Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike IsaacMy rating: 3 of 5 stars
It was a pretty fun read, and there were lots of good anecdotes.
I thought it landed too far on the judgmental side, though; it didn’t editorialize a ton, but I basically got the sense that the author thinks obviously Uber shouldn’t have done all the stupid shit that it did.
As a result, I never really felt like it got into what I think is the most interesting part of all this: what should Uber have done in order to maximize its market cap?
Sure, they’ve done lots of horrible and embarrassing things. But they’ve also created a shitton of value, and genuinely made the lives of lots and lots of people better and more convenient, and probably a lot of that is thanks to aspects of their hard-charging bro culture or whatever. At the same time, a lot of the PR stuff has been expensive, and I’m sure they haven’t made the exact right decisions along the way.
Idk, it’s easy to point to individual dumb things, like they shouldn’t have gone to that KTV, and the whole leather jacket debacle. But to avoid all those little things, you need the sort of cautious HR-conscious culture that one imagines might have legitimately hindered their growth. And then there’s things like Greyball, which feels more like a conscious decision that could have been altered, but also it seems like it was pretty helpful and I don’t think the consequences have been that negative so far.
Anyway, I guess this is all hard to answer. This book provided some decent case studies, though.
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