Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber

by Mike Isaac

Just a few weeks prior, Portland was one of the first cities in the country to draft rules that allowed Airbnb, the home-sharing startup, to operate legally within the city’s confines. And for more than a year, the hope was that such a forward-thinking city could do the same with ride-sharing.

But Portland’s good intentions weren’t delivering on Kalanick’s time frame. Now, the two sides found themselves at an impasse. “Get your fucking company out of our city!” Novick yelled into the speaker phone. Plouffe, the charmer, was silent.

Uber’s nice-guy approach hadn’t worked. But it wa...

Over the previous five years, the company had grown from a startup employing a couple of techies in a San Francisco apartment to a burgeoning global behemoth oper...

The thirty-eight-year-old chief executive was a pacer.

Pacing was something he had done for as long as any friends of his could remember; his father once remarked that a young Travis had worn a hole in the floor of his bedroom from all the pacing. The habit didn’t dissipate with age. As he grew older, Kalanick leaned into it. Pacing became his thing. Occasionally, when taking a business meeting with an unfamiliar face, he’d apologize and stand up—he had to pace.

“You’ll have to excuse me, I just gotta get up and move around,” Kalanick would say, already out of his chair. Then he would continue the conversation, full of kinetic energy. Everyone inside Uber headquarters was used to Kalanick doing lap...

Allowing random citizens to drive other people around for money opened up a slew of problems, most notably that no one had any idea whether or not it was legal. At Uber, no one really cared.

#culture

Kalanick was done waiting. It was time to go. He gave the word and Uber general managers on the ground in the Pacific Northwest got the message: Protect the drivers, trick the cops, and unleash Uber in Portland.

#beastmode

“Let drivers know they get $500 cash when they take their first ride on UberX,” the advertisements said.

#uber

England didn’t know was that Uber’s general managers, engineers, and security professionals had developed a sophisticated system, perfected over months, designed to help every city strike team—including the one in Portland—identify would-be regulators, surveil them, and secretly prohibit them from ordering and catching Ubers by deploying a line of code in the app. The effect: Uber’s drivers would evade capture as they carried out their duties. Officers like England could not “see” the shady activity, and could never prove it was happening.

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.

After zeroing in on problematic individuals, the company would deploy one of its most effective weapons: Greyball. Greyball was a snippet of code affixed to a user’s Uber account, a tag that identified that person as a threat to the company. It could be a police officer, a legislative aide or, in England’s case, a transportation official.

Having been Greyballed, England and his fellow officers were served up a fake version of the Uber app, populated with ghost cars. They had no chance of ever capturing the rogue drivers. They m...

For the next three years, Uber operated with impunity in Portland. It wasn’t until 2017 when the New York Times broke the story of how Uber used Greyball to evade the authorities that Portland officials fully ...

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.

With every new zero added to the revenue figure, Uber’s thousands of employees were rewarded with an all-expenses-paid trip to another global destination.

Uber was “fast-growing,” “pugnacious,” a “juggernaut.” They heard the whispers of staggering revenue growth, and saw the company’s surging valuation, which was already well into the billions.

They loved how Kalanick brought a hacker-like mentality to the way he built and ran his company. No one wanted to miss their shot at entering the next Google or Facebook on the ground floor.

Recruiters knew exactly how to sell it, tweaking the FOMO† of ambitious engineers. “You don’t want t...

Joining Uber in those days was a statement, like driving a Tesla or wearing a Rolex.

One employee hired a pair of prostitutes to join him in his hotel room. The next morning, he and his roommate woke up with all of their belongings stolen, including their work laptops. Uber management, terrified of company secrets being sold on the black market, fired the employees on the spot and tried to track down the hardware.

A Los Angeles general manager was fired in 2015 for groping the breasts of one of his team members. Managers were doing drugs with their subordinates—cocaine, marijuana, and ecstasy, mostly. Then there was the employee who managed to steal a party transportation shuttle and joyride it with other Uber employees looking for a good time.

But the crown jewel was the final musical guest. As Uberettos lined the venue inside the Palms hotel, the house lights went dark and the stage filled with smoke. A voice began to sing the first few slow bars of a familiar song. Then she appeared. Wrapped in a blood-red jumpsuit, sequins shimmering against the neon beams behind her, fog machines wrapping her in mist. The words started coming into focus, a hit all the twentysomething employees knew by heart: “Got me looking so crazy right now, your love’s got me looking so crazy right now. . . .” Employees began screaming as the singer stepped into the spotlight. They realized what Kalanick had done: He got Beyoncé.

#dream #brew

The night exploded, with employees dancing and singing along to a string of number-one hits. The crowd hushed for a haunting acoustic rendition of “Drunk in Love,” a standby. Up in the rows of seats facing the stage sat Beyoncé’s husband, Jay-Z, smoking a cigar and smiling.

At the end of the week, Uber’s finance team added it all up. The entire “X to the x” celebration cost Uber more than $25 million in cash—more than twice the amount of Uber’s Series A round of venture capital funding.

Fast-rising rents pushed wage earners out of San Francisco, while landlords flipped those former apartments to new, wealthier tenants. The “gig economy” unleashed by companies like Uber, Instacart, TaskRabbit, and DoorDash spurred an entirely new class of workers—the blue-collar techno-laborer.

the newest brilliant mind who sought, in the words of Steve Jobs, to “make a dent in the universe.”