Airbnb feels benign and optimistic, the way we all used to feel about Silicon Valley. Uber is the dark twin, a symbol of rapacious capitalism and dehumanising technology. On reading Brad Stone’s book, it becomes clear that much of this divergence can be attributed to the personality of each company’s chief executive – Brian Chesky at Airbnb and Travis Kalanick at Uber.
.. watching Casino Royale, Daniel Craig’s first James Bond movie. In one scene, Bond is driving in the Bahamas and glances down at his phone to check a graphical icon of his car moving on a map. Entranced, Camp became obsessed by the idea of an upmarket limousine service with vehicles that customers could track on a phone.
.. He is irresistibly drawn to unnecessary arguments.
.. Kalanick, to use an expression one would never hear in an elegant restaurant, is an asshole. Yet it is impossible to read The Upstarts and not conclude that he is a brilliant asshole.
.. dizzying swerves of direction that seem reckless at the time but turn out to have been visionary, such as giving up on being an upmarket limo company to become a mass-market ride-hailing service. It is he who sees, almost from the beginning, that Uber is not only a more convenient way of ordering a cab, but a way of reconfiguring the relationship between time, space and money in the city.
.. Time and again, Kalanick makes the risky but right decision after rejecting the advice of clever and reasonable colleagues. It takes a certain kind of character to behave like this.
.. He argued that although a lack of social skills will hold you back in most areas of life, it can be an advantage to the entrepreneur in possession of an innovative idea. Those with a normal desire to fit in with people around them are easily persuaded to abandon original, strange-sounding notions; those who don’t care about being liked pursue them regardless. To be unbending, it helps to be insensitive.
.. An industrial designer by trade, he takes great care over how it feels to use his service. Good designers are usually good listeners, naturally curious about human psychology and behaviour.
.. “Brian was always worried about how do we scale our culture – how does every Airbnb office feel?”
.. He is interested in people in the way a physicist is interested in atoms. What fascinates him about his business is the mathematical complexity of getting enough drivers to enough riders at the right time, and at the right price. Indeed, it is a point of pride to him that Uber minimises human interaction. “We don’t own cars and we don’t hire drivers . . . It’s very straightforward. I want to push a button and get a ride.”
.. “Travis’s Law”. In summary, this states that if a product is so good that the public decides it must have it, all political opposition will eventually cede to pressure and become support. The business imperative is therefore to move fast and be uncompromising: build it, and they will fold.
Uber’s C.E.O. Plays With Fire
So Apple would not find out that Uber had secretly been tracking iPhones even after its app had been deleted from the devices, violating Apple’s privacy guidelines.
.. In a quest to build Uber into the world’s dominant ride-hailing entity, Mr. Kalanick has openly disregarded many rules and norms, backing down only when caught or cornered. He has flouted transportation and safety regulations, bucked against entrenched competitors and capitalized on legal loopholes and gray areas to gain a business advantage.
.. Mr. Kalanick, 40, is driven to the point that he must win at whatever he puts his mind to and at whatever cost — a trait that has now plunged Uber into its most sustained set of crises since its founding in 2009.
“Travis’s biggest strength is that he will run through a wall to accomplish his goals,” said Mark Cuban, the Dallas Mavericks owner and billionaire investor who has mentored Mr. Kalanick. “Travis’s biggest weakness is that he will run through a wall to accomplish his goals. That’s the best way to describe him.”
.. Mr. Kalanick mixes with celebrities like Jay Z and businessmen including President Trump’s chief economic adviser, Gary D. Cohn. But it has alienated some Uber executives, employees and advisers. Mr. Kalanick, with salt-and-pepper hair, a fast-paced walk and an iPhone practically embedded in his hand, is described by friends as more at ease with data and numbers (some consider him a math savant) than with people.
.. the company has been reeling from allegations of a machismo-fueled workplace where managers routinely overstepped verbally, physically and sometimes sexually with employees.
.. Uber is financed by a who’s who of investors including Goldman Sachs and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund,
.. Mr. Kalanick controls the majority of the company’s voting shares with a small handful of other close friends, and has stacked Uber’s board of directors with many who are invested in his success.
.. He is interviewing candidates for a chief operating officer, even as some employees question whether a new addition will make any difference
.. “Scour was about efficiency. Swoosh was about efficiency. It’s just the way his brain is wired. It’s like the way Uber works right now: What’s the fastest, cheapest and most efficient way to get from point A to point B? That consumes him, and all parts of his life.”
.. When the company struggled, Mr. Kalanick and a partner took the tax dollars from employee paychecks — which are supposed to be withheld and sent to the Internal Revenue Service — and reinvested the money into the start-up, even as friends and advisers warned him the action was potentially illegal.
.. he once held the world’s second-highest score for the Nintendo Wii Tennis video game.
.. “The Travis Kalanick I came to know 17 years ago was relentless in pursuit of his goals at the expense of those who supported him along the way, deluded by his own embellished personal narrative, and a serial prevaricator,”
.. he told Mr. Kalanick, “Sometimes in business you have to battle the establishment, and it can get brutal and ugly.”
.. The idea for Uber came in 2009 from Garrett Camp, a friend of Mr. Kalanick’s, who became fixated on hailing a private luxury car with a smartphone app after being unable to catch cabs in San Francisco.
.. His pacing is so legendary, his father once said, that he wore a hole in the carpeting.
.. In October 2010, the company shortened its name to Uber after receiving a cease-and-desist letter from San Francisco officials for marketing itself as a taxi company without the proper licenses and permits.
.. In some places, Uber employees were also told to create computer programs known as scripts that would automatically vote for the ride-hailing service in city-administered surveys.
.. Hollywood stars were eager to buy into Uber, which they had started using to get around. Actors like Edward Norton, Olivia Munn and Sophia Bush took small stakes in the company.
.. Mr. Kalanick and a top lieutenant, Emil Michael, sometimes hung out with Leonardo DiCaprio, who is also an investor, and Jay Z, whose wife, Beyoncé, performed for Uber employees at a poolside party in Las Vegas in 2015.
.. Mr. Kalanick began mixing with elite business executives. He developed a close relationship with Mr. Cohn, then a top-ranking executive at Goldman Sachs. At one point, the two men spoke on a near daily basis.
.. Mr. Kalanick’s main mantra was “growth above all else.”
.. Uber’s top performers were often promoted and protected. When one general manager, a title for a city-level chief, threw a coffee mug at a subordinate in a fit of rage, the incident was reported to human resources — but there was no follow up.
.. Friends and employees told Mr. Kalanick that he should at least pretend to care about how it looked to take such a hostile stance with Uber’s users. Several described him as “emotionally unintelligent.”
.. Slice collected its customers’ emailed Lyft receipts from their inboxes and sold the anonymized data to Uber. Uber used the data as a proxy for the health of Lyft’s business.
.. Uber’s “driver satisfaction rating,” an internal metric, has dropped since February 2016, and roughly a quarter of its drivers turn over on average every three months.
.. The tool, developed to aid driver safety and to trick fraudsters, essentially showed a fake version of Uber’s app to some people to disguise the locations of cars and drivers. It soon became a way for Uber drivers to evade capture by law enforcement in places where the service was deemed illegal.
.. Mr. Kalanick told his engineers to “geofence” Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., a way to digitally identify people reviewing Uber’s software in a specific location. Uber would then obfuscate its code from people within that geofenced area, essentially drawing a digital lasso around those it wanted to keep in the dark. Apple employees at its headquarters were unable to see Uber’s fingerprinting.
Google vs Uber with Judge Alsup
I want to start briefly with our document production, which is due on Friday. We are making good progress. And I am expecting that by Friday we will be able to produce documents that are at Uber that are responsive to the Court’s order. Now — THE COURT: Responsive or all documents? MR. GONZÁLEZ: Well — THE COURT: That’s a cleverly worded thing. I didn’t just fall off the turnip truck. I know what you’re telling me.
.. And if you think for a moment that I’m going to stay my hand, because your guy is taking the Fifth Amendment, and not issue a preliminary injunction to shut down what happened here, you’re wrong. This is a very serious — now, some of the things in your motion are bogus. You’ve got things in there like lists of suppliers as trade secrets. Come on. It undermines the whole thing.
But there are some things in that motion that are very serious. They are genuine trade secrets. And if you don’t come in with a denial, you’re probably looking at a preliminary injunction.
.. If his truck driving company gets shut down because of theft of trade secrets on a record that he’s not willing to deny, too bad for him. Too bad. Listen, I’m not sympathetic to it. You represent somebody who’s in a mess. Well, they’re in a mess too.
.. THE COURT: You’ve got it all wrong. You’re trying to put the burden on me and on them. They have made a record. You are not even a party to the case. Uber is the party to the case. And on this record there is a good chance that Uber is going to get hit with a preliminary injunction come May 3rd. And if you want to deny the facts, go ahead. If you want to stand moot because of the Fifth Amendment, that’s your privilege. But you’re not going to slow this down — you’re not going to slow this down because of this kind of a situation. I’m sorry. The equity is on their side, not on your side.
.. THE COURT: No. This is — this is a nonstarter. I’m not going to get diverted off into you coming in here with — with no motion whatsoever, nothing, and trying to get special pleading because you represent somebody big, and get an under-seal hearing so the public can’t hear it. That’s not going to work.
.. If your guy is involved in criminal activity and has to have criminal lawyers of the caliber of these two gentlemen, who are the best, well, okay, they got the best. But it’s a problem that I can’t solve for you. And if you think I’m going to cut you slack because you’re looking at — your guy is looking at jail time, no.
.. If the Court grants our petition, then it means that this trade secrets issue goes into arbitration. And if he testifies there, it’s — it’s in confidence. It’s a big difference.
THE COURT: Ridiculous. It’s not in confidence. The United States Attorney can go subpoena information all day long.
.. If I cannot get a declaration from him, then, Your Honor, I’m going to do the following: We’re going to demonstrate to you that we are not using any of these things that they say he may have taken. That’s my point. And it’s a very important point. THE COURT: That would be a legitimate point
.. THE COURT: Listen, please don’t do this to me again. There’s going to be a lot of adverse headlines in this case on both sides. And I can’t stop that. And that’s — the public has a right — in fact, this whole transcript, I’m going to make it public. There’s nothing — what do you say?
.. if there’s not a clear-cut path to showing that those 14,000 documents weren’t used, then you’re looking at a preliminary injunction.
.. If you all keep insisting on redacting so much information, like — and you’re the guilty one on that, Mr. Verhoeven — then arbitration looks better and better. Because I’m not going to put up with it. If we’re going to be in a public proceeding, 99 percent of what — 90 percent, anyway, has got to be public. The stuff — this employment agreement by Google, it’s laughable that you want to keep that under wraps. Just laughable.
.. And I feel that so strongly. I am not — the U.S. District Court is not a wholly owned subsidiary of Quinn Emanuel or Morrison & Foerster or these two big companies. We belong to the public.
.. We are specifically not waiving either of those rights or privileges. And we would ask the Court, it’s simply the 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 27 question of identifying the name of a vendor who reviewed materials. This is something that can wait. THE COURT: No, it can’t wait. There is no basis for making this wait. At least on the record that I have now. And you were free for the last two weeks to bring any motion that you wanted, instead of a sandbag motion out of left field and the way you’re doing it here today. So the answer is no. Your objection is made for the record. Good. Okay.
.. THE COURT: And if you don’t — if you can’t order your guy to do what he’s required to do to meet the charges Mr. Verhoeven has leveled against him, and has proof to back it up, that sounds to me — then, to finish my thought, too bad.
.. Now, when I was practicing law, the idea that you could withhold the author of a document in a privilege log was also laughable. No such thing.
.. So maybe what you need to do is bring your own lawsuit against Uber. But I’m not giving you that relief right now. If you brought a formal motion with points and authorities that said I had to do that, of course, I would definitely consider that. But off the top of my head and the way this is being presented out of left field today, I would say you’re out of luck on that.
Waymo Asks Court to Block Uber’s Self-Driving Car Project
In February 2016, Mr. Levandowski left to start his own self-driving truck company, Otto. He sold it to Uber for $680 million six months later.
.. Mr. Droz said this did not surprise him because Mr. Levandowski had told him earlier that he wanted to start a self-driving car company and that Uber would be interested in “buying the team” responsible for the lidar being developed at Google.
.. Mr. Droz also said Mr. Levandowski, after being spotted at Uber headquarters while still working at Google, admitted to him that he had met with the ride-hailing service because he was looking for investors for his new company. Mr. Droz joined Google when it acquired 510 Systems in 2011, a self-driving car start-up he founded with Mr. Levandowski.