kellyzen's review against another edition
4.0
Never doubt that one small group of sociopaths can change the world! Inspiring.
kristinnyoung's review against another edition
5.0
I’m not particularly into Tech, the Startup world, or Finance, but this story is honestly so wild I could not put this book down. If you’re turned off by the subject matter, understand that it’s just a backdrop to a completely sensational, unbelievable, dramatic story about a company that’s incredibly relevant in most people’s lives. It would have been difficult to make this story uninteresting but I think the author did a fantastic job of keeping attention even through the minutiae (which was still necessary) and excellently framed the aspects of the story that we as the reader should care about.
lamida's review against another edition
5.0
# Summary
This is a messy story of a company that revolutionizes the transport industry. The story of a man that almost will do anything to make his company successful and on some level, he makes that really happens. However, some downfall follows with plenty of scandals taint the image in the company history. This is the story of Travis Kalanick in building Uber, make it big, make controversies, and getting ousted from it.
# Important Ideas
- Building a great company is hard, especially for operation-heavy businesses like ride-hailing.
- In an attempt to make Uber great, Travis almost try to do everything to work in his mission, including deceiving much official authority of cities where Uber was launching, although, in the early days, Uber mostly was trying to escape from enforcement of the law that is still grey anyway. Concepts like “breaking the law” weren’t applicable, they believed when the laws were bullshit in the first place.
- Another significant scandal is the case of Susan Fowler which reveal her sexual harassments experience, which later found as non isolated cases. Recently Fowler has written a book to talk more about this.
- Fraud is eating so many of Uber's cakes, mainly with its China launch (which eventually halted later). Unfortunately, the silver bullet of detecting fraud by using device identifiers is killed by Apple for the name of privacy protection. Crazily, Uber workaround this by implementing geofencing for the code that will still try to extract device fingerprints from the phone. The geofencing will disable the device fingerprint in the Apple headquarter area (assuming the apps reviewer are only based there) and will enable the device fingerprinting everywhere else.
- Uber is one company that introduces dual-class stocks (maybe not the first), one stock type with just a single vote and another stock type with higher vote power, which make Travis's power almost can't be contained until the last minute he can be ousted.
- Interesting side story, is about Ryan Graves billion dollar tweet.[https://twitter.com/ryangraves/status/7422940444](https://twitter.com/ryangraves/status/7422940444) But as I read the book, I am still not really getting the role of Ryan Graves, perhaps he can stay around just because can get along well with Travis.
- Dara Khosrowshahi replaced Travis to helm uber in 2017 and since has been trying to fix Uber images and businesses.
# Highlights
115
18/8/2021 7:59:48 pm
Hales took the call in an office in City Hall, joined by Steve Novick, his
115
18/8/2021 7:59:53 pm
Hales took the call in an office in City Hall, joined by Steve Novick, his transportation commissioner.
183
18/8/2021 8:13:54 pm
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.
191
18/8/2021 8:14:32 pm
Uber security personnel spied on government officials, looked deep into their digital lives, and at times followed them to their houses.
202
18/8/2021 8:15:39 pm
Greyball was consistent with one of Uber’s fourteen company values: Principled Confrontation.
204
18/8/2021 8:15:50 pm
Concepts like “breaking the law” weren’t applicable, they believed, when the laws were bullshit in the first place.
297
18/8/2021 9:01:11 pm
One employee hired a pair of prostitutes to join him in his hotel room.
368
18/8/2021 9:09:17 pm
Kalanick carefully studied the methods of Bezos and his company, down to the fourteen core leadership principles posted to Amazon’s website: Customer Obsession Ownership Invent and Simplify Are Right, A Lot Learn and Be Curious Hire and Develop the Best Insist on the Highest Standards Think Big Bias for Action Frugality Earn Trust Dive Deep Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit Deliver Results Kalanick had a surprise for his employees, inspired by Bezos’s
368
18/8/2021 9:09:41 pm
Kalanick carefully studied the methods of Bezos and his company, down to the fourteen core leadership principles posted to Amazon’s website: Customer Obsession Ownership Invent and Simplify Are Right, A Lot Learn and Be Curious Hire and Develop the Best Insist on the Highest Standards Think Big Bias for Action Frugality Earn Trust Dive Deep Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit Deliver Results
370
18/8/2021 9:09:07 pm
Customer Obsession Ownership Invent and Simplify Are Right, A Lot Learn and Be Curious Hire and Develop the Best Insist on the Highest Standards Think Big Bias for Action Frugality Earn Trust Dive Deep Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit Deliver Results
377
18/8/2021 9:10:09 pm
The house lights shone on the blackboard behind Kalanick. Written in white chalk were fourteen bullet points, each a short saying or thought, sprung directly from the brain of the CEO. The audience read the list as Kalanick rattled them off aloud: Always Be Hustlin’ Be An Owner, Not Renter Big Bold Bets Celebrate Cities Customer Obsession Inside Out Let Builders Build Make Magic Meritocracy & Toe-Stepping Optimistic Leadership Principled Confrontation Super Pumped Champions Mindset / Winning Be Yourself
413
18/8/2021 9:14:12 pm
One of Uber’s greatest strengths was its incredible product focus, drive, and intensity—from every employee, at every level of the company.
438
18/8/2021 9:16:00 pm
Travis Cordell Kalanick was born on August 6, 1976, in Northridge Hospital to Donald and Bonnie Kalanick, an average, white, middle-class couple who built a comfortable life for themselves in California.
459
18/8/2021 9:18:04 pm
One friend described him as a pit bull that spent its life getting kicked by its owners—no matter how beaten down Travis was, he never, ever gave up.
755
18/8/2021 9:48:17 pm
“No. Stop it right there. I don’t want a wave of shitty apps from outsiders polluting this phone. Not going to happen.”
778
18/8/2021 9:49:43 pm
Until 2006, computer programmers made their living inside big corporations or software development outfits. To have your software touch millions of people usually required the distribution of major software publishers, ones with sizeable marketing budgets and deals with off-the-shelf, big-box retailers. Places like Best Buy, FuncoLand, and Babbage’s had aisles stocked like a grocery store, stuffed with rows of boxes of PC and Mac programs.
982
18/8/2021 10:03:38 pm
Just then, a twenty-six-year-old intern named Ryan Graves happened to be looking at Twitter, and spotted Kalanick’s request. He was interested, but didn’t want to come off as too desperate. Three minutes later, he tweeted back at Kalanick with a cheeky response: “heres a tip. email me. :) graves.ryan[at][gmail.com](http://gmail.com/).”
1008
18/8/2021 10:05:31 pm
Graves went to startup networking events and happy hours. He read TechCrunch, VentureBeat, the Times, the Journal, Techmeme—feeling the pulse of all things tech.
1010
18/8/2021 10:05:51 pm
Michael Arrington,
1046
18/8/2021 10:09:02 pm
“Uber CEO ‘Super Pumped’ About Being Replaced By Founder,”
1089
18/8/2021 10:16:28 pm
Twenty-four-year-old Austin Geidt was tasked with figuring this out.
1241
18/8/2021 11:50:24 pm
Even now, nearly twenty years into a phenomenal career in venture capital, the first thing anyone notices upon meeting Bill Gurley is that he is enormous.
1374
19/8/2021 2:12:51 pm
Gurley had grown famous for his personal blog, Above the Crowd, where he would occasionally post investment treatises and thoughts on the state of technology investing.
1465
19/8/2021 8:52:47 pm
Sunil Paul, a serial entrepreneur and longtime transportation geek, was experimenting with a different way of offering rides to people with his San Francisco–based startup, Sidecar.
1537
19/8/2021 8:58:13 pm
Uber had discovered a winning formula to expansion. But each new city required capital, an upfront investment to kickstart what they called the demand “flywheel.” Drivers wouldn’t work for Uber unless there was enough demand from riders. And new riders wouldn’t sign up or return unless there was a critical mass of available drivers. It was a classic chicken-and-egg problem.
1610
19/8/2021 9:03:16 pm
Where Kalanick and Michael really shined, however, was in raising money. The two perfected their technique through sheer force of repetition.
1757
19/8/2021 9:24:56 pm
As Kalanick was hammering out an exciting future for Uber with top brass at the Googleplex, Anthony Levandowski sat frustrated just a few buildings away.
1838
19/8/2021 9:36:12 pm
Doug Schifter, a livery driver from Manhattan, faced financial ruin after the rise of Uber wrecked his income driving for traditional car services. Schifter drove to City Hall in Lower Manhattan on a cold Monday morning in February 2018, put a shotgun to his head, and pulled the trigger.
1874
19/8/2021 9:39:42 pm
In states where fingerprint-based background checks were legally required, Uber hired lobbyists to get laws rewritten that mandated drivers undergo the traditional checks.
1962
19/8/2021 10:50:30 pm
The random commenters didn’t bother him. But Sarah Lacy got under his skin. Lacy, a long-time tech journalist who made her name at Bloomberg Businessweek and Time, frequently bashed Kalanick.
1998
19/8/2021 10:53:37 pm
“This is crazy.” Of all Kalanick’s transgressions, his pushing out of Brent Callinicos, Uber’s chief financial officer, peeved Gurley the most.
2310
19/8/2021 11:46:14 pm
Pham spun up a crisis team, poaching top security and fraud detection talent from local Bay Area competitors to form a fifty-person fraud squad at Uber’s HQ in San Francisco. He ordered local managers in China to review new sign-ups more rigorously.
2359
19/8/2021 11:51:39 pm
should switch over to driving for DiDi. One
2359
19/8/2021 11:51:45 pm
One of DiDi’s preferred tactics was to send new recruits over to Uber to join as engineers. As soon as they were hired they acted as moles, feeding proprietary Uber information back to DiDi and carrying out corporate sabotage on some of Uber’s internal systems.
2451
19/8/2021 11:59:47 pm
Two years earlier, Apple released a version of its iOS mobile software that killed outside access to the unique identification number of every iPhone, the so-called IMEI number, or “international mobile equipment identity” number.
2466
20/8/2021 12:01:39 pm
After Apple’s iOS software release, about a half dozen companies sprang up overnight that claimed they could detect the sacred IMEI. Quentin tested a few of them before landing on InAuth, Inc., a small firm based in Boston.
2955
20/8/2021 1:09:10 am
At the moment, Uber was competing against DiDi in China, against Grab and Go-Jek in Southeast Asia, against Ola in India, and against Lyft in the United States. These were costly, painful wars—with battles on multiple fronts on multiple continents against well-funded adversaries.
3227
20/8/2021 2:23:02 am
“Surge pricing has been turned off at #JFK Airport. This may result in longer wait times,” the tweet read. “Please be patient.”
3424
20/8/2021 2:44:19 am
In a later meeting, Fowler recalled a director boasting about withholding information from one executive to curry favor with another (and it worked).
4022
20/8/2021 3:43:17 am
The never-before-reported details of a case in Indonesia, for example, would grow into an enormous problem. As Uber set up shop to compete with Grab in Indonesia, Uber would open “green light hubs,” which were makeshift checkpoints for drivers in the area to receive vehicle inspections, register complaints with district managers, and other activities. The problem was that the hubs were set up in suburban districts zoned for residential use only. Almost overnight, the green light hubs began attracting hundreds of drivers, which clogged the suburban streets and angered the locals. When the police found out, they threatened to shut Uber’s hubs down.
4052
20/8/2021 3:45:37 am
In the immediate aftermath of the attack, a theory was floated that the rape possibly may not have taken place at all and was in fact part of a plot against Uber perpetrated by executives at Ola, Uber’s major Indian ride-hailing competitor.
4174
20/8/2021 3:56:20 am
What is graves role?
4174
20/8/2021 3:56:21 am
Graves
5079
20/8/2021 10:07:34 am
As he looked at Uber’s balance sheet, awash in red ink, he began to cut losses. That meant selling off Uber’s business in Southeast Asia to Grab, the local ride-hailing competitor, for a 27.5 percent ownership stake in the Singaporean company.
This is a messy story of a company that revolutionizes the transport industry. The story of a man that almost will do anything to make his company successful and on some level, he makes that really happens. However, some downfall follows with plenty of scandals taint the image in the company history. This is the story of Travis Kalanick in building Uber, make it big, make controversies, and getting ousted from it.
# Important Ideas
- Building a great company is hard, especially for operation-heavy businesses like ride-hailing.
- In an attempt to make Uber great, Travis almost try to do everything to work in his mission, including deceiving much official authority of cities where Uber was launching, although, in the early days, Uber mostly was trying to escape from enforcement of the law that is still grey anyway. Concepts like “breaking the law” weren’t applicable, they believed when the laws were bullshit in the first place.
- Another significant scandal is the case of Susan Fowler which reveal her sexual harassments experience, which later found as non isolated cases. Recently Fowler has written a book to talk more about this.
- Fraud is eating so many of Uber's cakes, mainly with its China launch (which eventually halted later). Unfortunately, the silver bullet of detecting fraud by using device identifiers is killed by Apple for the name of privacy protection. Crazily, Uber workaround this by implementing geofencing for the code that will still try to extract device fingerprints from the phone. The geofencing will disable the device fingerprint in the Apple headquarter area (assuming the apps reviewer are only based there) and will enable the device fingerprinting everywhere else.
- Uber is one company that introduces dual-class stocks (maybe not the first), one stock type with just a single vote and another stock type with higher vote power, which make Travis's power almost can't be contained until the last minute he can be ousted.
- Interesting side story, is about Ryan Graves billion dollar tweet.[https://twitter.com/ryangraves/status/7422940444](https://twitter.com/ryangraves/status/7422940444) But as I read the book, I am still not really getting the role of Ryan Graves, perhaps he can stay around just because can get along well with Travis.
- Dara Khosrowshahi replaced Travis to helm uber in 2017 and since has been trying to fix Uber images and businesses.
# Highlights
115
18/8/2021 7:59:48 pm
Hales took the call in an office in City Hall, joined by Steve Novick, his
115
18/8/2021 7:59:53 pm
Hales took the call in an office in City Hall, joined by Steve Novick, his transportation commissioner.
183
18/8/2021 8:13:54 pm
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.
191
18/8/2021 8:14:32 pm
Uber security personnel spied on government officials, looked deep into their digital lives, and at times followed them to their houses.
202
18/8/2021 8:15:39 pm
Greyball was consistent with one of Uber’s fourteen company values: Principled Confrontation.
204
18/8/2021 8:15:50 pm
Concepts like “breaking the law” weren’t applicable, they believed, when the laws were bullshit in the first place.
297
18/8/2021 9:01:11 pm
One employee hired a pair of prostitutes to join him in his hotel room.
368
18/8/2021 9:09:17 pm
Kalanick carefully studied the methods of Bezos and his company, down to the fourteen core leadership principles posted to Amazon’s website: Customer Obsession Ownership Invent and Simplify Are Right, A Lot Learn and Be Curious Hire and Develop the Best Insist on the Highest Standards Think Big Bias for Action Frugality Earn Trust Dive Deep Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit Deliver Results Kalanick had a surprise for his employees, inspired by Bezos’s
368
18/8/2021 9:09:41 pm
Kalanick carefully studied the methods of Bezos and his company, down to the fourteen core leadership principles posted to Amazon’s website: Customer Obsession Ownership Invent and Simplify Are Right, A Lot Learn and Be Curious Hire and Develop the Best Insist on the Highest Standards Think Big Bias for Action Frugality Earn Trust Dive Deep Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit Deliver Results
370
18/8/2021 9:09:07 pm
Customer Obsession Ownership Invent and Simplify Are Right, A Lot Learn and Be Curious Hire and Develop the Best Insist on the Highest Standards Think Big Bias for Action Frugality Earn Trust Dive Deep Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit Deliver Results
377
18/8/2021 9:10:09 pm
The house lights shone on the blackboard behind Kalanick. Written in white chalk were fourteen bullet points, each a short saying or thought, sprung directly from the brain of the CEO. The audience read the list as Kalanick rattled them off aloud: Always Be Hustlin’ Be An Owner, Not Renter Big Bold Bets Celebrate Cities Customer Obsession Inside Out Let Builders Build Make Magic Meritocracy & Toe-Stepping Optimistic Leadership Principled Confrontation Super Pumped Champions Mindset / Winning Be Yourself
413
18/8/2021 9:14:12 pm
One of Uber’s greatest strengths was its incredible product focus, drive, and intensity—from every employee, at every level of the company.
438
18/8/2021 9:16:00 pm
Travis Cordell Kalanick was born on August 6, 1976, in Northridge Hospital to Donald and Bonnie Kalanick, an average, white, middle-class couple who built a comfortable life for themselves in California.
459
18/8/2021 9:18:04 pm
One friend described him as a pit bull that spent its life getting kicked by its owners—no matter how beaten down Travis was, he never, ever gave up.
755
18/8/2021 9:48:17 pm
“No. Stop it right there. I don’t want a wave of shitty apps from outsiders polluting this phone. Not going to happen.”
778
18/8/2021 9:49:43 pm
Until 2006, computer programmers made their living inside big corporations or software development outfits. To have your software touch millions of people usually required the distribution of major software publishers, ones with sizeable marketing budgets and deals with off-the-shelf, big-box retailers. Places like Best Buy, FuncoLand, and Babbage’s had aisles stocked like a grocery store, stuffed with rows of boxes of PC and Mac programs.
982
18/8/2021 10:03:38 pm
Just then, a twenty-six-year-old intern named Ryan Graves happened to be looking at Twitter, and spotted Kalanick’s request. He was interested, but didn’t want to come off as too desperate. Three minutes later, he tweeted back at Kalanick with a cheeky response: “heres a tip. email me. :) graves.ryan[at][gmail.com](http://gmail.com/).”
1008
18/8/2021 10:05:31 pm
Graves went to startup networking events and happy hours. He read TechCrunch, VentureBeat, the Times, the Journal, Techmeme—feeling the pulse of all things tech.
1010
18/8/2021 10:05:51 pm
Michael Arrington,
1046
18/8/2021 10:09:02 pm
“Uber CEO ‘Super Pumped’ About Being Replaced By Founder,”
1089
18/8/2021 10:16:28 pm
Twenty-four-year-old Austin Geidt was tasked with figuring this out.
1241
18/8/2021 11:50:24 pm
Even now, nearly twenty years into a phenomenal career in venture capital, the first thing anyone notices upon meeting Bill Gurley is that he is enormous.
1374
19/8/2021 2:12:51 pm
Gurley had grown famous for his personal blog, Above the Crowd, where he would occasionally post investment treatises and thoughts on the state of technology investing.
1465
19/8/2021 8:52:47 pm
Sunil Paul, a serial entrepreneur and longtime transportation geek, was experimenting with a different way of offering rides to people with his San Francisco–based startup, Sidecar.
1537
19/8/2021 8:58:13 pm
Uber had discovered a winning formula to expansion. But each new city required capital, an upfront investment to kickstart what they called the demand “flywheel.” Drivers wouldn’t work for Uber unless there was enough demand from riders. And new riders wouldn’t sign up or return unless there was a critical mass of available drivers. It was a classic chicken-and-egg problem.
1610
19/8/2021 9:03:16 pm
Where Kalanick and Michael really shined, however, was in raising money. The two perfected their technique through sheer force of repetition.
1757
19/8/2021 9:24:56 pm
As Kalanick was hammering out an exciting future for Uber with top brass at the Googleplex, Anthony Levandowski sat frustrated just a few buildings away.
1838
19/8/2021 9:36:12 pm
Doug Schifter, a livery driver from Manhattan, faced financial ruin after the rise of Uber wrecked his income driving for traditional car services. Schifter drove to City Hall in Lower Manhattan on a cold Monday morning in February 2018, put a shotgun to his head, and pulled the trigger.
1874
19/8/2021 9:39:42 pm
In states where fingerprint-based background checks were legally required, Uber hired lobbyists to get laws rewritten that mandated drivers undergo the traditional checks.
1962
19/8/2021 10:50:30 pm
The random commenters didn’t bother him. But Sarah Lacy got under his skin. Lacy, a long-time tech journalist who made her name at Bloomberg Businessweek and Time, frequently bashed Kalanick.
1998
19/8/2021 10:53:37 pm
“This is crazy.” Of all Kalanick’s transgressions, his pushing out of Brent Callinicos, Uber’s chief financial officer, peeved Gurley the most.
2310
19/8/2021 11:46:14 pm
Pham spun up a crisis team, poaching top security and fraud detection talent from local Bay Area competitors to form a fifty-person fraud squad at Uber’s HQ in San Francisco. He ordered local managers in China to review new sign-ups more rigorously.
2359
19/8/2021 11:51:39 pm
should switch over to driving for DiDi. One
2359
19/8/2021 11:51:45 pm
One of DiDi’s preferred tactics was to send new recruits over to Uber to join as engineers. As soon as they were hired they acted as moles, feeding proprietary Uber information back to DiDi and carrying out corporate sabotage on some of Uber’s internal systems.
2451
19/8/2021 11:59:47 pm
Two years earlier, Apple released a version of its iOS mobile software that killed outside access to the unique identification number of every iPhone, the so-called IMEI number, or “international mobile equipment identity” number.
2466
20/8/2021 12:01:39 pm
After Apple’s iOS software release, about a half dozen companies sprang up overnight that claimed they could detect the sacred IMEI. Quentin tested a few of them before landing on InAuth, Inc., a small firm based in Boston.
2955
20/8/2021 1:09:10 am
At the moment, Uber was competing against DiDi in China, against Grab and Go-Jek in Southeast Asia, against Ola in India, and against Lyft in the United States. These were costly, painful wars—with battles on multiple fronts on multiple continents against well-funded adversaries.
3227
20/8/2021 2:23:02 am
“Surge pricing has been turned off at #JFK Airport. This may result in longer wait times,” the tweet read. “Please be patient.”
3424
20/8/2021 2:44:19 am
In a later meeting, Fowler recalled a director boasting about withholding information from one executive to curry favor with another (and it worked).
4022
20/8/2021 3:43:17 am
The never-before-reported details of a case in Indonesia, for example, would grow into an enormous problem. As Uber set up shop to compete with Grab in Indonesia, Uber would open “green light hubs,” which were makeshift checkpoints for drivers in the area to receive vehicle inspections, register complaints with district managers, and other activities. The problem was that the hubs were set up in suburban districts zoned for residential use only. Almost overnight, the green light hubs began attracting hundreds of drivers, which clogged the suburban streets and angered the locals. When the police found out, they threatened to shut Uber’s hubs down.
4052
20/8/2021 3:45:37 am
In the immediate aftermath of the attack, a theory was floated that the rape possibly may not have taken place at all and was in fact part of a plot against Uber perpetrated by executives at Ola, Uber’s major Indian ride-hailing competitor.
4174
20/8/2021 3:56:20 am
What is graves role?
4174
20/8/2021 3:56:21 am
Graves
5079
20/8/2021 10:07:34 am
As he looked at Uber’s balance sheet, awash in red ink, he began to cut losses. That meant selling off Uber’s business in Southeast Asia to Grab, the local ride-hailing competitor, for a 27.5 percent ownership stake in the Singaporean company.
jeremyanderberg's review against another edition
4.0
It's impossible to read this book and not be reminded of last year's superb Bad Blood, which told the story of Elizabeth Holmes and the now-defunct Theranos. Holmes and Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick are remarkably similar in their egocentrism, their creation of a dysfunctional company culture, their delusion about their product and employees, and now, their Silicon Valley banishment.
The very real difference between the two stories? Theranos didn't have a real product, whereas Uber was basically printing cash for a handful of years, leading the company to be called the "unicorn of unicorns" (a startup valued at $1 billion).
Uber subversively wound its way into major cities (even internationally) breaking dozens of local regulations en route. But debut author and NYT tech reporter Mike Isaac, through hundreds of interviews, pulls back the curtain on the appallingly destructive and misogynistic bro culture that was lurking in the shadows. Kalanick is a bit like the Wizard of Oz — initially seen as a magical tech founder who could do no wrong, but is ultimately revealed as a troubled and deeply flawed leader.
In 2017, which Isaac calls one of the worst single years ever for a corporation, Uber was in the news a lot, mostly for ill. From the infamous Susan Fowler blog post, to Kalanick's involvement with President Trump's tech council, to the even more infamous video of Kalanick berating one of his own drivers, things couldn't have been much worse. The co-founder departed, decidedly not amicably, and now the company is trying to claw its way out of PR hell.
This is one of those books where the writing complements the story in such a way as to not be a hindrance. The focus is not on the words necessarily, but in how those words are carrying the crazy plot forward. Isaac finds this balance very well, as John Carreyrou did in Bad Blood.
Super Pumped is a page-turning and noteworthy book which adds to the growing library that exposes Silicon Valley’s not-so-glamorous underbelly, and one that will force readers to reconsider their use of not only Uber, but ride-sharing companies in general.
The very real difference between the two stories? Theranos didn't have a real product, whereas Uber was basically printing cash for a handful of years, leading the company to be called the "unicorn of unicorns" (a startup valued at $1 billion).
Uber subversively wound its way into major cities (even internationally) breaking dozens of local regulations en route. But debut author and NYT tech reporter Mike Isaac, through hundreds of interviews, pulls back the curtain on the appallingly destructive and misogynistic bro culture that was lurking in the shadows. Kalanick is a bit like the Wizard of Oz — initially seen as a magical tech founder who could do no wrong, but is ultimately revealed as a troubled and deeply flawed leader.
In 2017, which Isaac calls one of the worst single years ever for a corporation, Uber was in the news a lot, mostly for ill. From the infamous Susan Fowler blog post, to Kalanick's involvement with President Trump's tech council, to the even more infamous video of Kalanick berating one of his own drivers, things couldn't have been much worse. The co-founder departed, decidedly not amicably, and now the company is trying to claw its way out of PR hell.
This is one of those books where the writing complements the story in such a way as to not be a hindrance. The focus is not on the words necessarily, but in how those words are carrying the crazy plot forward. Isaac finds this balance very well, as John Carreyrou did in Bad Blood.
Super Pumped is a page-turning and noteworthy book which adds to the growing library that exposes Silicon Valley’s not-so-glamorous underbelly, and one that will force readers to reconsider their use of not only Uber, but ride-sharing companies in general.
pinging92's review against another edition
2.0
I had high expectations of this book as it was recommended to me as a similar book as Bad Blood - but I really disliked this book. A lot of the times I felt like the story got side-tracked into non-relevant stories. It also repeated a lot of information, starting in one part of the book and then suddenly repeating and expanding on that information in later chapters. I can't say that I am a lot wiser now about the journey of Uber.