Can you build a company like Uber without being a jerk?

On this week’ interview episode of The Vergecast, editor-in-chief of The Verge Nilay Patel sits down with New York Times reporter Mike Isaac. Isaac has been reporting on the ride-sharing company Uber for over five years now and just released a book all about Uber and the stories surrounding it called Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber. Nilay and Mike talk about how Uber got to where it is today, Uber’s interactions with companies like Apple and Google, and whether or not you have to be a “jerk” to start a company that changes the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 0:59Nilay Patel?

  Hey, everybody. It's Neelai from The Vergecast. On this week's interview episode, we have Mike Isaac. He's a reporter at The New York Times. He's been covering Uber for five years. He just wrote a book about Uber called Super Pumped. It is basically the history of Uber's founding, where it came from, how Travis Kalanick and his co-founders got the idea, how they built the company, the very peculiar set of morals and values they instilled the company with to achieve growth at all costs. And then, obviously, it's extraordinarily tumultuous. 2017, which saw Kalanick get ousted, new CEO come in and basically the entire company fall apart and get rebuilt. It's an absolutely tremendous book. Mike did hundreds of interviews with hundreds of people. It's extremely deeply reported. He probably knows more about Uber than anybody. We talked about how Uber got to where it is, whether you have to be a jerk to start a company

• 1:44Nilay Patel?

  that changes the world, the way that Uber changed the world. That's a really difficult question. You can see that Mike is really thinking about it after having written this book. And Uber's interactions with some big companies like Apple and Google, which are far more contentious than I think I even ever expected. Check it out. This is Mike Isaac. He's the author of Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber.

• 2:05Nilay Patel?

  All right, Mike Isaac is here. Welcome, Mike.

• 2:07Speaker 03

  Hey, thanks for having me.

• 2:08Nilay Patel?

  So you have written a book.

• 2:10Speaker 03

  Ostensibly, I have written a book.

• 2:12Nilay Patel?

  It's right here. It's called Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber.

• 2:15Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:16Nilay Patel?

  It's no lie to say the book is extraordinarily well-received. It's extremely deeply reported. I was reading the sort of end of it. It's like 200 interviews or something crazy.

• 2:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:26Nilay Patel?

  Extremely deeply reported on the sort of rise and fall not of necessarily Uber itself, which continues and seems we've got to talk about where it's going.

• 2:32Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:33Nilay Patel?

  But particularly of Uber's founder and CEO, Travis Kalanick, who is, I think, a parable for the entire tech industry of that moment. Right before he started taping, we were discussing 2014, which is like when a lot of things went down.

• 2:46Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:47Nilay Patel?

  It seems like a different universe than now. So many things have changed.

• 2:50Speaker 03

  I mean, I remember, yeah, I started the beat in 2014 when I joined The Times. I was part of Recode, which is now part of Vox. But it was this sort of drumbeat where every other week or month, they were raising another billion dollars as a private company. It seemed like they were kind of unstoppable in their trudge across the globe. And they just seemed like a real, real different company than they do now. And I don't know if that was, if that's just perception versus like the reality of what they are, you know? Or if the market conditions have really changed, maybe a little bit of both. But yeah, it's like now they're, today, I think, before I walked in here, the stock price was at a record low or something and...

• 3:32Nilay Patel?

  Their book came out.

• 3:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:34Nilay Patel?

  Congratulations.

• 3:35Speaker 03

  God, I'm sorry. I don't want to take credit for that. But it definitely, they just seem more vulnerable now than they did four or five years ago.

• 3:42Nilay Patel?

  And four or five years ago, there really was. They were taking on billions of dollars in venture capital money. And that money was earmarked, "Go lose this money to build your monopoly, and then you'll own the world and we'll have a monopoly and we'll just charge monopoly prices." Everyone, it'll be fine. I mean, that was like, it was pretty naked.

• 3:59Speaker 03

  Well, the thesis, I think, back then, which, you know, doesn't sound completely unreasonable, was, "Look, we're going to build this huge war chest and raise, ultimately, I think it was over $10 billion in private capital." And we're going to just charge headlong into all these markets before governments can stop us, before transportation officials can stop us, before competitors can really like get in our way. And the advantage we will have, and Travis used to say this internally or something like this, is like this capital advantage against everyone else. And for a while, I think that worked, and I kind of maybe believed it worked, and other folks were just like, okay, you know, the investors sort of believed it worked. And then things really changed beyond like the gnarliness of Uber's 2017 and like a zillion different

• 4:43Speaker 03

  scandals. The funding environment changed, like SoftBank entered the picture with their like hundred billion dollar vision fund that they can swing around and do whatever they want with. The rise of competitors in different countries really changed the environment. Uber was not on home territory in Southeast Asia when they were fighting some places like Gojek is, I think, a competitor of theirs. So it really, a lot more competitors with a lot more money than they expected came up almost overnight. And then 2017 just was like the cherry on the crap cake, where they just got their asses kicked for a full year.

• 5:16Nilay Patel?

  So let's start at the start. I think the narrative of Uber, particularly for listeners, The Rich Cast is pretty well familiar, but let's take it from sort of like a meta direction. You set out to write this book. How do you decide where to start telling the story of Uber? What was the frame that you were thinking of?

• 5:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think the reason I chose Uber was less about the company and more about what kind of what you were talking about, this parable for tech in general. And I think early, maybe, let's say 10 or 15 years ago, I think tech was viewed with a more optimistic lens through everyone kind of adjacent to it and in it, right? Like, I think you and I wrote stories about Facebook back then that would be probably very different than we do now, right?

• 5:56Nilay Patel?

  Very true.

• 5:57Speaker 03

  And I've looked at that arc as it happened. And I think back then, like, folks didn't really have a grasp on how transformative some of the things they were building were and are. And only now are we sort of catching up to the idea that tech really does undergird pretty much every part of the world around us and can change, you know, cultures if you have like a disinformation campaign in Myanmar, right? Or they can result in driver deaths in Brazil if you barrel into a new country with just sort of unfettered growth as your directive, right? So I think back then, it wasn't really, the negative consequences of tech wasn't like top of mind. And that is also when Travis, sort of as a serial

• 6:41Speaker 03

  entrepreneur, started his third startup with a few other folks and jumped into Uber. And it really was a different type of business where it wasn't just them building a software business, it was a transportation company that really capitalized on the iPhone and the admin and the iPhone. And so from there, you know, without the sort of tech lash that we're going in right now, they were able to really expand very rapidly. I think not much of the sort of tech bad behavior had been surfaced quite yet. And I think Travis sort of became, over time, the poster child for the bad boy of tech, or like, this is like the tech, you know, whether you believe he deserves it or not, the tech bro that is sort of a caricature of how valley, folks think of some valley engineers and

• 7:26Speaker 03

  valley types. And so I think his standing in and Uber's standing in for the shining example of what can go wrong in tech with hubris and like obscene wealth and growth at all costs made the company and the characters a lot more interesting for me.

• 7:42Nilay Patel?

  So let's talk about Travis. I mean, he's very clearly the main character of your book. It seems as though he was paranoid early on, driven to grow at all costs, made a number of questionable decisions. But I get the sense, having furiously read the book to prepare for this interview, do you have like a kind of a grudging respect for him?

• 8:02Speaker 03

  Absolutely. I think the thing that I feel grateful for even was to take, I mean, look, he could become an easy caricature of like a bad guy, right? And like in 2017, when all of the, when all this shit was going down, he was like basically an evil cartoon character. And I was given the space in this book to just sort of flesh him out as more than a two dimensional character. He's a human being, right? And he has motivations. And I wanted to dig into what makes someone, you know, after I talked to a billion VCs and all these different folks who were around him, like, they would all say the same thing. I've never met anyone as driven or hard. Charging or whatever in my entire career as I have with this guy. And for whatever faults you see in him or for the reasons that that eventually was his undoing,

• 8:46Speaker 03

  it was still like, he was a unique entrepreneur, right? And he was willing to sort of go as far as he could in many situations and really grew this company from nothing from the early days. So I definitely respect him in the sense that like, he built this enterprise when it was, it just didn't exist, you know? And that's still a question people have, like, could it have been done if it wasn't for him?

• 9:07Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I think that's kind of the big question raised throughout the book, which is Uber is, it should exist. Like, I use Uber.

• 9:15Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 9:16Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, it seems like a very natural thing to exist.

• 9:19Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 9:19Nilay Patel?

  Taxi dispatch is something, Canon should be automated. They went ahead and automated. They took a lot, they cut a lot of corners along the way.

• 9:26Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 9:26Nilay Patel?

  And I think one of the sort of big valley questions to this day is, do you need to be that kind of founder to will this kind of company into existence?

• 9:35Speaker 03

  Absolutely. It's, yeah, like, the, I put it less colorfully, but like, do you, or I put it more colorfully and somewhere else, but it was just, do you have to be a jerk to build a world-changing company, right? And I don't know if you have to be a jerk to build a world-changing company, but you might have had to be a jerk to build an Uber, you know? Just because, like, think of the barriers to entry in the taxi and transportation industry and how those differ from, say, a software business like Facebook, right? Now, Mark Zuckerberg has made his fair share of enemies over the years, but he doesn't have people, or he didn't, at least early on. I was gonna say, maybe not now, but at least earlier on, he didn't have like mob boss,

• 10:18Speaker 03

  mafioso types ready to like break his legs for entering their market or whatever. So it definitely, it was a harder industry from the outset, and I think it took, I think that took its toll on Travis's mind, along with, I talk a little bit about in the book, the sense of distrust that he has for really anyone around him from being spurned by venture capitalists early on in his career.

• 10:40Nilay Patel?

  So I want to talk about three kind of big moments with Uber that you have built up beautifully in the book, but I want to unpack them a little bit. The first, obviously, is Susan Fowler. That seemed to be the breaking point in which the company's culture just caught up with it. Susan Fowler publishes her blog post, says it's been a weird year at Uber, lays out the litany of harassment she faced, reporting to HR, there's functionally no HR, even though Uber is like a big company worth billions of dollars, and she's out, right? And she says, this was a horrible year. It seemed like, A, that had a breaking point for Uber. It led to a much greater sense of consequences throughout the valley. But that seems like the moment where a lot of things crystallized.

• 11:18Speaker 03

  It was definitely, I mean, if you can remember back in 2017, this was pre Harvey Weinstein. This was pre like Me Too getting a real lift from The Times breaking the Weinstein stuff. And it was also right after Trump had taken the presidency and there were a lot of just sort of forces happening, forces sort of like crystallizing that I think were waiting for some sort of breaking point in many different industries, not just in, I mean, like in, you know, they broke this open in the entertainment industry and then it just sort of launched into a huge movement, right? And I also, in the book, I talk a little bit about how I think this nebulous feeling of like tech might not be good for us was sort of made more concrete in the idea that,

• 12:02Speaker 03

  oh, did Facebook influence the election? And to this day, we still don't know to what degree, if any, you know, these things changed how people voted or whatever. But it was this nebulous thought that, oh, well, you know, Mark Zuckerberg was asleep at the wheel and now, you know, Russians are manipulating us, or this tech bro is running this company and women are being rampantly harassed and misogyny is ruling the roost, right? And I think Susan, to her credit, like she, I imagine, had no idea what she was going to set off with this blog post, but she presses publish in February and all of this pent-up frustration, anger internally for things that many employees had felt, just was sort of like a dam-bursting moment.

• 12:44Speaker 03

  And I was telling someone else, like, once you lose your employees inside of the company, then you're really screwed. Because you can do all these fights outside and say, like, hunger down, the press is against us or whatever, but when your own people are revolting, you're in trouble.

• 12:58Nilay Patel?

  And they also, they also calling you.

• 13:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right. I mean, that's the moment that journalists love.

• 13:04Nilay Patel?

  So that blog post is published and then there's, you described already a year of pain. And what's really interesting to me, a lot of the early parts of the book lay out how little trust Travis Kalanick has in investors and VCs. He says, they're always out for themselves and he constructs the company of all this power. And he gets ousted anyway. Walk us through that.

• 13:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, so for a long time, you know, Travis in his early days had these issues with VCs, how they, how they treated him. And just very early on, he was burned by an early relationship with an investor. And he kind of swore to himself, he was just not going to be put in an advant- a position we take advantage of again. So he built in protections over the years that cemented his control over his company. I think the real coup for him was when they raised three and a half billion dollars from the Saudi Public Investment Fund, he also added the ability to give himself additional board seats to essentially place puppets in these seats that would vote for him whenever he wanted. And, you know, any logical investor

• 14:06Speaker 03

  that was on the board of the company would probably bristle when you give unfettered access to, or unfettered control of, of the entity to the, this founder who may make a bad decision or whatever, you know. But one of the themes that I sort of hammer on in the book is this idea that founder worship always brings about this sort of like cult-like mentality of the founder knows what he's doing, so we should let him be in full control. And, you know, Zuckerberg built this world-changing company and Larry and Sergey are billionaires ten times over or whatever. So, you know, the cult of the founder is a good thing. And, you know, Travis, again, like the sort of like overarching point is that Travis

• 14:47Speaker 03

  would represent the worst version of that scenario playing out if you give the founder control and you want to oust him and he's Unable to let go of his company, but um, he makes sure that if anyone's gonna take him out of the company, he's not gonna go without a fight. And that's ultimately what happens.

• 15:03Nilay Patel?

  It was quite a fight.

• 15:05Speaker 03

  Very public.

• 15:06Nilay Patel?

  Very, very public. Um, actually, you bring in the book, you mentioned that the gold room a couple of times, which is a gentleman's entertainment club in San Francisco. And the night before you broke the story, have I ever told you this before?

• 15:17Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 15:18Nilay Patel?

  The night before you-

• 15:19Speaker 03

  Were you in the gold club?

• 15:20Nilay Patel?

  I was not in the gold club.

• 15:20Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 15:21Nilay Patel?

  Uh, the night before you broke the story in the Times, Travis is leaving.

• 15:24Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 15:24Nilay Patel?

  I received from like 15 jobs ago, a text, "Hey, my friend is a dancer at the gold club. She says Travis is out tomorrow."

• 15:33Speaker 03

  What?

• 15:33Nilay Patel?

  And there's like, there's no way to follow, like, no way to follow that up.

• 15:36Speaker 03

  Whoa.

• 15:38Nilay Patel?

  And like, I was like, what do I do with this information?

• 15:40Speaker 03

  Oh, my gosh.

• 15:41Nilay Patel?

  It was an absolutely wild night.

• 15:43Speaker 03

  Whoa. Oh, my God. No, I hadn't what that is.

• 15:46Nilay Patel?

  I should, I can't believe I've never told you that. And I was like, well, I was just gonna wait for my-

• 15:49Speaker 03

  That's beautiful. Wow.

• 15:51Nilay Patel?

  It was like, very late, anybody who would've talked to us was done. I was like, I'll just wait. Like, literally, that was the reaction that we had. Like, well, it's gonna happen, but we can't run, we can't run that.

• 16:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, right. Totally.

• 16:03Nilay Patel?

  And the next morning, I was like, oh, there it is.

• 16:06Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 16:07Nilay Patel?

  But that's the culture, right? I mean, that's, for, for me to get that twisted source of information, uh, that there's only one kind of company culture that allows that to happen. So that's the year, but even though he built, he'd built in all those protections, he did get ousted.

• 16:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, a lot of things led to, so the, it ultimately came down to this thing where, and I go into it in pretty great detail in the book, but essentially, like, his own people kind of turned against him and, and sort of vowed to launch a campaign against the guy and, and say, and this is, I inadvertently become a character in the book, just because it was very weird to report it out in retrospect and realize that I was being used as like a weapon against Travis. But like, essentially, like, threaten the guy and say, you know, you better step down, or we're gonna take this fight out into the public. And, and so, after like, a year of being beaten down brutally, and some other sort of like, really tragic things happening in his life, he, he does step down of his

• 17:02Speaker 03

  own accord. And almost immediately, though, he, he is, he sees how he's betrayed and then starts to fight back up again. And it goes through, like, close to the, the end of the year. So- I wonder if things had gone differently, if he would have stayed CEO, because it really would have been very, very difficult, if not impossible, just very difficult to remove him without him doing so himself. But I think it was just the sustained beating he took and the loss of friends and family around him to really get to that point where he decided to step down.

• 17:34Nilay Patel?

  Well, because the obvious parallel is Facebook, right? Where every, every year, the shareholders vote to change Mark Zuckerberg's power structure. Or, I mean, and the margins are quite high, right? Like, massive numbers of Facebook shareholders are like, just be the chairman, change the stock structure, and he's, he always, he has more votes.

• 17:53Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 17:54Nilay Patel?

  And it's, there's a very obvious parallel here, and you're saying, unless he decides to do it himself, it's almost impossible.

• 17:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's the thing. I mean, the, this, this is where it gets like finance wonky, but like, this dual-class stockholder structure that was really, was not invented by, but really championed by Sergey and Larry in when they took Google public, really just essentially hands all the power to the founders. And, you know, the idea of a shareholder is just, is just bogus. It's like, they, they might have a say, but founders can do what they want. And like, in the, in the best possible version of that scenario, you could maybe look like Google or Facebook before 2016 or 2017, and everyone decided that they're the worst companies in the world. And, and that's, you know, like, I, I really do, I also live in San Francisco, and like,

• 18:44Speaker 03

  I'm constantly surrounded by just real chest-beating and championing of these like, figureheads at these companies. And, and I just really wanted to show, like, look, this is not, like, being a founder is not the platonic ideal of capitalism. Things can go wrong, you know? Things are bad sometimes. And this is also not to say that I don't think Uber did a lot of things really well, and that Travis was a, someone to be admired in, in his own twisted way, I guess, you know? Like, I think he has some very redeeming qualities that keep people around him, attached to him, and appreciating him. But I still think it's just worth exploring what can go wrong when everything does.

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• 20:57Nilay Patel?

  So, two more things I want to, two more scenes, conflicts I want to, I want to dig into. We talk a lot on the show about the App Store and the overwhelming amount of power that Apple has. Totally. You have a couple scenes where Travis goes and meets with Eddie Q and Tim Cook and knows basically his business is on the line. Yep. Because he's, Uber has done like some shady things. That, I don't think people really get a sense that Apple can just destroy billion-dollar companies. Absolutely. I mean, that's really, I remember when I found out.

• 21:26Speaker 03

  This anecdote through back in-

• 21:28Nilay Patel?

  Well, tell the story.

• 21:29Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, so basically Uber runs afoul of Apple's App Store rules by sort of skirting some of the privacy guidelines they have. And like Uber had a case to do for what it did, right? Like Uber was dealing with huge amounts of fraud in China and other places. And Apple didn't have a very, you know, a great way of helping to prevent that fraud. So Uber kind of took a shortcut and did this, which is-

• 21:56Nilay Patel?

  If only you could see Mike's face right now. He's like the one of many shortcuts that Uber takes.

• 22:01Speaker 03

  Exactly. And to make a long story short, it ended up biting them, coming back to them because Apple found out that Uber was skirting some of its rules around primacy and what's called fingerprinting iPhones. And so there's this dramatic meeting with Eddie Q and then later another one with Eddie and Tim where essentially they say like, straighten up or we'll boot you from the App Store. And I mean, that's, that is business killing, right? Like at that, for a lot of Uber's life, it was an iPhone only app and then later, you know, it moved out to other, to Android. But like, like if you lose iPhone customers who are, you know, who spend more money on average, it's company crippling, business killing. And it's really interesting now to think about it in the age of antitrust

• 22:46Speaker 03

  and anti-competitive action. I mean, that's, I'm sure where you were going with this. But like, it's just sort of like, when you come back at the end of the day, like to look at who has power and control, and I think even other companies like Facebook would probably point towards Apple and Google and the vast amount of power they have with what apps win and what apps lose. It's pretty freaky. You're kind of playing in these companies, you know, pools and, and have to make them happy and keep that relationship good. And ultimately, the companies themselves do have some leverage because people like Uber and use Uber and Apple can threaten Uber to take them down. But at the same time, people will still be mad if they're like, why did Apple take this app down? I love this app, blah, blah, blah. So there is a power dynamic, but it's still, you know,

• 23:31Speaker 03

  Apple and Google are, are the ones who make the rules in the end of the day.

• 23:35Nilay Patel?

  Well, what struck you in that scene is that it's the one time you described Kalanick as being contrite. And that to me, it's like the one, he's like, I know that I have to get this right. And he's like, I won by apologizing, I won. And that's, that's remarkable. At the same time, it's like, Apple does have a privacy policy.

• 23:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, totally. I mean, like, look, I, I think there's a case for both parties here. I think they ultimately, um, what I was told is they ultimately got to a place where they found a solution to help stop fraud without, like, I think, I think Uber's engineers and some of Apple's engineers built some, worked together to build something. So they got to a better place on that. And like, ideally, that's where you net out. But it's really, um, Apple's fascinating too, because it's just sort of like a Byzantine, like, law book that, where things get made up as, as the world moves on and stuff sort of is invented, new apps are even invented.

• 24:28Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's, every one of these companies is building a new legal system around itself, right? Like, they're all replacing some piece of actual society. Apple's like, we've got a court that lets you get into the market.

• 24:38Speaker 03

  Right.

• 24:39Nilay Patel?

  Facebook's like, literally like, we're starting a court. And Uber's like, we are, we are now the bus. Right? Like, it's, you guys know, it's just, this is just, we're starting a country. And the other one I want, really wanted to talk about is Google. And the relationship between Google and Uber is very complicated. They were an investor, and then there was obviously the big lawsuit. What did you discover as you were reporting out that relationship?

• 25:01Speaker 03

  So it was really interesting when I got to go to cover the court case when Uber was eventually sued by Waymo and hear Travis deliver testimony. But it was, I think, going in, Travis, so Travis, you know, to predicate this, Travis took on $250 million from investment from GV, Google Ventures, which is Google's investment arm for startups. From the outset, I think Travis had a different understanding of what that meant. He thought, okay, I've got Google money now, I'm untouchable, they're gonna make me a king in this space and... Because they've invested in me, I'm awesome. And I think Google had a very different idea of this. You know, like, first of all, they go to great lengths now to caution people.

• 25:46Speaker 03

  You know, we are not a part of Google. We were an independent arm. And just because you have our backing doesn't mean that Larry Page, at the end of the day, is going to like, support you and champion you or whatever. And so eventually, it got to a point where Travis realized, like, this is gonna, we're gonna crash into each other if we're... What is the logical endpoint of a taxi service? And that's automating it, right? And Google, you know, Larry Page in particular, had been working on self-driving cars for years at that point. So they were frenemies until they were enemies. And I think ultimately, it ended very poorly, obviously. Waymo believed, at least, that one of its former engineers, Anthony Levandowski,

• 26:27Speaker 03

  stole IP, trade secrets, brought it over to Uber, sued Uber over that for theft of trade secrets. That ended up settling. But it was just sort of a case study in how the incestuousness of the valley can end up working against you at times. And I think for Travis, it felt like a real betrayal and an eye-opening moment of, oh, God, the... What is the analogy I'm looking for?

• 26:51Nilay Patel?

  Fox.

• 26:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, Fox is in the house there. Yeah, exactly. Actually, I think one of the Apple executives might have used that analogy at one point. But like, there was a point in which, and I think I put this out in the book, is like, they kind of say, like, what, you know, Google's on your board, David Drummond is on your board, are you not worried about that? And I don't think Travis was worried about it until it was too late and really figured, oh, okay, well, now I'm gonna have to compete with my own backers. So it ended spectacularly poorly for all of them. Uber, in court, said famously, "The only thing we have to show for Anthony Levandowski is this lawsuit," basically. They ended up net negative, and it set them back probably a lot.

• 27:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we had Sarah John on our team when Austin was going...

• 27:35Speaker 03

  I love Sarah.

• 27:35Nilay Patel?

  Sarah's now at the Times. I remember she...

• 27:38Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, she was there.

• 27:39Nilay Patel?

  She was there.

• 27:40Speaker 03

  Covering it.

• 27:40Nilay Patel?

  She was covering the hell out of that case.

• 27:41Speaker 03

  She beat me.

• 27:43Nilay Patel?

  And we were talking about it every day, because it was, you know... This is a case that famously gave the world the phrase, "The laser is the sauce."

• 27:50Nilay Patel?

  Which I, like Sarah and I, I literally, as I was reading your book, I just texted Sarah, the lasers and sauce, because it was like all we said to each other. We were just, we were just saying that with different inflections to communicate for like a week.

• 28:00Speaker 03

  Oh, God.

• 28:01Nilay Patel?

  And, uh, Google's case is pretty bad.

• 28:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:04Nilay Patel?

  And I remember she wrote a post being like, this case is actually pretty bad. And they settled the next morning. Uh, and it, I think this, a lot of this comes down to, and I think, you know, we cover consumer tech. Like, here's the product you're looking at. It's the new iPhones coming out, the screen's this big, and it's pretty divorced from the personalities of the people.

• 28:22Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 28:22Nilay Patel?

  And these big companies are really big. They're very good at crafting sort of forward-facing personalities. And you're like, oh, they just hated each other. And they like, made Mike and Sarah sit in a courtroom for a while. Over a case that was fundamentally pretty bad, they just didn't like each other. And there's like a deep strain of actual human being personality issues underneath these companies. What's the thing, as you, as you're writing the book, like, what's the thing that you like learned the most about these folks?

• 28:49Speaker 03

  Hmm. I, I wonder, I think that the, the question that I keep coming away from is like, what does it take to build a great company? Do you have to be ruthless? Do you have to exist? Is it like luck and timing? You know, like, a lot of, a lot of the stars aligned. You know, Travis, you know, has his strengths, and a lot of folks still wonder if, could they have built Uber without Travis? But like, a lot of this, and I get into this in the book, a lot of the stars really aligned to make Uber what it was during the time it was. You know, there were, there were lesser apps that kind of did the same thing that were around at the same time. But I think ubiquity of internet and the, the advent of the iPhone, AWS becoming like a thing, like, it just really took a lot of, um, stars

• 29:33Speaker 03

  aligning to, to make this happen. So I think there's a part of, part of it is luck, and then part of it's timing, and then part of it is, and this is a question I wonder, is like, do you just have to be a ruthless jerk? Or can you be a nice company builder? You know? And like, I mean, I think about Steve Jobs, I think about, you know, what Larry and Sergey were like, I think about Zuckerberg and his sort of, Zuckerberg is a ruthless businessman, I know that, um, firsthand. And so I wonder if that's just the laws of business, you know? And maybe, maybe Uber... You know, maybe Uber had the unfortunate position of being like the poster child of all the crappy things that one has to do, or might, or one can get caught doing on

• 30:17Speaker 03

  the way to building like a huge company. But I would like to think that you can build something worthwhile and not be a jerk when you're doing it.

• 30:26Nilay Patel?

  So this brings us to the new CEO, Dara. How's Dara doing?

• 30:31Speaker 03

  I mean-

• 30:31Nilay Patel?

  Because he was installed as the nice one.

• 30:33Speaker 03

  Right, right, right. The dad of Silicon Valley.

• 30:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, like he's polite. When he like got rid of like the bro code that like Uber had, like, he's rebooted the company.

• 30:41Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm. Super Pumped is no longer a value. I have to explain to people what Super Pump mean. A lot of the times, it's really just, oh, God. It's a great, it's a great title, though.

• 30:53Nilay Patel?

  It is a fantastic title.

• 30:55Speaker 03

  But no, I think, look, this is the funny sort of irony about the whole thing is now people are kind of weirdly pining for the fire that Travis brought. And this is the credit I'll give him all day long. It's like, he instilled a real loyalty, real sort of sense of duty and purpose in the folks that were there. I think Dara was absolutely the right sort of temperament to right the ship when the building was on fire, or whatever mixed metaphor you want to use, because like, there was like so much going on in 2017 that went wrong. And just having someone that felt like a grown up in the room was great. And the question mark for some now is like, okay, great, he's like, whatever,

• 31:37Speaker 03

  he's tamped down the emergency mode, and now we need to prove that we can be the next Amazon of transportation, as they like to say. And that's just, they have to prove it, you know? And that's, they have bets out, right? They're doing food delivery, they have scooters and things. Payments is actually going to be a next thing that they're, they're keeping close to the vest right now, but it's going to be a thing. But it's still TBD, you know? I still think it's, it's too early. If you're, if you're looking at becoming a platform and be, moving just beyond this core ride-hailing business, it's too early to say- Whether they're gonna make it well or not.

• 32:12Nilay Patel?

  Well, that's the next big question, right? So there's like the WeWork IPO a couple of weeks ago and everyone everyone just looked at it. I mean, it's, we talked about it on this show. I'm sure you, no tech reporter could resist tweeting about it. It's like the most fanciful IPO document in history. It like begins with a prayer. It's like so out of control.

• 32:33Nilay Patel?

  But like, everyone sees it for what it is, right? This is a real estate company using some tech language to mask an upside down business model. A lot of that thinking seems to be applied to Uber lately, right? We're gonna front a ton of cash to build some monopoly position and then literally like charge rent. It's Uber. More, more or less.

• 32:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:51Nilay Patel?

  But it's like more useful.

• 32:52Speaker 03

  No, it's, yeah, no. Well, like, that's the, the difficulty of having a commodity service too, I think, right? Like, I think the, the real part that's difficult is like, they don't enjoy the same advantages of like network effects that a Facebook does or, or, you know, other businesses that really thrive on the bigger we are, the better we are, I think, in, in the, in the exact same way. And the cost of switching is so low and like Lyft's network is big enough that they, or, you know, if you go to China, Didi's network is big enough or Hula in India, like there's just, the friction between switching services is not high enough to keep people in that universe.

• 33:33Speaker 03

  So they need to add more things in that, whether it's, again, like if it's food, they're doing like loyalty programs. It's kind of like airlines back in the day, like, you know, like it's just sort of, people are very price sensitive. So what's gonna keep you here? And for airlines, at least, a lot of it was like brand and perks. And if your brand is in the toilet, then you have a big problem. So, I don't know. I mean, I'm still, I'm looking at this, Uber has like gold and platinum and Uber cash.

• 34:00Nilay Patel?

  Oh, I don't take more than a couple of Ubers a week and I'm like, Uber just bestows status to me left and right. It's like hilarious.

• 34:08Speaker 03

  Compelling?

• 34:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, I keep you saying.

• 34:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, there you go. Well, maybe, maybe it'll work. I, yeah, I don't, I don't know. Like, I really do think, what I wonder is like, do they have enough time to prove it out in the next, you know, however many years or months or whatever, before the street gets agitating for, for change?

• 34:25Nilay Patel?

  Before their burn rate catches up.

• 34:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, right.

• 34:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think the number is $5 billion a quarter they're losing.

• 34:30Speaker 03

  That was a lot. There was, it was, there were some one-time charges, to be fair, but it was, there's, the losses are, are still crazy.

• 34:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So what's next for Uber?

• 34:38Speaker 03

  Oh, man.

• 34:38Nilay Patel?

  And really, what's next for, next for my guys? These two fates are intertwined.

• 34:43Speaker 03

  I hope not. Oh, God, I, I hope this is, I hope this is it. The book, the, the thing that I do feel really happy about is like capturing this specific moment in time for the valley and what tech means to people, what it's gonna mean in the future. The other thing I like thinking about a lot is like, tech is not going away. It's not like, not like, not like we've had a reckoning and we're gonna just go full Luddite and start torching every, I mean, not that I've seen so far. So like, what is the way in which we live ethically, responsibly, you know, with tech ingrained into every part of our society, which it already is, right?

• 35:20Speaker 03

  What do we start looking back on and, and say, hey, I am okay with this, or I'm not okay with this, or this is part of the value proposition of advertising that is fine by me, but this, this part of tracking or whatever, I'm not cool with, you know? I think people are like, starting to actually ask those questions. And, and I think it's gonna go far beyond Uber. I think it's gonna be, you know, important for our industry, for, uh, you have social media, for social media, for all sorts of different realms. So that's what most interests me now is just how we live in a post-tech clash society while not, you know, sort of like going full Prepper and living in a bunker underground.

• 35:58Nilay Patel?

  I would say the Prepper thing is very tempting to me.

• 36:00Speaker 03

  I mean.

• 36:01Nilay Patel?

  Every time I'm upstate, I like go to the grocery store, I'm like, I'm gonna buy like three to four Prepper magazines.

• 36:05Speaker 03

  Oh, my God.

• 36:06Nilay Patel?

  It's fine. It's a real whiplash reading a Prepper magazine.

• 36:08Speaker 03

  We gotta hang out.

• 36:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Well, actually, that's, that's my last question. A lot of the Uber story was an end run around regulation.

• 36:15Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 36:16Nilay Patel?

  Right? The regulations aren't ready for us. We don't think they're, they're appropriate. They're just in our way. We can just show up in Portland and

• 36:22Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 36:23Nilay Patel?

  And we'll make people love us, and then you're screwed, and now you have to deal with us.

• 36:25Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 36:26Nilay Patel?

  We're definitely in the regulation moment.

• 36:28Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 36:28Nilay Patel?

  Right? The government has noticed that tech companies exist. And then, I mean, even on sort of the left, you have Elizabeth Warren saying, "We're going to break you all up."

• 36:36Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 36:37Nilay Patel?

  On the right, you have Josh Hawley being like, "I'm going to ban autoplay video on your phone." Like, this is a wide spectrum. There's an ideological realignment. Is Uber just entrenched enough to navigate it now?

• 36:47Speaker 03

  Hmm. The only thing I think they're really, they should be kind of worried about is like, attacks at their labor model. You saw Buttigieg the other day in San Francisco show up and say, "We want these drivers to be employees." And that's obviously politically savvy of him, but it's also like, there are bills in California that are sort of pushing that as well right now. So there are things there they need to worry about. I do think they have enough lobbyists that they're not going to go anywhere. It's just more, what is that future going to look like for them? And are they going to get any sort of unduly harsh rules that might hamper their business model even more?

• 37:24Nilay Patel?

  All right. Mike, thank you so much for coming. Super pumped. The Battle for Uber is out now. You can buy it from Amazon, which is another tech monopoly, and support your local bookseller. Where can they find you? Where can they tweet at you?

• 37:35Speaker 03

  Get me at @MikeIsaac, I S A A C on Twitter, or Mike underscore Isaac, I S A A C on Instagram, because someone stole my name on Instagram.

• 37:45Nilay Patel?

  Wow, that's the next book. There it is.

• 37:47Speaker 03

  Thanks, man.

• 37:48Nilay Patel?

  All right. Thanks, Mike.

• 37:52Nilay Patel?

  All right. My thank you to Mike Isaac. You can go buy the book out in the world. It's Super Pumped, The Battle for Uber. We are at the Apple event this week. It's coming right up. It's iPhone time. So we'll see you on the chat show this week to wrap up Apple. I love to hear from you. Tweet at me. I'm at Reckless. Would love to know who you want me to interview next, what themes you want me to cover. I love all that feedback. Hit me up. We'll see you later this week with the chat show.

• 38:45Speaker 06

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