Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber

by Mike Isaac

If everything went sideways, the syndicate had a secret weapon. The lawyers discovered a flaw in Uber’s company charter. Currently, the group all held a significant amount of Class B stock, classified as “supervoting shares,” which carried ten votes per every one share they held. But if the syndicate deployed its “nuclear option,” it could force everyone to convert all supervoting “Class B” shares to Class A shares, which carried only one vote per share. While that would severely curtail Benchmark’s supervoting power, it would also rein in Kalanick’s supervoting power as well. The result would be a scramble to build coalitions of shareholders that could seize power. But the group didn’t want to go there quite yet; giving up its supervoting power was a last-resort technique.

“Did you ever see the movie Life?” Gurley asked everyone on the conference call. “The one with Ryan Reynolds in space, with that black goo alien they captured? Once they find the alien, they place it in an indestructible box inside a lab in their spaceship to keep themselves safe while they perform tests on it.

the alien escapes. It gets out of the box somehow, and ends up killing everyone on the spaceship. It heads to earth to kill everyone there, too. All because it got out,” he said.

“Well, Travis is exactly like that alien,” he said. “If we let him out of the box—at any point during the day—he’ll destroy the entire world.”

The syndicate picked Matt Cohler and Peter Fenton. Cohler, a brilliant early Facebook employee who joined Benchmark in 2008, was practical, realistic, and frank; he could deliver the news to Kalanick in a sober way that the CEO could understand.

Rubenstein was a fixture in the world of crisis PR firms, having done damage control for Rupert Murdoch during the infamous phone hacking scandal that engulfed News Corp in the early 2000s. A wiry, sarcastic New Yorker with thick black glasses, Rubenstein would begin spinning the events to journalists once the confrontation had occurred.

They gave Kalanick an ultimatum: They needed an answer by the end of the day, around 6:00 p.m. If he declined to answer, if he took too long, if he tried to stall them further—if he did anything that seemed like an underhanded maneuver—the venture capitalists would walk out of the room, text members of the syndicate and immediately spin up the communications machine to take the fight public.

It became untenable for Bill Gurley to remain on the board. Gurley may have won the fight, but Kalanick never wanted to see or deal with the venture capitalist ever again, much less work with him on Uber’s board for years to come. After some haggling, the sides agreed on a compromise; Gurley would step off Uber’s board and be replaced by his partner, Matt Cohler, instead.

All I was told was that Kalanick was being pushed out in an investor coup, and that I needed to hurry up and file a story before someone beat me to it. What I wouldn’t know until much later: at least one source in the syndicate full of people plotting Kalanick’s downfall wanted to make sure Kalanick would never return to his spot at the top. While most of the syndicate expected the soft landing story to be carried out as planned, there were a select few who wanted it to look as messy as it all really was. And they used me, an unwitting participant, to make that happen.

Kagle, who sat on eBay’s board of directors, saw the growth potential in the young company and placed a young Whitman at the helm. By the time Whitman left eBay a decade later, the company was an industry titan, with more than 15,000 employees and a market capitalization of more than $40 billion.

If the coup hadn’t already done so, the lawsuit damaged the “founder friendly” image Benchmark had worked so long to cultivate.

By 2017, SoftBank had been making serious turbulence in Silicon Valley by slinging money from the “Vision Fund,” an enormous $100-billion pool of capital formed by the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, Apple, Qualcomm, and SoftBank itself,

In December, Son reached a deal with Khosrowshahi and Uber’s board, in which SoftBank would purchase some 17.5 percent of Uber’s overall shares in what was called a tender offer, a way for outsiders to buy stock from existing shareholders in the company. The SoftBank shares would come from a group of people, including employees who were long waiting to sell but couldn’t due to Kalanick’s restrictions.

Son and Khosrowshahi settled on a purchase price of $33 per share, pegging Uber’s valuation at about $48 billion—a steal for SoftBank.

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.

Uber’s self-driving division, one of the biggest drains on Uber’s finances and once considered an “existential” area of development for the company, is in limbo at the time of this writing.

When not working on his startup, Levandowski was busy founding his own religion: a church devoted to Artificial Intelligence as a godhead. It was called the “Way of the Future.”

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.”

Waymo too would have a stake in Uber’s success.