Super Pumped Quotes

“I waved him over, looking as harmless as I could. My reporter trick is to play dumb and friendly; dumb and friendly is always more approachable than eager and prodding.”
― Mike Isaac, Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber

“The “gig economy” unleashed by companies like Uber, Instacart, TaskRabbit, and DoorDash spurred an entirely new class of workers—the blue-collar techno-laborer.”
― Mike Isaac, Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber

“If he had played by the rules, as he had mostly done at Google, he’d still be waiting for approval. Inside Otto, engineers printed out orange-colored stickers and pasted them around the San Francisco headquarters with a message they knew Levandowski would love: “Safety Third.”
― Mike Isaac, Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber

“In the eyes of Travis Kalanick, Uber’s co-founder and chief executive, the entire system was rigged against startups like his. Like many in Silicon Valley, he believed in the transformative power of technology. His service harnessed the incredible powers of code—smartphones, data analysis, real-time GPS readings—to improve people’s lives, to make services more efficient, to connect people who wanted to buy things with people who wanted to sell them, to make society a better place. He grew frustrated by people with cautious minds, who wanted to uphold old systems, old structures, old ways of thinking. The corrupt institutions that controlled and upheld the taxi industry had been built in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he thought. Uber was here to disrupt their outmoded ideas and usher in the twenty-first.”
― Mike Isaac, Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber

“What 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. England”
― Mike Isaac, Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber

“Second, the hurdles for entrepreneurs who wanted to launch a company were lowering quickly. Amazon Web Services, or AWS, changed the startup game entirely. Amazon started AWS in 2002 as an engineering side project; it would grow to become one of its most successful innovations in Amazon history. Amazon Web Services powers cloud computing services for coders and entrepreneurs who can’t afford to build their own infrastructure or server farms on their own. If a startup is a house, AWS is the electric company, the foundation and the plumbing combined. It keeps the business up and running while the company”
― Mike Isaac, Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber

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― Mike Isaac, Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber

“Kalanick treated user privacy as an afterthought. At one point, Kalanick changed Uber’s settings so the app could track people even after they had ended their ride.”
― Mike Isaac, Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber

“Kill or be killed” was the unofficial motto at Uber, where if you weren’t watching your back you might be betrayed by a colleague looking to get ahead.”
― Mike Isaac, Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber

“But when a company actively seeks out legal “grey areas” during rapid expansion, compliance, by definition, is not a priority.”
― Mike Isaac, Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber

“It was a recurring theme at Uber: something went wrong, the boss wanted it taken care of, and he didn’t much care how you got it done. Just get it done.”
― Mike Isaac, Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber

“On occasion, when a sexual assault victim decided not to pursue litigation or if the evidence in a police report was not conclusive enough to prosecute, a round of cheers would ring out across the fifth floor of Uber HQ.”
― Mike Isaac, Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber

“Uber’s compliance division was marginal. Compliance is one of the most important safeguards a company can have, as it ensures a company acts within the law.”
― Mike Isaac, Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber

“But as one Uber employee competing with Lyft at the time said, “The law isn’t what is written. It’s what is enforced.”
― Mike Isaac, Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber

“And around the same time Levandowski left, his partner, Lior Ron, had searched Google for some incriminating phrases, including “how to secretly delete files mac” and “how to permanently delete google drive files from my computer.”
― Mike Isaac, Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber

“Uber was spending $40 million to $50 million on subsidies in China every single week, an enormous sum just to convince riders and drivers to use Uber over DiDi.”
― Mike Isaac, Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber