by Isaac, Mike
Whetstone’s and Kalanick’s relationship had grown strained over the course of the past few months. Kalanick believed Whetstone and her deputy, Jill Hazelbaker—another Google alumna and former political operative—were doing a terrible job shaping Uber’s image, evidenced by the company’s consistently bad coverage. The comms team, on the other hand, believed they were doing their best to defend the company with what they were given: an unlikeable, inflexible CEO and a raucous workplace staffed with thousands of men shaped in Kalanick’s image. By the time Fowler’s post hit the web, Kalanick had begun questioning Whetstone’s strategies aloud in front of other executives.
During the Monday morning meeting with Kalanick and the rest of the leadership team, Whetstone offered advice Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, had told her years ago: “Once you bring in outsiders, it’s the fastest way to lose control.” It was one thing for Uber to root around in its own garbage and discipline or fire employees. It was another to bring in some of the best lawyers in the country and tell them to have at it. Fresh, inquisitive eyes would surely unearth new, horrifying skeletons. Even so, it was Whetstone who first mentioned the possibility of bringing Holder on; if Uber was going to bring in outside investigators, she thought, it should be someone like him.
Travis needed no convincing. He had been upset after reading Fowler’s post and wanted it handled immediately.
The way he had it handled, however, would lead to deeper issues than he could have forseen. Kalanick didn’t understand what such an investigation would be like—much less how thorough Holder’s investigators would turn out to be—but he instructed Emil Michael to contact Holder and hire him on the spot. In a memo sent later that afternoon, Kalanick tried to reassure his upset employees:
Team,
It’s been a tough 24 hours. I know the company is hurting, and understand everyone has been waiting for more information on where things stand and what actions we are going to take.
First, Eric Holder, former US Attorney General under President Obama, and Tammy Albarrán—both partners at the leading law firm Covington & Burling—will conduct an independent review into the specific issues relating to the work place environment raised by Susan Fowler, as well as diversity and inclusion at Uber more broadly . . .
Second, Arianna is flying out to join me and Liane [Hornsey, Director of HR] at our all hands meeting tomorrow to discuss what’s happened and next steps . . .
Third, there have been many questions about the gender diversity of Uber’s technology teams. If you look across our engineering, product management, and scientist roles, 15.1% of employees are women and this has not changed substantively in the last year. As points of reference, Facebook is at 17%, Google at 18% and Twitter is at 10%. Liane and I will be working to publish a broader diversity report¶¶¶¶¶¶ for the company in the coming months.
I believe in creating a workplace where a deep sense of justice underpins everything we do. . . . It is my number one priority that we come through this a better organization, where we live our values and fight for and support those who experience injustice.
Thanks,
Travis
Executives expected pushback, but the letter seemed to ease tension internally—at least until the all-hands meeting the next morning. For the moment, uChat cooled down, and employees went back to work.
Kalanick believed he was doing the right thing. And as others would later say, to his credit, he moved quickly and decisively to try and rectify what had happened to Fowler. He leaned heavily on another board member to repair Uber’s image in the public eye, someone who would grow closer to Kalanick over the next six months than anyone else in his life.
That board member was Arianna Huffington.
Kalanick never planned to trust Arianna Huffington with his life and career; it just happened to turn out that way.
When Kalanick and lieutenant Emil Michael were dreaming up ideas for a perfect celebrity board member, Oprah Winfrey topped both of their lists. But when they failed to entice the megastar, Kalanick began thinking about another celebrity he had already known for years: Huffington.
The two first met at a technology conference in 2012, where Kalanick took Huffington aside during a break between speakers to show her how Uber worked. Back then, Uber was still a luxury service for the wealthy—Uber X wouldn’t come for another few months—and Huffington was an ideal early adopter. “@travisk showing me his super cool app, Uber: everyone’s private driver uber.com,” Huffington tweeted, pushing a photo of the two together at the conference to Huffington’s millions of followers. For Kalanick, it was a big moment; Huffington was a celebrity, the exact type of client he wanted carted around in Uber’s black car service.
Huffington’s star had risen long before anyone had imagined the idea of Uber, much less the iPhone that had made the startup possible. Born in Greece in 1950 to Konstantinos and Elli Stassinopoulos and raised in Athens, Arianna grew up close to her family and sister, Agapi, until her parents had marital troubles. Their father, an unfaithful journalist, separated from their mother when Arianna was young. The two girls stayed with their mother, a warm, intelligent woman who spoke four languages and who was supportive of her daughters. Their beginnings were humble, but her mother valued higher learning. “Your dowry is your education,” Elli told the girls. Her mother moved them to London just so Arianna could take her entrance exams to Cambridge.
It paid off. Arianna was naturally intelligent, like her mother, who pushed the two girls to climb the social ladder. Arianna won a partial scholarship to Cambridge, the start of her journey into an elite social class. In school she excelled, studying economics at Cambridge and, later, comparative religion in India. Instead of gravitating toward partying and drugs as a teenager in the 1960s, Arianna preferred debate and civics. A fortuitous appearance in a televised debate on feminism at the end of her school tenure brought a publisher to her doorstep. That eventually led to the writing of her first book, The Female Woman, published in 1973, which took a much more conservative stance on women’s issues—a reaction to the women’s lib movement that would begin Arianna’s long career as a public contrarian.
The first book led to many others—more than a dozen by the time she met Kalanick—and the development of her voice as a fearless writer with bold opinions. In 1981, she penned a biography of Maria Callas, a famed Greek soprano. In ’88 she moved on to a book on Picasso. Both were bestsellers.*******
In the eighties, she met Michael Huffington, a Republican banker and politician. After a brief courtship and marriage in 1986, the contrarian author became Mrs. Arianna Huffington, the wife of a Republican House of Representatives member and, eventually, a prominent Republican herself. Huffington wrote the occasional piece for the National Review, aligned with Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich, played the conservative talking head on weekly radio shows and writing outfits, and in the nineties moved into regular guest spots on Larry King Live and Bill Maher’s political talk show.
Huffington commanded every room she entered. At nearly six feet tall with a shock of copper-red hair, Arianna Huffington had striking looks, but more distinctive was her over-the-top accent, boisterous and full. “Daaah-ling,” she’d call people even if they’d only just met, as if speaking to an old friend.
Huffington possessed enormous charisma. Both friends and enemies alike marveled at her skill: Want an introduction for work? Huffington knew everyone in New York, Los Angeles, and DC. Need a blurb quote for your book cover? Huffington could provide it—she had written fifteen books herself. And after she blurbed your jacket cover, she might host your book party and invite her celebrity friends.
She was a master of reinvention. In her earlier years she explored mysticism, later on came meditation. After years as a Republican, she did an about-face and fashioned herself a progressive, embracing eco-friendly policies and supporting John Kerry’s presidential run.
Her progressive streak, coupled with John Kerry’s loss to
George W. Bush in 2004, eventually led to Huffington’s first stab at a true online media destination, what the New Yorker called “a kind of liberal foil to the Drudge Report.” With venture funding and an old tech executive partner, in 2005 she launched the Huffington Post. The site pioneered an early form of “citizen journalism”—in reality, freelancers farmed the web for others’ articles to summarize, aggregate, and repost on the Huffington Post’s website. Mainstream journalists pilloried the idea. Huffington and her partners laughed all the way to the bank; she sold the Huffington Post to AOL in 2011 for $315 million, personally netting more than $20 million.
Huffington was impossible to pigeonhole. There was no cause, no point of view that others felt was consistent throughout her life. The one thing that remained true about Arianna Huffington was that she seemed unclassifiable to anyone but herself. Her only constant was change.
“Is it possible to come up with a unified theory of Arianna?” one writer said of Huffington in 2006, while reviewing her eleventh book. “What does she believe?”
At sixty-six, after being edged out of power within AOL, she moved into personal care and health, launching a lifestyle brand, Thrive Global, and promoting a new book.
“There are two schools of thought about Arianna,” Mort Janklow, a former agent to Huffington for her Picasso book, told Vanity Fair in 1994. “One is that it’s all deliberate and calculated and she’s ruthless. The other is that she really convinces herself beforehand. She sells herself first.”
Her political career had paved a pathway to digital media. Media begat her new venture into health and wellness. And as wellness continued, she looked westward and saw the transformative nature of Silicon Valley.
After their initial 2012 meeting, Huffington slowly grew closer to Kalanick. They would appear onstage at conferences together. Huffington invited Travis to a Christmas party at her home one year, and Travis brought his parents, Bonnie and Donald, as guests. By 2016, she was in.
Huffington’s friendship came at a pivotal moment in Kalanick’s personal life. The end of 2016 was difficult for him. He and Gabi Holzwarth, his girlfriend of two years, had recently split up. The only non-work relationships Kalanick had mostly consisted of his parents and Holzwarth. Now, Holzwarth was gone. The couple couldn’t withstand Kalanick’s grueling work schedule. Devoted to Uber, he spent nearly every waking hour at the office. Holzwarth took off to Europe with a friend for a few weeks to try and blow off steam; Kalanick stayed at work.
When Kalanick decided Huffington was the one for Uber’s board, in early 2016, he came to her bungalow in Brentwood for a talk. Kalanick paced around the room, explaining his ideas to Huffington. One day there would be an Uber that moved more than just people—food, retail items, and packages, everything†††††††—and his company would be the one laying the infrastructure to make it happen. He foresaw self-driving Ubers, fleets of them, navigating San Francisco. Someday, there would even be flying Ubers, carting people through the air, from city to city. Four hours later, he was still moving and talking. She was enamored with his vision, his passion for what he wanted Uber to be. And Kalanick felt great warmth from Arianna, an almost maternal sense of encouragement for his goals.
The two sealed the deal over omelets, which Huffington cooked in her kitchen and Travis ate while pacing around the room. Arianna Huffington would be Uber’s newest board member. She would have Kalanick’s back.
Chapter 23 notes
¶¶¶¶¶¶ Kalanick’s sudden openness to a diversity study—an internal tabulation and breakdown of the gender and ethnicity breakdown of Uber’s workforce—was met with bewilderment by employees. For years, staffers had pushed Kalanick to publish a diversity report, which by 2017 was an increasingly common transparency tactic offered in the predominantly white, predominantly male world of Silicon Valley. Joe Sullivan, Kalanick’s own chief security officer, often pushed Kalanick the hardest. But Kalanick refused, over and over; diversity reports went against the spirit of Uber’s cultural values. Uber, after all, was a “meritocracy” in his eyes. Uber only hired the “best,” he believed, and was otherwise blind to gender and ethnic differences. As with the Trump council decision, many saw the diversity report announcement as too little, too late.
******* Both books also came with their share of controversy. When her Callas biography came out, Arianna was accused of plagiarizing passages from another Callas biographer’s past work. For her Picasso release, an art historian accused her of worse: “What she did was steal twenty years of my work,” Lydia Gasman, the professor, told a journalist in 1994. Arianna, who has consistently denied all claims of plagiarism, settled the first case out of court; her second accuser never filed a lawsuit.
††††††† “Everything” except one item of business: The mail. Kalanick was deeply against becoming a modern-day version of the United States Postal Service. An unattractive market, in his eyes, he could cede the regular mail to Amazon if Bezos wanted it.
Chapter 24
NO ONE STEALS FROM LARRY PAGE
At the end of 2016, months before Susan Fowler’s blog post, Travis Kalanick had a different problem brewing: forty miles south of San Francisco, Larry Page was fuming.
Anthony Levandowski—his star pupil and golden child—had left the company in January 2016. On his way out the door, Levandowski collected $120 million in bonuses for his contributions to Google’s self-driving-car project. After investing eight years, hundreds of millions of dollars, and the time and resources of dozens of employees in the project, Google’s top brass felt like Levandowski was leaving the self-driving program in the lurch. Worse, Google employees were defecting en masse to his wayward protégé’s new self-driving-car startup, taking valuable knowledge and experience with them.
For Page, it was personal. He had long ago checked out of the daily minutiae of the search engine business. In 2015 Google had changed its corporate structure, creating a parent holding company, Alphabet, with Page as CEO. Google’s search business was still printing money—billions every single quarter—which gave Alphabet’s other companies the ability to pursue diverse projects.
It also freed the reclusive Page from the public eye. He hated the scrutiny that followed the CEO of Google, and wanted more time to pursue his own projects. The idea of self-driving cars had been a private goal for a long time. And self-driving was just the beginning; Kitty Hawk, a side project backed by his personal bank account, was working on a first consumer-ready version of a flying car. Page wanted to make his childhood dreams of the future come true in his own lifetime.
Although Google was the first Big Tech company to devote substantial resources and money to self-driving-car research, executives admitted they were slow to move and test the cars more aggressively. Competitors like Apple and Tesla were gaining traction in the space. After Levandowski left, Page made changes to how the self-driving wing would operate. Formerly operating under the Google “X” wing of “Moonshots,” Page spun self-driving research out into its own, separate company. It was called Waymo, derived from the idea that the work will create “a new way forward in mobility.” Page tapped John Krafcik, a former president of Hyundai Motor America, to be Waymo’s CEO. Waymo had a years-long head start on the competition. The new company planned to capitalize on that lead, before they were overtaken.
Levandowski revealed his new startup, Otto, in May of 2016, four months after leaving Google. Then, in August, just three months later, he sold the new company to Uber for over $600 million. Page was immediately alarmed; the company was already embroiled in arbitration with Levandowski, suing him months ago for allegedly using Google’s confidential salary information to lure employees over to Otto. Immediately turning around a sale to Uber raised Page’s hackles even further. He had some of his deputies begin forensic investigation on Levandowski’s old Google workplace accounts and the circumstances of the engineer’s departure. Something didn’t smell right.
Page’s hunch
proved correct. After running forensics on Levandowski’s Google-issued work laptop, investigators discovered that in the weeks before he left, Levandowski downloaded more than 14,000 confidential files related to the self-driving program from Google’s servers directly to his personal laptop. Among the files were designs for Waymo’s proprietary lidar‡‡‡‡‡‡‡ circuit boards, one of the crucial components necessary for most self-driving cars to function. After downloading the files, he copied and transferred all of the 9.7 gigabytes of Waymo data over to a personal, external hard drive. When he finished, Levandowski installed a new operating system, erasing the contents of his work laptop hard drive. “After Levandowski wiped this laptop,” Waymo’s attorneys would later say, “he only used it for a few minutes, and then inexplicably never used it again.”
Other employees who followed Levandowski to Otto downloaded proprietary information as well, including “confidential supplier lists, manufacturing details and statements of work with highly technical information.” And around the same time Levandowski left, his partner, Lior Ron, had searched Google for some incriminating phrases, including “how to secretly delete files mac” and “how to permanently delete google drive files from my computer.”