Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber

Wall Street Journal and New York Times Bestsellers

The compelling tale of Uber, the Silicon Valley firm at the epicentre of one of the biggest power battles in venture capital today, is told by a New York Times technology journalist. The hard-charging CEO of Uber, Travis Kalanick, was removed in a boardroom coup in June 2017, capping a terrible year for the transportation behemoth. Uber had risen to prominence in the IT industry, but for many, it came to represent everything that was wrong with Silicon Valley. In Super Pumped, the award-winning New York Times technology writer Mike Isaac describes the extraordinary growth and collapse of Uber against a backdrop of Silicon Valley's fast transformation. Uber, driven by a bold and ambitious creator and supported by billions of dollars in venture funding, promised to transform the way people and products are moved across the globe. Uber was an almost immediate "unicorn," ready to establish itself as a major player in the tech industry alongside Amazon, Apple, and Google. What transpired thereafter became a corporate cautionary tale about the dangers of startup culture and a striking illustration of how blindly following company founders may lead to disastrous consequences. Isaac describes Uber's hard-fought conflicts with drivers and taxi unions, the company's poisonous internal culture, and the low-tech strategies it came up with to get around roadblocks in its pursuit of market supremacy. Isaac demonstrates how venture investors used their authority and took control of the firm as it battled its way towards its disastrous IPO, with billions of dollars on the line. Super Pumped is a page-turning tale of ambition and deception, outrageous wealth, and bad behaviour that examines how fintech and financial innovation culminated in one of the most disastrous twelve-month periods in American corporate history. It is based on hundreds of interviews with current and former Uber employees as well as previously unpublished documents.