Wild Ride: Inside Uber's Quest for World Domination

by Adam Lashinsky

Overview

In your pocket is something amazing: a quick and easy way to summon a total stranger who will take you anywhere you’d like. In your hands is something equally amazing: the untold story of Uber’s meteoric rise, and the massive ambitions of its larger-than-life founder and CEO.

Before Travis Kalanick became famous as the public face of Uber, he was a scrappy, rough-edged, loose-lipped entrepreneur. And even after taking Uber from the germ of an idea to a $69 billion global transportation behemoth, he still describes his company as a start-up. Like other Silicon Valley icons such as Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, he’s always focused on the next disruptive innovation and the next world to conquer.

Both Uber and Kalanick have acquired a reputation for being combative, relentless, and iron-fisted against competitors. They’ve inspired both admiration and loathing as they’ve flouted government regulators, thrown the taxi industry into a tailspin, and stirred controversy over possible exploitation of drivers. They’ve even reshaped the deeply ingrained consumer behavior of not accepting a ride from a stranger—against the childhood warnings from everyone’s parents.

Wild Ride is the first truly inside look at Uber’s global empire. Veteran journalist Adam Lashinsky, the bestselling author of Inside Apple, traces the origins of Kalanick’s massive ambitions in his humble roots, and he explores Uber’s murky beginnings and the wild ride of its rapid growth and expansion into different industries.

Lashinsky draws on exclusive, in-depth interviews with Kalanick and many other sources who share new details about Uber’s internal and external power struggles. He also examines its doomed venture into China and the furtive fight between Kalanick and his competitors at Google, Tesla, Lyft, and GM over self-driving cars. Lashinsky even got behind the wheel as an Uber driver himself to learn what it’s really like.

Uber has made headlines thanks to its eye-popping valuations and swift expansion around the world. But this book is the first account of how Uber really became the giant it is today, and how it plans to conquer the future.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780735211407
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	05/23/2017
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	16 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

ADAM LASHINSKY is the executive editor of Fortune, editorial director of the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference, and co-chair of the Fortune Global Forum. He wrote the 2012 New York Times bestseller Inside Apple, and he appears regularly on Fox News. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and daughter.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1

A Wild Ride Through China

Travis Kalanick sits in the back of a chauffeur-driven black Mercedes making its way through the traffic-clogged streets of Beijing. It is the dead of summer in 2016, and the sky above the Chinese capital is thick with pollution, the air muggy and still. As CEO of Uber, the world's most valuable start-up, Kalanick has been visiting China about every three months for three years now. All the travel from his home base in San Francisco is part of a money-draining and quixotic gambit to replicate the global success of Uber's disruptive ride-hailing service in the world's most populous country.

Kalanick has spent the previous three days in Tianjin, a megacity on the Yellow Sea, two hours southeast of Beijing. There he was a cochair of the World Economic Forum's (WEF) New Champions meeting, the so-called summer Davos. Weeks shy of his fortieth birthday, Kalanick was the toast of Tianjin, where he enjoyed the considerable fringe benefits of his newfound worldwide prominence. The California start-up he runs has been around a mere six years, yet at the off-season international gabfest he scored an audience with the second most powerful government official in China, Premier Li Keqiang. Kalanick appeared on WEF panels moderated by Western and Chinese broadcasters, gamely attempted to flip a traditional pancake over an intimate dinner with the managers responsible for Uber's local operations in Tianjin, and huddled with his entrepreneurial peers. Among them was Lei Jun, founder of the highly valued Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi. Lei's penchant for bold claims and his company's controversial business model of selling ultracheap phones make him as notorious in China as Kalanick is everywhere else.

Already, Kalanick's trip is a success, judged at least through the prism of the image-enhancing mentions he has racked up in the Chinese and international press. Li, the Chinese premier and an outspoken promoter of entrepreneurialism in China, called Kalanick a "pioneer." He said this in English, a flattering flourish and tidbit the Uber CEO's China-based minions dutifully fed to the local press. Indeed, Kalanick's every utterance on this trip is making headlines. Asked during a WEF fireside chat if self-driving vehicles would make the human-driven kind obsolete, Kalanick threw off one of his signature and controversial one-liners that combined insouciance, boastfulness, and don't-mess-with-me humor. "You might own a car like maybe some people own a horse," he deadpanned in front of an admiring audience. "You know, you might take a ride on the weekends or something."

As he leaves Tianjin and in the privacy of his human-driven vehicle on the road to Beijing, however, his cocky good cheer gives way to prickly tension. In fact, Kalanick has a full-blown crisis on his hands. He joins a conference call with a team of Uber executives in three countries on two continents. A team of communications executives dials in from San Francisco. Others call from Seoul, South Korea. Two executives are in the car with Kalanick, both critical to Uber's Asian ambitions. One is Emil Michael, Uber's chief business officer and the CEO's all-purpose right-hand man, to whom on this very trip Kalanick has delegated the role of engaging in high-stakes and secretive negotiations to sell Uber's China business to its chief rival, Didi Chuxing. The other is Liu Zhen, the head of strategy for Uber China and its best-known Chinese employee. Liu is also a first cousin of Jean Liu, the former Goldman Sachs banker who is president of Didi and whose father founded the computer behemoth Lenovo.

The purpose of the call is to discuss whether or not Kalanick should travel as planned early the next day to Seoul for a most unusual appointment. In late 2014 a Korean prosecutor indicted Kalanick, holding him responsible for what the South Korean government deemed to be Uber's illegal taxi service. This service was a version of the company's popular UberX service in the United States, in which amateur drivers use their own cars to serve passengers. Kalanick agreed to appear in court to answer the charges. The plan, worked out by Uber's legal team after protracted negotiations with the Korean prosecutors, is for Kalanick to plead guilty to what is effectively a misdemeanor-and then to be immediately released.

From a legal perspective, appearing in the Seoul court is low risk. Prosecutors have assured Uber's lawyers that Kalanick would be given a suspended sentence, making him free to leave Seoul. And that would be fine with the CEO, who is well accustomed at this point to picking fights with regulators and other officials the world over. Since it received its first cease-and-desist letter from the city of San Francisco in 2010, Uber has been clashing with adversaries from Seattle to New York and Paris to Delhi and beyond-often with its pugnacious CEO stirring the pot with inflammatory comments to the media and outrageous tweets. What's more, South Korea wasn't all that important a market for Uber, with restrictive laws preventing the company from operating all but the highest-end limousine version of its service there. Uber's motivation in settling the case, therefore, wasn't so much about commerce as about eliminating a pesky and embarrassing thorn in its CEO's side.

As the car snakes its way through snarled Beijing traffic, however, Kalanick becomes increasingly agitated. He's concerned that what ought to be a simple legal proceeding instead has the potential to turn into what he terms a "shit show" on the ground in Korea. Repeatedly, he queries his public-relations and legal advisers about the ramifications of the local media learning that the renegade CEO had alighted in Seoul. The goal was to cause as little ruckus as possible. To achieve that outcome, Uber has chartered a private jet, which stands at the ready at an airfield in Beijing to whisk Kalanick in and out of Korea without the press catching wind of his appearance. And yet someone, likely in the prosecutor's office, has leaked word that Kalanick will appear next day. Kalanick envisions the worst possible scenario for his and Uber's brand: photos of him being handcuffed and paraded through a Korean courtroom, an Asian perp walk at precisely the moment he was working so hard to project an image of leadership in China and the rest of Asia.

When it comes to protecting his image, no detail is too small. Kalanick wants to know, for example, how many doors there are in the courtroom-the better to understand effective escape routes. How ironclad is the promise to release him immediately? Would he be able to clear customs quietly in the private-aviation terminal? Opinions fly on the line as executives talk over one another, including the CEO. At one particularly heated moment Kalanick instructs his man on the ground in Seoul, Uber's top business-development executive for Asia, to "stop interrupting me."

It will be hours before Kalanick decides to skip the court date and instead instruct his Korean lawyers to request, for the fourth time, an extension. It is a calculated risk. Angering a Korean judge might make Kalanick permanently unwelcome in Korea. And yet the bet pays off, at least in the short term. His failure to appear earns brief mentions in the Korean press and is ignored everywhere else, including in the United States. Months later there is no movement in the case, and there isn't likely to be until Uber decides having a business in Korea is worth the renewed effort.

In the meantime, the Uber entourage reaches its Beijing destination, the glittering Shangri-La Hotel. Next to the hotel is a convention center where Kalanick will address a conference hosted by the Chinese Internet company NetEase. Kalanick and his colleagues briefly hole up in a private room to complete their call as a crowd of one thousand overwhelmingly youthful employees of Chinese Internet companies waits in a strobe-lit hall with loudspeakers blaring.

Despite Uber's underdog status in China, Kalanick is a rock star to the young, Internet-savvy Chinese audience. Obsessed with all things digital and entrepreneurial, the tech workers know well the story of Uber's global success and its efforts in China. Even though Didi outshines it at home, Uber has carved out a sizable piece of the market, and Kalanick is a boldface name for the audience. The packed ballroom is skeptical but intrigued by Kalanick's maverick reputation and record of persistence. They have no idea how close Uber is to capitulating in China. They also know nothing of how distracted Kalanick is by the prospect of possible arrest in Seoul. The air of excitement in the room is palpable.

For Kalanick, however, it's just another speech, followed by an onstage interview with a local broadcaster with impeccable English. As the attendees don headphones for simultaneous translation, the Uber CEO strides onstage in the crisp gray suit and collared white shirt he'd worn that morning to meet the premier of China. He gives an abbreviated version of a talk he'd delivered months earlier at the world-famous TED conference in Vancouver, including a photo of the Los Angeles suburb where he grew up. This iteration of the talk, though, is tailored for the Chinese audience. Newly added is an update on Uber's three-year-old China business, which by now includes service in some sixty cities. In a brief Q&A following his talk, Kalanick is asked if he minds being second place in the Chinese market, given Uber's leading position most everywhere else in the world. He chuckles and gives a nonanswer: "The way I like to think of this is, it's our job to serve drivers and riders better. If we ultimately serve them better we will have most of the customers. And we still have some work to do." Asked directly about first-place Didi, Kalanick deflects: "In an ideal world we are serving those customers better and most of those customers are ours."

It's late afternoon and not only is Kalanick spent, he has bigger things on his mind than convincing China's Internet community that Uber can best Didi. The appearance lasts barely twenty minutes, after which the CEO hustles out of the hall and to a nearby hotel to mull his Korean dilemma.



By breakfast the next day at the sturdy and sumptuous Rosewood Beijing hotel, the tense pall hanging over Kalanick the day before has lifted completely. Having already decided to skip the Seoul jaunt, Kalanick has moved on. Freshly shaved and dressed in his more typical jeans and a polo shirt, he is rested and relaxed. He professes to be completely over the ordeal and unaffected by it. The back-and-forth with authorities is a necessary dance, he tells me, and he is dutifully executing his steps. In Kalanick's worldview, Uber's entire business model is predicated on challenging obsolete laws meant to protect entrenched interests and frustrate innovation rather than benefit consumers. The whole notion of taxi medallions and fixed pricing, for example, constricts supply and keeps prices high-both negatives for riders. For him, it has become part of the job to fight what he sees as injustice. Where the world sees a provocateur, Kalanick looks in the mirror and sees a truth seeker.

Given that he'd been planning on stealthily jetting to Korea on this fine summer morning, Kalanick has a rare open schedule in front of him; he isn't due in his next destination, Hangzhou, until the next day. After polishing off an omelet he plans to sit at his computer and see "what shit I can stir up," he declares.

And so, at right that moment, Kalanick begins telling me his life story. For the better part of two years I had been attempting to persuade the reluctant CEO to cooperate with me on a book about Uber. As a writer for Fortune based in San Francisco, I had been covering Silicon Valley's top companies for nearly twenty years and had written a book about Apple in 2012. After fits and starts and discussions about having further discussions, he had finally relented. I was planning to write the book with or without him, and he made a pragmatic decision to have his say rather than remain quiet. Weeks earlier, he had invited me to tag along on this trip to China, given how central the country was to Uber's story. Kalanick and his advisers also correctly foresaw that a trip far from headquarters would afford moments like this, where the harried executive would have time to talk with me.

Indeed, once Kalanick got to talking, he didn't let up. We continue the conversation over the course of the next several days in China and then again once we'd both returned home to San Francisco. We talk on a flight-on the plane that was supposed to ferry him to Korea-to the coastal city of Hangzhou, where he'll meet with Uber China's top executives as well as Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba and China's Internet kingpin; in a van shuttling him to a resort hotel on the outskirts of Hangzhou; in mid-July back home, during a three-hour walk through the streets of San Francisco; and during numerous additional formal and informal chats after that.

Uber's story isn't strictly synonymous with Travis Kalanick's, but he is its central character. In fact, Uber wasn't initially his idea. Kalanick's involvement with Uber was part time for the entire first year of the company's existence, a time when he was recuperating from his last gig and keeping his options open for his next one. All the same, Kalanick was present nearly at the creation of Uber, and he supplied the critical insight that transformed someone else's idea from merely interesting to undeniably groundbreaking. He has been Uber's iron-fisted, omnipresent CEO from the time it first gained traction and began expanding beyond San Francisco. As a result, Uber has become as identified with Kalanick as Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook are with Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg, respectively.

Whether or not Uber becomes as powerful and highly valued as these enduring technology-industry titans, its CEO already has become an object of fascination and, for many repulsion. In the short period that Uber went from an idea to the biggest of the so-called unicorns-privately held start-ups valued at more than $1 billion, once a rarity-Kalanick became world famous for his ruthlessness, lack of empathy, and willingness to flout anybody else's rules. He was a veritable poster boy for the "brogrammer" culture of San Francisco, a male-dominated universe of engineers-turned-entrepreneurs. Older than Gates, Jobs, and Zuckerberg were when they founded their companies, he arrived on the scene already a B-level fixture in San Francisco's post-Internet-bubble start-up community.

And while Kalanick had struggled with his previous start-ups, his timing with Uber was impeccable. Just as Microsoft defined the personal computer revolution, Apple wrote the next chapter of digital entertainment, and Facebook created the twenty-first century's most powerful publishing platform, Uber perfectly exemplifies all the attributes of the information-technology industry's next wave. A mobile-first company, if there had been no iPhone there would have been no Uber. Uber expanded globally almost from its beginning, far earlier than would have been possible in an era when packaged software and clunky computers were the norm. It is a leader of the so-called gig economy, cleverly marrying its technology with other people's assets (their cars) as well as their labor, paying them independent-contractor fees but not costlier employee benefits. Such "platform" companies became all the rage as Uber rose to prominence. Airbnb didn't need to own homes to make a profit renting them. Thumbtack and TaskRabbit are just two companies that matched people looking for project-based work with customers-without having to make any hires themselves.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 A Wild Ride Through China 1

Chapter 2 Training Wheels 23

Chapter 3 Lean Times 39

Chapter 4 Jamming 59

Chapter 5 Early Days 71

Chapter 6 Travis Takes the Wheel 91

Chapter 7 Growing Pains 113

Chapter 8 Juggernaut 139

Chapter 9 Driver's Seat 159

Chapter 10 The Autonomous Future 175

Chapter 11 Outflanked in China 189

Chapter 12 A Long Walk Through San Francisco 201

Acknowledgments 227

Editorial Reviews

Wild Ride…is a crisp and lively look at both the good and bad aspects of the rise of Uber and its C.E.O., [Travis] Kalanick.

The New York Times Book Review - Walter Isaacson

Adam Lashinsky is one of the most insightful, enterprising, and energetic reporters covering technology in America today. He’s always a joy to read.”
—WALTER ISAACSON, author of Steve Jobs and The Innovators

“In Silicon Valley, no company is more ambitious, audacious, or annoying than Uber. Adam Lashinsky’s insightful book, brimming with comments and confessions from CEO Travis Kalanick, would be worth reading even at surge pricing.”
—STEVEN LEVY, author of Hackers and In the Plex

“Adam Lashinsky chronicles Uber’s rise from scrappy start-up to global giant with aplomb. It’s an epic story in itself, but Lashinsky’s insight and extensive reporting guarantee that it’s a valuable read as well.”
—BETHANY MCLEAN, author of All the Devils Are Here and The Smartest Guys in the Room

“Wild Ride is the unprecedented story of Uber and its ruthless and visionary CEO Travis Kalanick. No new company has ever grown larger faster. Lashinsky captures Uber’s epic ambitions with extraordinary access and keen judgment. It’s a must read for everyone interested in business, technology, and the future.”
—JOHN DOERR, chairman of Kleiner Perkins

“With the eye of a fine journalist and the ear of a mordant humorist, Adam Lashinsky has nailed the formative ingredients which gave rise to the four-letter word known around the world—‘Uber.’”
—MICHAEL MORITZ, partner at Sequoia Capital

“Just a few pages into Wild Ride you can see why the insanely talented Adam Lashinsky is one of the most respected business journalists around today. Lashinsky takes you behind the many layers of tumult and ambition that created one of Silicon Valley’s most controversial and disruptive juggernauts, Uber, and the company’s insatiable, and often frightening, quest to win.”
—NICK BILTON, author of American Kingpin and Hatching Twitter

From the Publisher

★ 05/15/2017
Lashinsky (assistant managing editor, Fortune; Inside Apple) takes readers inside the world of Uber and its enigmatic CEO, Travis Kalanick. Drawn from extensive research including interviews with Kalanick and others involved in the company, the author presents a vivid account of the story of Uber. The company came about when Kalanick and his friend Garrett Camp could not catch a cab during a blizzard in 2008. The idea was "if only there were a way to turn one's phone into a taxi dispatcher." Uber's first prototype called UberCab was created by Camp along with Oscar Salazar and Conrad Whelan, with Kalanick as "chief incubator" and adviser. Kalanick became CEO in 2010, with the company ultimately changing its name to Uber. It grew to be worth $69 billion, and along the way, Kalanick has faced government regulators and turned the taxi industry upside down. Uber continues to explore new ventures, including working toward adding self-driving cars (facing competition with Google, Tesla, Lyft, and General Motors). VERDICT An insightful and highly recommended account of Uber, this book should attract a wide audience. Would-be entrepreneurs as well as business and technology students and faculty will appreciate this inspirational story.—Lucy Heckman, St. John's Univ. Lib., Queens, NY

Library Journal

Journalist Adam Lashinsky provides a fascinating account of Uber founder Travis Kalanick’s aggressive behavior and ambitions. Lashinksy’s pleasant, if rather workmanlike, narration describes Kalanick’s wild excursion into the creation and management of the company that allows your mobile phone or a similar device to summon you a ride to nearly anywhere. Of special interest is an exploration of Uber’s successes and failures in international locations. The work provides insights into the humor, dedication, rudeness, and extremes of the demanding personalities one associates with a Silicon Valley start-up, especially one that challenges a long-standing industry such as the taxi business. W.A.G. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

JUNE 2017 - AudioFile