The Meteoric Rise And Fall Of Uber's Founder
This is part 1 of a two-part conversation.
In 2009, when the ride-hailing app Uber first started, it was called UberCab. The company was a basic black car service, limited to people in San Francisco who were willing to pay a premium to get driven around the city, according to New York Times technology reporter Mike Isaac.
Since then, Uber has upended transportation throughout the world.
The company has expanded beyond its single-city hub and onto multiple continents. And although it’s struggling now, at Uber’s highest valuation, when the company went private, Isaac says it was worth upward of $60 billion.
“The popular phrase out in the Valley is that Uber was the fastest growing startup in Silicon Valley history,” says Isaac. “And I don’t think you can really challenge that.”
Uber had what some called the perfect “product-market fit,” according to Isaac, meaning there were cities with poor public transportation systems that were ripe for the company to come in to fill the void.
“I remember living in San Francisco in 2008,” he says. “You’d have to call a cab and just pray that it would come, whether it did or not.”
However, Uber’s remarkable rise to the top of its industry wasn’t always a clean ride.
In his new book, “Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber,” Isaac details the company’s willingness to break rules — and even laws. He also describes the misdeeds that forced the resignation of Uber’s founder and CEO, Travis Kalanick.
“Kalanick, he’s a startup guy from the beginning, a serial entrepreneur [who] really cherished this small company spirit and wanted to empower every new general manager in cities across the world to sort of take control of how they ran their local office,” says Isaac. “The drawbacks of that is if you sort of empower this army of bros to kind of take over each city and do what they want, sometimes you can have some really negative consequences.”
Interview Highlights
On Uber’s legally questionable methods for setting up shop in cities, and the pushback from
