Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber

by Mike Isaac

Neither Camp nor Kalanick wanted to take on the founder’s challenge for their on-demand, app-based fleet of luxury black cars. So they tweeted out a call to arms. On January 5, 2010, Kalanick posted: “Looking 4 entrepreneurial product mgr/biz-dev killer 4 a location based service. . pre-launch, BIG equity, big peeps involved--ANY TIPS??” he tweeted. Just then, a twenty-six-year-old intern named Ryan Graves happened to be looking at Twitter, and spotted Kalanick’s request. He was interested, but didn’t want to come off as too desperate. Three minutes later, he tweeted back at Kalanick with a cheeky response: “heres a tip. email me. :) graves.ryan[at]gmail.com.” Though Graves didn’t know it at the time, that tweet would eventually net him more than a billion dollars. It proved to be the luckiest decision he’d make in his life. But at the beginning of 2010, Graves was still an aimless twentysomething, one of many trying to hit it big in the startup world. Taking a chance on a gig at UberCab seemed like a cool thing to do.