to meet the desires of existing, real-world people for experiences, places, and things. Whereas before a Beanie Baby enthusiast might have had to search high and low for a particular plush giraffe, the web could put that person in touch with someone who had stockpiled a warehouse of them. There were endless combinations of buyers and sellers, and hundreds of potential marketplaces bubbling up from the minds of young entrepreneurs, waiting to be brought to life with Benchmark’s blessing—and capital.

But Gurley was also a pragmatist; companies that spent all their time dreaming of projects of the future rather than watching their balance sheet could find themselves out of luck—and cash—long before realizing those dreams.

Paul was first to the thought, and more prescient than he could have known at the time. But in Silicon Valley, being first doesn’t matter—being the best does.

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