Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber

by Mike Isaac

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.

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

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.

“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,”

“There are forces all around you when you run a company, . . . ready to take you out,” Kalanick said. “The [CEOs] that survive are the ones that are supposed to be there.”

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

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.