Uber. The name itself means superlative, the most of something, super top extreme. My guess is you don't name your company Uber if you're planning to play by all the rules, make decisions by committee, and be everyone's friend. Unlike many Silicon Valley companies promising to revolutionize the world, Uber has actually done it. The eighty two billion dollar company has changed the way we move people through the world. It certainly changed the way I moved through the world, and has done it so well and with such market dominance that Uber is now that most special of brand achievements, a verb on top of which many believe Uber when they say they are just getting started and that ridehailing was merely the first feature of a much broader platform. Is dar Kazbrashahi Uber's knew as in not. Travis Kalinich, CEO said cars are to us what books were to Amazon. Let that sink in for a second. Can you imagine if Amazon still only sold books for nearly a decade? What was driving Uber's innovation was a growth at any cost. Culture and today's podcast guest Mike Isaac calls the superpumped egos of founders who were worshiped as demigods. This led to a period of time at Uber that was so turbulent the company and its goal of an IPO were nearly derailed entirely. Here's what I wonder, is Uber two point o for real or has a dark seed been planted that is going to metastasize at some point in the future. Could you have had the success without that dark side? Is this kind of behavior emblematic of the overinflated valuations and perhaps underinflated core values of a new generation of Unicorns? Or is it just part of the coming of age story of a tech startup with Uber sized dreams. I get to chat today with Mike Isaac, who covers Uber for The New York Times. He's written about the company extensively for the past bunch of years and also wrote the great book super Pumped, The Battle for Uber. So let's start with the title of your book, super Pumped. What did that come to mean to Kalenik In twenty fifteen, Travis had this real obsession with Amazon. He always sort of looked up to Amazon as the company he wanted Uber to look like to be. And Amazon has this list of fourteen values. A lot of them have to do with customer obsession and like a lot of this sort of typical platitudes of Silicon Valley, And so Travis translated that into probably a bro speak version of his own fourteen values, and super Pumped Nois was one of those that eventually became something. They evaluated people on their job performance, and it embodied this idea that they could do anything, they could take on the world, and being super pumped meant you were like ready to fight or be in the trenches or whatever, and that became a quality that was very important to him and everyone he hired, and that also tended to be a lot of twenty something NBA frat boy times he saw it is unabashedly a good thing. Absolutely. I mean, I think, you know, in the clearer light of day, after the federal investigations of past, we might see the downside of that, But at the time, you know, like that was he hired people like him and super pumped no This was part of the criterion even before those investigations come to a close. You've come to think about Super Pumped in a slightly darker way. Right, My book is pretty critical of the company, but I also think that every entrepreneur in the Valley especially, is starting from a place of zero, right, you have everything against you. No one wants you to win, especially if you're taking on an incumbent industry like the taxi and limousine and transportation in cities. You know, So there's the class half full. Part of it is you need to be as as optimistic energetic as possible, and I sort of get that. But then where that sort of turns is when you know you don't know when to rein it back in. You don't know when the aggression sort of tips over into alienating yourself from the industry or not being able to make friends. And I think that's really the story of uber is is going hard and really diving into to pushing into an industry that had never been disrupted before, and then sort of becoming a winner, but not knowing how to go into any other mode. We talk a lot about a corporate culture on this show, and Andy gross famous quote is the former CEO of Intel, Only the paranoid survive that paranoia. That sense of being the underdog is supposed to be a good thing, but when does it become the When does it become a bad thing? When do you need to have a broader sense of yourself in the world. Yeah, totally. I mean, you know, you have to sort of read the room over a period of time. And in twenty fourteen, I think is when Uber started becoming a verb rather than like an now and if that makes sense, I'm going to the ultimate brand achievement. True. Yeah, like Google, I'm gonna Google this or Facebook me or whatever people say, you know. I think I think Uber probably tipped around then, and there was a moment where I think Travis's pr tried to rainiment right and tried to say, look, you need to start making friends instead of fighting all these regulators in Europe because they're going to all come at you really hard. And I think he tried. But I see him as a tragic character because I don't think he's able to operate in any other mode. I don't think he's able to really grow and mature like some of probably the best CEOs are able to, you know, for all their faults. I think Mark Zuckerberg is at least entering a new phase where he's trying to change. He moves, he doesn't just stay the same. He moves. We can quibble about whether he's moving fast enough and hard enough, but he moves. I totally agree, And I think even a lot of the valley now is sort of realizing this tech reckoning is happening, and the maybe doctor Frankenstein moment of what have we wrought? And how do we change that or at least adapt to that? But I think that's what the best CEO is doing. I don't. I don't know if Travis's has ever been able to do that. It's actually another really interesting thing about this story that I find goes against Countrarian wisdom, or at least what I debatably thought was my wisdom, but which is that people like Kellen at Cove had failure in their past are more equipped to grow and change and to see problems and to listen to other people and appreciate difference. And yet it didn't work that way for Kalinnik for some reason. Yeah. I mean, he did two startups. One of them was a file sharing startup. It was basically like a proto version of Napster meets Google, and that crash and burn really hard. That was when the record industry actually had much more clout than it did right now. He did another one that was parlayed into a mild success, but not really He made maybe like a million dollars, which made him like Silicon Valley middle class I guess so, which is another depressing story. But I think the reason that some felt he was right for Uber after that is that even through all the hardship he faced with those two first startups, he still kept pushing through it and fighting these really large existing companies, you know, to keep going. But I'm not sure if he took away, like you said, the exact lessons that he might have needed to from the beginning things that he went through. I'm thinking as you talk that maybe the difference here is between insecurity and paranoia. That paranoia it might be a good thing, but a fundamental insecurity and a person which might be tell me, if you agree with this, what Travis Kalinek has might be a very dangerous thing. I try to get into his head in this, and he wouldn't talk to me for this book, and so I had to sort of do a lot of reporting around him, and so I think talking to hundreds of people who have dealt with him, around him, got a good insight into how he sort of operates and a lot of a lot of this posturing, this sort of broneness and you know, we're we're the ship and we're cool or whatever, and you know we're going to take over the world. I think does fundamentally stem from this um, this insecurity and his that went even in his childhood, that went from a sort of like nerdy guy trying to like seem like he was cool. You know, sometimes that drives people, but I think it also has its limits, as we as we see. I thought this sentence in your book perhaps sums up his inability to grow, and you wrote, Travis Kalenek couldn't figure out why everyone hated his guts. So what's your absolute favorite Travis Kalinic story. You have so many great anecdotes in the book. What's the one that really stood out to you that you had that aha moment when you were reporting. It's not as sort of sexy as some of them, but I think he really he really didn't understand drivers super well. One of the things he really pushed back on for a very long time was this idea that drivers deserved tips, right, and he just he was the only stopping block. Literally everyone in the company was like, we need to tip these people like it's just part of how labor works, right, Like LYFT is doing it like this is something that this is a table stakes minimum and he didn't get this obsession with customer experience and if we add another like thing in the app, it's going to make people mad and there's too much friction, blah blah blah. And you know, it wasn't until he literally was pushed out of the company that they were able to add tipping. And it absolutely, you know, helped drivers a lot. And I think the way you can look at how he saw the people who worked for him was he referred to drivers as supply instead of people, which is which really just gives you a perspective on how he looks at you. An entire class of workers that company a little bit of an engineering brain, although perhaps that's not fair to most engineers. Yeah, there's a quote from another article that I loved that the company's new chief HR person I think told you, and it was every strength in excess is a weakness. What has driven Uber to immense success. It's aggression. The hard charging attitude has toppled over. And I thought about that slightly differently. Could you have had the success without the way Travis was. That I think is the ultimate question that even folks who have invested in this company, even folks who don't have a relationship with Travis anymore and once really cared about him or believed in him, but he is now alienated, still are questioning to this day. Right, Like one of my verses told me, he was the right guy for a certain period of time in the company, and then it was clear that he wasn't the right guy anymore, and he wasn't able to see that he wasn't you know. They tried giving him executive coaching, they tried to sort of like put people around him. There's this sort of i would say, legendary figure in the valley, Bill Campbell, who you probably know who's been on the board of Apple, and he's they call him the coach, right, and they wanted folks like that to really bring him into a new phase of leadership. And he can't do it. He really can't do it. I think he's sort of the way I wrote this book, I just saw him as like a Greek tragic figure where he was he flew too close to the sun and then and then just sort of fell over because he wasn't able to wasn't able to see it himself. Do you think it ultimately is a story that says Silicon Valley has to change? Or do people look at this and because Uber was such a success, do you think there's more emulating of him going on. The ending, which people vaguely know, at least in the public eye, is that everyone got really rich. Right, yeah, exactly. But even if the company, like the company now is the funny thing is the IPO didn't go at all the way they wanted it to. You know, they had a real bust first price that actually opened lower than the price they set at the market, which is very embarrassing for the for the company, it's just not what you want. People didn't make as much money as they wanted to. But at the same time, you know, Travis is a billionaire right now. Ryan Graves, another longtime employee, is a billionaire. Garrett Camp, the guy who came up with the idea, is a billionaire, and Bill Gurley a benchmark. The main venture capitalist that was involved in the company probably made what was considered one of the greatest venture capital investments of all time. Everyone quote unquote one in a way, and in the like lesson, if I'm being super cynical, is is maybe it did work. You know, maybe this sort of terrible behavior did works, got rewarded and right, even if he lost control of his company, he got the money. That's right the way I feel. You know, I'm not exactly crying for him in his billions of dollars, but I you know, ultimately Uber was his baby, and that was more about the company entire life. He had a girlfriend, lost her, had a mother, had a family, and his mother died tragically and completely out of the blue. He really had no one. Even his closest friends and colleagues sort of alienated him towards the end. So the one thing he had and really the reason he started fighting for it so desperately later on, is this company. And so you might argue that, you know, he did get fabulously wealthy, but he lost one of the most important things in his life too. I can see why you call it a tragic story in some ways, and it'll be interesting to see what the lesson becomes, what the valley does with this. So going back to the inner workings of Uber, you talk in your book about this competitive intelligence and about an uber's case, you could argue they crossed the line, but where where is the line? Because you also write everyone in Silicon Valley has some version of this, So where does it go from being okay to being not okay? It's really funny. There was a saga the other day on the Internet about this company that just came out. It was called Superhuman. It's an email company. It's it's totally a value thing. But basically they use a tracking pixel, which is fairly common in email marketing and sort of basically tells you when you open an email, but it sends tracking pixels to anyone that you send an email for. And so the idea is you can tell when you have opened an email, if you send it to someone, how many times they've read it, where in the world they are when they've read it. And the company sort of launched thinking that this was an okay thing, right because so many other types of services do this, And when someone pointed out, like, oh my god, what do you like? This is crazy? This is like Fucoldian panopticon, right, like why are you doing this? And there was a minor freak out. Again it was like a tech thing, but but I think we're in a moment right now where the norms of what is acceptable in tech is starting to at least be questioned, if not changing, you know, and I think people are reckoning with the power of how tech can shape and transform society. I get in my book, like I do think that the moment that Trump was elected was this sort of moment that folks said, oh my god. You know, immediately everyone turned to Facebook and these disinformation campaigns. And there's still question on how much that shape things at all, but like the idea, just the idea that people were manipulated by ads and even fake information on Facebook gave people this idea that, oh my god, tech tech has more power than we thought it did. And so I think the norms around what is acceptable, which is you know, maybe surveillance type tech that Uber was doing, or you know, monitoring how much people spend on their credit cards per month, monitoring what Lift its biggest competitor was doing. Heaven in Hell. Yeah, totally, Heaven in Hell. These two really nefarious programs that they thought were cool, but we're actually pretty quickly they were sure. So Heaven was this internal program at Uber that allowed basically for a time, anyone inside the company to see where any car and any user was on Earth ever, right, and there were no safeguards around it internally, anyone could look it up. Like there's one scene where Travis at an event with just sort of a bunch of folks at a hotel dinner, he displays Heaven on this big screen in a room and anyone can just sort of look at where all these users are. It's just really sort of no care for user privacy and where anyone is. It's sensitive information where I take a car in the world, right, Like I don't want people knowing where I am all the time, right, Yeah. Terrifying and so hell. The counterpoint to that hell was Uber's way of monitoring its biggest American competitor, Lift, and sort of through a bunch of different tracking methods, were able to tell which drivers were driving for Lift, how much they were getting paid, so Uber would spend slightly more money to get them to abandon Lift and come over to Uber. And there's just questions around how ethical that was and how much spuying on your competitors you should do, and what's acceptable, which are big questions. Do you think they felt they were crossing the line, or do you think when you tell me that story about Travis putting this up on a screen, it doesn't seem like it was some big internal secret, right. And that's the thing I ran up against in my reporting over and over when I would discover something or someone else would discover something, employees inside would be like, why are you freaking out about this? This is like a common thing, or we've had this for years that you just very everybody does this, yes, or everyone does it, and like that's the thinking that I think is really pervasive even now in the valley and really dangerous. And I don't think folks in the tech world fully appreciate that normal people don't know these things, right. They don't really know what norms are or what they're comfortable with. And part of that, I think is the failing of the media too getting into how these things work that we use every every part of our lives, you know, are involved in them, and what we're okay with. I want to go to the role of the venture capitalists and this talk a little bit about Bell Gurley. I love this quote you've gotten your book from Gurley about Kalinnik. If we let him out of the box at any point during the day. He'll destroy the entire world. But why couldn't the vcs control Kalinik? I sort of look at VC from a few different angles, you know. I think part of how VC works shapes how these companies have to act the way venture capitalists invest. They don't want to flip a company for two x. They need to flip it for ten x or whatever. You know. They need to make it sell or ipo and make their investment really a grand slam. Yeah, because a lot of investing is a lot of failures, right, So it's pushing harder and Gurley eventually turns on Kalenik. But for a lot of the time, you supported all the moves that Kalenik was making and was just as aggressive as him. And there's a question as to his indemnity in this whole thing, and how culpable he is for some of the things. Our adventure capitalist part of the problem in the valley. If you ask an entrepreneur who has raised VC again, I don't pity them too much once they say it's a series A worth thirty million dollars or whatever, because you just get a lot of these damn, investors are trying to make me do something. But but but that puts you on a trajectory and you have to grow. It's grow or guy, you can't do anything but go up into the left on your charts when you have to make your presentations to vcs and to get there, that means doing anything you can, and a lot of the times that means shady, subversive practices. You know, whether it's in like social networking and sharing phone book contact lists without people's knowledge, or in ride hailing where you're doing sort of shady tracking mechanisms or even thinking of ways to track other drivers or even passengers. I think it perverts the idea that you should in some entrepreneurs, at least who don't have like a fully formed moral compass. It just it sort of makes you think you have to grow at all costs, and sometimes that means going into the darker side of how how growth works. And it's making me think that the venture capitalists don't always have they're not always the adult in the room either. They don't always have the moral compass. Ideally, you have someone that's very involved and can guide you. But I don't think that's the case at the end of the day, they need to make this company worth a lot of money and sell it, either take it to IPO or sell it to Facebook, Google, microsore one of the big five companies that end up buying a lot of these companies anyway. And that's that's a motivation, right and that provides perverse incentives over time, and a lot of the time vcs vcs are just as aggressive as any entrepreneur. And do you think that's changed over time? I mean, do you think was there a mythical period in the past, speaking of myths, where venture capitalists were all about creation and all about building a company and the money kind of came second, or do you think it's always been all about the money and the big cash out day. The rise of MBA business culture, I think kind of changed how people think and work a lot. Once the finance guys started flooding into tech companies. I think that that kind of just changed how these companies work. That's why engineers are still so vaunted and because like the roots of the valley are about building and cre and tinkering. Steve Jobs is this still mythical figure because he cared about users and the user experience, and it's really about computing, right, And I think earlier on it was about building a computer in a garage and worshiping that, and now it's really about the Internet and software, and you see different types of folks sort of flooding into that. So you know, we're always instalgic for periods of the past, and it may or may not have existed, yeah exactly, Like I'm probably oversimplifying some things, but I think I think it has changed a lot with the rise of the Internet and the rise of this sort of NBA culture. And maybe there's also a point where the money has just become so big that it's a tipping point, right, And so many of these stories are about a tipping point. And that might be true for Uber, and it might be true for the valley broadly. Writ Right, once the money just got to a certain point, the corruption sets in. And I'm using the word corruption loosely. Yeah, yeah, right, not necessarily in the legal sense. But I think these numbers, even the small rounds, what a series a round of venture capital used to be was like maybe five million or less, and now you know, you're seeing like thirty to forty million dollars series A's right, these are wow. The amount of money getting put in earlier on is increasing exponentially in some cases, and that is having again adverse effects on how companies operate. So I do think they're going to hit a wall with some of this, or maybe I hate to use the B word of bubble, but it can't keep going like this. But that has also invited private equity and hedge funds and all this other money coming in start flooding in, and so it gets bigger and bigger until it all goes splat. Right, that's right. Why is it that some companies like Uber get the special dispensation to continue to lose money and other companies have immense pressure put on them to be profitable. Is that decision made in some kind of fair and calculated way, or is it that certain people just get a dispensation that others don't. It's so funny, and I go head to head with some vcs on this all the time. Their favorite buzzword is economies of scale. Right, once you hit certain large enough point, the math starts to work apparently, and you need to be able to have metal I guess I mean that's TVD on Uber at least, but you need to be have the metal to burn enormous amounts of money to get there, and that means raising enormous amounts of money up front in order to do that. I don't think that works for every company, right Like I think at some point because a lot of folks like to look back at the first dot com bubble and say, look that these IPOs were happening and everyone crashed. This going to happen again. And the distinction they make is that the revenues that current internet companies have are not insignificant. There are like in the tens or hundreds and millions of dollars in revenue which didn't exist during the first dot com era. But you just wonder whether you can push into profitability, you know, and what point and how long it's going to be in what point you have to do that? And I think it's just different mindsets. You think the West Coast is vcs are much more comfortable with burn huge piles of cash over time, and the East Coast and folks who actually like to see profitable companies make a profit are more conservative, they would say in that respect. And I don't know if that's going to ever change. Can Uber ever make money? Is it structurally unprofitable or do you think there's just going to be a moment where they can cut back on the expenses and achieve those economies of scale. What Uber would say is their current business is driving other lines of business. They everyone wants to be a platform Silicon Valley, and that's the argument that Uber, right, yes, and that's what they're saying now, we're not a car service, where a transportation platform, right, which is like I sort of rule my eyes at because literally everyone wants to be a platform, and they all say that that. I didn't know that was the new cliche. That's fast. Oh yeah, someone says a platform. You know, they're full of it. But I think but I think the thing that shows some promise even though it's still the new cash suck for them is their food delivery stuff and using some of their existing assets to try to push into a new industry. But you know, you could also argue they're just kicking the can down the road, right, Like, at the end of the day, you either have to increase prices for customers or decrease profits for drivers, right, And you're balancing a very fine three sided marketplace essentially between customers drivers in the company itself, and someone has to at the end of the day eat those costs. And you and I have seen artificially depressed prices on the rides that we take for a very long period of time, and slowly those either have to go up or the drivers have to get paid less. If you look at lifts S one and paperwork, they subtly say that they're essentially going to increase costs for drivers over time or decrease what they're paying them because like the only way they can get closer to profitability at all is by doing one of those two things. Lift is even more screwed in a way than Uber because they don't have these other lines of business to point out. It's interesting, though, is you talk. I'm thinking that Uber is obviously really different from a Google and a face Book because there's no network effect with Uber, right, And I think it might even be fundamentally different than an Amazon because once you shop on Amazon it's just so easy, whereas Uber, the consumer switching costs from Uber to Lift is not that high, and so I don't I wonder how much flexibility do they have? No, you're exactly right. And the problem Uber had and has is that it's been commoditized and done very quickly. Right. So like even though the verb and brand, Uber is still sort of there, and that's like a positive thing. A lot of folks, myself included, will open Uber, look at the price, and then open Lift and see if there's like a buck or too cheaper, and then I might go over to the other one, right, because it's essentially the same service, all this driver's drive for the same company. There's this really good book called hard Landing about the airline industry. It compares because airlines are also like a sort of commodity industry. Right. They look at Southwest Air as a case study where brand and the lock in of customers based on these added things, and a lot of it was like brand and then over time like loyalty, point programs and things like that become the differentiator for you, right, And so I think people are still price sensitive on it airlines a lot of the time. But you have to find ways to attract people to your service, and I think Uber is testing that right now, or at least dipping his toe into it with rewards programs. How do you think about Dara so far. Reid Hoffman and his book Blitz Scaling talks about how in all startups you have to move from being a pirate to commanding and Navy. Is Dara the guy to do that. So he's been at the Helm for a little more than a year. He was not who you know. We get into towards the end of the book. There's this big board fight. The board becomes entirely dysfunctional, and so many great anecdotes it was so fun to report, actually insane and maddening. It essentially comes down to a few candidates and no one really wanted Dara to be the guy to take over, but they end up with him over a series of essentially yeah exactly like no one was satisfied, but he became the guy. He's a very straight laced professional CEO. He knew how to take a company public in some ways, and in that most of his job was not being Travis for the first year of his entire CEO And he's got a great quote. Over the next eighteen months, Uber's new chief executive would systematically undermine nearly everything his predecessor had stood for. That's it. He went on an apology tour if there's a moment in London where they are trying to bar Uber from operating and he had to sort of give maya cop post to everyone. If you look at all of his statements, it's basically we are not the old Uber. And so in the sense that he's not Travis, he was probably pretty good. But there's also a question of can he be as inspiring to some of the people there as the former leader was. It's back to that dark side, but also the positive side. Can he what was good about Travis? And can Dara replate ken Dar replate takeaway what was bad? And is there can you can you still have what was good? Yeah? Totally. I mean, look again, for all of Travis's faults or many, I think one of the things he was really able to do is is rally these troops around him and like so like cried Hoffman was saying they were a pirate ship company, but they didn't know when they turned into a navy right, And he wasn't able to sort of operate on any mode but rallying his fellow pirates and taking over everybody. But you'd say, you'd say it's still tbd whether whether whether Dara can keep the good while getting rid of the bad. Dar's a numbers guy. He was a CFO at m I see for a very long time Barry Dealer's company. He and Barry Diller are still really close. And he's a numbers guy, right, So he looks at the balance sheet, sees how much they're bleeding, and has to start cutting and changing things in the street. Probably really likes that. But you know, employees there were used to some level of whatever comfort or just decisions that might not be as popular. So it's still only eighteen months in or whatever he's at now, it's still I'll give him like a little more time to see what here. You start to make a judgment. Yeah, On that note, I also wonder a sort of corollary to that. As much as he's tried to change the culture, is the culture of a company set with its founder? In other words, is that darker side of Uber still? Is it a seed that's waiting to blow up in some ways, not just through the ongoing investigations, but just that is going to exist in the company, regardless of what Darr tries to do to change it. Right. No, I love that point because if you look at I mean every smart VC that's trying to give advice to the founders. Is talks about like culture set from the very beginning and tone at the top. I think it's very difficult to change that, and the authority that a founder has over that is very powerful. Right. So even if you look at like Twitter, there was a time when Twitter was in the news all the time for being one of the most dysfunctional companies ever, right, And a lot of that came with the in fighting between the three founders of the company from the very beginning, and to this day it's still it still shapes Twitter in some ways, it still shapes the company. Google is seen as like a sort of grad school of the valley and very engineering heavy, and that's from Larry Page and Sergey On down right. That's how they started the company, and that's what's most treasured inside of Google. So that DNA really sets the tone for the company and it's hard to change that. Over Travis Kalenik is gone, but as a ghost haunts the hallways. I love despite all the press around the culture and around the destructiveness of the brolite culture at Uber, which is a huge part of your book as well, with Susan Fowler's letter. Is that going to change? I mean again, this is the question, because you know, bad behavior ultimately got rewarded, like a lot of people got rich at the IPO. Right. I live in San Francisco, and I'm already seeing home prices go up. I live around many Uber employees, you know. I talk about this thing called the like the cocktail party test, where it's whether or not you're embarrassed to where your T shirt or tell people at a cocktail party where you work. And there's like a version of the old Wall Street Journal test. Right, if you're not afraid to see it a headline in the Wall Street Journal, that's it. And so there's a period where Uber employees didn't wear their swag out in public, and now they're back to it, you know, now they're they're sort of wearying again. And maybe that's just the proof that you can act, you can act with impunity and get away with it as long as everybody gets paid. Yep, that's a fairly devastating quote. You quote another CEO, female CEO named Karina Lake, which she wrote in an email it's demoralizing and said that something like Uber can even exist and even thrive. Do you agree with that? Look? I think if there are founders trying to do things the right way, it's really it is really depressing to see that other companies can thrive when they're not doing it quote unquote the right way. And maybe that's naive. Maybe maybe someone like me or someone like her look at the world in a way that is moralizing and not cynical enough. Sometimes, you know, maybe maybe this is how you have to build companies. But I'd like to think that that you don't have to be an asshole to build a great company, you know, and like you can be an entrepreneur and guide things in a way that you're proud of, or that like you can have a headline in the Wall Street Journal and not have to cringe about it, or at least not have to cover up your behavior. You wrote at the end of the book, And I think it's it's interesting that it is an open question. I wondered if there would be a new generation of Travis Kalenik protege as soon. The hope I have in this I met a young kid I was at like a New York Times event last year when I was reporting the book, and I met a young, like nineteen year old who's fresh out of Harvard and he was African American and identified as gay. And he heard me talk and he was like, you know, part of why I want to go into tech is to try to like change what that culture kind of looks like. And since tech is not going away, be a part of the force for representing like all types of people building these things instead of like young white men who've grown up in largely in it was at least safe financial bubbles or whatever. Right, maybe maybe the people building these products should look more like the rest of the world instead of a monoculture in the valley. And that I thought was pretty hopeful. Maybe there's maybe the people behind it are going to look different in a generation. I love this. We get to end on a positive note here, it's not all dark. Thank you so much for coming, Thanks for having me. It's striking to me how many things about Travis Kalenik and the Uber story turn accepted wisdom on its head. Most of all, it's supposed to be good to be paranoid. It's supposed to be good to have failed in the past. But in Kalinich's case, the past failure it seems to have sharpened already sharp edges to a knife point, and the paranoia took an indisputably dark turn that still might destroy Uber. It's also interesting to me that there are all these big questions that we want answered, at least that I want answered, but real life, a real business, doesn't always yield clarity, or at least not the clarity. Would like. We want there to be a moral to this story, a good moral, but I'm not sure there is. At least the moral might be to do as Kalenick did rather than the opposite. Would like for a kindler, gentler company to have had the same degree of success that Uber did. It's not clear to me that it would have. Most of all, would like to believe that Silicon Valley, which is so critically important to our economy and our lives, is going to have a day of reckoning. It's going to leave its ugly childlike aspects in the past. It's going to grow up. It's not so clear to me that's going to happen, at least not anytime soon. Making a Killing is a co production of Pushkin Industries and Chalk and Blade. It's produced by Ruth Barnes and Rosie Stoffer. My executive producers are Alison mcclein. No relation in making Casey. The executive producer at Pushkin is Mia Loebell. Engineering is by Jason Gambrell. Our music is by Jed Flood. Special thanks to Jacob Weisberg at Pushkin and everyone on the show. I'm Bethany mcclein. Thanks so much for listening. Find me on Twitter Bethany mac twelve and let me know who you've enjoyed hearing from.

Uber. The name itself means superlative, the most of something, super top extreme. My guess is you don't name your company Uber if you're planning to play by all the rules, make decisions by committee, and be everyone's friend. Unlike many Silicon Valley companies promising to revolutionize the world, Uber has actually done it. The eighty two billion dollar company has changed the way we move people through the world. It certainly changed the way I moved through the world, and has done it so well and with such market dominance that Uber is now that most special of brand achievements, a verb on top of which many believe Uber when they say they are just getting started and that ridehailing was merely the first feature of a much broader platform. Is dar Kazbrashahi Uber's knew as in not. Travis Kalinich, CEO said cars are to us what books were to Amazon. Let that sink in for a second. Can you imagine if Amazon still only sold books for nearly a decade? What was driving Uber's innovation was a growth at any cost. Culture and today's podcast guest Mike Isaac calls the superpumped egos of founders who were worshiped as demigods. This led to a period of time at Uber that was so turbulent the company and its goal of an IPO were nearly derailed entirely. Here's what I wonder, is Uber two point o for real or has a dark seed been planted that is going to metastasize at some point in the future. Could you have had the success without that dark side? Is this kind of behavior emblematic of the overinflated valuations and perhaps underinflated core values of a new generation of Unicorns? Or is it just part of the coming of age story of a tech startup with Uber sized dreams. I get to chat today with Mike Isaac, who covers Uber for The New York Times. He's written about the company extensively for the past bunch of years and also wrote the great book super Pumped, The Battle for Uber. So let's start with the title of your book, super Pumped. What did that come to mean to Kalenik In twenty fifteen, Travis had this real obsession with Amazon. He always sort of looked up to Amazon as the company he wanted Uber to look like to be. And Amazon has this list of fourteen values. A lot of them have to do with customer obsession and like a lot of this sort of typical platitudes of Silicon Valley, And so Travis translated that into probably a bro speak version of his own fourteen values, and super Pumped Nois was one of those that eventually became something. They evaluated people on their job performance, and it embodied this idea that they could do anything, they could take on the world, and being super pumped meant you were like ready to fight or be in the trenches or whatever, and that became a quality that was very important to him and everyone he hired, and that also tended to be a lot of twenty something NBA frat boy times he saw it is unabashedly a good thing. Absolutely. I mean, I think, you know, in the clearer light of day, after the federal investigations of past, we might see the downside of that, But at the time, you know, like that was he hired people like him and super pumped no This was part of the criterion even before those investigations come to a close. You've come to think about Super Pumped in a slightly darker way. Right, My book is pretty critical of the company, but I also think that every entrepreneur in the Valley especially, is starting from a place of zero, right, you have everything against you. No one wants you to win, especially if you're taking on an incumbent industry like the taxi and limousine and transportation in cities. You know, So there's the class half full. Part of it is you need to be as as optimistic energetic as possible, and I sort of get that. But then where that sort of turns is when you know you don't know when to rein it back in. You don't know when the aggression sort of tips over into alienating yourself from the industry or not being able to make friends. And I think that's really the story of uber is is going hard and really diving into to pushing into an industry that had never been disrupted before, and then sort of becoming a winner, but not knowing how to go into any other mode. We talk a lot about a corporate culture on this show, and Andy gross famous quote is the former CEO of Intel, Only the paranoid survive that paranoia. That sense of being the underdog is supposed to be a good thing, but when does it become the When does it become a bad thing? When do you need to have a broader sense of yourself in the world. Yeah, totally. I mean, you know, you have to sort of read the room over a period of time. And in twenty fourteen, I think is when Uber started becoming a verb rather than like an now and if that makes sense, I'm going to the ultimate brand achievement. True. Yeah, like Google, I'm gonna Google this or Facebook me or whatever people say, you know. I think I think Uber probably tipped around then, and there was a moment where I think Travis's pr tried to rainiment right and tried to say, look, you need to start making friends instead of fighting all these regulators in Europe because they're going to all come at you really hard. And I think he tried. But I see him as a tragic character because I don't think he's able to operate in any other mode. I don't think he's able to really grow and mature like some of probably the best CEOs are able to, you know, for all their faults. I think Mark Zuckerberg is at least entering a new phase where he's trying to change. He moves, he doesn't just stay the same. He moves. We can quibble about whether he's moving fast enough and hard enough, but he moves. I totally agree, And I think even a lot of the valley now is sort of realizing this tech reckoning is happening, and the maybe doctor Frankenstein moment of what have we wrought? And how do we change that or at least adapt to that? But I think that's what the best CEO is doing. I don't. I don't know if Travis's has ever been able to do that. It's actually another really interesting thing about this story that I find goes against Countrarian wisdom, or at least what I debatably thought was my wisdom, but which is that people like Kellen at Cove had failure in their past are more equipped to grow and change and to see problems and to listen to other people and appreciate difference. And yet it didn't work that way for Kalinnik for some reason. Yeah. I mean, he did two startups. One of them was a file sharing startup. It was basically like a proto version of Napster meets Google, and that crash and burn really hard. That was when the record industry actually had much more clout than it did right now. He did another one that was parlayed into a mild success, but not really He made maybe like a million dollars, which made him like Silicon Valley middle class I guess so, which is another depressing story. But I think the reason that some felt he was right for Uber after that is that even through all the hardship he faced with those two first startups, he still kept pushing through it and fighting these really large existing companies, you know, to keep going. But I'm not sure if he took away, like you said, the exact lessons that he might have needed to from the beginning things that he went through. I'm thinking as you talk that maybe the difference here is between insecurity and paranoia. That paranoia it might be a good thing, but a fundamental insecurity and a person which might be tell me, if you agree with this, what Travis Kalinek has might be a very dangerous thing. I try to get into his head in this, and he wouldn't talk to me for this book, and so I had to sort of do a lot of reporting around him, and so I think talking to hundreds of people who have dealt with him, around him, got a good insight into how he sort of operates and a lot of a lot of this posturing, this sort of broneness and you know, we're we're the ship and we're cool or whatever, and you know we're going to take over the world. I think does fundamentally stem from this um, this insecurity and his that went even in his childhood, that went from a sort of like nerdy guy trying to like seem like he was cool. You know, sometimes that drives people, but I think it also has its limits, as we as we see. I thought this sentence in your book perhaps sums up his inability to grow, and you wrote, Travis Kalenek couldn't figure out why everyone hated his guts. So what's your absolute favorite Travis Kalinic story. You have so many great anecdotes in the book. What's the one that really stood out to you that you had that aha moment when you were reporting. It's not as sort of sexy as some of them, but I think he really he really didn't understand drivers super well. One of the things he really pushed back on for a very long time was this idea that drivers deserved tips, right, and he just he was the only stopping block. Literally everyone in the company was like, we need to tip these people like it's just part of how labor works, right, Like LYFT is doing it like this is something that this is a table stakes minimum and he didn't get this obsession with customer experience and if we add another like thing in the app, it's going to make people mad and there's too much friction, blah blah blah. And you know, it wasn't until he literally was pushed out of the company that they were able to add tipping. And it absolutely, you know, helped drivers a lot. And I think the way you can look at how he saw the people who worked for him was he referred to drivers as supply instead of people, which is which really just gives you a perspective on how he looks at you. An entire class of workers that company a little bit of an engineering brain, although perhaps that's not fair to most engineers. Yeah, there's a quote from another article that I loved that the company's new chief HR person I think told you, and it was every strength in excess is a weakness. What has driven Uber to immense success. It's aggression. The hard charging attitude has toppled over. And I thought about that slightly differently. Could you have had the success without the way Travis was. That I think is the ultimate question that even folks who have invested in this company, even folks who don't have a relationship with Travis anymore and once really cared about him or believed in him, but he is now alienated, still are questioning to this day. Right, Like one of my verses told me, he was the right guy for a certain period of time in the company, and then it was clear that he wasn't the right guy anymore, and he wasn't able to see that he wasn't you know. They tried giving him executive coaching, they tried to sort of like put people around him. There's this sort of i would say, legendary figure in the valley, Bill Campbell, who you probably know who's been on the board of Apple, and he's they call him the coach, right, and they wanted folks like that to really bring him into a new phase of leadership. And he can't do it. He really can't do it. I think he's sort of the way I wrote this book, I just saw him as like a Greek tragic figure where he was he flew too close to the sun and then and then just sort of fell over because he wasn't able to wasn't able to see it himself. Do you think it ultimately is a story that says Silicon Valley has to change? Or do people look at this and because Uber was such a success, do you think there's more emulating of him going on. The ending, which people vaguely know, at least in the public eye, is that everyone got really rich. Right, yeah, exactly. But even if the company, like the company now is the funny thing is the IPO didn't go at all the way they wanted it to. You know, they had a real bust first price that actually opened lower than the price they set at the market, which is very embarrassing for the for the company, it's just not what you want. People didn't make as much money as they wanted to. But at the same time, you know, Travis is a billionaire right now. Ryan Graves, another longtime employee, is a billionaire. Garrett Camp, the guy who came up with the idea, is a billionaire, and Bill Gurley a benchmark. The main venture capitalist that was involved in the company probably made what was considered one of the greatest venture capital investments of all time. Everyone quote unquote one in a way, and in the like lesson, if I'm being super cynical, is is maybe it did work. You know, maybe this sort of terrible behavior did works, got rewarded and right, even if he lost control of his company, he got the money. That's right the way I feel. You know, I'm not exactly crying for him in his billions of dollars, but I you know, ultimately Uber was his baby, and that was more about the company entire life. He had a girlfriend, lost her, had a mother, had a family, and his mother died tragically and completely out of the blue. He really had no one. Even his closest friends and colleagues sort of alienated him towards the end. So the one thing he had and really the reason he started fighting for it so desperately later on, is this company. And so you might argue that, you know, he did get fabulously wealthy, but he lost one of the most important things in his life too. I can see why you call it a tragic story in some ways, and it'll be interesting to see what the lesson becomes, what the valley does with this. So going back to the inner workings of Uber, you talk in your book about this competitive intelligence and about an uber's case, you could argue they crossed the line, but where where is the line? Because you also write everyone in Silicon Valley has some version of this, So where does it go from being okay to being not okay? It's really funny. There was a saga the other day on the Internet about this company that just came out. It was called Superhuman. It's an email company. It's it's totally a value thing. But basically they use a tracking pixel, which is fairly common in email marketing and sort of basically tells you when you open an email, but it sends tracking pixels to anyone that you send an email for. And so the idea is you can tell when you have opened an email, if you send it to someone, how many times they've read it, where in the world they are when they've read it. And the company sort of launched thinking that this was an okay thing, right because so many other types of services do this, And when someone pointed out, like, oh my god, what do you like? This is crazy? This is like Fucoldian panopticon, right, like why are you doing this? And there was a minor freak out. Again it was like a tech thing, but but I think we're in a moment right now where the norms of what is acceptable in tech is starting to at least be questioned, if not changing, you know, and I think people are reckoning with the power of how tech can shape and transform society. I get in my book, like I do think that the moment that Trump was elected was this sort of moment that folks said, oh my god. You know, immediately everyone turned to Facebook and these disinformation campaigns. And there's still question on how much that shape things at all, but like the idea, just the idea that people were manipulated by ads and even fake information on Facebook gave people this idea that, oh my god, tech tech has more power than we thought it did. And so I think the norms around what is acceptable, which is you know, maybe surveillance type tech that Uber was doing, or you know, monitoring how much people spend on their credit cards per month, monitoring what Lift its biggest competitor was doing. Heaven in Hell. Yeah, totally, Heaven in Hell. These two really nefarious programs that they thought were cool, but we're actually pretty quickly they were sure. So Heaven was this internal program at Uber that allowed basically for a time, anyone inside the company to see where any car and any user was on Earth ever, right, and there were no safeguards around it internally, anyone could look it up. Like there's one scene where Travis at an event with just sort of a bunch of folks at a hotel dinner, he displays Heaven on this big screen in a room and anyone can just sort of look at where all these users are. It's just really sort of no care for user privacy and where anyone is. It's sensitive information where I take a car in the world, right, Like I don't want people knowing where I am all the time, right, Yeah. Terrifying and so hell. The counterpoint to that hell was Uber's way of monitoring its biggest American competitor, Lift, and sort of through a bunch of different tracking methods, were able to tell which drivers were driving for Lift, how much they were getting paid, so Uber would spend slightly more money to get them to abandon Lift and come over to Uber. And there's just questions around how ethical that was and how much spuying on your competitors you should do, and what's acceptable, which are big questions. Do you think they felt they were crossing the line, or do you think when you tell me that story about Travis putting this up on a screen, it doesn't seem like it was some big internal secret, right. And that's the thing I ran up against in my reporting over and over when I would discover something or someone else would discover something, employees inside would be like, why are you freaking out about this? This is like a common thing, or we've had this for years that you just very everybody does this, yes, or everyone does it, and like that's the thinking that I think is really pervasive even now in the valley and really dangerous. And I don't think folks in the tech world fully appreciate that normal people don't know these things, right. They don't really know what norms are or what they're comfortable with. And part of that, I think is the failing of the media too getting into how these things work that we use every every part of our lives, you know, are involved in them, and what we're okay with. I want to go to the role of the venture capitalists and this talk a little bit about Bell Gurley. I love this quote you've gotten your book from Gurley about Kalinnik. If we let him out of the box at any point during the day. He'll destroy the entire world. But why couldn't the vcs control Kalinik? I sort of look at VC from a few different angles, you know. I think part of how VC works shapes how these companies have to act the way venture capitalists invest. They don't want to flip a company for two x. They need to flip it for ten x or whatever. You know. They need to make it sell or ipo and make their investment really a grand slam. Yeah, because a lot of investing is a lot of failures, right, So it's pushing harder and Gurley eventually turns on Kalenik. But for a lot of the time, you supported all the moves that Kalenik was making and was just as aggressive as him. And there's a question as to his indemnity in this whole thing, and how culpable he is for some of the things. Our adventure capitalist part of the problem in the valley. If you ask an entrepreneur who has raised VC again, I don't pity them too much once they say it's a series A worth thirty million dollars or whatever, because you just get a lot of these damn, investors are trying to make me do something. But but but that puts you on a trajectory and you have to grow. It's grow or guy, you can't do anything but go up into the left on your charts when you have to make your presentations to vcs and to get there, that means doing anything you can, and a lot of the times that means shady, subversive practices. You know, whether it's in like social networking and sharing phone book contact lists without people's knowledge, or in ride hailing where you're doing sort of shady tracking mechanisms or even thinking of ways to track other drivers or even passengers. I think it perverts the idea that you should in some entrepreneurs, at least who don't have like a fully formed moral compass. It just it sort of makes you think you have to grow at all costs, and sometimes that means going into the darker side of how how growth works. And it's making me think that the venture capitalists don't always have they're not always the adult in the room either. They don't always have the moral compass. Ideally, you have someone that's very involved and can guide you. But I don't think that's the case at the end of the day, they need to make this company worth a lot of money and sell it, either take it to IPO or sell it to Facebook, Google, microsore one of the big five companies that end up buying a lot of these companies anyway. And that's that's a motivation, right and that provides perverse incentives over time, and a lot of the time vcs vcs are just as aggressive as any entrepreneur. And do you think that's changed over time? I mean, do you think was there a mythical period in the past, speaking of myths, where venture capitalists were all about creation and all about building a company and the money kind of came second, or do you think it's always been all about the money and the big cash out day. The rise of MBA business culture, I think kind of changed how people think and work a lot. Once the finance guys started flooding into tech companies. I think that that kind of just changed how these companies work. That's why engineers are still so vaunted and because like the roots of the valley are about building and cre and tinkering. Steve Jobs is this still mythical figure because he cared about users and the user experience, and it's really about computing, right, And I think earlier on it was about building a computer in a garage and worshiping that, and now it's really about the Internet and software, and you see different types of folks sort of flooding into that. So you know, we're always instalgic for periods of the past, and it may or may not have existed, yeah exactly, Like I'm probably oversimplifying some things, but I think I think it has changed a lot with the rise of the Internet and the rise of this sort of NBA culture. And maybe there's also a point where the money has just become so big that it's a tipping point, right, And so many of these stories are about a tipping point. And that might be true for Uber, and it might be true for the valley broadly. Writ Right, once the money just got to a certain point, the corruption sets in. And I'm using the word corruption loosely. Yeah, yeah, right, not necessarily in the legal sense. But I think these numbers, even the small rounds, what a series a round of venture capital used to be was like maybe five million or less, and now you know, you're seeing like thirty to forty million dollars series A's right, these are wow. The amount of money getting put in earlier on is increasing exponentially in some cases, and that is having again adverse effects on how companies operate. So I do think they're going to hit a wall with some of this, or maybe I hate to use the B word of bubble, but it can't keep going like this. But that has also invited private equity and hedge funds and all this other money coming in start flooding in, and so it gets bigger and bigger until it all goes splat. Right, that's right. Why is it that some companies like Uber get the special dispensation to continue to lose money and other companies have immense pressure put on them to be profitable. Is that decision made in some kind of fair and calculated way, or is it that certain people just get a dispensation that others don't. It's so funny, and I go head to head with some vcs on this all the time. Their favorite buzzword is economies of scale. Right, once you hit certain large enough point, the math starts to work apparently, and you need to be able to have metal I guess I mean that's TVD on Uber at least, but you need to be have the metal to burn enormous amounts of money to get there, and that means raising enormous amounts of money up front in order to do that. I don't think that works for every company, right Like I think at some point because a lot of folks like to look back at the first dot com bubble and say, look that these IPOs were happening and everyone crashed. This going to happen again. And the distinction they make is that the revenues that current internet companies have are not insignificant. There are like in the tens or hundreds and millions of dollars in revenue which didn't exist during the first dot com era. But you just wonder whether you can push into profitability, you know, and what point and how long it's going to be in what point you have to do that? And I think it's just different mindsets. You think the West Coast is vcs are much more comfortable with burn huge piles of cash over time, and the East Coast and folks who actually like to see profitable companies make a profit are more conservative, they would say in that respect. And I don't know if that's going to ever change. Can Uber ever make money? Is it structurally unprofitable or do you think there's just going to be a moment where they can cut back on the expenses and achieve those economies of scale. What Uber would say is their current business is driving other lines of business. They everyone wants to be a platform Silicon Valley, and that's the argument that Uber, right, yes, and that's what they're saying now, we're not a car service, where a transportation platform, right, which is like I sort of rule my eyes at because literally everyone wants to be a platform, and they all say that that. I didn't know that was the new cliche. That's fast. Oh yeah, someone says a platform. You know, they're full of it. But I think but I think the thing that shows some promise even though it's still the new cash suck for them is their food delivery stuff and using some of their existing assets to try to push into a new industry. But you know, you could also argue they're just kicking the can down the road, right, Like, at the end of the day, you either have to increase prices for customers or decrease profits for drivers, right, And you're balancing a very fine three sided marketplace essentially between customers drivers in the company itself, and someone has to at the end of the day eat those costs. And you and I have seen artificially depressed prices on the rides that we take for a very long period of time, and slowly those either have to go up or the drivers have to get paid less. If you look at lifts S one and paperwork, they subtly say that they're essentially going to increase costs for drivers over time or decrease what they're paying them because like the only way they can get closer to profitability at all is by doing one of those two things. Lift is even more screwed in a way than Uber because they don't have these other lines of business to point out. It's interesting, though, is you talk. I'm thinking that Uber is obviously really different from a Google and a face Book because there's no network effect with Uber, right, And I think it might even be fundamentally different than an Amazon because once you shop on Amazon it's just so easy, whereas Uber, the consumer switching costs from Uber to Lift is not that high, and so I don't I wonder how much flexibility do they have? No, you're exactly right. And the problem Uber had and has is that it's been commoditized and done very quickly. Right. So like even though the verb and brand, Uber is still sort of there, and that's like a positive thing. A lot of folks, myself included, will open Uber, look at the price, and then open Lift and see if there's like a buck or too cheaper, and then I might go over to the other one, right, because it's essentially the same service, all this driver's drive for the same company. There's this really good book called hard Landing about the airline industry. It compares because airlines are also like a sort of commodity industry. Right. They look at Southwest Air as a case study where brand and the lock in of customers based on these added things, and a lot of it was like brand and then over time like loyalty, point programs and things like that become the differentiator for you, right, And so I think people are still price sensitive on it airlines a lot of the time. But you have to find ways to attract people to your service, and I think Uber is testing that right now, or at least dipping his toe into it with rewards programs. How do you think about Dara so far. Reid Hoffman and his book Blitz Scaling talks about how in all startups you have to move from being a pirate to commanding and Navy. Is Dara the guy to do that. So he's been at the Helm for a little more than a year. He was not who you know. We get into towards the end of the book. There's this big board fight. The board becomes entirely dysfunctional, and so many great anecdotes it was so fun to report, actually insane and maddening. It essentially comes down to a few candidates and no one really wanted Dara to be the guy to take over, but they end up with him over a series of essentially yeah exactly like no one was satisfied, but he became the guy. He's a very straight laced professional CEO. He knew how to take a company public in some ways, and in that most of his job was not being Travis for the first year of his entire CEO And he's got a great quote. Over the next eighteen months, Uber's new chief executive would systematically undermine nearly everything his predecessor had stood for. That's it. He went on an apology tour if there's a moment in London where they are trying to bar Uber from operating and he had to sort of give maya cop post to everyone. If you look at all of his statements, it's basically we are not the old Uber. And so in the sense that he's not Travis, he was probably pretty good. But there's also a question of can he be as inspiring to some of the people there as the former leader was. It's back to that dark side, but also the positive side. Can he what was good about Travis? And can Dara replate ken Dar replate takeaway what was bad? And is there can you can you still have what was good? Yeah? Totally. I mean, look again, for all of Travis's faults or many, I think one of the things he was really able to do is is rally these troops around him and like so like cried Hoffman was saying they were a pirate ship company, but they didn't know when they turned into a navy right, And he wasn't able to sort of operate on any mode but rallying his fellow pirates and taking over everybody. But you'd say, you'd say it's still tbd whether whether whether Dara can keep the good while getting rid of the bad. Dar's a numbers guy. He was a CFO at m I see for a very long time Barry Dealer's company. He and Barry Diller are still really close. And he's a numbers guy, right, So he looks at the balance sheet, sees how much they're bleeding, and has to start cutting and changing things in the street. Probably really likes that. But you know, employees there were used to some level of whatever comfort or just decisions that might not be as popular. So it's still only eighteen months in or whatever he's at now, it's still I'll give him like a little more time to see what here. You start to make a judgment. Yeah, On that note, I also wonder a sort of corollary to that. As much as he's tried to change the culture, is the culture of a company set with its founder? In other words, is that darker side of Uber still? Is it a seed that's waiting to blow up in some ways, not just through the ongoing investigations, but just that is going to exist in the company, regardless of what Darr tries to do to change it. Right. No, I love that point because if you look at I mean every smart VC that's trying to give advice to the founders. Is talks about like culture set from the very beginning and tone at the top. I think it's very difficult to change that, and the authority that a founder has over that is very powerful. Right. So even if you look at like Twitter, there was a time when Twitter was in the news all the time for being one of the most dysfunctional companies ever, right, And a lot of that came with the in fighting between the three founders of the company from the very beginning, and to this day it's still it still shapes Twitter in some ways, it still shapes the company. Google is seen as like a sort of grad school of the valley and very engineering heavy, and that's from Larry Page and Sergey On down right. That's how they started the company, and that's what's most treasured inside of Google. So that DNA really sets the tone for the company and it's hard to change that. Over Travis Kalenik is gone, but as a ghost haunts the hallways. I love despite all the press around the culture and around the destructiveness of the brolite culture at Uber, which is a huge part of your book as well, with Susan Fowler's letter. Is that going to change? I mean again, this is the question, because you know, bad behavior ultimately got rewarded, like a lot of people got rich at the IPO. Right. I live in San Francisco, and I'm already seeing home prices go up. I live around many Uber employees, you know. I talk about this thing called the like the cocktail party test, where it's whether or not you're embarrassed to where your T shirt or tell people at a cocktail party where you work. And there's like a version of the old Wall Street Journal test. Right, if you're not afraid to see it a headline in the Wall Street Journal, that's it. And so there's a period where Uber employees didn't wear their swag out in public, and now they're back to it, you know, now they're they're sort of wearying again. And maybe that's just the proof that you can act, you can act with impunity and get away with it as long as everybody gets paid. Yep, that's a fairly devastating quote. You quote another CEO, female CEO named Karina Lake, which she wrote in an email it's demoralizing and said that something like Uber can even exist and even thrive. Do you agree with that? Look? I think if there are founders trying to do things the right way, it's really it is really depressing to see that other companies can thrive when they're not doing it quote unquote the right way. And maybe that's naive. Maybe maybe someone like me or someone like her look at the world in a way that is moralizing and not cynical enough. Sometimes, you know, maybe maybe this is how you have to build companies. But I'd like to think that that you don't have to be an asshole to build a great company, you know, and like you can be an entrepreneur and guide things in a way that you're proud of, or that like you can have a headline in the Wall Street Journal and not have to cringe about it, or at least not have to cover up your behavior. You wrote at the end of the book, And I think it's it's interesting that it is an open question. I wondered if there would be a new generation of Travis Kalenik protege as soon. The hope I have in this I met a young kid I was at like a New York Times event last year when I was reporting the book, and I met a young, like nineteen year old who's fresh out of Harvard and he was African American and identified as gay. And he heard me talk and he was like, you know, part of why I want to go into tech is to try to like change what that culture kind of looks like. And since tech is not going away, be a part of the force for representing like all types of people building these things instead of like young white men who've grown up in largely in it was at least safe financial bubbles or whatever. Right, maybe maybe the people building these products should look more like the rest of the world instead of a monoculture in the valley. And that I thought was pretty hopeful. Maybe there's maybe the people behind it are going to look different in a generation. I love this. We get to end on a positive note here, it's not all dark. Thank you so much for coming, Thanks for having me. It's striking to me how many things about Travis Kalenik and the Uber story turn accepted wisdom on its head. Most of all, it's supposed to be good to be paranoid. It's supposed to be good to have failed in the past. But in Kalinich's case, the past failure it seems to have sharpened already sharp edges to a knife point, and the paranoia took an indisputably dark turn that still might destroy Uber. It's also interesting to me that there are all these big questions that we want answered, at least that I want answered, but real life, a real business, doesn't always yield clarity, or at least not the clarity. Would like. We want there to be a moral to this story, a good moral, but I'm not sure there is. At least the moral might be to do as Kalenick did rather than the opposite. Would like for a kindler, gentler company to have had the same degree of success that Uber did. It's not clear to me that it would have. Most of all, would like to believe that Silicon Valley, which is so critically important to our economy and our lives, is going to have a day of reckoning. It's going to leave its ugly childlike aspects in the past. It's going to grow up. It's not so clear to me that's going to happen, at least not anytime soon. Making a Killing is a co production of Pushkin Industries and Chalk and Blade. It's produced by Ruth Barnes and Rosie Stoffer. My executive producers are Alison mcclein. No relation in making Casey. The executive producer at Pushkin is Mia Loebell. Engineering is by Jason Gambrell. Our music is by Jed Flood. Special thanks to Jacob Weisberg at Pushkin and everyone on the show. I'm Bethany mcclein. Thanks so much for listening. Find me on Twitter Bethany mac twelve and let me know who you've enjoyed hearing from.