In the nine years since it first launched, Uber has become one of the most prominent platforms in the world. The company currently offers rides on every continent except for Antarctica. Behind the app's rise to global prominence, however, was a dark corporate culture that embraced sexism and misogyny, according to New York Times reporter Mike Isaac's new book "Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber."
In the book, which was released in September, Isaac explores how former Uber CEO and co-founder Travis Kalanick muscled his way into being one of the most powerful forces in Silicon Valley, and how he was subsequently brought down by a litany of scandals regarding the company's behavior.
“I think it was never necessarily for [Kalanick] about being the next [tech titan]. I think it was more, ‘Whatever I do, or whatever single thing I push into or compete in, I’m going to dominate it and absolutely win,’” Isaac said in an interview with WGBH News. “That has been a theme of Kalanick’s entire career, from Red Swoosh and Scour to Uber.”
Uber was initially founded in San Francisco with the goal of offering an easier solution to hailing a taxi. What Kalanick and his founders eventually found out, however, was that municipalities and the taxi industry would not take kindly to the new service, which circumvented strict regulations surrounding the taxi industry and allowed anyone with a car to operate like a taxi. Eventually, Kalanick’s drive to expand into other cities would prompt him to forcibly take on the governments of cities like Seattle, Portland and even Boston. Perhaps the most alarming takeaway in Isaac’s book is the account of an internal application called "greyball" that allowed Uber drivers to spy on municipal officials in various cities and deter their efforts to shut the company’s operations down.
In 2017, Isaac reported that the Department of Justice opened an inquiry into Uber surrounding its attempts to use greyball to evade law enforcement. Uber has declined to make public comments about the program.
Though many Silicon Valley firms make use of aggressive means of business intelligence, Isaac said Kalanick’s drive to fend off his competitors and rivals went further than most. In the case of Lyft, Uber’s biggest competition in the ride-sharing market, Isaac compared Kalanick’s drive to obliterate the company to Captain Ahab’s quest to kill Moby Dick in the classic novel.
“There’s healthy competition, which I guess the valley espouses, and then there’s complete, Ahab-level obsession with destroying your counterpart,” Isaac said. “I’ve never seen anyone hate another company as much as he did.”
Recently, Uber has drawn the ire of government officials who have decried the company’s treatment of its drivers, who Uber insists are not employees. In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signed a bill into law that would force companies like Uber and Lyft to treat their full-time drivers like employees, including offering them health insurance and other benefits. Some have said it could be a death knell to Uber, which recently posted more than $5 billion in losses in their second fiscal quarter as a public company. Isaac, however, said that while Uber may struggle to stay afloat, he does think Kalanick’s goal of destabilizing the transportation sector has succeeded. Whether it’s Uber, Lyft or another ride-sharing app, Isaac said ride-sharing is most likely going to be a permanent fixture in daily life.
“People still use them, and use them very frequently. ... However you may feel about Uber, or its CEO, or how these companies treat drivers, a lot of people use ride hailing services,” Isaac said. “At the end of the day, a lot of this comes down to people and what they want. Regulators have not gone after, at least, Uber in the same way that they might be going after Facebook, just because of the utility of the service and people actually using it.”
