The Vergecast - Can you build a company like Uber without being a jerk?

Episode Date: September 9, 2019

On this week’ interview episode of The Vergecast, editor-in-chief of The Verge Nilay Patel sits down with New York Times reporter Mike Isaac. Isaac has been reporting on the ride-sharing company Uber for over five years now and just released a book all about Uber and the stories surrounding it called Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber.   Nilay and Mike talk about how Uber got to where it is today, Uber’s interactions with companies like Apple and Google, and whether or not you have to be a “jerk” to start a company that changes the world.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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He's a reporter at the New York Times. He's been covering Uber for five years. He just wrote a book about Uber called Super Pumped. It is basically the history of Uber's founding where it came from, how Travis Kalanick and his co-founders got the idea, how they built the company, the very peculiar set of morals and values

they instilled the company with to achieve growth at all costs. And then obviously it's extraordinarily tumultuous. 2017, which saw Calnick get ousted, new CEO come in and basically the entire company fall apart and get rebuilt. It's an absolutely tremendous book. Mike did hundreds of interviews with hundreds of people. It's extremely deeply reported. You probably knows more about Uber than anybody. We talked about how Uber got to where it is, whether you have to be a jerk to start a company that changes the world, the way that Uber changed the world.

That's a really difficult question. You can see that Mike is really thinking about it after having written this book. And Uber's interactions with some big companies like Apple and Google, which are far more contentious. than I think I even ever expected. Check it out. This is Mike Isaac is the author of Super Pumpt, the Battle for Uber. All right, Mike Isaac is here. Welcome, Mike.

Hey, thanks for having me. So you have written a book. Ostensibly, I have written a book. It's right here. It's called Super Pumpt, the Battle for Uber. Yep. It's no lie to say the book is extraordinarily well-received. It's extremely deeply reported.

I was reading the sort of end of it. It's like 200 interviews or something crazy. Yeah. Extremely reported on the sort of rise in Falunato of necessarily Uber itself, which continues and seems we've got to talk about where it's going. Yep. But particularly of Uber's founder and CEO Travis Kallanek, who is, I think, a parable for the entire tech industry of that moment.

Right before he started taping, we were discussing 2014, which is like when a lot of things went down, it seems like a different universe than now. So many things have changed. I mean, I remember, yeah, I started the beat in 2014 when I joined the Times. I was part of Recode, which is now part of Vox. But it was this sort of drumbeat where every other week or month they were raising another billion dollars as a private company. It seemed like they were kind of unstoppable in their trudge across the globe. And they just seemed like a real, real different company than they do now.

And I don't know if that was, if that's just perception versus like the reality of what they are, you know, or if the market conditions have really changed, maybe a little bit of both. But yeah, it's like now there, today I think before I walked in here, the stock price was at a record low or something. And they seemed... Your book came out. Yeah. Well, congratulations. Yeah, God, I'm sorry. I don't want to take credit for that.

But it definitely, they just seem more vulnerable now than they did four or five years ago. And four or five years ago, it really was. They were taking on billions of dollars in venture capital money. And that money was earmarked. Go lose this money to build your monopoly. And then you'll own the world. and we'll have the monopoly and we'll just charge monopoly prices everyone. And it'll be fine.

I mean, that was like, it was pretty naked. Well, the thesis I think back then, which, you know, doesn't sound completely unreasonable, was, look, we're going to build this huge war chest and raise, ultimately, I think it was over $10 billion in private capital. And we're going to just charge headlong into all these markets before governments can stop us, before transportation officials can stop us, before competitors can really, like, get in our way. and the advantage we will have, and Travis uses internally or something like this, is like this capital advantage against everyone else.

And for a while, I think that worked, and I kind of maybe believed it worked, and other folks that were just like, okay, you know, the investors sort of believed it worked. And then things really changed beyond, like, the gnarliness of Uber's 2017 and, like, a zillion different scandals. The funding environment changed, like SoftBank entered the picture with their, like, $100 billion vision fund. They can swing around and do whatever they want with. The rise of competitors in different countries really changed the environment.

Uber was not on home territory in Southeast Asia when they were fighting some places like Gojek is, I think, a competitor of theirs. So really a lot more competitors with a lot more money than they expected came up almost overnight. And then 2017 just was like the cherry on the crap cake where they just got their asses kicked for a full year. So let's start at the start. I think the narrative of Uber, particularly for listeners, the Vurchcast is pretty well familiar, but let's take it from sort of like a meta direction. You set out to write this book. How do you decide where to start telling the story of Uber?

What was the frame that you were thinking of? Yeah, I think the reason I chose Uber was less about the company and more about what kind of what you were talking about, this parable for tech in general. And I think early, maybe let's say 10 or 15 years ago, I think tech was viewed with a more optimistic lens through everyone kind of adjacent to it and in it, right? Like, I think you and I wrote stories about Facebook back then. That would be probably very different than we do now, right? It's very true.

And I've looked at that arc as it happened. And I think back then, like, folks didn't really have a grasp on how transformative some of these things they were building were and are. And only now are we sort of catching up to the idea that tech really does undergarde pretty much every part of the world around us and can change, you know, cultures if you have like a disinformation campaign in Myanmar, right? Or they can result in driver deaths in Brazil if you barrel into a new country with just sort of unfettered growth as your directive, right? So I think back then it wasn't really, the negative consequences of tech wasn't like top of mind. And that is also

when Travis sort of as a serial entrepreneur started as third. startup with a few other folks and jumped into Uber. And it really was a different type of business where it wasn't just them building a software business. It was a transportation company that really capitalized on the iPhone and the admin in the iPhone. And so from there, without the sort of tech lash that we're going in right now, they were able to really expand very rapidly. I think not much of the sort of tech bad behavior had been surfaced quite yet.

And I think Travis sort of became, over time, the poster child for the bad boy of tech or like this is like the tech, you know, whether you believe he deserves it or not, the tech bro, that is sort of a caricature of how valet folks think of some valley engineers and valley types. And so I think his standing in and Uber standing in for the shining example of what can go wrong in tech with hubris and like obscene wealth and growth at all costs made the company. and the character is a lot more interesting for me. So let's talk about Travis. I mean, he's very clearly the main character of your book. It seems as though he was paranoid early on, driven to grow at all costs, made a number of questionable decisions. But I get the sense, having furiously read the book to prepare for this interview. Do you have, like, a kind of a grudging respect for him?

Absolutely. I think the thing that I feel grateful for, even, was to take, I mean, look, he could become an easy caricature of, like, a bad guy, right? Right. And like in 2017, when all of the, when all the shit was going down, he was like basically an evil cartoon character. And I was given the space in this book to just sort of flesh him out as more than a two-dimensional character. He's a human being, right? And he has motivations. And I wanted to dig into what makes someone, you know, after I talked to a billion VCs and all these different folks who were around him, like, they would all say the same thing. I've never met anyone as driven or hard charging or whatever in my entire career as I have with this guy. And for whatever faults you see in him or for the reasons that that eventually was his undoing, it was still like he was a unique entrepreneur, right? And he was willing to sort of go as far as he could in many situations and really grew this company from nothing from the early days. So I definitely respect him in the sense that like he built this enterprise when it was, it just didn't exist, you know? And that's still a question people have.

Like, could it have been done if it wasn't for him? I mean, I think that's kind of the big question raised. throughout the book, which is Uber is, it should exist. Like, I use Uber. Sure. Right? Like, it seems like a very natural thing to exist. Yep.

Taxi dispatch is something. Kenan should be automated. They went ahead and automated. They took a lot, they cut a lot of corners along the way. Yep. And I think one of the sort of big Valley questions to this day is, do you need to be that kind of founder to will this kind of company into existence? Absolutely.

It's, yeah, like the, I put it less colorfully, but like, I put it more colorfully and somewhere else, but it was just, do you have to be a jerk to build a world-changing company, right? And I don't know if you have to be a jerk to build a world-changing company, but you might have had to be a jerk to build an Uber, you know, just because, like, think of the barriers to entry in the taxi and transportation industry and how those differ from, say, a software business like Facebook, right? Now, Mark Zuckerberg has made his fair share of enemies over the years, but he doesn't have. people, or he didn't, at least early on, I was going to say, maybe not now, but at least earlier on, he didn't have, like, mob boss, mafioso types ready to, like, break his legs for entering their market or whatever. So it definitely, it was a harder industry from the outset, and I think it took, I think that took its toll on Travis's mind, along with, I talk a little bit about in

the book the sense of distrust that he has for really anyone around him from being spurned by venture capitalists early on in his career. So I want to talk about three kind of big moments with Uber that you have built out beautifully in the book, but I want to unpack them a little bit. The first, obviously, is Susan Fowler. That seemed to be the breaking point in which the company's culture just caught up with it. Susan Fowler publishes her blog post, says it's been a weird year at Uber, lays out the litany of harassment she faced, reporting to HR. There's functionally no HR, even though Uber's like a big company worth billions of dollars. She's out, right?

And she says, this was a horrible year. It seemed like A, that had a breaking point for Uber. It led to a much greater consequences throughout the valley. But that seems like the moment where a lot of things crystallized. It was definitely, I mean, if you can remember back in 2017, this was pre Harvey Weinstein. This was pre like Me Too getting a real lift from the times breaking the Weinstein stuff. And it was also right after Trump had taken the presidency. and there were a lot of just sort of forces happening, forces sort of like crystallizing

that I think were waiting for some sort of breaking point in many different industries, not just in, I mean, like, you know, they broke this open in the entertainment industry and then it just sort of launched into a huge movement, right? And I also, in the book, I talk a little bit about how I think this nebulous feeling of like tech might not be good for us was sort of made more concrete in the idea that, oh, did Facebook influence the election? And to this day, we still don't know to what degree, if any, you know, these things changed how people voted or whatever. But it was this nambulist thought that, oh, well, you know, Mark Zuckerberg was asleep at the wheel and now, you know, Russians are manipulating us.

Or this tech bro is running this company and women are being rampantly harassed and the misogyny is ruling the roost, right? And I think, Susan, to her credit, like she, I imagine had no idea what she was going to set off with this blog post, but she presses publish in February. and all of this pent up frustration, anger internally for things that many employees had felt just was sort of like a damn bursting moment. And I was telling someone else, like, once you lose your employees inside of the company, then you're really screwed because you can do all these fights outside and say, hunger down, the press is against us or whatever. But when your own people are revolting, you're in trouble.

And they also are calling you. That's right. I mean, that's the moment that journalists love. So that blog post is published, and then there's, you described it already a year of pain. And what's really interesting to me, a lot of the early parts of the book lay out how little trust Travis Kalenick has in investors and VCs. He says, they're always out for themselves, and he constructs the company of all this power. And he gets ousted anyway. Walk us through that.

Yeah. So for a long time, you know, Travis in his early days had these issues with VCs, how they treated him. and just very early on he was burned by an early relationship with an investor. And he kind of swore to himself he was just not going to be put in a position we take advantage of again. So he built in protections over the years that cemented his control over his company. I think the real coup for him was when they raised $3.5 billion from the Saudi public investment fund, he also added the ability to give himself additional board seats to essentially

place puppets in these seats that would vote for him whenever he wanted. And, you know, any logical investor that was on the board of the company would probably bristle when you give unfettered access to or unfettered control of the entity to this founder who may make a bad decision or whatever, you know. But one of the themes that I sort of hammer on in the book is this idea that founder worship always brings about this sort of like cult-like mentality of the founder knows what he's doing. doing, so we should let him be in full control, and, you know, Zuckerberg built this world-changing company, and Larry and Sergey, or billionaires, 10 times over, or whatever, so, you know,

the cult of the founder is a good thing. And, you know, Travis, again, like, the sort of, like, overarching point is that Travis would represent the worst version of that scenario playing out if you give the founder control and you want to oust him, and he's unable to let go of his company. But he makes sure that if anyone's going to take him out of the company, he's not going to go without a fight. And that's ultimately what happens. It was quite a fight. Very, very public. Very, very public.

Actually, in the book, you mentioned the gold room a couple times, which is a gentleman's entertainment club in the New York, and the night before you broke the story in the Times, Travis was leaving. And the night before you broke this story, have I ever told you this before? I don't know. The night before you were you in the gold club? I was not in the gold club. Okay. The night before you broke the story in the Times, Travis was leaving. I received from like 15 jobs ago a text,

Hey, my friend is a dancer at the Gold Club. She says Travis is out tomorrow. What? There's like, there's no way to fall. Like, no way to follow that up. Whoa. And like, I was like, what do I do with this information? Oh, my gosh.

It was an absolutely wild note. Whoa. Oh my God. No, I hit what that is. I can't believe I've ever told it. And I was like, well, I was just going to wait from my. That's beautiful. Wow.

It was like very late. anybody would have talked to as was done. I was like, I'll just wait. Like, literally, that was the reaction that we had. Like, well, it's going to happen. But we can't run that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, right, totally. And then the next morning I was like, well, there it is.

Wow. But that's the culture, right? I mean, that's for me to get that twisted source of information, that there's only one kind of company culture that allows that to happen. So that's the year. But even though he'd built in all those protections, he did get ousted. Yeah, you know, A lot of things led to, so it ultimately came down to this thing where I go into it in pretty

great detail in the book, but essentially like his own people kind of turn against him and sort of vowed to launch a campaign against the guy and say, and this is, I inadvertently become a character in the book just because it was very weird to report it out in retrospect and realize that I was being used as like a weapon against Travis. But like, essentially like threaten the guy and say, you know, you better step down and we're to take this fight out into the public. And so after like a year of being beaten down brutally and some other sort of like really tragic things happening in his life, he does step down of his own accord. And almost immediately, though, he sees how he's betrayed and then starts

to fight back up again and it goes through like close to the end of the year. So I wonder if things had gone differently if he would have stayed CEO because it really would have been very, very difficult, if not impossible, just very difficult to remove him without him doing so himself. But I think it was just the sustained beating he took and the loss of friends and family around him to really get to that point where he decided to step down. Well, because the obvious parallels Facebook, right, where every year the shareholders vote to change Mark Zuckerberg's power structure or, I mean, and the margins are quite high, right? Like massive numbers of Facebook shareholders are like, just be the chairman.

change the stock structure, and he always, he has more votes. Yep. And there's a very obvious parallel here, and you're saying, unless he decides to do it himself, it's almost impossible. Yeah, that's the thing. I mean, this is where it gets, like, finance wonky, but, like, this dual-class stockholder structure that was really, was not invented by, but really championed by Sergey and Larry in when they took Google Public, really just essentially hands all the power

to the founders. And, you know, the idea of a shareholder is just, is just bogus. It's like they might have a say, but the founders can do what they want. And like in the best possible version of that scenario, you could maybe look like Google or Facebook before 2016 or 2017, and everyone decided that they're the worst companies in the world. And that's, you know, like, I really do. I also live in San Francisco and, like, am constantly surrounded by just real chess beating and championing of these figureheads at these companies.

And I just really wanted to show, like, look, this is not, like, being a founder is not the platonic ideal of capitalism. Things can go wrong, you know? Things are bad sometimes. And this is also not to say that I don't think Uber did a lot of things really well and that Travis was someone to be admired in his own twisted way, I guess, you know? Like, I think he has some very redeeming qualities that keep people around him attached to him and appreciating him.

But I still think it's just worth exploring what can go wrong when everything does. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard. It can be really scary, too. So much work goes into this thing that you're not entirely sure will even work. But here's a better thought. What if it did all work? What if your instincts were actually right all along?

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With Gramerly, you never will. Download Grammarly for free at Grammarly.com. That's Grammarly.com. So two more things I want to, two more scenes, conflicts I want to dig into. We talk a lot on the show about the App Store and the overwhelming amount of power that Apple has. Totally. You have a couple scenes where Travis goes and meets with Eddie Q and Tim Cook and knows. basically his business is on the line.

Yep. Because Uber has done some shady things. That, I don't think people really get a sense that Apple can just destroy a billion-dollar companies. Absolutely. I mean, that's really, I remember when I found out this anecdote through back in, tell the story. Well, yeah. So basically, Uber runs afoul of Apple's App Store rules by sort of skirting some of the privacy

guidelines they have. And, like, Uber had a case to do for what it did, right? like Uber was dealing with huge amounts of fraud in China and other places, and Apple didn't have a very, you know, a great way of helping to prevent that fraud. So Uber kind of took a shortcut and did this, which is. If only you can see Mike's face right now. He's like one of many shortcuts that it were takes. Exactly. And to make a long story short, it ended up biting them coming back to them because Apple found out that Uber was skirting some of its rules around primacy and what's called fingerprinting.

iPhones. And so there's this dramatic meeting with Eddie Q and then later another one with Eddie and Tim where essentially they say like straighten up or we'll boot you from the app store. And I mean that's that is business killing, right? Like at that for a lot of Uber's life, it was an iPhone only app and then later it moved out to other to Android. But like if you lose iPhone customers who are, you know, who spend more money on average, it's company. crippling, business killing. And it's really interesting now to think about it in the age of antitrust and anti-competitive action. I mean, that's, I'm sure, where you were going with this. But, like, it's just sort of like when you come back at the end of the day, like, to look at

who has power and control, and I think even other companies, like Facebook would probably point towards Apple and Google and the vast amount of power they have with what apps win and what apps lose, it's pretty freaky. You're kind of playing in these companies' pools and have to make them happy and keep that relationship good. And ultimately, the companies themselves do have some leverage because people like Uber and use Uber and Apple can threaten Uber to take them down, but at the same time, people will still be mad if they're like, why did Apple take this app down? I love this app, blah, blah, blah. So there is a power dynamic, but it's still, you know, Apple and Google are the ones who make the rules in the

end of the day. Well, what struck you know that scene is that it's the one time you described Calanick as being contrite. Yeah. And that to me, it's like the one. He's like, I know that I have to get this right. And he's like, I won by apologizing I won. And that's, that's remarkable.

At the same time, it's like Apple does have a privacy policy. Yeah, totally. I mean, like, look, I think there's a case for both parties here. I think they ultimately, what I was told is they ultimately got to a place where they found a solution to help stop fraud without like I think I think Uber's engineers and some of Apple's engineers built some work together to build something so they got to a better place on that and like ideally that's where you net out but it's really um Apple's fascinating too because it's just sort of like a Byzantine like law book that where things get made up as as the world moves on

and stuff sort of is invented new apps or even invented what's every one of these companies is building a new legal system around itself. They're all replacing some piece of actual society. Apple's like, we've got a court that lets you get into the market. Facebook's literally like, we're starting a court. And Uber's like, we are now the bus. You guys know, it's just this is just we're starting a country. And the other one I really wanted to talk about is Google.

And the relationship between Google and Uber is very complicated. They were an investor. And then there's obviously the big lawsuit. What did you discover as you were reporting out that relationship? So it was really interesting when I got to go to cover the court case when Uber was eventually sued by Waymo and hear Travis deliver testimony. But it was, I think, going in, Travis, so Travis, you know, to predicate this, Travis took on $250 million from investment from GV, Google Ventures, which is Google's investment arm for startups. From the outset, I think Travis had a different understanding of what that meant. He thought, okay, I've got Google money now.

I'm untouchable. They're going to make me a king in this space. And because they've invested in me, I'm awesome. And I think Google had a very different idea of this, you know, like, first of all, they go to great lengths now to caution people. You know, we are not a part of Google. We're an independent arm. And just because you have our backing doesn't mean that Larry Page at the end of the day

is going to, like, support you and champion you or whatever. And so eventually it got to a point where Travis, realized, like, this is going to, we're going to crash into each other if we're, what is the logical endpoint of a taxi service, and that's automating it, right? And Google, you know, Larry Page in particular, had been working on self-driving cars for years at that point. So they were frenemies until they were enemies. And I think ultimately it ended very poorly, obviously. Waymo believed, at least, that one of its former engineers, Anthony Lewandowski, stole IP, trade Secrets brought it over to Uber, sued Uber over that for theft of trade secrets. That ended

up settling. But it was just sort of a case study in how the incestuousness of the Valley can end up working against you at times. And I think for Travis, it felt like a real betrayal and an eye-opening moment of, oh, God, the, what is the analogy I'm looking for? Fox. Yeah, yeah, Fox is in the House there. Yeah, exactly. Actually, I think one of the Apple executives might have used that analogy at one point. But like there was a point in which, and I think I put this out in the book, is like they kind of say like, you know, Google's on your board. David Drummond is on your board. Are you not worried about that? And I don't think Travis was worried about it until it was too late and really figured, oh, okay, well, now I'm going to have to compete with my own backers. So it ended spectacularly

poorly for all of them. Uber in court said famously the only thing we have to show for Anthony Levendowski is this lawsuit, basically. They ended up net negative, and it set them back probably a lot. You know, we had Sarah Jong in our team when a lawsuit was going. Sarah is now at the times. I remember she... Oh, yeah, she was there. She was there.

She was covering it. She was covering it all of that case. And we were talking about it every day because it would, you know, this is a case that famously gave the world the phrase, the laser is the sauce. Which I, like, Sarah and I literally as they're reading her book, I just texted Sarah out the lasers and sauce. Because it was like all we said to each other. We were just saying that with different inflections to communicate for like a week.

Oh, God. And Google's case is pretty bad. Yeah. And I remember she wrote a post being like, this case is actually pretty bad. And they settled the next morning. And I think a lot of this comes down to, and I think we cover consumer tech. Like, here's the product. You're looking at it.

The new iPhone's coming out. The screen's this big. And it's pretty divorced from the personalities of the people. And these big companies are a really big. They're very good at crafting sort of forward-facing personalities. And you're like, oh, they just hated each other. And they, like, made Mike and Sarah sit in a courtroom for a while. Over a case, it was fundamentally pretty bad.

They just didn't like each other. And there's, like, a deep strain of actual human being personality issues underneath these companies. What's the thing as you're writing the book, like, what's the thing that you, like, learned the most about these folks? I wonder, I think the question that I keep coming away from is like what does it take to build a great company? Do you have to be ruthless? Do you have to exist? Is it like luck and timing? You know, like a lot of the stars aligned. You know, Travis, you know, has his strengths and a lot of folks still wonder if could they have built Uber without Travis? But like a lot of the stars, and I get into this in the book, a lot of the stars really aligned to make Uber what it was during the time it was. You know, there were, there were lesser apps that kind of did the same thing that were around at the same time. But I think ubiquity of Internet and the advent of the iPhone, AWS becoming like a thing. Like it just really took a lot of stars aligning to make this happen.

So I think there's a part of it is luck and then part of its timing and then part of it is, and this is the question I wonder is like, do you just have to be a ruthless jerk or can you be a nice company builder? You know, and like, I mean, I think about Steve Jobs. They think about, you know, what Larry and Sergey were like. I think about Zuckerberg and his sort of, Zuckerberg is a ruthless businessman. I know that firsthand. And so I wonder if that's just the laws of business, you know. And maybe Uber, you know, maybe Uber had the unfortunate position of being like the poster child of all the crappy things that one has to do or might or one can get caught doing on the way to.

building like a huge company, but I would like to think that you can build something worthwhile and not be a jerk when you're doing it. So this brings us to the new CEO, Dara. How's Dara doing? I mean, because he was installed as the nice one. Right, right, right, the dad of Silicon Valley. Yeah, like, he's the polite, when he like got rid of like the brocode that like Uber, like he's rebooted the company.

Super Pump is no longer a value. I have to explain to people what Super Pump mean a lot of the time. it's really just, oh, God. It is a great, it's a great title, though. It is a fantastic title. But no, I think, look, this is the funny sort of irony about the whole thing is now people are kind of weirdly pining for the fire that Travis brought, and this is the credit I'll give him all day long.

It was like he instilled a real loyalty, real sort of sense of duty and purpose in the folks that were there. I think Dara was absolutely the right sort of temperament to write the ship when the building was on fire or whatever mixed metaphor you want to use because there was like so much going on in 2017 that went wrong. And just having someone that felt like a grown up in the room was great. And the question mark for some now is like, okay, great, he's like whatever. He's tamped down the emergency mode and now we need to prove that we can be the next Amazon of transportation. as they like to say. And that's just, they have to prove it, you know.

And that's, they have bets out, right? They're doing food delivery. They have scooters and things. Payments is actually going to be a next thing that they're keeping close to the vest right now, but it's going to be a thing. But it's still TBD, you know. I still think it's too early. If you're looking at becoming a platform and moving just beyond this core ride-hailing

business, it's too early to say whether they're going to make it well or not. Well, that's the next big question, right? So there's like the WeWork IPO a couple weeks ago. And everyone just looked at it. I mean, we talked about it on this show. I'm sure you know tech reporter could resist tweeting about it. It's like the most fanciful IPO document in history. It begins with a prayer.

It's like so out of control. But like everyone sees it for what it is. This is a real estate company using some tech language to mask an upside down business model. A lot of that thinking seems to be applied to Uber lately, right? We're going to front a ton of cash to build some monopoly position and then literally, like, charge rent. It's Uber. More or less. Yeah.

But it's like more useful. No, it's, yeah, no. Well, like, that's the difficulty of having a commodity service, too, I think, right? Like, I think the real part that's difficult is, like, they don't enjoy the same advantages of, like, network effects that a Facebook does or, you know, other businesses that really thrive on the bigger we are. the better we are, I think, in the exact same way. And the cost of switching is so low and, like, Lyft's network is big enough that they, or, you know, if you go to China, Dedi's network is big enough or Ola in India. Like, there's just, the friction between switching services is not high enough to keep people in that universe. So they need to add more things in that, whether it's, again,

like if it's food, they're doing like loyalty programs. It's kind of like airlines back in the day. You know, like it's just sort of people are very price sensitive, so what's going to keep you here? And for airlines, at least a lot of it was like brand and perks. And if your brand is in the toilet, then you have a big problem. So I don't know. I mean, I'm still, I'm looking at this. Uber has like gold and platinum and Uber cash. Oh, I don't take more than a couple of Uber's a week.

And I'm like the Uber just like bestows status to me left and right. It's like hilarious. That compelling? Yeah, I mean, I keep using it. Yeah, there you go. Well, maybe it'll work. Yeah. I don't know.

Like, I really do think what I wonder is, like, do they have enough time to prove it out in the next, you know, however many years or months or whatever before the street gets agitating for change? Before their burn right catches up. Yeah, right. I think the number is $5 billion a quarter. They're losing. That was a lot. There were some one-time charges, to be fair, but it was, the losses are still crazy. Yeah.

So what's next for Uber? Oh, man. And really what's next for my guy's like? These two fates are intertwined. I hope not. Oh, God, I hope this is, I hope this is it. The book, the thing that I do feel really happy about is, like, capturing this specific moment in time for the Valley and what tech means to people, what it's going to mean in the

future. The other thing I like thinking about a lot is, like, tech is not going away. It's not like, not like we've had a reckoning and we're going to just go full Luddite and start torching everything. I mean, not that I've seen so far. So, like, what is the way in which we live ethically, responsibly, you know, with tech ingrained into every part of our society, which it already is, right? What do we start looking back on and say, hey, I am okay with this or I'm not okay with this or this is part of the value proposition of advertising that is fine by me, but this part of tracking or whatever I'm not cool with, you know? I think people are like starting to actually ask those questions.

And I think it's going to go far beyond Uber. I think it's going to be important for our industry, for media, for social media, for all sorts of different realms. So that's what most interests me now is just how we live in a post-techlash society while not sort of like going full prepper and living in a bunker underground. I always say the proper thing is very tempting to me. Every time I'm upstate and go to the grocery store, I'm like, I'm going to buy like three to four prepper magazines.

It's fine. It's a real whiplash reading in a prepper magazine. We got to hang out. Well, actually, that's kind of my last question. A lot of the Uber story was an end run around regulation. The regulations are ready for us. We don't think they're appropriate. They're just in our way.

We can just show up in Portland and we'll make people love us and then you're screwed. And I have to deal with us. We're definitely in the regulation moment. Yep. Right? The government has noticed the tech companies exist. I mean, even on sort of the left, you have Elizabeth Warren saying, we're going to break you all up. On the right, you have Josh Hawley being like, I'm going to ban

auto play video on your phone. This is a wide spectrum. There's an ideological realignment. Is Uber just entrenched enough to navigate it now? The only thing I think they're really, they should be kind of worried about is like attacks at their labor model. You saw Buttigieg the other day in San Francisco show up and say, we want these drivers to be employees.

And that's obviously politically savvy of him. But it's also like there are bills in California that are sort of pushing that as well right now. So there are things there they need to worry about. I do think they haven't have lobbyists that they're not going to go anywhere. It's just more what is that future going to look like for them and are they going to get any sort of unduly harsh rules that might hamper their business model even more. All right.

Mike, thank you so much for coming. Super pumped. The battle for Uber is out now. You can buy it from Amazon, which is another tech monopoly and support your local book seller. Where can they find you? Where can they tweet at you? Get me at at Mike Isaac I-S-A-A-C on Twitter or Mike underscore Isaac I-S-A-A-C on Instagram because someone stole my name on Instagram.

Wow, that's the next book. There it is. Thanks, man. All right, thanks, Mike. All right, my thank you to Mike Isaac. You can go buy the book out in the world. It's super pumped to battle for Uber. We are at the Apple event this week.

It's coming right up. It's iPhone time. So we'll see you on the chat show this week to wrap up Apple. I love to hear from you, tweet, and I'm at Reckless. We'd love to know who you want me to interview next. what themes are I'm going to cover I love all that feedback hit me up we'll see you later this week with the chat show