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Mike Isaac

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber Hardcover – September 3, 2019

by Mike Isaac (Author)

4.5 2,334 ratings

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New York Times and Wall Street Journal Bestseller

A New York Times technology correspondent presents the dramatic story of Uber, the Silicon Valley startup at the center of one of the great venture capital power struggles of our time.

In June 2017, Travis Kalanick, the hard-charging CEO of Uber, was ousted in a boardroom coup that capped a brutal year for the transportation giant. Uber had catapulted to the top of the tech world, yet for many came to symbolize everything wrong with Silicon Valley.

Award-winning New York Times technology correspondent Mike Isaac’s Super Pumped presents the dramatic rise and fall of Uber, set against an era of rapid upheaval in Silicon Valley. Backed by billions in venture capital dollars and led by a brash and ambitious founder, Uber promised to revolutionize the way we move people and goods through the world. A near instant “unicorn,” Uber seemed poised to take its place next to Amazon, Apple, and Google as a technology giant.

What followed would become a corporate cautionary tale about the perils of startup culture and a vivid example of how blind worship of startup founders can go wildly wrong. Isaac recounts Uber’s pitched battles with taxi unions and drivers, the company’s toxic internal culture, and the bare-knuckle tactics it devised to overcome obstacles in its quest for dominance. With billions of dollars at stake, Isaac shows how venture capitalists asserted their power and seized control of the startup as it fought its way toward its fateful IPO.

Based on hundreds of interviews with current and former Uber employees, along with previously unpublished documents, Super Pumped is a page-turning story of ambition and deception, obscene wealth, and bad behavior that explores how blistering technological and financial innovation culminated in one of the most catastrophic twelve-month periods in American corporate history.

Print length

408 pages
Language

English
Publisher

W. W. Norton & Company
Publication date

September 3, 2019
Dimensions

6.5 x 1.3 x 9.6 inches
ISBN-10

0393652246
ISBN-13

978-0393652246
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From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

An Amazon Best Book of September 2019: Love it or hate it, Uber changed the way we use transportation in the U.S. and beyond. The story of this Silicon Valley start-up and its maverick founder Travis Kalanick is utterly riveting, and in Super Pumped author Mike Isaac gives readers an insider’s view of the stunning highs and catastrophic lows of what Isaac calls one of the first mobile unicorns. Through a combination of rapid-fire technological advances and hubris, Uber not only challenged an antiquated system, they delivered it a death blow that has had profound repercussions. The abhorrent behavior, cut-throat mentality, and frat-boy corporate culture within Uber may make you question how it became such a success, but this was also a power structure founded on remarkable creativity, innovation, and tenacity. Kalanick was a master of manipulation and deception during his reign at Uber, and it’s fascinating to see the machinations and greed that were ultimately his downfall. Once again, Uber is making headlines, and Super Pumped gives readers the jump on some of the backroom dealings that are now coming to light. A masterful work of investigative journalism perfect for readers who were captivated by Bad Blood, Mike Isaac’s book is a wild ride that you won’t want to miss. —Seira Wilson, Amazon Book Review

Review

“The tale of Uber, the queen of the so-called ‘unicorns,’ is a parable about power―and the lengths to which some startup founders will go to amass it and hold onto it. Aside from being a delicious read, Mike Isaac’s account is also teeming with new revelations that will shock and outrage you.”
- John Carreyrou, author of Bad Blood

“[Isaac’s] meticulously reported account of Uber’s trajectory avoids the easy paths.”
- Nitasha Tiku, WIRED

“Isaac is great at the ticktock of events as they unfold, but his best work comes when he steps back to examine the bigger picture.”
- Leslie Berlin, New York Times Book Review

“[Isaac] spins a compelling yarn. . . [Super Pumped] is no dry business profile but a tale that Isaac has deeply reported yet still made accessible.”
- William Nottingham, Los Angeles Times

“A devastating expose.”
- John Arlidge, The Times

“The first thing to know about Mike Isaac’s new book is that it’s wildly entertaining. But it’s also a very important read, because Isaac shows how Uber’s messy inner workings and dramatic power struggles have made a company that, for better and worse, is now part of the fabric of modern life.”
- Bethany McLean, author of The Smartest Guys in the Room

“Travis Kalanick changed an entire industry, made billions of dollars, and made a company into a verb, and he did so by destroying anything and anyone who stepped in his way. A riveting read about bro culture gone awry.”
- Nick Bilton, special correspondent, Vanity Fair

“A gripping, masterfully reported book that offers an essential window into what can go wrong with Silicon Valley’s growth-at-any-cost culture.”
- Sheelah Kolhatkar, author of Black Edge

“Reading more like a soap opera than a business book. . . Super Pumped goes beyond the business profile to reveal something deeper and darker. The Uber of Super Pumped―most likely still the Uber of today―is not just a business; it’s a Beast.”
- B. David Zarley, Paste

“A detailed, unsparing account of entrepreneurial arrogance, breathtaking excess, and cutthroat competition at one of the tech industry’s most vaunted, loathed, and socially transformative companies. In tracking Uber’s turbulent trajectory and Kalanick’s eventual fall from grace, Mike Isaac illuminates―and indicts―some of the business practices, cultural values, and mythologies shaping our new social infrastructure.”
- Anna Wiener, author of Uncanny Valley

“[R]ollickingly entertaining.”
- Edward Niedermeyer, The Drive

“Many people have an Uber story – this is the Uber story, and it’s a corporate nightmare. Once poised to take its place beside Amazon, Facebook and Google as a blue-chip tech giant, Uber’s disastrous IPO was the result of ruthless ambition, misconduct and billions of dollars gone awry.”
- Newsday

“[E]xpansive and lucid. …the definitive Uber book.”
- Noah Kulwin, The Baffler

“Mike Isaac’s new book about Uber provides many lessons for aspiring entrepreneurs, technologists and elected officials, and for society as a whole.”
- Dylan Schleicher, Porchlight Books

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ W. W. Norton & Company; 1st edition (September 3, 2019)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 408 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0393652246
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0393652246
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.41 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.5 x 1.3 x 9.6 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #525,743 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #232 in Venture Capital (Books)
- #933 in Company Business Profiles (Books)
- #1,106 in Workplace Culture (Books)

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4.5 2,334 ratings

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Mike Isaac

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Mike Isaac is a technology reporter at the New York Times whose Uber coverage won the Gerald Loeb Award for distinguished business reporting. He writes frequently about Uber, Facebook and other Silicon Valley giants for the Times, and appears often on CNBC and MSNBC. He lives in San Francisco, California.

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Alice

Cannot put it down

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 5, 2019

Verified Purchase

Halfway through and yes, it's quite remarkable. It is like the author was hiding behind doorways in some conversations.
So far, and admittedly I haven't seen all of it, I think it feels fair and even-handed, not over-sensational.
The writing is also very good -- fast reading and I'm finding myself obsessed with this story.
Hard not to compare it to Bad Blood, equally juicy. The difference is that we all saw this -- we were all riding Ubers and loving the convenience and celebrating the fact that is has transformed urban transportation.
And we all knew someone who worked there and hated the culture -- but who wanted to stay to cash out.

Will update more in a day or two, with more thoughts and details.

UPDATE: <100 pages to go
I am obsessed with this book and the story. I find it so amazing that such a large, transformative company was run just so poorly. I'm at the point where Bad Boy Travis is taking a break from the company -- and I do feel sorry for him, up to a point. I don't feel sorry for the enablers -- some whom I think Isaac let off pretty lightly. In fact, many of the characters he describes show up (at least up to this point) as quite admirable, such as the CTO Thuan Pham, among others.
I cannot wait to talk about this book with friends and observers. I am less sanguine that it cannot happen again, and again and again, because the whole startup/crazy money chasing the next big thing/bro culture has no reason to change.

UPDATE: finished the book and just raced through toward the end. I think everyone interested in startups/disruption and tech in general should read this book, for what it says about the whole cycle of money-funding-new-ideas.
Was riveted by the ins and outs of Benchmark's actions and how one of the most founder-friendly firms in Silicon Valley, could push out a CEO who controls the shares and the board!
Yes, I loved reading the book but am saddened the the problems will not go away because there's too much money sloshing around looking for the next big thing, with investors all FOMO about the next bro startup. Kalanick, who Mike Isaac described as having a philosophy of "Ayn Rand meets Wolf of Wall Street," is part of the system, not an outlier. Susan Fower's "very strange year" at Uber is happening again in firms all over, venture firms are ignoring women founders, and tools like AI propogate the same old ideas. Sigh.
Still, it's great to dissect how this very visible company jumped the shark, and keep the conversation going about how Silicon Valley, innovators, and investors can do much, much better.
OK, sermon over.
Thanks for reading.

57 people found this helpful

Helpful

A.I. 8706

A good story, some head-scratching errors

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 17, 2019

Verified Purchase

Super Pumped tells the story of Uber, from its inception as a black car-hailing startup to one of the biggest private companies of all time. The story as it's told is quite compelling-- it cobbles together interviews with VCs, current and former employees, allies as well as adversaries of Travis Kalanick's, as well as bystanders. It's quite clear which accounts the author finds compelling and which he's more apt to dismiss. In all, it does present a work of deep reporting that tells a fascinating story.

My biggest gripe is that it's rife with odd factual and narrative errors. A lot of these things are easy to find via a cursory Google search. Others contradict themselves a few pages later. Just a few-- the author writes that a modem that downloads at 1.5MBPS is "thousands of times" faster than one that downloads at 28KBPS. Simple math tells you that that isn't the case. Similarly, the author declares Kalanick to be a savant because he could calculate the approximate time it takes to get somewhere given the average speed and distance remaining. Maybe those kind of calculations are tough for an elementary schooler. After that, it's not difficult. These errors don't take away from the book's message, but they do cause one to wonder whether the author had a copy editor.

Other errors are factually wrong. For instance, founders are described as a rare species, of which each company can only have one. Conveniently, that's not true of.... Uber itself, which was notably co-founded by Kalanick and Garrett Camp, as well as its main rival Lyft (Logan Green and John Zimmer). But it's not even true of old tech giants-- Mark Zuckerberg was certainly the lone face of Facebook and Jack Dorsey of Twitter... but Microsoft was co-founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, and Google by Sergey Brin and Larry Page. How that got past a copy edit is beyond me. Others are less obvious but equally off the mark. Cooley and Paul Weiss, for instance, are presented as powerful Silicon Valley law firms. Cooley certainly fits the bill. But Paul Weiss, while a very prominent New York law firm, not only doesn't have a strong Silicon Valley presence; it is one of a relative few New York powerhouse firms that don't have an office in the Bay Area at all. Such errors, together, lead me to question some of the factual reliability of the other claims made in the book.

So while I enjoyed the book itself, I'm not certain how much of it to believe.

10 people found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Iain Webster

Well worth a read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on October 5, 2020

Verified Purchase

This book is one of a quartet of my recent reads about the genesis of successful companies.
Shoe Dog (Nike) – Phil Knight
Super Pumped (Uber) – Mike Isaac
That will never work (Netflix) – Mark Randolph
The Airbnb story – Leigh Gallagher

I would rank it at #2. A very engaging read from an author who clearly had the inside track. A bit odd that it finished at 80% read and then went on for an Epilogue, a Postscript and then notes to the Postscript. My only other criticism is that I did not need the childhood and high school background to many of the secondary characters.

2 people found this helpful

Luke software developer

Well written detailed factual account of a start up that went global. Strongly recommended

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on November 25, 2019

Verified Purchase

Professionally written and a superb, engrossing story. It follows the initial start up and evolution of the idea from an elite limousine service to one where anyone with a car can become a taxi driver. The use of ex spies to identify potential law enforcement officials and then the development and use of the 'grey ball' software to evade them is breathtaking. The negotiations with venture capitalists are instructive. The use and misuse of customer data is an important case study. The denouement where CEO Travis is forced out is riveting and instructive about corporate governance. Travis leaves with $5 billion after 8 years work but casualties along the way.

One person found this helpful

P. Kapoor

Great drama - Very easy read

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 8, 2020

Verified Purchase

Spectacular story of one of the biggest success stories of our time! I came out of it disgusted at Kalanick's behaviour and values but also in awe of his ambition and raw talent. Clearly he built the Uber we can't seem to do without now

2 people found this helpful

AKF

Very vindictive of Travis and the leadership team

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 27, 2021

Verified Purchase

This is a very interesting book, only because Uber is an incredibly interesting and groundbreaking company. The writer however is incredibly vindictive towards Travis, even as the writer is describing how Travis is taking time away to grieve his mother’s death, the writer still finds a way to describe Travis as a Toxic person. Wow!

Amazon Customer

Well written and exceptionally well researched

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 30, 2019

Verified Purchase

I'm a big fan of tech bios/insider books and this is one of the best I've read. Mike provides a wealth of background context on each of the players but it never feels forced. I guess it helps that there was so much drama at Uber. In any case well worth a read

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