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BOOK REVIEW
Super Pumped
The Battle for Uber
By Mike Isaac
Norton: 408 pages, $27.95
You’d expect a private
security firm — say, the noto-
rious Blackwater — to em-
ploy ex-CIA, Secret Service
and FBI operatives to snoop
on enemies and conduct
espionage, tailing political
figures, snapping their pho-
tos and communicating
through an encrypted app
that keeps messages from
being traced.
But a San Francisco ride-
sharing company?
Yet, indeed it was so, as
Mike Isaac reveals in “Super
Pumped: The Battle for
Uber.” The New York Times
technology reporter spins a
compelling yarn that chroni-
cles the transit company’s
unruly development, from
its two-entrepreneur start-
up days in 2009 to its explo-
sive expansion into a publi-
cly traded billion-dollar
global behemoth, often
aided by spying on competi-
tors and outwitting trans-
portation regulators.
For those unfamiliar with
Uber’s early days, the pio-
neering ride-hailing service
took off when the invention
of the iPhone delivered a
seamless path to beating
traffic and the entrenched
taxi cab industry. An Uber
app displays a street map
that connects needy riders
with passing drivers, all paid
for by credit card so no one
fumbles for change.
The book’s central char-
acter is founder Travis
Kalanick, whose steady rise
and ultimately humiliating
downfall has long been in the
news. But Isaac goes deeper
into how this sometimes
mesmerizing, always fre-
netic product of Northridge
and UCLA developed his
tireless drive to win, even if it
meant burning through bil-
lions of dollars in expenses
or surveilling the move-
ments of competitors such
as Lyft.
“One Lyft executive grew
so paranoid about being fol-
lowed by Uber,” Isaac writes,
“that he walked out onto his
porch, lifted both middle fin-
gers in the air and waved
them around, sending a
message to the spies he was
absolutely sure were watch-
ing.”
For every round of busi-
ness success in Uber’s early
days, Kalanick would keep
his workforce “super
pumped” by throwing lavish
bacchanales in places like
Miami and Las Vegas, the
latter capped with a special
appearance by Beyoncé.
Misbehavior was common.
Kalanick was so eager to
constantly expand that he
let his managers run their
own far-flung regions, re-
gardless of how inexperi-
enced they were at directing
people or spending the hefty
budgets Uber provided for
advertising or discounts
that might spur ridership. It
was a “brilliant” move, Isaac
writes, even if “giving too
much autonomy to a legion
of twentysomethings” let
some managers go off the
rails. The New York office
was infamous for its aggres-
sive “bro culture.” And one
tacky promotion in France
offered “free rides from in-
credibly hot chicks.”
Isaac also provides a co-
gent explanation of what it
takes to succeed in the
multibillion-dollar techworld of Silicon Valley. If you
don’t know what the all-im-
portant venture capitalist
really does, for instance, this
book will tell you.
Much of any VC’s success
depends on finding the right
“founder,” someone who not
only holds the vision but has
the stamina to devote every
waking hour to building out
and scaling up while attract-
ing investors and inspiring
employees to work just as
hard. Kalanick was all that.
Kalanick viewed Uber as
a crusader “battling the
under-handed, street-fight-
ing entrenched interests ...
who were colluding to keep
taxi service bad and over-
priced.” He would launch
Uber into city after city with-
out going through the usual
regulatory channels, such as
paying medallion fees re-
quired of cab drivers.
“There’s been so much
corruption and so much
cronyism in the taxi indus-
try ... that if you ask for per-
mission upfront for some-
thing that is already legal,
you’ll never get it,” Kalanick
once told a reporter.
Uber strike teams would
descend on a region like
paratroopers, at first con-
tacting limousine and town
car companies and persuad-
ing their drivers to fill idle
hours by working with Uber.
The “guerrilla tactics far
outmatched the resourcesand technical acumen of
government workers or taxi
operators,” Isaac writes.
And inside state capitols
and city halls, the company
was ready to play hardball:
At one point, Uber employed
more lobbyists than Ama-
zon, Microsoft and Walmart
combined, Isaac reports.
It was the rise of Lyft that
caused Uber to shift from
hiring only limo and town
car drivers, who were al-
ready licensed and insured
livery vehicle operators. Lyft
began letting anyone with a
Class C license shuttle pas-
sengers using their own per-
sonal cars, meaning it had
no fleet to lease, insure, keep
fueled or service. So Uber
did the same.
Lyft was a particular burr
under Kalanick’s saddle. A la
President Trump, he would
use Twitter to needle Lyft’s
founders — “You’ve got a lot
of catching up to do” — and
he worked to impede their
growth by dissuading ven-
ture capital firms from pro-
viding any money. Uber even
bought a billboard in San
Francisco, showing a giant
razor blade about to take a
swipe at a pink mustache,
Lyft’s trademark.
But like a tenderfoot
scout who confidently builds
a campfire only to end up
burning down the forest,
Kalanick’s loose manage-
ment — of his staff and him-self — paved the way for a
cascade of embarrassing
scandals by 2014.
Apple executives were
outraged when Uber engi-
neers found a way to defeat
an iPhone privacy update
because it blocked them
from tracking accounts cre-
ated by fraudsters in China.
There was a dust-up over
whether Uber’s self-driving
car division was using data
swiped from Google. A re-
sulting lawsuit was settled in
2018 when Uber gave Google
$245-million worth of stock.
(On Aug. 27, a federal grand
jury indicted former Uber
engineer Anthony Levan-
dowski on 33 counts of steal-
ing or trying to steal trade
secrets he obtained when he
worked at Google.)
And in 2015, an Uber man-
ager was accused of proposi-
tioning Susan Fowler, a
young site reliability engi-
neer, on her first day on the
job. When Fowler reported
the harassment, human re-
source representatives said
they would only reprimand
the manager since he was a
“high performer” who had
no other complaints against
him. She later found out that
other women had also been
targeted. After only a year,
she left Uber — and blogged
about her experience.
Just as the #MeToo
movement was gaining po-
litical steam in 2017, the blogdetails catapulted Fowler
onto the cover of Time
magazine’s Person of the
Year issue, alongside actress
Ashley Judd (Harvey Wein-
stein), Taylor Swift (a Den-
ver radio DJ) and more than
30 other sexual harassment
“silence breakers.”
Former Atty. Gen. Eric
Holder was hired by the
company to investigate that
and other Uber missteps,
and the report he delivered
was a shocker. According to
Isaac, Uber board member
Bill Gurley, the venture capi-
talist closest to Kalanick, felt
it “read like a lewd magazine,
a racist, sexist Silicon Valley
bachelor party.”
By then, the board of di-
rectors knew Kalanick had
to go if Uber was to survive.
This is no dry business
profile but a tale that Isaac
has deeply reported yet still
made accessible. The details
about how Kalanick furi-
ously scrambled to fight
back would make a darn
good Hollywood movie. But
kids, don’t wait for that:
Look up from your phones
now and see where all those
Uber fares have really been
going. It won’t take long.Nottingham, a former
Times journalist, edited
government and
transportation news when
Uber arrived in Los Angeles
in 2013.Deep inside Uber’s bumpy ride
Mike Isaac’s ‘Super Pumped’ dives into the ride-sharing company’s troubled history with riveting detail
By William Nottingham
THE RISEand fall of Uber founder Travis Kalanick, leaving a courthouse in 2018, is detailed in Mike Isaac’s new book, “Super Pumped.”Elijah NouvelageGetty ImagesW.W. Nor ton & Co.Five Days Gone
The Mystery of My
Mother’s Disappearance
as a Child
Laura Cumming
Scribner: 320 pages, $26
One autumn afternoon in
1929, when Laura Cum-
ming’s mother was 3 years
old, she disappeared from
the beach where she was
playing with her mother.
“Short fair hair, no coat, blue
eyes and dress to match:
That was the description
later given to the police,”
Cumming writes.
So begins one of the most
compelling memoirs of re-
cent years, with as many
twists and turns as any mys-
tery, a family history of great
emotional resonance.
Little Betty Elston, as she
was then known, was re-
turned to her parents,
George and Veda, after five
days. She didn’t learn about
her own kidnapping until
decades later.
There were other secrets
too. The Elstons were not a
family that spoke openlyabout things. Their home,
stultifyingly quiet, lay in the
tiny town of Chapel St Leon-
ards in Lincolnshire, “the
flattest of all English coun-
ties,” Cumming writes, “the
least altered by time, or
mankind.”
People in the village knew
more of Betty’s life story
than she did; their reticence
to share that knowledge ren-
ders them an uncommonly
silent Greek chorus.
One of the other secrets
was that Betty hadn’t always
been Betty. She was named
Grace at birth by her unwed
young mother and arrived as
a toddler to live with George
and Veda when they were
both 49. The childhood she
remembered was protective
without being loving.
“Veda never played with
Betty,” Cumming writes,
whether because she was
overwhelmed by housework
or perhaps simply “unaccus-
tomed to small children, shy,
uncertain, possibly under-
mined by the kidnap.” The
three lived with Veda’s
mother, whom Betty recalls
as “very deaf, frail and
alarmingly given to nose-
bleeds.”
I say that Betty remem-
bers her that way: Many of
the book’s most charming
lines come from Betty her-
self — the result of a memoir
Betty wrote at Laura’s re-
quest, a gift for her 21st
birthday. And what a gift!
Both women are strong
and graceful writers, and asa result “Five Days Gone”
combines richly layered nar-
ratives and descriptions, in-
cluding a window into Bet-
ty’s younger life as remem-
bered by her in middle age.
“Her life began with a
false start and continued
with a long chain of decep-
tions, abetted by acts of
communal silence so deter-
mined they have continued
into my life too,” Cumming
writes. “But to my surprise,
the truth turns out to pivot
on images as much as
words.”
Cumming, an art critic
for the Observer newspaper,
starts with the trove of fam-
ily pictures taken by Betty’s
father, a hobbyist photogra-
pher. Betty appears happy
and healthy; what she re-
members, though, is “the
photographer’s tyranny,”her father’s gruff orders and
overprotective bullying. The
pictures begin with her
adoption and end when she
is 13, around the time she
learns the secret and con-
fronts her parents about it,
only to meet more silence.
“We need images quite
apart from anything else,”
Cumming writes, “when we
have no words.”
Cumming’s previous
book, “The Vanishing Ve-
lasquez,” traced an art his-
torical mystery story; here
she widens her viewfinder,
drawing on images as div-
erse as seaside posters, chil-
dren’s alphabet books and
paintings by Degas and Fra
Angelico. She’s interested in
memory, stories and images
— all of which can change
meaning with the smallest
shifts in perception.“The lives of our parents
before we were born are
surely the first great mys-
tery,” she writes. It’s a curi-
osity that stems in part from
egoism — how could the
world exist before we do? —
but also comes from love.
The deep devotion of
mothers and daughters runs
through “Five Days Gone”
like an underground river.
From her own difficult and
often cold childhood, Betty
grew to be a devoted mother,
fiercely connected to her
children, telling them, “I ne-
ver belonged to anyone until
I belonged to you.”
Perhaps that love is what
makes this book so compel-
ling, bestows on it a kind of
grace that allows, in the end,
for no villains. As Cumming
discovers her family’s truth,
she writes, “I have grown up
and learned about human
frailty; the effects of foolish-
ness and disappointment;
the longing for a child.”
The book begins and
ends with two versions of the
same tiny photograph, a cir-
cular tale that winds
through nearly a century of
family lives and lies. “She
stopped searching long
ago,” Cumming writes of her
mother, “but now I must dis-
cover the truth of her story.”
It’s an extraordinary story
and an even better book.Tuttle is a book critic whose
work has appeared in the
Boston Globe, Washington
Post and New York Times.‘Gone’ girl: Kidnapping was just one family secret
By Kate Tuttle
LAURACumming explores her own family history.Seb Barfield ScribnerPaperback available on Amazon
eBook available on the usual platforms
YouTube Channel “Don’t Delay Writing Your Book”Become inspired