by Isaac, Mike
This was the height of tech utopianism. And though Kalanick would have no way of knowing it until years later, Uber’s company trajectory would closely map that of the tech industry more broadly. Both were surging faster, higher than anyone could have anticipated. And just as the country was beginning to cast suspicion on the beneficence of Facebook’s algorithms, consumers reached the limits of what they were willing to observe with rose-colored lenses. Soon thereafter the world of uninhibited technological progress came to a screeching halt.
And so did Uber and Travis Kalanick.
There was one other event employees would recall long after leaving the desert.
After a day of drinking beer in poolside cabanas, Uberettos checked their apps to find their next destination: Planet Hollywood. They made their way up the moving staircase, under pink and red shimmering entrance lights and into the spacious Axis Theater. Large enough for 7,000 people, the Axis was decked in gold and deep purple velvet.
Long-time employees were used to pomp and circumstance on corporate retreats. But this was different. “Ten to the ten” meant something special to Kalanick; he wanted to show everyone how far Uber had come, and what it meant to him.
As the lights dimmed, a pair of silhouettes wheeled a large, rickety chalkboard onto the stage, green slate framed with wood, as if they had robbed a high school science classroom. Onto the stage walked Kalanick, clad in a stark white lab coat and thick-rimmed black glasses.
He became “Professor Kalanick” for the better part of the next three hours, explaining to his employees his vision for the company. He was introducing what he called his “philosophy of work,” the result of what he said was hundreds of hours of deliberation and discussion.
The entire presentation was born directly from Kalanick’s obsession with Amazon, the online retailer led by Jeff Bezos, a founder every young entrepreneur idolized. Bezos’s path to success was the stuff of Kalanick’s dreams. The small online bookstore had become a multi-billion-dollar retail behemoth by skating on razor-thin profit margins, focusing on long-term growth over short-term gains, and relentlessly undercutting competitors on prices. Kalanick admired how Bezos reinvested profits on future opportunity, to always stay one step ahead of his competition.
More than any other company, Amazon embodied the type of business he wanted Uber to become. As Kalanick saw it, delivering people from place to place was only the beginning of Uber’s potential; one day, Uber would match drivers with packages, food, and retail goods, and solve untold numbers of other logistical problems. Kalanick imagined he would one day become a direct challenger to Bezos, reshaping the way people and goods moved major urban centers. Uber wanted to be the Amazon for the twenty-first century.
Kalanick carefully studied the methods of Bezos and his company, down to the fourteen core leadership principles posted to Amazon’s website:
Customer Obsession
Ownership
Invent and Simplify
Are Right, A Lot
Learn and Be Curious
Hire and Develop the Best
Insist on the Highest Standards
Think Big
Bias for Action
Frugality
Earn Trust
Dive Deep
Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit
Deliver Results
Kalanick had a surprise for his employees, inspired by Bezos’s leadership, the company he built, and the leadership principles that formed Amazon’s culture.
“I want to introduce you to Uber’s values,” Kalanick said, pointing to the chalkboard on stage. The house lights shone on the blackboard behind Kalanick. Written in white chalk were fourteen bullet points, each a short saying or thought, sprung directly from the brain of the CEO. The audience read the list as Kalanick rattled them off aloud:
Always Be Hustlin’
Be An Owner, Not Renter
Big Bold Bets
Celebrate Cities
Customer Obsession
Inside Out
Let Builders Build
Make Magic
Meritocracy & Toe-Stepping
Optimistic Leadership
Principled Confrontation
Super Pumped
Champions Mindset / Winning
Be Yourself
Some of the employees in the audience were confused. “Is this a joke?” one twenty-seven-year-old whispered to a colleague sitting next to him. “Is this still part of the whole professor act?”
The list read like Amazon’s corporate values run through a bro-speak translation engine. People in Kalanick’s world were not happy or sad, they were “super pumped” or “super unpumped.” Company brainstorming meetings were “jam sessions.” Half the company enjoyed Kalanick’s colorful vocabulary. The other half bit their lips. Kalanick expected everyone to be as “super pumped” about the values as he was.
Over the next two and a half hours, Kalanick explained each value in excruciating detail, carting out a different executive or Uber employee who embodied it. Ryan Graves, head of operations, was brought out to reflect “always be hustlin’,” a willingness to move fast into new cities. Austin Geidt, an early intern who eventually rose to become one of Uber’s most respected and high-ranking executives, walked onstage to “celebrate cities.”
“Customer obsession” came straight from the mind of Bezos. Just like Bezos, Kalanick had an almost single-minded fixation on improving the customer experience of his product. Everything about riding in an Uber—from opening the app to getting out at the destination—should be seamless, easy, enjoyable. To Kalanick, all employee actions should stem from that point of view. “Principled confrontation” rested on the idea that Uber employees wouldn’t shy away from conflict or a fight—as long as it came from a place of principle. This value was often used to justify Uber’s barging into new cities even when it wasn’t lawful or welcomed; Uber knew taxis were corrupt and protectionist. Uber was elbowing its way in for the good of the customers in the city, even though they didn’t know it yet.
“Super pumped” was a particular point of pride. In Uber’s early years, every employee was evaluated on a list of eight core “Uber competencies,” from qualities like “fierceness” to “scale” and “innovation.” Scoring low could mean termination, while scoring high influenced pay raises, promotions, and annual bonuses. But it was an employee’s level of “super pumpedness” that made all of the difference in a performance review.
“Super pumpedness is all about moving the team forward, working long hours—pretty much a do-whatever-it-takes attitude to move the company in the right direction,” as one Uber employee explained the term. If there was one quality Travis Kalanick looked for in a new recruit, it was that they were as super pumped as he was to work for Uber.
Now, six years into the company’s history, Kalanick felt Uber was finally coming into its own. With an audience of millions and billions in venture capital in the bank, Uber was unstoppable. It was inevitable—so Kalanick believed—that Uber would one day challenge Amazon as another global tech superpower.
After the first evening’s presentation, Kalanick told employees in the audience he had a special guest to interview: Bill Gurley.
Bill Gurley, a former financial analyst turned legendary Silicon Valley venture capitalist, would prove to be instrumental in Uber’s entire arc of success. As a general partner at Benchmark, a top-tier VC firm, Gurley secured a Series A investment in the young company. As a board member and vocal supporter of Uber, Gurley was someone almost everyone in the company looked up to for advice. Two other Uber backers joined the discussion.
Towards the end of the interview, the tone shifted. Kalanick asked what advice the venture capitalists would give to him for the future. Gurley sat back and mulled the question for a moment, furrowing his brow. Then the investors gave it to Travis straight.
One of Uber’s greatest strengths was its incredib
le product focus, drive, and intensity—from every employee, at every level of the company. That ability to strive for greatness drove Uber to global, multi-billion dollar heights. “But what I’ve seen from you, as a leader, is that if you expect people to jump to the ceiling, they’ll actually do it,” one investor said, as Gurley nodded. “They’ll jump so high, they’ll smash through the roof with their heads.”
But that strength in excess, the investors claimed, was also Uber’s greatest weakness. Perhaps Kalanick would do well to help employees take better care of themselves—through wellness, massage, meditation, even yoga, the investor offered.
Some employees were shocked. Uber’s backers were telling Travis to take it easy. Even Gurley, one of the most competitive VCs in the Valley, believed it was important for the company. But he was right. Uber employees were always sprinting. They kept working even after they went home, terrified of both their competitors and their bosses. The pace was causing burnout at all levels of the company; some engineers and designers were seeing therapists to deal with the strain.
As the audience of employees applauded at the suggestion, Kalanick smirked, moving into a mock yogic child’s pose on the stage in front of his employees. The VC’s were right; Kalanick couldn’t “run the company under the red line forever.”
But Kalanick went on to make clear where he stood—Uber wouldn’t be resting on its laurels.
“Make sure we all understand: This is a marathon,” he said. “I’m down for that.”
Chapter 1 notes
* Every tech company over the course of its maturation process must create for itself a noun to describe its collective employees. Google employed Googlers, Twitter employees were called “tweeps,” and for Uber in its early days, the noun was “Uberetto.” The exact etymological origins of the noun—which confused many employees after they joined—are not clear.
† “Fear of missing out,” naturally.
‡ Before Uber’s 2015 party, the local taxi unions had kept ride-sharing out of Vegas. Uber launched in Las Vegas just one month prior, but the company was barred from picking up passengers from the airport; that was still Big Taxi’s turf.
Chapter 2
THE MAKING OF A FOUNDER
The streets of Northridge, California, are sectioned into an asymmetric grid. There is an order to the layout, a nine-and-a-half-square-mile trapezoid the shape of Utah tucked between the San Fernando and Simi valleys in Greater Los Angeles. Seen from above, Northridge is framed by a near-perfect square of freeways, an emblem of transportation efficiency.
Travis Cordell Kalanick was born on August 6, 1976, in Northridge Hospital to Donald and Bonnie Kalanick, an average, white, middle-class couple who built a comfortable life for themselves in California. Travis spent his formative years in a wood and brick ranch-style home on the corner of a quiet intersection, purchased by his father on a civil engineer’s salary. Like the neighborhood of Northridge, even the family driveway was built symmetrically, a stretch of grey cement slabs outlined with red brick.
Bonnie worked at the local paper, the Los Angeles Daily News, as an advertising executive. She spent decades selling ad space to small and medium-sized businesses across the San Fernando Valley, a time when the internet was a distant threat and the news business was still lucrative. Bonnie was one part of a normal, Northridge nuclear family, “always happy, upbeat, and never spoke poorly about anybody,” Melene Alfonso, a former co-worker, said of her. “Her customers loved her.”
She was good at her job, a resilient worker and a charmer. Bonnie had a reputation at the paper for her sales prowess and the charisma to win over clients—a quality that she would pass on to her young son Travis. Though Bonnie’s smile was always quick, her co-worker recalled, she possessed an inherent competitive spirit.
But at the end of a day of hard work and constant selling, Bonnie would return home to Donald, Travis, and Travis’s little brother, Cory, born just a year later. Bonnie doted on her two boys, spending all her hours away from the newspaper caring for them.
Travis, in particular, was close to his mother, and she was close to him. Later, when Travis rose to power, friends remarked on how terribly proud of her son she was. After he’d left home in his thirties, Travis would return annually to Los Angeles to celebrate Christmas with the family. One friend recalled how Bonnie scurried back and forth between the living room and kitchen, cooking a holiday feast for the family while making sure Travis had enough to eat. Bonnie kept clippings of newspaper articles detailing her son’s success, showing them to friends, neighbors, visitors, anyone.
“She wore her heart on her sleeves,” Travis later said of her. “And when she walked into a room, her warmth, her smile and her joy would instantly fill it.”
Bonnie’s dedication to Travis never wavered. He was never the most popular kid, nor did he have overnight success in the startup world. Long before the breakout success of Uber, Kalanick had been seen as an entrepreneurial failure. When pitching new clients on his enterprise products, door after door was closed in his face. When one company was nearly acquired by a tech giant, the opportunity was snatched away at the last minute. And when one of his closest advisors and investors betrayed him early on in his career, it didn’t keep Travis from building another new venture shortly thereafter. One friend described him as a pit bull that spent its life getting kicked by its owners—no matter how beaten down Travis was, he never, ever gave up.
Later, when an interviewer asked his parents where Travis got his stubbornness, Bonnie raised her hand.
“Working for a newspaper, I was used to sales rejection all the time, so I knew what that was like,” she said in an interview in 2014. “But I had hope, since he is very determined and he will not back down when he felt he was right—he’s tenacious.”
Donald, without a doubt, was the left brain of the family. A civil engineer by trade, Donald spent much of his career working for the City of Los Angeles, where he contributed to projects at Los Angeles International Airport, as well as other parts of the city.
Donald’s marriage to Bonnie was not his first. He married once before at twenty-seven, to a younger woman, in a pairing he would later call a mismatch. He had two daughters with his first wife, half-siblings to Travis and Cory. Even after remarrying, Donald maintained a positive relationship with his ex-wife. “Peaceful,” he’d later note.
Donald considered himself an analytical thinker, a champion of logic, rules, and complex systems. Instead of father and son football games or having a catch, the two bonded by working together on Travis’s grade-school science projects. The two once built an electrical transformer together. Travis liked to call him a tinkerer—and he was.
“I liked to build things,” Donald later told a reporter. “I thought it’d be nice to be driving by a structure and say ‘hey, I had a good part in building that.’ ” He went to junior college before transferring to receive an engineering degree. He felt at home surrounded by math, by numbers.
Donald was tough on his sons, and had high expectations for them. He also introduced them to the world of computers. Early in Travis’s life, his father brought home the family’s first computer, giving Travis the ability to practice programming for the first time. He learned to code by the time he was in middle school. Travis ultimately never mastered coding languages—he preferred thinking through product and user-experience issues—but the early connection to technology would stay with him. Travis loved efficiency and hated waste. He appreciated how the rise of software and the internet allowed old, ineffectual, and broken systems to be overturned and rebuilt anew. Code and programming enabled anyone willing to learn and work hard a chance to change the system—to change the world.
Travis took traits from both Bonnie and Donald in equal measure.
A precocious child, he picked up his father’s skills with mathematics, impressing others with his ability to speed through arithmetic in his head where other classmates needed pencil and paper. His mo
ther’s sales talent rubbed off on him as well. Travis and Donald were part of the YMCA’s Indian Guides youth troop, where Travis was a top seller for the group’s annual pancake breakfast fundraiser. Travis spent hours outside his neighborhood grocery store, pitching shoppers on their way inside to donate to his troop’s fundraiser. He was charming, persistent, tireless, and competitive; his parents eventually had to drag him home in the evenings.
He maintained that competitive edge as he grew older. At Patrick Henry Middle School—only a half-mile drive from his home in Northridge to Granada Hills—Travis was naturally athletic. Travis ran track, played football, and shot hoops. At eleven, an article in his mother’s newspaper praised him for being a basketball player with a 4.0 grade point average. His prize: an enormous trophy—larger than the ones that teams received for winning the regional championship.
“Success in athletics doesn’t happen by accident; it requires hard work and discipline,” the award presenter said of Travis and his classmates at the time. “When you learn the art of discipline, that’s half the battle.”
Despite these talents, middle school was not easy for him. Older kids began to pick on the wiry youth for his intelligence, or for not wearing the right clothes or not knowing how to act “cool.” The bullying was relentless, in part due to Travis’s early lack of emotional intelligence, friends and close ones say. Being a math whiz who could rapidly crunch large numbers in his head scored points with his teachers. But it also put a target on his back; he was a geek. And in Travis’s middle school, geeks got bullied.
At some point in middle school, Travis decided he would not take the bullying anymore. He pushed back against his aggressors, and even began bullying others to deflect attention from himself. Fighting came naturally and ultimately his aggression won him a spot in the cool crowd.