Super Pumped _ The Battle for Uber - Mike Isaac Page 0,1

thinking it is above the law.”

Novick and Hales had tried to tell Uber for months that the company couldn’t just roll into town and set up shop just because it was ready to do so. The taxi union would have a conniption. Furthermore, there were existing regulations that prevented some of Uber’s services from operating. And since ride-hailing was such a new phenomenon, much of Portland’s existing rules didn’t address the practice—laws for Uber just hadn’t been written yet. Uber would have to wait.

It wasn’t as if Novick and Hales were being inflexible. Hales had promised to overhaul transportation regulations upon entering office. Just a few weeks prior, Portland was one of the first cities in the country to draft rules that allowed Airbnb, the home-sharing startup, to operate legally within the city’s confines. And for more than a year, the hope was that such a forward-thinking city could do the same with ride-sharing.

But Portland’s good intentions weren’t delivering on Kalanick’s time frame. Now, the two sides found themselves at an impasse. “Get your fucking company out of our city!” Novick yelled into the speaker phone. Plouffe, the charmer, was silent.

Uber’s nice-guy approach hadn’t worked. But it wasn’t designed to. Over the previous five years, the company had grown from a startup employing a couple of techies in a San Francisco apartment to a burgeoning global behemoth operating in hundreds of cities across the world. It had done so by systematically moving from city to city, sending a strike team of employees to recruit hundreds of drivers, blitz smartphone users with coupons for free rides, and create a marketplace where drivers were picking up passengers faster than the blindsided local authorities could possibly track or control. This was the plan for Portland as well, no matter what the mayor and his enforcer had to say. And Travis Kalanick was tired of waiting.

Six hundred miles south of Portland, at 1455 Market Street in San Francisco, Travis Kalanick was power-walking around Uber headquarters.

The thirty-eight-year-old chief executive was a pacer. Pacing was something he had done for as long as any friends of his could remember; his father once remarked that a young Travis had worn a hole in the floor of his bedroom from all the pacing. The habit didn’t dissipate with age. As he grew older, Kalanick leaned into it. Pacing became his thing. Occasionally, when taking a business meeting with an unfamiliar face, he’d apologize and stand up—he had to pace.

“You’ll have to excuse me, I just gotta get up and move around,” Kalanick would say, already out of his chair. Then he would continue the conversation, full of kinetic energy. Everyone inside Uber headquarters was used to Kalanick doing laps around the office. They just made sure to stay out of his way.

Uber headquarters was specifically designed with Kalanick’s pacing in mind. The 220,000 square feet of office space in the heart of San Francisco included a quarter mile of indoor, circular track built into the cement floor, which weaved through rows of standing desks and shared conference room tables. The track, he would say, was for “walk and talks.” Kalanick liked to boast that during the course of any given week his walk and talks would take him 160 laps around the quarter-mile track, the equivalent of forty miles.

This was not just any walk and talk. Portland officials had been stalling on new transportation regulations for more than a year. Now Uber was going to launch in the city, without the mayor’s consent. They didn’t have time for city officials to get their act together and write new laws. “Often regulations fail to keep pace with innovation,” an Uber spokeswoman would later tell reporters of the Portland incident. “When Uber launched, no regulations existed for ride-sharing.”

The problem wasn’t Uber’s black car service, which functioned well in a number of cities because it adhered to standard livery and limousine service regulations. The problem was UberX, an ambitious, low-cost model that turned nearly anyone on the road who had a well-conditioned car and could pass a rudimentary background check into a driver for the company. Allowing random citizens to drive other people around for money opened up a slew of problems, most notably that no one had any idea whether or not it was legal. At Uber, no one really cared.

Kalanick didn’t think much of the nice-guy approach to dealing with cities. He believed that politicians, when it came down to it, would always act the same way: they would