by Isaac, Mike
The details were damning. But Page’s investigators may not have pieced all of it together were it not for a mistake from one of Waymo’s own lidar component suppliers. In February 2017, months after the Otto acquisition, the manufacturer accidentally included a Waymo employee on an email, an email which happened to include a schematic of a component from Uber’s most recent lidar design. The Waymo engineer noticed something peculiar; Uber’s lidar component looked like a carbon copy of Waymo’s hardware.
Page had trusted Levandowski. For years the Google CEO had paid his protégé handsomely and put up with his insubordination, protecting Levandowski from managers who wanted to fire him. And now, Page’s star pupil was betraying him.
On February 23, 2017, lawyers from the firm Quinn, Emanuel, Urquhart & Sullivan filed a lawsuit in the Northern District of California federal court on behalf of Waymo. The suit claimed that both Otto and Uber stole Waymo’s intellectual property and trade secrets, infringed on multiple Waymo patents, and that the two companies had conspired and committed fraudulent, unlawful, and unfair business acts in concert with one another. The theft, Waymo claimed, was a rejuvenation of Uber’s thus far unsuccessful efforts to build self-driving technology on its own.
“Otto and Uber have taken Waymo’s intellectual property so that they could avoid incurring the risk, time, and expense of independently developing their own technology,” Waymo’s attorneys said in the filing. “Ultimately, this calculated theft reportedly netted Otto employees over half a billion dollars and allowed Uber to revive a stalled program, all at Waymo’s expense.”
It was a drastic measure by Page, who personally ordered the lawsuit. In Silicon Valley, companies copy their competitors’ projects with a frequency that would alarm a fashion designer, an auto manufacturer, or those in other, less derivative industries. Facebook copied Snapchat’s core feature, while hundreds of Instagram clones populated Apple’s App Store at different points over the past six years. Lawsuits, however, were a different story; suing a former employee was an enormous risk. All sorts of embarrassing emails and documents might come out during the legal discovery process. Prospective employees might think twice about joining a company willing to sue them if they left.
With this lawsuit, Waymo was sending a message—to Levandowski and to the rest of Silicon Valley. No one steals from Larry Page and gets away with it.
It was the middle of winter of 2017, and Jeff Jones, the man responsible for Uber’s public perception, was trying to shake everyone in the top ranks of the company awake. Uber didn’t have an image problem. Uber had a Travis problem.
As president of ridesharing and the only person on the executive leadership team with a history of marketing experience, Jones took it upon himself to study the root of the hatred of Uber’s brand, something he hadn’t anticipated before he joined. Jones knew people thought Travis was an asshole, but he wasn’t prepared for this. Susan Fowler’s blog post had made things exponentially worse.
The Waymo lawsuit—which landed just four days after Fowler’s post—created an enormous new problem: Uber’s new self-driving leader appeared to be a literal thief and potential criminal. And that wasn’t even the worst of it. Three days later, one of Uber’s marquee hires, Amit Singhal—the man responsible for perfecting Google’s search algorithms—was forced to resign from Uber before he could even begin his new job. Kalanick had announced his hire just a month previously, thrilling Uber’s employees. Instead, just days after Waymo’s lawsuit dropped, the press uncovered the fact that Singhal was pushed out of Google for claims of sexual harassment, something that Google executives had covered up during his departure. (Singhal has consistently denied the allegations.) Kalanick didn’t know about the claim when he hired him. For Uber, the timing could not have been worse.
But Jones wanted more data. When he first started at Uber, Jones told Kalanick he wanted to commission surveys into how people viewed Uber, and how those same people viewed Kalanick, separately, as well. The company didn’t really have any data on such questions, and Jones wanted to see what they said.
Months later, the data came back. Jones called most of the executive leadership team to join him on a two-day leadership offsite retreat away from the office. He asked Kalanick not to attend—he wanted to go over the data with the executive leadership team alone, not in front of the big boss, and hoped Kalanick could respect that. Kalanick bristled at the request, but Jones was adamant, and ultimately Kalanick stood down.
In late February, the group—roughly a dozen executives from all of Uber’s different divisions—gathered in downtown San Francisco’s Le Méridien, a hotel off Battery Street in the Financial District, to go over the results of the survey, among other things. Jones had booked a meeting room for the discussion; he had a PowerPoint presentation prepared so that the rest of the executive leadership team could understand the data.
The results were clear: People enjoyed using Uber as a service. But when you brought up Travis Kalanick, customers recoiled. Kalanick’s negative profile was actively making Uber’s brand worse.
Later that day, Jones got a text from Kalanick. The CEO was coming over to join the meeting. Kalanick didn’t like feeling left out while all his top lieutenants were discussing the future of his company. As Kalanick walked into the hotel meeting room filled with his executives, he saw charts, surveys, and studies taped to the walls. In the center of a room was a giant piece of paper with a sentence written on it. The group came up with what it believed Uber’s image was to outsiders, written in bold, black ink: A bunch of young bro bullies that have achieved ridiculous success. It was a hard point to argue.
Nonetheless, Kalanick began to push back on Jones’s findings immediately, rebutting the data he saw on the wall.
“Nuh-uh,” Kalanick said. “I don’t believe it, man. I don’t see it.”
His lieutenants were flabbergasted. Even in the midst of the most sustained set of crises in Uber’s history, Kalanick couldn’t see the literal writing on the wall. Aaron Schildkrout, who led Uber’s driver product development, leapt to defend Jones and the data. Daniel Graf and Rachel Holt—two other well-respected leaders—joined him. Kalanick didn’t love Jones at that point, but he respected Graf and Schildkrout, and Holt had been with him since the early days of Uber. And all three were supportive of the surveys. If anyone could get him to listen, it would be them.
The argument was interrupted. Rachel Whetstone, Uber’s communications head, got a phone call, and stepped out of the room into the hallway to take it. Moments later, Whetstone signaled for Jill Hazelbaker, her second in command at policy and comms, to join her in the hallway. Something bad was happening, but none of the executives in the room knew how bad it would turn out to be.
Moments later, Jones joined the communications heads in the hallway, followed by Kalanick. Whetstone grabbed a laptop from the conference room and set it down on a chair in front of them. She opened a webpage to Bloomberg News’s website; they had just posted a story about Kalanick online. At the top of the article was a video clip.
The four executives huddled around the laptop, with Kalanick kneeling on the floor in front of the chair. They watched as a grainy dashcam video began playing. Shot from inside an Uber, the video shows a driver with three passengers: two women and a man, Travis Kalanick, sandwiched in between them in the back seat.
It begins innocuously, the tinny audio capturing snippets of the group’s conversation and shared laughter—the giddiness suggested a tipsy ride home from a night out. As a Maroon 5 song plays on the radio, Kalanick starts shimmying his shoulders, swaying to the beat. As they watched their boss on camera, some in the room could only think of one word: “douchebag.”
As Kalanick and his friends pull up to their destination, the driver strikes up a conversation, acknowledging that he knows who Kalanick is. Then the video takes a turn. Fawzi Kamel, the driver, presses Kalanick on Uber’s dropping prices for customers, which in turn has hit the drivers hard.
“I lost $97,000 because of you,” Kamel tells him, “I bankrupt because of you. You keep changing every day.”
“Hold on a second!” Kalanick interrupts. The conversation starts getting heated. “What have I changed about [Uber] Black?”
“You dropped everything!” Kamal pushes back.
“Bullshit. You know what?” Kalanick says, beginning to get out of the car. “Some people don’t like to take responsibility for their own shit!” he shouts, now shouting over Kamel’s protests and into his face.
Kalanick raises a finger and jabs it into the air as he finishes his thought. “They blame EVERYTHING in their life on somebody ELSE. Good luck,” he jabs back. Kalanick exits the car to a shouting Kamel, disappearing from the frame of the video seconds before it ends. Someone closed the laptop.
Kalanick—the flesh-and-blood one in the hotel that Tuesday morning—already brought to his knees, began muttering to his lieutenants. “This is bad, this is really bad.” He fell further forward, writhing around on the floor. “What is wrong with me?” he yelped.
None of the executives knew what to do. Seeing Kalanick squirm like this made them deeply uncomfortable.
Kalanick dialed the only person he felt he could turn to; he called Arianna Huffington. “Arianna, we need help,” he cried into his phone. “How are we going to get out of this? This is so bad. I fucked up.” Huffington cooed platitudes into the phone, attempting to calm down the distraught Kalanick.
Jones tried to offer some solace, suggesting talking to crisis PR firms§§§§§§§ to help strategize and figure out what to do next to pull Uber out of its tailspin.
“There are experts who can help us here, Travis,” Jones said.
Whetstone disagreed. “I don’t think you’re going to find better people than me and Jill,” she offered. Whetstone believed the PR leaders could still pull him out of this disaster.
Kalanick lashed out, directing his anger toward Whetstone and Hazelbaker. “You two aren’t strategic or creative enough to help us get out of this situation,” he said. The room was silent as Kalanick’s insult hung in the air. Whetstone and Hazelbaker had had enough. The two of them stood up, gathered their belongings, and walked out of the room.
Kalanick soon realized his mistake: he had pissed off the very people trying to protect him from a press corps that was about to tear him apart. As he chased his communications executives down the hotel hallway to try and convince them to stay, Hazelbaker confronted him.
“How dare you!” she screamed, inches from Kalanick’s face, as the rest of the group watched in shock. “I’ve walked through fire for you and this company! You did this TO YOURSELF!”¶¶¶¶¶¶¶
As the group split and the day wound down, Kalanick eventually managed to convince Whetstone and Hazelbaker not to quit their posts. Half of the group made its way back to Hazelbaker’s townhouse, a twenty-minute Uber ride away in San Francisco’s Cow Hollow district. Hazelbaker ordered takeout for the group.
Sitting on the sofas in Hazelbaker’s living room, Uber’s top executives shared pizza and beer and mulled their options. Meanwhile, Kalanick continued his theatrics, writhing around on Hazelbaker’s carpet. Kalanick kept repeating the same thing over and over: “I’m a terrible person. I’m a terrible person. I’m a terrible person.”
Whetstone tried to console him, halfheartedly. “You aren’t a terrible person. But you do do terrible things,” she said.
By the end of the day, Whetstone, Hazelbaker, and Kalanick had settled upon a statement to hand out to reporters. By then, the press and the public were frothing at the video, which had gone viral. Here was conclusive proof that Kalanick didn’t care about drivers. That he partied like a douchebag. That Travis Kalanick was, in fact, an asshole.
Later that evening, Kalanick circulated an apology memo to his employees. They posted the memo to the company’s public blog the next morning.
By now I’m sure you’ve seen the video where I treated an Uber driver disrespectfully. To say that I am ashamed is an extreme understatement. My job as your leader is to lead . . . and that starts with behaving in a way that makes us all proud. That is not what I did, and it cannot be explained away.
It’s clear this video is a reflection of me—and the criticism we’ve received is a stark reminder that I must fundamentally change as a leader and grow up. This is the first time I’ve been willing to admit that I need leadership help and I intend to get it.
I want to profoundly apologize to Fawzi, as well as the driver and rider community, and to the Uber team.
—Travis
Chapter 24 notes
‡‡‡‡‡‡‡ Short for “Light Detection And Ranging,” lidar is an important part of most prototype vehicles among the tech and automotive companies competing to successfully create fleets of autonomous vehicles.
§§§§§§§ The group made a brief call to Steven Rubenstein, a crisis PR expert who regularly worked for the Murdoch family. Rubenstein ultimately decided not to take on Kalanick as a client, though he would cross paths again with Kalanick less than a month later. But as a parting gift, Rubenstein offered two pieces of advice: First, Kalanick had to “find his Sheryl,” a reference to Mark Zuckerberg’s relationship with Sheryl Sandberg, then widely considered a competent counterbalance to Zuck’s leadership. Second, he said Kalanick needed to take a leave of absence. “You either shoot yourself in the foot, or the press will end up shooting you in the head.”
¶¶¶¶¶¶¶ One witness to the confrontation between Hazelbaker and Kalanick recalled the communications executive using far more colorful vocabulary during the encounter.
Chapter 25
GREYBALL
A week after Susan Fowler’s blog post exploded across the Valley and the front pages of newspapers worldwide, I got a telephone call from a number I didn’t recognize.
“Hello, is this Mike? Mike Isaac?” a voice on the other end of the line asked. “Hi Mike, my name is Bob. I work for Uber. Can we talk off the record?”
A few days prior, my story “Inside Uber’s Aggressive, Unrestrained Workplace Culture” had run on the front page of the New York Times. I had spoken to more than thirty current and former Uber employees, detailing life inside of the company. Since joining the Times in 2014, I had written dozens of stories about Uber, but Fowler’s post was something different.
For every woman in tech who had deflected sexual advances from a superior, or endured an inappropriate comment on Slack; for every female founder who saw men land funding for their subpar ideas over better, woman-led startups—the Fowler post perfectly articulated the harassment, the bias, and the abuse built into the “meritocratic” systems touted so arrogantly by tech utopianists.
Fowler didn’t know it, but her post signaled an early shot that later in 2017 would turn into a movement. That fall, the Times and the New Yorker would publish groundbreaking investigations into the systematic, widespread sexual harassment of Harvey Weinstein, the Hollywood mega-producer, which would eventually lead to his arraignment and spark the #MeToo movement. In the wake of the Fowler post, I joined the scrum of journalists reporting on the chaos and lawlessness inside of Uber.
Bob told me he appreciated my story, which was the first to dive into the details of Uber’s Las Vegas bacchanal during the company’s “X to the x” retreat, the multiple lawsuits waged by Uber’s own employees against the company, the rampant drug use and sexual harassment beyond Fowler’s initial claims. “It was the most accurate piece I’ve seen that attempted to capture what it was like inside,” he said.
“But you only scratched the surface. Does the term ‘Greyball’ mean anything to you?” Bob asked. It didn’t.
He suggested we meet to talk about it.
The parking lot of the ramshackle pizza joint in Palo Alto was mostly empty at eight o’clock on a Tuesday evening. The place was a dump, serving greasy slices and flat soda pop. That was exactly the point; Bob didn’t want to be seen in public with
me. We definitely wouldn’t run into other Uber engineers in a dive like this.
As I sat in my car, I went over Bob’s checklist. Before I left my house, I was to delete my Uber app and check the setting buried in the app submenu that deleted my contact information from Uber’s servers. One of Uber’s features requested users to upload their phone books to the cloud. If two friends or colleagues took a ride together, this feature allowed them to quickly split the fare. For most users, this was a nifty, convenient feature. For Bob and me, it was a liability; if Uber’s information security team wanted, they could spy on the rides I’d taken, the names and numbers of my contacts and sources—any information I’d willingly given over to Uber. Better I delete Uber from my phone entirely. I was to leave my phone in the car, turned off, and bring nothing but a pen and notebook. He’d find me when I got there.
The place was dingy. It felt old, with shabby plastic booths and half-lit Budweiser ceiling lamps above the pool tables. I ordered a pizza for both of us, took a seat in a grungy booth and waited for Bob to show up. The only people there were two young guys playing pool, the cashier behind the counter, and another guy in the back, making pizzas.
Bob was nervous when he walked in, wearing a baseball cap and carrying a file folder bulging with paperwork. He wasn’t used to meeting with reporters, and the risk he took was a big one; if Kalanick discovered what he was up to, Uber’s lawyers could turn his life upside down. I appreciated the lengths he was going to just to meet me. I waved him over, looking as harmless as I could. My reporter trick is to play dumb and friendly; dumb and friendly is always more approachable than eager and prodding.
Over sweating cups of cold Pepsi and pepperoni slices, Bob and I went through a file of documents, bits of evidence from different Uber projects. One of Uber’s local general managers had sent an email offering drivers a list of tactics to evade police capture: