Review: Super Pumped, by Mike Isaac

Russ Allbery eagle at eyrie.org
Sat Dec 28 21:17:02 PST 2019


Super Pumped
by Mike Isaac

Publisher: W.W. Norton
Copyright: 2019
ISBN:      0-393-65225-4
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     350

Mike Isaac is a technology reporter for the New York Times who wrote
extensively about Uber, including in 2017 when Susan Fowler's bombshell
Medium essay dropped and Travis Kalanick's reign at Uber started to
unravel. This is the extended story of the company in book form, from
Kalanick's pre-Uber startup experiences until the end of the postscript
in May of 2019 following Uber's IPO.

To non-fiction book publishers of the world: Please make the exposé of
dysfunctional, exploitative capitalism and its abusive leaders a major
genre. I will be there for each book launch with my wallet in hand.
Timely essay journalism is probably more effective from a public
interest perspective, but there is nothing like a book-length treatment
to dig into the power structures that enable companies like Uber to
exist and the critical tipping points that may allow them to be
dismantled.

Super Pumped opens with Uber's "X to the x" company-wide party in Las
Vegas in October of 2015, which included the announcement of Uber's 14
company values. Value number 12, "Super Pumped," provides the title of
this book. (The precise meaning of this value isn't clear, although
cult-like devotion to the company is part of it.) But the book as a
whole is also a biography of Travis Kalanick, Uber's now-ousted CEO and
driving force through most of its existence.

Uber was not Kalanick's first startup. That was Scour, a search engine
for file-sharing sites somewhat similar to Napster. Kalanick took
venture capital for Scour under threat of a lawsuit from the VC and
then lost control of the company, which was sold for parts in
bankruptcy court after a lawsuit from the RIAA and MPAA. Kalanick then
spent six years barely keeping his second startup, Red Swoosh, alive
until it could be sold to Akami for $20 million and a personal profit
of $2 million. Both of those experiences left him with a deep distrust
of venture capitalists and a determination to keep control of any
future company out of the hands of the money people. That sets up one
of the themes of Uber's history: a governance structure that gave
Kalanick near-total control with very few sanity checks.

If you're not familiar with the Bay Area tech culture or with startup
finance, you may not know about the huge fight over control of
startups. Historically, it was common for startup founders to give up
majority control of their companies to early venture capital funders,
and for those funders to then replace the management (and, some would
argue, meddle with the company mission) once the company became more
mature and was heading for an "exit" (a stock market IPO or
acquisition, so-called because those events let early investors sell
off their stake and "exit" the company with a profit). Google and
Facebook are among the wildly successful companies that broke this mold
and retained founder control. Those examples, plus the flood of
additional money into tech startups, let more founders or early owners
like Kalanick follow suit and refuse to give up a majority stake in the
company.

This is an interesting debate because there are good arguments to be
made for both models. On one hand, no one likes bankers, who are widely
(and not entirely inaccurately) viewed as reluctantly necessary
parasites. The process of bringing in professional management at the
behest of the VC owners was often very disruptive, came with aggressive
layoffs and reorganizations, and in some cases involved dismantling the
business for parts or selling it to a competitor rather than continuing
to develop a product. The founders usually had a vision for how the
company could change the world, or at least its market, and while those
visions were often dubious, that sort of mission and focus was often
more appealing to the general employees of the company than the VC
focus on a lucrative exit.

On the other hand... there's Travis Kalanick.

As Isaac explains, and which I didn't know before reading this book,
Kalanick was not the founder of Uber. That's Garrett Camp, who had the
initial idea and brought Kalanick on as an advisor. He was happy to
mostly step aside early on, however, leaving Kalanick with uncontested
control of the company. It's Kalanick who decided on the strategy of
aggressive expansion, openly illegal flouting of taxi laws, political
hardball, and massive runaway spending to try to break into Asian
transportation markets. It's under Kalanick's watch that Uber built
systems to hide their activity from police and government regulators.
And Kalanick oversaw the culture of pervasive sexual harassment that
led to a massive internal investigation and his eventual ouster.

One interesting thread of this book is an argument in favor of banker
control, at least as the least-bad option if the alternative is someone
like Kalanick. Investors may not be interested in making the world a
better place, but they are interested in preserving their investment
and not making negative front-page headlines, which means they're less
likely to openly break laws, more likely to hire adult supervision, and
more likely to make boring and conventional business decisions. It's
quite the unappealing choice, though. One comes away from Super Pumped
dubious that either Kalanick or his investors have any business being
in charge of anything that affects other people's lives.

I obviously came to this book with my own biases and prejudices, and
was not expecting to like Kalanick, but it's even worse than I
expected. The moment that put my shoulders up around my ears came after
Kalanick was recorded screaming at an Uber driver about company
policies. When Kalanick was shown that video, Isaac describes him (via,
to be clear, second-hand accounts; Isaac was not there) spending the
rest of the night literally writhing on the floor, repeating how
terrible of a person he is and asking what was wrong with him.

This is, to be explicit, not typically the behavior of someone who is
genuinely apologetic about something they've done. This sort of
over-the-top, theatrical apology and elaborate groveling is more
typical of abusive people after they've been caught. It re-centers the
moment away from the person who was abused and back on the abuser,
making everything about their pain and their anguish. There are a lot
of places in this book where Isaac is willing to ascribe Kalanick's
actions to a deep-seated belief in the corruption of the taxi industry,
determination to retain control of his company, or aspirations to
transform transportation. This moment was when I decided that Isaac,
despite his skeptical treatment, was being far too kind, and Kalanick
is scary and dangerous. There's further reinforcement of this pattern
later in the book when Kalanick attempts to write a message to the
company after the Holder report on Uber's culture of sexual harassment
was complete, and some very troubling glimmers of it in the small
amount that Isaac reports about Kalanick's relationship with his former
girlfriend.

Super Pumped is a detailed, mostly-chronological story of the rise of
Uber under Kalanick, its growing financial struggles in Asia, its
arrogance and political aggressiveness, and then the revelation and
aftermath of multiple classes of illegal behavior. It closes with the
last fight over control of Uber, one that Kalanick finally lost, and
the naming of Khosrowshahi as the new CEO. The detail and clarity are
the strengths of this book; the weakness is that Isaac is much more
interested in pure reportage than analysis. Super Pumped is a
chronological account of events and not much more; Isaac is focused on
the process of reporting and the way stories broke rather than on
broader implications for society as a whole.

That's forgivable, of course. Not every long-form journalist is (or
should be) Michael Lewis. But for me that made Super Pumped good, not
great, and not rising to the level of the best books of this type (The
Smartest Guys in the Room and Bad Blood). Admittedly, as much of a
disaster as Uber was (and arguably is), it's rather hard to compete
with the sheer madness of Theranos.

The lack of more contextualization and broader analysis was one
disappointment in this book. Another was Isaac's unwillingness to talk
more directly about the red flags around Kalanick's behavior, instead
deciding to report the facts as he knows them and let the reader draw
their own conclusions. (I realize that my desire for the author to
engage more directly in the topic is a personal preference that won't
be shared by all readers.) A third isn't Isaac's fault: Neither Uber's
story nor Kalanick's are over, so while Super Pumped reaches an
adequate conclusion after Uber's IPO, I would have liked to read
analysis of Kalanick's subsequent sale of all of his Uber stock and his
new startup venture. We'll have to wait for that. (I would also love
someone to ask him why, after walking away with several billion
dollars, he's choosing to found another company, but I doubt I'd get a
satisfactory answer.)

But, those disappointments aside, Super Pumped was compulsively
readable and filled in numerous details that I'd not previously known.
If you like this style of long-form journalism on disasters of
capitalism, this is worth your attention.

Someday there is going to be a book like this about WeWork, and I'm
going to read the hell out of that.

Rating: 8 out of 10

Reviewed: 2019-12-28

URL: https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/reviews/books/0-393-65225-4.html

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)             <https://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>


More information about the book-reviews mailing list