Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber

by Mike Isaac

Camp couldn’t leave out the best part. They’d market UberCab to professionals in dense cities—people like themselves—and try to make it feel exclusive, almost like a club. You’ve got to be a member to use it, guaranteeing a “respectable clientele,” and they’d only accept top-of-the-line luxury vehicles. The kind you’d want to be seen in riding around town: Mercedes, BMW, Lincoln. Best-case scenario, Camp believed, is that he created a market leader in private transportation, with the possibility of hundreds of millions in annual revenue. At worst, he’d create a small black car service for executives in San Francisco; basically, an upscale transportation service for himself and all of his friends. Even if he lost, he would win. He wasn’t subtle about pushing the idea. “Uber” replaced “great” in his vocabulary, a way to call things great. Things were “uber” this and “uber” that. That car? Uber cool. Tasty pizza for dinner? Uber slice. He wanted Uber to become something more than a German preposition, a noun synonymous with cool. Both Camp and Kalanick loved the idea. The problem was, neither Camp nor Kalanick wanted to run it. The thirty-two-year-old Kalanick was still trying to embrace his role as The Wolf, a “funding shepherd,” after years of nonstop work at Red Swoosh.