Talking with MikeIsaac, whose new book is perhaps the most complete picture of how Uber's bulletproof founder was brought down from inside his own company
Travis Kalanick Photo: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images It seems like every large tech company has had a rough couple of years, but it’s easy to argue that no company has had a worse year than Uber did in 2017. It began with the #DeleteUber controversy, then rolled right into a number of scandals regarding sexual harassment and inappropriate workplace conduct.
I get into detail about a few incidents in Southeast Asia that underscore the depravity in at least some of the offices in this company. Like managers smashing a girl’s face into a pile of cocaine. In another incident, this other woman feared getting raped and her manager texted her, “Don’t worry, we will pay all your medical bills.
I don’t know if I want to tag him with that, but what I will say is that Uber is one of the first start-ups that really crashed into the real world in a very different way than Facebook or Snapchat or whatever. That said, you know, you could argue Facebook has a body count, too: People spread anti-vaxx information, for instance. Uber literally changed how cities work and in a very short period of time. Deep, quick cultural change can often come with pushback, and violent pushback.
I think Gurley in the end believed he was doing the ouster for the right reasons, and something they would even repeat to each other is, “We wanted to do the right thing.” Everyone at Benchmark, the VC firm that Gurley belongs to, believed that they were doing the right thing in pushing Travis out. That said, Bill’s an aggressive guy and had at least some indication of what the company was doing early on and some of the moves that it was making.
One concept I also get into is founder worship. The founder of a company is almost this man-god on the earth and what they do is worthy of bowing down. To be fair, they do a lot of hard stuff and it’s very difficult to build a business, and I totally respect that, but also Travis might represent the platonic ideal, or inverse, of what happens when you let a founder retain complete control and then have to resort to really drastic measures to deal with them.
I mean, if this book creates an entire class of shitty founders, you’re welcome to call me up in a year and tell me that I failed. I hope that’s not the case. In general, I like to give young founders a little more credit. I have a lot of criticisms of the Valley, but I think people generally recognize what went wrong inside of Uber now, and have a sense of wariness around how they want their own company to grow. Uber is a case study in going totally off the rails.
I think it’s really indicative of the state of the company. It was a knife party, man. Everyone was constantly fearing their execution, and their evisceration in the press, or someone was trying to go after them so they would have to go to someone else. This is how a lot of investigative reporting works: There’s a dysfunction and that’s when leaks start to occur.
That’s a really interesting point. I think people definitely discriminate based on height. Folks that aren’t as tall have insecurities about it. It’s an interesting thought to play out in terms of hiring and leadership roles. I was at this press conference yesterday [regarding the recent charges against former Uber employee Anthony Levandowski] with the new U.S. attorney in San Francisco, who is literally part of the Department of Justice, and that dude is huge.
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