Super Pumped

By Mike Isaac

9 min read

Why does it matter? Because the company that broke every rule won — and that's the problem.

Uber ran illegally in Portland for three years. It built software to identify transportation inspectors and serve them phantom cars that would never arrive. It hired former intelligence operatives to track government officials. It operated without a permit, without permission, without consequence. Portland never caught them. The law never stopped them. Today Uber is stitched into the city's transit system, as permanent as the pavement.

So here's the uncomfortable question this book keeps forcing: what exactly went wrong?

Super Pumped is the story of Travis Kalanick, and its unsettling argument is that the quality that made him a threat to taxi cartels and the quality that made him a threat to his own employees — the bone-deep conviction that rules existed for lesser people — were never in tension. They were one thing. Portland was just the proof of concept.

The Founding Story Was Real — Which Is Exactly Why the Collapse Was So Total

Garrett Camp is in his South Park apartment, watching Casino Royale, when the idea arrives — not from genius, but from a four-second product-placement shot. Bond is driving through Nassau, a phone on the seat tracking his position in real time. Most viewers took it as spy-movie atmosphere and moved on.

Camp couldn't. The iPhone had launched a few months earlier, and he immediately mapped Bond's gadgetry onto Apple's new hardware: Wi-Fi, accelerometer, future GPS — the exact components needed to track your own position in real time. What if you didn't have to spend nights dialing for cabs? What if there was an app for that? He tacked on one more question, the one that reveals where this really came from: What if, like James Bond, you could look like a total badass using it?

Camp was a wealthy entrepreneur (he'd recently sold StumbleUpon to eBay for $75 million) who had been blacklisted by San Francisco's cab companies after a logical hack: he'd call all of them at once and take the first car that showed. The companies caught on and stopped coming. He laid it out plainly. "Even if he lost, he would win."

That candor is what makes the founding story matter. A real problem, a clever fix — nobody was pretending to save the world yet. The world-saving pitch came later. And because the original frustration was so recognizable, so plainly human, everyone believed the pitch when it arrived. The genuine and the grandiose arrived at the same address. By the time you could tell them apart, you'd already signed on.

Winning Portland Should Have Been a Warning, Not a Victory

Greyball wasn't a workaround. It was a weapon: designed, staffed by ex-intelligence professionals, and justified in writing as company philosophy. That distinction matters because the weapon worked, and a weapon that works gets used again.

The night Erich England found this out, he was standing outside the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall in Portland, posing as a concertgoer, trying to catch an Uber driver in the act. Enforcement officers had spent weeks attempting to document the company's illegal operation. England opened the app, requested a ride, watched a driver accept. Then the driver canceled. A car rolled past him without stopping. He stood on the sidewalk with no explanation and no evidence.

He'd been Greyballed. Uber's system had tagged his account as a threat and served him a fake version of the app, populated with phantom vehicles. He had no idea.

The people who built this weren't twenty-somethings acting on instinct. Uber had recruited from the CIA, NSA, and FBI: a corporate espionage capability aimed at the people whose job was to hold the company accountable.

The philosophical cover was already in place. One of Uber's fourteen official company values was called "Principled Confrontation." The taxi industry was corrupt. The regulations protecting it were bureaucratic barnacles on a system that needed disruption. When laws are illegitimate, breaking them isn't really breaking them — it's principle. Greyball wasn't a legal department's nightmare; by Uber's own written logic, it was a feature.

Uber dispatched Obama's 2008 campaign manager to call the transportation commissioner — not to negotiate, but to buy hours while the launch proceeded.

Portland enforcement officers spent three years trying to catch drivers they could never see. By the time the story broke publicly, in 2017, Uber was already operating legally in Portland. Not in spite of the deception. Because the deception had held long enough for the company to become indispensable. The fight was over before anyone knew it had started.

That's the shape of what Kalanick built: not a startup that sometimes bent rules, but a machine for operating outside accountability while accountability caught up. Portland was where the machine proved itself. The machine ran on everything after that.

Kalanick Didn't Fall Into Unchecked Power — He Engineered It One Investor Meeting at a Time

David Krane of Google Ventures spotted Travis Kalanick at the TED Conference in Long Beach, laughing with Cameron Diaz. Sensing his opening, Krane stepped between them, easing the actress aside, and introduced himself. He'd been chasing this deal for months. A Google Ventures investment was supposed to be a signal, a blessing — firms didn't usually have to elbow past celebrities to get noticed.

By 2013, Uber was raising its third major funding round. But Kalanick didn't go to investors. He made them come to him. Three meetings a day at Uber's San Francisco headquarters, one week, time slots that firms had to compete for. Emil Michael, the polished dealmaker Benchmark's Bill Gurley had recruited as Kalanick's fundraising partner, watched the room during each pitch, tracking body language, noting who leaned forward when the growth numbers appeared. Then he'd wait a week before responding to anyone. A follow-up note would sit unanswered before an Excel spreadsheet arrived asking how much each firm wanted to invest and at what valuation. The power in that spreadsheet was entirely Kalanick's.

Krane eventually got his presentation slot at Uber HQ. GV's partners promised strategic support, recruiting connections, deep experience. Kalanick listened, then named his terms: $250 million, valuing Uber at $3.5 billion. GV wrote the check — the largest in the firm's history. In return, Krane received a non-voting board observer seat. Not a vote. An observer.

Then, at the eleventh hour, Kalanick told Krane he was adding TPG Capital, and giving TPG's David Bonderman, a private equity legend with connections to heads of state, the actual board seat Krane had been denied despite writing three times the money. There was nothing Krane could do.

Kalanick had stripped most investors of their information rights (the routine access to financials that normally comes with a large ownership stake) and issued himself supervoting shares worth ten votes each against common shareholders' one. Uber was Travis Kalanick's company. If you were fortunate, he might allow you to fund it.

The Only Metric That Determined What You Could Get Away With Was Your Revenue Number

A woman in Uber's Malaysia office is walking home from work in 2015 when she realizes she's being followed. It's a local gang. Scared, she starts texting anyone who might help, including her direct boss, the local general manager. She tells him what's happening. She thinks she's going to be raped.

His reply arrives while she's still moving: "Don't worry, Uber has great health care. We will pay for your medical bills."

The Malaysia office hit its numbers. No one faced consequences.

This was the mechanism. Ryan Graves, who ran Uber operations and was nominally in charge of human resources, had never built any real HR function, because the company's internal logic had already resolved the question of accountability another way. Revenue was the permission slip. Every office that performed was, by definition, well-managed. The manager in Malaysia had closed the loop. His office was fine. His employee was fine, medically speaking.

The same accounting shaped how Uber treated the people who actually drove the cars. After launching a carpooling product in New York, the company sent drivers a satisfaction survey. Back at headquarters, a roomful of employees reviewed the results. One manager, glancing at the spelling errors in the responses, quipped that he couldn't believe these people's votes counted the same as his. They didn't, really: roughly a quarter of Uber's drivers quit every three months, and the company's response was to recruit replacements from Walmart and McDonald's. The drivers were supply. Supply was replaceable.

Kalanick had not sent a memo telling managers to respond to gang-stalking with insurance reminders or to treat driver surveys as jokes. He'd done something more lasting: built a culture that selected for people who would. The company's written values — "champion's mindset," "let builders build" — weren't decoration. They were a filter. The people who rose at Uber were the people who made their numbers without pausing to ask whether they should. The people who asked got iced out.

Hit the number. Everything else is someone else's problem.

In May 2017, the Personal Catastrophe and the Corporate One Arrived on the Same Day

By May 2017, Eric Alexander had become Uber's most dangerous problem.

Alexander was Uber's Asia president, the man Kalanick called first when a driver in India was accused of rape in 2014. He'd handled it: the damage control, the negotiations, the settlement. Now, three years later, it emerged that during the investigation, Alexander had obtained the victim's private medical records through Uber's outside counsel in the case and carried them back to the US. The files documented her physical exam from the night of the assault. More damaging still: Kalanick had raised a specific anatomical detail from those records with colleagues, in a way his executives read as casting doubt on whether the assault had happened. At least two members of the leadership team told him back, bluntly, that the records didn't rule out what had been done to her.

Kalanick fired Alexander before the story ran. The executive team drafted a letter to the board demanding an independent chairman, Emil Michael's removal, and Kalanick's leave of absence. The apparatus he'd spent a decade building had turned against him, formally, in writing.

Three weeks later, his mother died.

Bonnie Kalanick's last message to her son was a photo of Pine Flat Lake (a place the family spent summers when Travis was young), still trying to get him to cancel his East Coast meetings and join them for the holiday weekend. He didn't. The boat struck rocks on the way back from the river. His father Donald, thrown into the water with five fractured ribs, a cracked vertebra, a broken leg, and one collapsed lung, fought his way back to the sinking boat, kept Bonnie afloat with life jackets, and swam with her for two hours until they reached shore. He tried CPR on the beach. It didn't work.

He rented a conference room at the Holiday Inn across from the Fresno hospital where his father was recovering. He paced the carpeted hallway dictating a redemption letter to his staff, the first genuine apology he'd ever put in writing. The letter included the line: "sometimes it's more important to show you care than to prove you're right." He believed it might save his job.

He would never send it. The board had already moved. But the shape of the thing is clear: the same instinct that ran every crisis of the previous five months — position before accountability, manage the message, hope the apology lands before the story does — had now arrived at Kalanick personally, drafting in a hotel hallway, trying one last time to write his way out.

The Ending Refuses to Give You a Lesson

Travis Kalanick is standing ten feet from the reporter who helped end his career, waiting outside a federal courtroom in San Francisco, and he walks over.

He shakes Isaac's hand. Puts an arm around his shoulder. Makes small talk, asks to go off the record, jokes about not being able to pace while testifying. That afternoon he charms the Waymo jury so thoroughly that the trade secrets case — which could have dismantled Uber's self-driving program — settles before a verdict is reached.

Then he turns and peers through the courtroom's glass doors, raises his arms slowly above his head.

"It feels like we're in the tunnel in a stadium, right before the Super Bowl," he says, to no one in particular. "I'm ready."

This is the book's last image of Kalanick, and it is not the ending the story seemed to be building toward. After the board coup, the investor lawsuit, the years of scandal, what followed was supposed to be diminishment. What Isaac delivers instead is Kalanick with his arms raised: Miami resident, yacht parties in the French West Indies, cloud kitchen startup, recruiting the employees he was forced to fire.

The shape of the story pointed toward reckoning. The reckoning never quite arrived. Uber's May 2019 IPO opens at $42 per share, below its own $45 floor, shedding more dollar value on opening day than any American IPO since 1975. Dara Khosrowshahi, who had replaced Kalanick as CEO, toasts employees holding Big Macs and champagne: "Five years from now... they'll say, Holy shit. I want to be Uber." The confidence that had driven Uber's rise made its public debut a disaster.

But Kalanick had left the NYSE ceremony before trading began. His stake was worth $5.4 billion.

A decade of behavior that would have ended most careers produced, net, a billionaire's stake and a new company staffed with people Kalanick himself got fired. What lands instead is a harder question, one the book was always circling: what do you do with a system that produces Travis Kalanick, rewards him anyway, and is already building the next one?

The Arms Stay Raised

The arms go up slowly. That's what stays with you — not the boardroom coup, not the Senate hearing, not the IPO that shed more dollar value in a single day than almost any American offering in living memory. The arms, the grin, the man recruiting back the employees he got fired, already incorporated into his next company before the Waymo jury had even settled. Portland is a legal Uber market now. The numbers look like resolution. But a reckoning proportionate to what the apparatus actually did to people — the employee texted about health care while a gang followed her home, the drivers processed like rotating inventory, the regulatory officers standing on empty sidewalks with no evidence and no recourse — that reckoning never quite arrived. What arrived was $5.4 billion. Somewhere right now, a founder who has decided the rules don't apply to them is running the math on a dinner napkin. The tunnel is always full.