Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber

by Mike Isaac

Travis Kalanick woke up to an iPhone on nuclear meltdown. Within hours, the link to Susan Fowler’s blog post had been shared internally, across private messages and chat rooms hundreds of times. Uber employees were buzzing with ire, excitement, confusion. It was raining in San Francisco that Sunday morning, but Kalanick was in Los Angeles. Groggy, he began returning the flood of calls that had come in from Uber’s top executives about Fowler’s whistleblowing memo. Fowler had never ranked high enough in the company to cross his radar. And yet this one woman—a single engineer in Uber’s sprawling workforce—was rattling the entire organization. Press calls began flooding into the public relations department, seeking comment on Fowler’s post. Fowler herself had gone dark, leaving reporters’ calls unanswered, saying nothing beyond what she had written on her blog.