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The “cult of the founder” is a widely discussed Silicon Valley phenomenon that has circulated in recent years is an integral part of understanding various missteps made by tech corporations. The “cult of the founder” describes a company culture in which the founder (usually also serving as CEO), is worshipped as a sort of philosopher king, one whose power and influence often go unchecked by their subordinates. These revered founders are the public faces of their respective corporations—Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook, Elon Musk at Tesla, Jeff Bezos at Amazon, and of course, Steve Jobs at Apple—and their individual animus informs the public conception of their companies. In Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber, New York Times tech reporter Mike Issac traces the meteoric rise of Uber, the popular ride-sharing service, and its embattled founder, Travis Kalanick. Isaac identifies how the “cult of the founder” flourished at Uber, and more specifically, the fact that it precipitated various PR disasters stemming from Kalanick’s unchecked influence—to the tune of an estimated $20 billion loss in valuation.
Super Pumped is a meticulously researched investigation of Uber’s precipitous rise and staggering fall, and examines both the individual actors and the industry-wide phenomena that contributed to Uber’s series of public relations disasters in 2017. Isaac digs deep into Kalanick’s origins, tracing his childhood as a competitive intellectual to his young adulthood as a startup partner obsessed with changing the tech space, following the models of personal heroes like Bezos and Jobs. Kalanick’s singleminded pursuit of market dominance and company growth at Uber can easily be traced back to his roots in the tech industry as a young founder who felt betrayed by VCs who didn’t value his insight or acumen. After selling a couple of peer-to-peer content delivery startups in his early days, Kalanick had the funds to begin courting other tech founders with promising ideas. For a time Kalanick served as an investor/advisor to these founders, until he met Garrett Camp, a programmer who had an idea for an exclusive ride-sharing platform where users could hail private cars from their phones.
This idea grew into what we now know as Uber, and began in cities like San Francisco and New York, where early users became infatuated with the ease and comfort of the Uber platform. However, it wasn’t long until transportation authorities in these markets were alerted to this new service, that undercut public taxi service on prices while also delivering increased comfort and facility, and was also breaking various transportation laws in the process. The story of Uber’s early steamrolling of these legal complaints is a fascinating one, and the precipitous and lawless rise of Uber in many ways predicts the troubles that follow. Isaac traces how Uber crushed government regulation and competing rideshare platforms by offering massive cash incentives to drivers and riders. These incentives were aimed at attracting and minting permanent users, and were extremely successful at growing the company, but in some cases opened up Uber to fraudulent enterprises and opened massive money pits in markets like China and Latin America.
This massive spending allowed Uber to grow into a virtual empire with Kalanick at the helm, until 2017, when the faults in the foundation began to crack. In the early weeks of the #MeToo movement, Uber was besieged with sexual harassment complaints, as a blog post by a former employee exposed a pervasive toxic and sexist company culture. Around the same time, Uber faced backlash when Kalanick agreed to serve on newly-elected (and vastly unpopular in the Valley) President Donald Trump’s Strategy and Policy Forum with other tech founders and prominent billionaires. Board members within Uber grew increasingly concerned with Kalanick’s toxic growth mindset, and wasteful spending practices, and their fears only grew with these mounting public relations disasters. Kalanick was unceremoniously pushed out before Uber’s disastrous IPO by board members and investors. Now, Uber is attempting to rebuild under a new CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, whose understated presence makes him the virtual opposite of the man he is replacing.
Since Super Pumped was published in 2019, Kalanick has sold off his entire stake in Uber and abdicated his board seat: the final swing of the axe cutting ties between the now disgraced founder an his once-beloved brainchild. While this final severing of relations between Kalanick and Uber may feel like the drama of Uber is behind us, the saga of tech ethics rages on. Anna Wiener’s recent memoir, Uncanny Valley, details her time in the male-dominated tech world, and suggests that sexism is not just an Uber problem. (Read my review here). She describes a toxic culture that sounds similar to the one Isaac describes at Uber, begging the question whether these issues can be ascribed to a single problematic founder, or whether their origins are a product of the entire industry itself. Super Pumped not only offers valuable insights into the dramatic saga of one giant Silicon Valley corporation, but also opens up a crucial dialogue surrounding the interaction of humans and technology.