Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber

by Mike Isaac

His thinking on keeping his seat on the council didn’t last long. In the span of a week, more than 500,000 people deleted their Uber accounts entirely, not counting the incalculable others who simply deleted the app from their phones. Uber’s all-important ridership growth curves—for years always hockey-sticking up and to the right—started turning downward. Kalanick began to sweat. Lyft, at that point running out of money and on the verge of surrender, benefitted enormously from the backlash. People began to ditch Uber and switch over to Lyft. (Protest felt good, but people still needed to be able to call a car sometimes.) Lyft’s executives then pulled a well-executed PR stunt, publicly donating $1 million to the American Civil Liberties Union over four years, making themselves look like white knights while Uber was groveling before Trump. The resultant surge in ridership brought Lyft back from the brink of failure. At last showing positive signs of growth, Lyft soon attracted investment from Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, the private equity firm, buoying the ride-hailing company with more than a half-billion dollars in additional capital. Lyft’s fundraising sunk Kalanick’s spirits. He had spent the entire summer trying, and failing, to defeat his largest competitor in China. And now, just as the new year began, his chance to kill his strongest American opponent had slipped away as well. He was so close to rubbing John Zimmer’s nose in defeat. No longer.

How Lyft survived