Part IThe Story
The Back Seat
The car was an Uber Black, the original product: a dark sedan, a professional driver, a fare set by an algorithm the driver had no say in. On Super Bowl Sunday in February 2017, the chief executive of Uber sat in the back of one beside two women. When the ride ended, the driver, a man named Fawzi Kamel, used the last minute to say something he had apparently been waiting to say. Uber's price cuts, he told the man who had ordered them, had cost him $97,000.
Travis Kalanick was forty years old. He ran the most valuable venture-backed private company in the world, a business that by then operated in more than seventy countries and was valued at roughly $70 billion on paper. He had built it on the premise that a city's cars, nearly all of them idle nearly all of the time, could be summoned with a button and priced by software. He did not take the complaint well. "Some people don't like to take responsibility for their own shit," he told Kamel. "They blame everything in their life on somebody else." Then he got out of the car.
The dashcam recorded all of it. Eric Newcomer of Bloomberg published the footage on February 28, 2017, and it took its place in the worst month any Silicon Valley chief executive has had in public. It belongs at the center of this story less because it was the gravest of his offenses (it was nowhere near that) than because of where it happened. For eight years Kalanick had been in the business of putting strangers into the back seats of other strangers' cars, and he himself was terrible at being a passenger. Someone else's hands on the wheel, someone else's foot on the brake, someone else holding the information or setting the price or naming the board: he arranged his whole life so that this would not happen, and he usually succeeded.
He was out of the job within four months. On June 20, 2017, the day five of Uber's largest investors forced his resignation, the company added a feature drivers had been requesting for years and Kalanick had refused to allow: an in-app button to leave a tip.
He later paid Kamel $200,000 out of his own pocket. The BBC reported that in the weeks after the video he began using a private driver.
By the Numbers
The Kalanick Ledger
$250BDamages sought from Scour by media companies in 2000, when Kalanick was 23
$2MKalanick's after-tax take from the 2007 sale of Red Swoosh
$11MBenchmark's 2011 Series A check for 20% of Uber
~$70BUber's private valuation at the height of his tenure
40%Share of Uber's voting power behind the June 2017 letter demanding his resignation
$2.5B+Uber stock he sold before leaving the board on December 31, 2019
$1.7BEquity raised by Atoms in July 2026, led by Andreessen Horowitz
A Quarter-Trillion-Dollar Education
When he was twenty-five, MIT Technology Review put Kalanick on a list of young innovators. The write-up began with a sentence that served as a summary of his first decade in business: "Travis Kalanick is good at escaping sticky situations."
The situations had been very sticky. In 1998 he left UCLA, where he was studying computer engineering and business economics and belonged to the Theta Xi fraternity, to work full-time at Scour, a multimedia search engine started by Dan Rodrigues that grew into a peer-to-peer file exchange. At its peak 250,000 people were using it at once to trade movies and music. Kalanick handled sales and marketing. He has called himself a co-founder, and the other co-founders have disputed that, which is a small early example of a lifelong habit of telling the story so that he is closer to its center.
Scour needed money, and money came with Michael Ovitz attached. The negotiations with Ovitz, the Hollywood super-agent, and the investor Ron Burkle were ugly enough that Ovitz sued the company for breach of contract, and Scour ended up taking unfavorable terms that gave Ovitz majority control. Then in 2000 the Motion Picture Association of America, the Recording Industry Association of America, and the National Music Publishers Association, joined by more than thirty media companies, sued Scour for $250 billion. Scour filed for Chapter 11 in September 2000. Kalanick was twenty-three.
Every later account of his career goes back to this point, because he seems to have taken two lessons from it and never questioned either. The first was about incumbents: entrenched industries do not compete with you, they sue you, and they will try to make the law do what the market won't. The second was about investors: the people who write the checks can take the company. Mike Isaac's Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber treats the Ovitz episode as the moment Kalanick's view of founder-investor relations went bad for good. Thirteen years later, apparently with no sense of irony, Ovitz told Fortune about the young man whose company he had sued: "You put him in the ring and he's always going to come out with the win."
In 2001, with his Scour colleague Michael Todd, Kalanick started Red Swoosh. He called it his "revenge business." It used the same peer-to-peer architecture the studios had sued over, except now the studios would be paying customers: media companies would pay Red Swoosh to deliver legitimate files more efficiently. The idea was smart. The timing was awful, since the dot-com market had just collapsed and nobody was funding file-sharing companies. By August 2001 some employees had gone months without being paid. In September 2001 the company spent roughly $110,000 of its payroll tax withholdings to keep operating.
There are three versions of who made that decision. In 2014 Business Insider reported that Kalanick blamed Todd publicly, that Todd said they decided together, and that an email from Kalanick at the time "appears to demonstrate his participation in the tax plan." In 2017 Isaac reported in the New York Times that the two decided together after friends and advisers warned Kalanick it could count as tax fraud. In his 2019 book Isaac told it differently again: an unnamed employee made the call, and Kalanick took the blame after that person left. A later funding round repaid the IRS and nobody was prosecuted. Todd was gone by the end of September. Kalanick accused him of trying to arrange jobs for himself and other Red Swoosh staff at Sony Ventures without telling him.
Kalanick moved back in with his parents in Northridge to save money. He later complained that "it sucked" because he "wasn't getting ladies," a line that shows two things he never lost: a willingness to say exactly what he was thinking, and a sense of humor that rarely improved what he was saying.
His parents are worth a moment. Bonnie Kalanick, whose Jewish family came to America from Vienna in the early twentieth century, sold retail advertising for the Los Angeles Daily News. Donald Kalanick, whose Catholic grandparents came from Graz, was a civil engineer for the City of Los Angeles. So the son grew up between a mother who sold things and a father who worked on the city's public infrastructure. He sold Cutco knives door to door as a teenager, and at eighteen he started a test-prep company, New Way Academy, with a classmate's father. He would go on to fight municipal engineers and regulators in hundreds of cities, and the first one he ever knew lived in his house.
By 2002 Red Swoosh had two employees, Kalanick and a former Scour engineer named Evan Tsang. It survived on last-minute deals. Kalanick has said he took no salary for four years, and Wikipedia says more than three. In early 2005 Todd helped recruit Tsang to Google, which embarrassed Red Swoosh publicly and cost it a potential deal with AOL. Help came from an unlikely place. Kalanick got into an argument with Mark Cuban on an internet forum, and Cuban, a man whose temperament is also best described as combative, ended up investing $1.8 million. Cuban's friends followed. Kalanick hired programmers, and around 2006 he took the engineering team to Thailand for two months.
In 2007 Akamai, a competitor, bought Red Swoosh for about $19 million. Kalanick cleared roughly $2 million after taxes. He had spent six years on it.
Talking to Ben Horowitz on Andreessen Horowitz's podcast in 2026, he described what those years did to him: "I went through such tough times as an entrepreneur pre-Uber that once I'm in Uber and things are working, I'm still acting like I'm not going to eat tomorrow. So I would do everything right up to the line, be perfect." He told David Senra he ran Uber, even at a $70 billion valuation, like someone worried about the next grocery bill. To him, scarcity was the normal state of things, and the rest of the story follows from that.
The Wolf at the Jam Pad
He bought a townhouse in the hills of San Francisco's Castro District and named it the Jam Pad. It had its own Twitter account. He also started using the Red Swoosh money for small angel investments: Expensify (he has said he was its first investor), Livefyre, CrowdFlower, Formspring. He positioned himself as a fixer for other founders, the person who could talk to an investor or help with a hire. The Jam Pad became a salon for young people who, like him, had come out of the first dot-com crash.
Jordan Kretchmer, a 25-year-old dropout then, met him in 2009 at a music festival in Austin, and he told the journalist Max Chafkin what Kalanick was like at the time: an engineer who talked like a salesman, wearing a cowboy hat, calling himself the Wolf after Harvey Keitel's fixer in Pulp Fiction, the cold, rational man who shows up to clean up a disaster. Kalanick was in his early thirties, likable and restless, and had not yet found the thing his energy was for. He had money, a house, a nickname, and a habit of staying up all night talking about the future of the internet.
The official origin of Uber says it came from a snowy night in Paris when Kalanick and Garrett Camp couldn't find a cab. Kara Swisher wrote in Vanity Fair in 2014 that the story is "only partially true." Both men were in Paris for LeWeb, the European tech conference, and both had recently sold companies and were looking for the next one. In their shared apartment outside the city, at a session Kalanick called a JamPad, a group of entrepreneurs traded ideas. On-demand cars were one of them. People who were there said it didn't stand out. On that trip Kalanick also climbed the Eiffel Tower and stepped over the barriers to get a better view.
Back in San Francisco Kalanick dropped the idea. Camp didn't. Camp was born in Calgary and had sold StumbleUpon, a web-discovery engine, to eBay for $75 million. By Kalanick's later account he was the one who wished out loud: "Man, I wish we could just push a button and get a ride." He and Kalanick had spent $800 on a private driver one New Year's Eve and thought it was absurd. Camp bought the domain UberCab.com and kept thinking about it. With friends he built a prototype. Kalanick agreed to be a "mega advisor" and nothing more. When Camp asked him to run the company full-time, he said no. Uber, he told Chafkin later, was "supercrazy freakin' small."
So somebody else got the job first. Ryan Graves became Uber's first employee in February 2010 and its chief executive that May. He was in the role for ten months, which turned out to be the length of a placeholder's term. In December 2010 Kalanick replaced him, Graves became chief operating officer, and Graves and Camp each signed over a large share of their equity to the new CEO. TechCrunch's headline on the change is now a historical artifact: "Uber CEO 'Super Pumped' About Being Replaced By Founder."
"Super pumped" became one of Uber's official values, which Kalanick described to Senra as infectious enthusiasm for difficult problems. It became the title of Isaac's book and of the Showtime series in which Joseph Gordon-Levitt played Kalanick. It entered the company's vocabulary through a press release about someone cheerfully accepting a demotion. That was a fair preview. A lot of people at Uber would later be super pumped while being moved aside.
In February 2011 Kalanick met Bill Gurley of Benchmark. Gurley is a tall former Wall Street analyst who wrote unusually rigorous blog posts about marketplace economics, and among venture capitalists he was known for actually doing the math. Benchmark invested $11 million for 20 percent of a company valued at roughly $50 million. The Series B in late 2011 raised $32 million more from Menlo Ventures, Jeff Bezos, and Goldman Sachs. Gurley became Kalanick's greatest supporter and, in the end, the main force behind removing him.
Principled Confrontation
In October 2010, before Kalanick had formally become CEO, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency sent UberCab a cease-and-desist letter saying it was operating as a taxi company without permits. Kalanick told the company to keep running. He did make one change: he dropped "Cab" from the name so nobody could say Uber was falsely advertising itself as a taxi service. That move told you how he would deal with regulators from then on. He ignored the order and adjusted the paperwork.
He had a name for the approach. He told The Observer he called it "principled confrontation." The paper noted that it wasn't a posture that left much room for compromise or negotiation, which was why he tended not to meet with his opponents. The practical version, as later lawsuits and leaks showed, was to launch first and argue the law afterward, to have customers lobby on the company's behalf, and to keep a very large lobbying operation (The Observer counted 161 lobbyists in the United States in 2014) for the arguments that couldn't be won any other way.
Fortune described a typical example from July 2013. Kalanick flew to Aspen for the magazine's Brainstorm Tech conference, where several hundred rich and influential people would need rides. Colorado regulators had been trying to restrict Uber. He called his Denver general manager. "I asked him two questions," he said on stage the next day. "I said, 'One, is [Governor] Hickenlooper still trying to put us out of business in Colorado? And two, when are we getting Aspen up?'" There were Uber cars in Aspen by the next morning.
When the District of Columbia's taxi commissioner accused Uber of breaking the law, Kalanick got customers to send 50,000 emails and 37,000 tweets. When Cambridge, Massachusetts, tried to shut Uber down, he tweeted: "Cambridge, MA, home to Harvard, MIT, and some of the most anticompetitive, corrupt transportation laws in the country." When a cease-and-desist arrived from anywhere, Uber kept operating.
He had a theory of history to support all this, and he laid it out at TED in February 2016, in Vancouver, a city that had banned Uber. The talk was about the jitney. In 1914, he said, a Los Angeles car salesman named L.P. Draper saw long lines of people waiting for trolleys downtown, put a sign on his car offering rides for a nickel ("jitney" was slang for a nickel), and started a craze. "There was an Uber way before Uber," Kalanick said, "and if it had survived the future of transportation would probably already be here." Jitneys in Los Angeles reached 50,000 rides in a single day. Within five years the trolley companies had used regulation to kill them, with rules such as requiring jitney drivers to work sixteen-hour days or keep two registered drivers per car. By his count, Uber was doing about as many daily rides in Los Angeles in 2016 as the jitneys had in 1915.
He was telling the story in his hometown's terms. The jitney was a Los Angeles invention destroyed by a Los Angeles monopoly with help from the city's regulators, and he was the son of a city engineer arguing that the city had gotten it wrong once and was about to do it again.
The history lesson left some things out. In 2011, when Wingz launched as the first ridesharing service to use ordinary drivers in their own cars, Kalanick thought it was illegal, said so on Jason Calacanis's podcast, and contacted authorities to stop it. At that point Uber was a black-car company, and he thought regular cars lacked the elegance customers would pay for. In April 2013, after Wingz, Lyft, and Sidecar had gotten licenses, Uber copied their model and opened UberX to drivers using personal vehicles. So Kalanick was against peer-to-peer rides when someone else was doing them and in favor of them once Uber was. Four years after he called Wingz illegal, a man who would later take his job, Expedia's chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi, led a multimillion-dollar investment in it.
The fights got darker. Uber built a tool called Greyball that identified likely regulators and police through geofencing, credit card records, device data, and social media, then showed them a fake version of the app with cars that never came. It was used in Portland, Australia, South Korea, China, and across Europe, and according to documents leaked in 2022 senior management including Kalanick knew about it. When police or regulators raided Uber offices, a system called Ripley could lock, shut down, and change the passwords on staff computers remotely. Bloomberg reported it was used at least twenty-four times between spring 2015 and late 2016. In one email from India, an Uber manager described sending authorities to the Dutch entity while cutting the local team off from the systems, "making it practically impossible for them to give out any info despite their willingness to do so." Uber's Asia head, Allen Penn, wrote: "we will generally stall, be unresponsive, and often say no to what they want. This is how we operate and it's nearly always the best."
Then there was France. In the 124,000 documents Mark MacGann leaked to The Guardian in 2022, other executives warned Kalanick that sending Uber drivers to a protest was dangerous, that far-right agitators had joined the taxi drivers' demonstrations and wanted a fight. His reply, as quoted: "I think it's worth it, violence guarantees success."
People have tended to read "principled confrontation" as a strategy for dealing with the outside world. The leak showed it was also a culture, an approach that, once it was in place, was used against anyone in the way, including the drivers.
The Architecture of Control
After Scour, Kalanick structured every financing so that it couldn't happen to him again. Investors in Uber's early rounds got shares with one-tenth the voting power of the shares held by Kalanick, Camp, and Graves. He tightly limited what financial information investors could see. In 2016 he got the board to give him the right to fill three more seats at his own discretion. The company was built so that the money had very little say.
Isaac reports that he explained this to Apple at one of his regular meetings with Tim Cook and Eddie Cue, which he held because the App Store was essential to Uber. Cue asked why Uber had taken money from Google, a potential self-driving competitor, and put Google's chief legal officer, David Drummond, on its board.
— Travis Kalanick to Apple executives, as recounted in Mike Isaac's Super PumpedThe board is irrelevant. I hand pick all of these guys. They do what I tell them, and the way I've structured things, I do what I want.
He ran the operation the same way. He told Senra he personally took part in setting prices in Uber's first twenty or thirty cities, and that each launch helped refine a playbook that could later run without him. He described his management philosophy as finding the line between order and chaos, using as few rules as possible while keeping enough structure to move fast. City teams were run by young general managers with a lot of freedom. Pricing, surge pricing above all, stayed with him. He told Calacanis at the All-In Summit in 2024 that surge pricing was a way of paying drivers double or triple on nights like New Year's Eve so that cars would actually be there. In December 2014, during the Sydney hostage crisis, the same algorithm charged people fleeing the city four times the usual fare, and the company offered free rides only after a public outcry.
Tipping was the clearest case. Drivers asked for it, and so did employees, for years. Kalanick said no because a tip added friction to a payment process he wanted to be frictionless: you'd tap a button and leave the car without thinking about money. When class actions in California and Massachusetts forced the company to explain itself, Uber published a blog post arguing that the "connection between tipping and quality of service can be weak. Many people tip because it's expected." Lyft allowed tips. Mashable wrote that Kalanick's refusal "contributed to the perception of Uber as the unfeeling, win-at-all-costs player in ride-hailing." To him, removing the friction for riders was elegant design. For drivers it meant losing a source of income, and they kept bringing it up, including the one who turned around in his seat on Super Bowl Sunday.
The control did not stop at Uber's own operations. In 2014 Uber employees were caught ordering and then canceling rides on Lyft and Gett. Lyft said it counted 5,560 such cancellations. Uber also reportedly paid recruiters commissions to ride with Lyft drivers and persuade them to switch, and Kalanick worked to block potential investors from putting money into Lyft. Uber denied the cancellation and recruiting schemes. In 2026, asked by Horowitz's partner whether he regretted not buying Lyft, Kalanick said the cultures were too different: "Maybe it started with the pink mustache." He had not changed his mind. "I wouldn't do anything different."
Ten to the Ninth
On October 25, 2013, Kalanick sent his roughly 400 employees an email with the subject line "URGENT, URGENT - READ THIS NOW OR ELSE!!!!!" and the Chinese character 九, meaning nine. The character was an internal code, and he wrote that it was "something we do not discuss externally." It stood for ten to the ninth, a billion dollars, the run-rate milestone the company had just reached. They were going to Miami's Shore Club to celebrate.
The email opened: "You better read this or I'll kick your ass." It told employees: "Have a great fucking time. This is a celebration! We've all earned it." It charged a $200 "puke charge." It said not to throw beer kegs off tall buildings. It set out the conditions under which employees could sleep with each other, requiring an "emphatic 'YES!'" and that the people involved ("the two (or more) of you") not be in the same chain of command, and ended: "Yes, that means that Travis will be celibate on this trip. #CEOLife #FML." It also noted that "Miami's transportation sucks ass," which was the start of Uber's campaign to operate there.
Some executives had advised him not to send it. He sent it again the next year to 1,800 employees. In 2017 the law firms investigating Uber's culture were looking at whether the letter had helped create the atmosphere they were studying.
The party kept growing. Isaac describes a week in Las Vegas to celebrate passing a billion dollars in gross bookings, with thousands of employees flown in, open bars, nightclubs, and Beyoncé performing at the end. It cost more than $25 million, over twice what Benchmark had invested in the Series A. The rest of the time, the work was relentless: company dinner wasn't served until 8:15 p.m., so the free meal effectively required staying two or three extra hours, and some engineers were seeing therapists for the strain.
The culture produced a long list of incidents. A 2012 company blog post called "Rides of Glory" used ride data to estimate one-night stands by neighborhood. In a 2014 GQ profile Kalanick joked that the company ought to be called "Boob-er" because of the attention it got him from women. Executives expensed strip-club visits, which staff jokingly called "Tits on Travis." Also in 2014 he went with a group of Uber executives to a Seoul karaoke bar where escorts worked, a female employee complained to HR, and little came of it. In November 2014 Emil Michael, Uber's senior vice president for business, said at a dinner he thought was off the record that the company could spend "a million dollars" on opposition researchers and journalists to look into critics' "personal lives, your families," and mentioned in particular Sarah Lacy of PandoDaily, who had written about Uber's "asshole culture" and said she was deleting the app. In 2014 Uber also had a tool insiders called God View, which showed the real-time locations of specific riders.
After a driver in Delhi was accused of raping a passenger in December 2014, Eric Alexander, an Uber Asia executive, obtained her medical records and shared them with other executives, and Kalanick questioned her account based on what was in them. That came out in 2017.
At that same TED talk in Vancouver, Chris Anderson, TED's head and normally a gentle interviewer, told Kalanick he was an enigma and that his company had tolerated bad behavior toward women. Kalanick said Uber had a communications problem. "We felt we were good people doing good work."
— A venture capitalist who worked with Kalanick, to Vanity Fair, 2014It's douche as a tactic, not a strategy.
That line from Swisher's 2014 piece was meant as a defense. It made the aggression sound like something worn for effect and removable later. Another early investor said it more plainly: "It's hard to be a disrupter and not be an asshole." Kalanick's own version was gentler: "Look, I'm a passionate entrepreneur. I'm like fire and brimstone sometimes." What all three explanations assume is that the behavior was deliberate and could be dropped when it stopped being useful. A company doesn't work that way. People imitate what the boss models and keep the people he protects, and Uber did that.
Becoming Chinese
In 2013 Kalanick took a small team to China for a week or two and met everyone he could. People told him it was the worst idea he could have. He told Senra that this was what made it appealing: "The harder it is, the more weird, gnarly, whatever words, whatever superlative you want to put in front of it, the more awesome it would be to solve it."
China was where the "super pumped" attitude got its biggest test. Uber launched in Beijing on July 15, 2014. The maps were different, GPS was different, and Kalanick told Senra the company had to treat it as an entirely new business. Uber's Chinese ridesharing service was branded the People's Uber, with red cars on the in-app map. He spent a great deal of time there, and by his own account Uber's ten largest cities by rides eventually were all Chinese. He took a Chinese partner to handle political pressure, and he says he gave up about 7 percent instead of the 50 percent people expected. He came away with a principle he still repeats: "Progress must be in harmony with stability." In a country where the ruling party values order above everything, a company that looked destabilizing could be shut down, while a company that looked stabilizing could grow.
It's an odd principle for this particular man. At home he had sent drivers into French protests and named his regulatory strategy after confrontation. In China he learned to defer to the state. Both were tactics, and he could switch between them.
Didi, the local rival, was better at copying than Uber was at inventing. Uber would build something and Didi would quickly match it. In February 2015 Didi Dache and Kuaidi Dache merged. In September 2015 the combined company raised $3 billion. In December 2015 Lyft, Didi, Ola, and Grab, all SoftBank-backed, announced a global alliance against Uber. Uber reportedly lost about $2 billion in China. On August 1, 2016, Didi agreed to buy Uber China, giving Uber an 18 percent stake in Didi and a $1 billion investment. Fortune named Kalanick its Businessperson of the Year for 2016 and called the deal "a shrewd capitulation" by a man about whom, the magazine wrote, "people start rooting for you to fail."
It may have been the most sensible decision he made as CEO, and it was a retreat. The same year he decided Uber's long-term future depended on getting rid of the driver altogether.
The Laser and the Lawsuit
Anthony Levandowski was born in Brussels in 1980 to a French diplomat mother and an American businessman father. He moved to California as a teenager, built websites for local businesses, and at Berkeley won a robotics competition with a machine made of 300 Lego pieces that sorted Monopoly money. In 2004 he led a team that built a self-driving motorcycle named Ghostrider for DARPA's Grand Challenge. At the starting line it fell over because someone had forgotten to flip a switch. It is now in the Smithsonian. In 2007, with Google aiming to map a million kilometers of roads for Street View by the end of the year, he ordered 100 Toyota Priuses from a local dealer. In 2008, for a Discovery Channel show, he built a driverless Prius that delivered a pizza across the Bay Bridge with a police escort. Google, he said later, "absolutely did not want their name associated" with it. He described the early, permitless testing like this: "If people asked us what was on the cars, we'd say it's a laser and just drive off."
He was Kalanick's counterpart in engineering: brilliant, hurried, contemptuous of regulators, and convinced the future would forgive whatever it took to get there. In January 2016 he left Google's self-driving project, which became Waymo, to start Otto, a company retrofitting trucks with self-driving kits. Uber acquired it that summer for roughly $680 million and put Levandowski in charge of its autonomous-vehicle program. In August 2016 Uber announced that self-driving Volvos would carry passengers in Pittsburgh, where a year earlier it had hired about fifty people away from Carnegie Mellon's robotics center.
Kalanick had been clear about why. At TED he said the transition to autonomy would be long and that ignoring it would be naive. The underlying logic was that Uber's largest cost was the driver, and the driver was also the source of most of its legal and moral exposure. A company that had argued for years that its drivers were independent contractors, not employees, was now building a future with no drivers at all.
On February 23, 2017, four days after Susan Fowler's blog post, Waymo sued Uber. It alleged that Levandowski had downloaded about 9.7 gigabytes of confidential material, roughly 14,000 files including lidar designs, before he left. Larry Page had reportedly been reluctant to sue until a supplier accidentally copied a Waymo engineer on an email containing an Uber lidar schematic that looked almost identical to Waymo's. Levandowski invoked the Fifth Amendment. Judge William Alsup referred the case to federal prosecutors. Uber fired Levandowski in May 2017. In February 2018, five days into the trial, Uber settled by giving Waymo 0.34 percent of its equity, about $245 million, and Uber's lawyers apologized publicly for hiring him.
Levandowski pleaded guilty in 2020 to one count of trade-secret theft. At sentencing Alsup called it "the biggest trade secret crime I have ever seen," and also called him a "brilliant, groundbreaking engineer that our country needs." He was sentenced to eighteen months. On January 20, 2021, Donald Trump's last day in office, he was pardoned. In 2017, the year everything came apart, he had founded a church called Way of the Future, whose mission was to "develop and promote the realization of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence."
Uber shut down its self-driving truck program in July 2018 and sold its autonomous-vehicle unit to Aurora in 2021. In 2026 the company Kalanick no longer ran was paying other people to put robotaxis on its network: up to $1.25 billion to Rivian for as many as 50,000 vehicles, along with partnerships with Nvidia, Baidu, Lucid, Nuro, and others. The driverless future he wanted did arrive, and Uber gets to it by buying from others.
February
It happened very fast.
On February 19, 2017, Susan Fowler, a former Uber site-reliability engineer, published a blog post titled "Reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber." She described a manager propositioning her for sex on her first day on his team, HR telling her he was a high performer and it was his first offense (it wasn't), and a later manager threatening to fire her if she kept reporting. Kalanick was reported to have known about her complaint. He called what she described "abhorrent" and announced an "urgent investigation," led by former Attorney General Eric Holder with the board member Arianna Huffington.
On February 23, Waymo filed suit.
On February 27, Amit Singhal, the former Google search executive Kalanick had hired as head of engineering only a month earlier, was forced out before he had really started, after it came out that he had left Google over a sexual-harassment allegation he hadn't disclosed. Singhal has denied the allegation.
On February 28, Bloomberg published the dashcam video.
Jeff Jones had joined from Target as president of ridesharing. He was the only member of Kalanick's leadership team with a marketing background, and he had commissioned surveys on how the public saw Uber and how it saw Kalanick. The results arrived that month. In late February he gathered about a dozen executives at Le Méridien on Battery Street in San Francisco's financial district and asked Kalanick to stay away so they could discuss the findings without him. Kalanick bristled at that but agreed. The data showed that people liked using Uber and disliked the man running it, and that his reputation was hurting the brand. Partway through the day Kalanick texted Jones that he was coming over. He walked into a room with charts taped to the walls.
He never had much tolerance for meetings about him that he wasn't in.
In early March he sent an apology to employees that was posted on the company blog. He wrote that he needed to "grow up" and that he needed "leadership help." Bloomberg later reported that when two executives showed him the dashcam footage, he got down on his hands and knees and squirmed on the floor, saying, "This is bad. I'm terrible." Isaac's version has him repeating "I'm a terrible person," and Rachel Whetstone, his head of communications, answering: "You aren't a terrible person. But you do do terrible things."
Whetstone's line is the most precise description of Kalanick anyone has offered, and it came from someone paid to defend him.
The previous month had already gone badly. In December 2016 he had agreed to join President Trump's Strategic and Policy Forum. When the January 2017 travel ban led New York taxi drivers to stop pickups at JFK in protest, Uber kept operating and turned off surge pricing, which many people read as strikebreaking. #DeleteUber trended, and about 200,000 people deleted the app. Kalanick said publicly that he opposed the order and would raise it with the president. On February 2 he quit the council. His memo to staff invoked Uber's values, "Inside Out" and "Just Change," and said: "I am incredibly proud to work directly with people like Thuan and Emil, both of whom were refugees who came here to build a better life for themselves." Thuan was Thuan Pham, the chief technology officer. Emil was Emil Michael, the executive who had suggested digging into journalists' families.
Over the next two months more came out. On March 3 the New York Times reported on Greyball, and a federal criminal inquiry followed. On March 25 The Information reported on the Seoul bar visit. Jones resigned after less than a year, saying "the beliefs and approach to leadership that have guided my career are inconsistent with what I saw and experienced at Uber." Whetstone left. So did Ed Baker, Brian McClendon, and Gautam Gupta. Uber ended up with no chief operating officer, no chief financial officer, and no general counsel.
T
The Unraveling, 2017
Roughly four months from a blog post to a hotel room in Chicago.
Feb 2
Kalanick resigns from Trump's economic advisory council after #DeleteUber.
Feb 19
Susan Fowler publishes her account of harassment and retaliation at Uber.
Feb 23
Waymo sues Uber over trade secrets allegedly taken by Anthony Levandowski.
Feb 27
Amit Singhal resigns over an undisclosed harassment allegation from his time at Google.
Feb 28
Bloomberg publishes the dashcam video of Kalanick and driver Fawzi Kamel.
Mar 3
The New York Times reveals the Greyball program.
May 26
Bonnie Kalanick dies in a boating accident; Donald Kalanick is seriously injured.
Jun 11
The Holder investigation's findings are presented to Uber leadership.
Jun 13
Kalanick announces an indefinite leave of absence.
Jun 20
Five investors demand his resignation at the Ritz-Carlton in Chicago. He resigns. Uber adds in-app tipping.
The Ritz-Carlton, Chicago
On Memorial Day weekend 2017, Kalanick's parents were in a boating accident. His mother, Bonnie, was killed and his father, Donald, was seriously injured. Bonnie had sold newspaper ads in Los Angeles, and her son had used her money and her house when his first company failed and his second nearly did.
On June 11 the Holder findings were presented to Uber's leadership. The report ran to hundreds of pages and included about a dozen pages of recommendations, the most important being that Kalanick take a leave and give up some control. More than twenty employees had already been fired. At the all-hands meeting where the recommendations were announced, the board member David Bonderman made a sexist remark about women on boards and resigned that evening.
On June 13 Kalanick told employees he was taking a leave. His letter is the most unguarded thing he has published:
"For the last eight years my life has always been about Uber. Recent events have brought home for me that people are more important than work, and that I need to take some time off of the day-to-day to grieve my mother, whom I buried on Friday, to reflect, to work on myself, and to focus on building out a world-class leadership team." He also wrote: "if we are going to work on Uber 2.0, I also need to work on Travis 2.0." And he ended by saying what people could do to help: "Put people first, that is my mom's legacy."
Isaac reports that he kept working without the board's approval anyway.
A week later he was in Chicago interviewing candidates for the executive jobs Uber needed to fill. On June 20 two Benchmark partners, Matt Cohler and Peter Fenton, came to his room at the Ritz-Carlton with a letter from Benchmark, First Round Capital, Menlo Ventures, Lowercase Capital, and Fidelity, which together held about 40 percent of Uber's voting power and 28 percent of its stock. These were the same shareholders whose voting rights Kalanick had cut to a tenth, now combined into a bloc large enough to matter. "The public perception," the letter said, "is that Uber fundamentally lacks ethical and moral values." Its first demand: "you need to immediately and permanently resign as CEO."
The New York Times reported that Kalanick refused at first. He called Arianna Huffington, who told him the letter's suggestions deserved consideration. Then he spent the afternoon in a room with Cohler and Fenton, and after hours of argument he agreed. "I love Uber more than anything in the world," he said that night, "and at this difficult moment in my personal life I have accepted the investors' request to step aside so that Uber can go back to building rather than be distracted with another fight."
Steve Vassallo of Foundation Capital, an Uber investor, put it simply to CNBC: "it was clear Travis lost the team."
— Mark Cuban, early Red Swoosh investor, to The New York TimesTravis's biggest strength is that he will run through a wall to accomplish his goals. Travis's biggest weakness is that he will run through a wall to accomplish his goals.
He gave up the title but not the fight. He kept his board seat and, according to Isaac, kept calling employees and directors for internal information and to influence the search for his successor, until the executive team threatened to quit together and his server access was cut off. On August 10, 2017, Benchmark sued him for fraud, breach of contract, and breach of fiduciary duty, arguing that he had won the 2016 vote giving him three board seats by withholding material information. Investors almost never sue founders, and Silicon Valley was shocked. A court sent the case to arbitration on August 30. "Benchmark's false allegations," Kalanick said, "are wholly without merit and have unnecessarily harmed Uber and its shareholders."
At first he backed Jeff Immelt, formerly of General Electric, who was open to Kalanick keeping some role. Meg Whitman wanted him out completely. Immelt's presentation went badly and Kalanick lost interest in him. He then backed an unexpected candidate, Dara Khosrowshahi of Expedia, even though Khosrowshahi had made clear Kalanick would have no operating role. One of the slides in Khosrowshahi's pitch was titled "There cannot be two CEOs." He got the job at the end of August.
On September 29, while Khosrowshahi and Goldman Sachs were negotiating a SoftBank deal that would reduce Kalanick's voting power, Kalanick used the seats he had secured in 2016 and appointed Ursula Burns, formerly of Xerox, and John Thain, formerly of Merrill Lynch, to the board without telling the other directors, expanding it from nine members to eleven. Khosrowshahi wrote to employees that it was "disappointing" and "highly unusual." Benchmark dropped its suit in January 2018 so the SoftBank deal could close at a $48 billion valuation, about $20 billion below the peak. Kalanick sold shares worth $1.4 billion in the tender. Vanity Fair, citing Bloomberg, reported that he was spending time with his father in Los Angeles and getting good at a phone game called 2048.
In late February 2019, at the Vanity Fair Oscar party, Nick Bilton put out his hand. Kalanick refused it: "I'm not shaking your hand, homey."
Uber went public on May 10, 2019, at $45 a share and a valuation of about $82 billion, and the stock fell on its first day. Kalanick sold most of his shares in the weeks before Christmas, more than $2.5 billion and about 90 percent of his stake, and on December 24, 2019, said he would leave the board on December 31. In 2023, after Isaac's book had become a TV series and Uber had accumulated $31.5 billion in losses, the company reported its first operating profit. In 2025 it had $52 billion in revenue and $10 billion in net income, and it handled an average of 42 million trips and deliveries a day.
Ninja-Level Stealth
He was back at work within months. On March 7, 2018, he announced a fund called 10100, pronounced "ten-one-hundred," aimed at job creation in emerging markets. Soon afterward he said the fund had put $150 million into City Storage Systems, a company that redeveloped distressed real estate, and that he would run it. He later explained the name to John Coogan and Jordi Hays on TBPN: "City storage systems is like a hilarious name... It was on purpose." He chose it to be as dull and unsearchable as possible.
Under that name was CloudKitchens: commercial buildings converted into delivery-only kitchens, plus software for the restaurants that leased them. Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund put in $400 million, and a 2022 round valued the company at $15 billion. Kalanick joined the advisory board for Neom, the Saudi desert megacity, which has since been sharply scaled back. Employees, he said, were not allowed to list the company on LinkedIn. There were thousands of them. He described the approach as a "massive, high-fidelity playbook on how to not get attention for anything we did." The man who had once sent 37,000 tweets at the D.C. taxi commissioner now made sure nobody could find his company.
He gave his reason on TBPN. After Uber, after "dealing with 100 headlines every day, deciding what you do or the actions you take based on what the New York Times is gonna write," he wanted to "just wake up every day and sort of just get to work and build." At the All-In Summit in 2024 he joked about the change: "It's kinda funny when you go from being a tech guy to a kitchen guy." He gave the economics of running a restaurant the way he once gave Uber's pricing: labor 25 to 40 percent of revenue, rent 6 to 12, supply chain around 30, marketing 10. "A successful restaurant is going to have a 10% profit margin and be really pumped about that." He said his software touched 18 percent of online food delivery in the United States. The pitch hadn't changed in substance: make a prepared meal so efficient to produce and deliver that it costs close to cooking at home, and "you do to the kitchen what Uber did to the car."
On March 13, 2026, the company came out of hiding with a new name, Atoms, and a broader goal: specialized robotics and AI for food, mining, and transport, one industry at a time. On July 22 he announced a $1.7 billion round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Ben Horowitz joining the board, in a post titled "Unfinished Business." He wrote that in 2011, when he was raising Uber's Series B, he and Marc Andreessen and Horowitz had come "oh-so-close" to working together. "I blame Marc, Ben blames himself," he wrote, "and in 2017 Uber suffered the consequences of not having Marc on the board - iykyk."
Something else in that post matters more than the jab at Benchmark. "As a young unproven entrepreneur, you work with whomever is willing to work with you. But once you've succeeded, you get to work with the people you choose to work with." The Scour founder who had taken Ovitz's money because no one else would offer any had finally reached a point where he could choose who funded him.
His framework now uses computer terms. He describes Atoms as building "atoms-based computers where CPU is manufacturing, storage is real estate, and network is transportation." By that description, Uber was the network. CloudKitchens covered processing and storage. Atoms would be the full machine. He told Senra he sees his job as "problem solver in chief." He describes management with something he calls the meta problem: the rate at which you solve problems has to stay greater than or equal to the rate at which you create them, and "if that's ever not true, you have a real problem." He used the same idea at All-In: "When the derivative of the problems you're creating is greater than the derivative of the problems you're solving then you have a real problem." He did not say out loud that February 2017 was a clear case of that. He did tell Senra: "Excellence is the capacity to take pain."
In March 2026 he told the TBPN hosts that until super-intelligent AI arrives, humans will become more valuable, not less, because they'll be "the long pole in the tent to progress." His example was plumbers. "Until we get there, I believe we're going to be super fine," he said. "That's my white pill." This is the man who, ten years earlier, told TED audiences that driverless cars were coming and that resisting them would be naive.
In the "Unfinished Business" post he described the industrial builders of the coming era as heading toward "the final boss, Nature and its fierce resistance to change." It's a familiar setup from him: one more incumbent to fight, though this time the opponent can't be lobbied or Greyballed. Asked whether he was still angry about Uber, he gave an answer that sounded rehearsed: "When you fall in love again, you don't think about the X very much."
Uber's headquarters at 1725 Third Street in Mission Bay, the building whose model he kept on his desk when Adam Lashinsky interviewed him in the summer of 2016, opened in March 2021. He never ran the company from it. When Lashinsky visited, the opening was planned for 2019, and the model sat next to the spot where Kalanick seldom sat, since he was usually on his feet.
He has since bought a $36.4 million penthouse at 565 Broome Street in Manhattan and a $43.3 million house in Los Angeles. He told the TBPN hosts that he now commutes to work on a jet ski, five minutes each way, and has hit seventy miles an hour. "It's a fucking notch on the belt," he said. "Who else do you know is jet skiing to work? Nobody. I'm the guy." A jet ski has one rider, no meter, and nobody else steering.
The only issue is the weather. When it rains, he said, "it gets a little weird." One of the hosts offered the obvious fix, and nobody argued: you call an Uber. Then someone else drives, and when the ride ends the app asks whether you'd like to leave a tip.
Part IIThe Playbook
Kalanick's methods worked very well and also did a great deal of damage, and the same methods produced both results. What follows tries to separate the parts that can be reused from the parts that destroyed his tenure, without pretending they can always be cleanly separated. Each principle is drawn from the record above. Several are warnings.
The principles
- 1.Design the term sheet around your worst memory, then audit the memory.
- 2.Run on scarcity, but know when it becomes a hazard.
- 3.Price the first cities yourself.
- 4.Make the customer your lobbyist.
- 5.Watch the derivative of problem creation.
- 6.A tactic repeated becomes a culture.
- 7.Control is a loan, not an asset.
- 8.Not all friction is waste.
- 9.In a foreign market, change everything, including your theory of power.
- 10.Diligence moves at the speed of the stakes, not the race.
- 11.Use silence to escape your own reputation.
Principle 1
Design the term sheet around your worst memory, then audit the memory
The Scour episode, with Ovitz's lawsuit, the unfavorable terms, and the loss of majority control, became the blueprint for Uber's capital structure. New investors got shares with a tenth of the founders' voting power. Financial disclosure was kept to a minimum. The board, by Kalanick's own account, was handpicked to "do what I want." For years this kept the company protected from the meddling investors he feared, and it let him move faster than any competitor could.
The weakness was that the defenses were built against a threat from 2000. They assumed outside capital would be the danger. It turned out to be the company's own behavior. When the crisis came, what removed him was not a takeover. It was a group of minority shareholders, with 40 percent of the vote between them, who had concluded that the company's conduct was eroding their investment. A structure built to keep investors out had also kept out the kind of oversight that might have prevented the scandals that brought those investors together.
The useful version is to protect yourself from the failures you've already lived through while asking what new failure that protection makes more likely. Insulation that stops a hostile investor also stops a sensible one.
Tactic: For every governance protection you negotiate, write down which risk it guards against and which one it makes harder to see.
Principle 2
Run on scarcity, but know when it becomes a hazard
"I'm still acting like I'm not going to eat tomorrow," Kalanick said about running a company worth tens of billions. That attitude came from Red Swoosh: four years without a salary, a two-person company, moving back in with his parents. It is a large part of why Uber outpaced better-funded rivals and why he priced cities himself, recruited hard, and treated each launch as if survival depended on it.
But scarcity thinking says you never have enough of anything, including ethical room. A founder who feels he's always about to starve will justify each next step past the line as necessary. Spending payroll tax money, ignoring cease-and-desist orders, deploying Greyball, refusing tips: in the moment, each could be described as survival. A company with $17 billion raised isn't fighting for survival, and acting as though it is turns aggression into a reflex.
It helps to treat scarcity as a gear rather than a permanent setting. The intensity that gets a company out of the early struggle needs a governor once the company is stable.
Tactic: Write down the specific financial or market conditions under which your company would no longer be in survival mode, and when you reach them, go through every practice you justified on survival grounds.
Principle 3
Price the first cities yourself
Kalanick told Senra he personally took part in pricing Uber's first twenty or thirty cities and used each one to refine a playbook that could later run without him. It's an important and often overlooked part of how Uber scaled. The founder doesn't hand off the most important variable until he understands it well enough to write it down.
This connects to his idea of a line between order and chaos, which he described as using as few rules as possible while keeping enough structure to move fast. Founders who delegate too early get inconsistent decisions and lose the details. Founders who never delegate cap the company at what they can personally handle. His sequence was to do it himself, write it down, then hand it off, so that his own involvement became a system and stopped being a dependency.
The point isn't that founders should set prices. It's that the founder should personally do whichever task contains the company's core economics, long enough to turn that knowledge into something others can run.
Tactic: Pick the one decision your business model depends on most and make it yourself for the first twenty instances, writing down the reasoning each time until someone else could follow it.
Principle 4
Make the customer your lobbyist
When the D.C. taxi commissioner accused Uber of breaking the law, Kalanick didn't hire more lawyers. He got customers to send 50,000 emails and 37,000 tweets. When regulators in a new market pushed back, Uber asked users to speak up. His TED talk on the jitney put the whole regulatory fight into a story with a hometown hero, a monopolist villain, and a warning: if regulators kill this, it will be the jitney all over again.
The underlying point is that regulators answer to constituents, and a product that people love creates constituents. A company that can mobilize its users changes the politics from "company versus regulator" to "regulator versus voters." It worked in dozens of American cities, and the courts later reflected it: in taxi companies' U.S. lawsuits against Uber, Uber won every case.
The limit shows up in the Uber Files. Mobilizing customers is legitimate pressure. Showing regulators a fake app, cutting off access to data during raids, and sending drivers into hostile protests are not. Kalanick did both, and the second category is what eventually tainted the first.
Tactic: Before you face a regulatory fight, make it easy for your most enthusiastic users to contact their representatives, and give them a historical story that makes their support feel like defending something rather than just protecting their convenience.
Principle 5
Watch the derivative of problem creation
Kalanick's best framework is one he described after leaving Uber: the rate at which you solve problems has to stay greater than or equal to the rate at which you create them. He doesn't treat problems as bad. Expanding into China created enormous problems that were worth having. The danger is when new problems arrive faster than the organization can absorb them.
His last two years at Uber show the framework failing. China, self-driving cars, Uber Eats, the Levandowski acquisition, the fight with Lyft, Greyball, the 2016 data breach, and dozens of city-level regulatory battles were all running at once while the company had no CFO, no COO, and an HR department that was failing. Then in February 2017 the backlog all came due within a few weeks. The meta problem explains what happened better than any single scandal does.
He says the key skill is predicting what problems a decision made today will produce six months from now. That means deciding not to start some things until you have the management capacity to handle them, and it's the hardest part of the framework to actually follow.
Tactic: Keep a running list of the problems each major initiative is expected to create over the next six months, and pause new initiatives whenever that list grows faster than your leadership team does.
Principle 6
A tactic repeated becomes a culture
"It's douche as a tactic, not a strategy," a venture capitalist said in Kalanick's defense in 2014. The defense assumes the aggression could be turned on for regulators and turned off for colleagues. The record says otherwise. The Miami letter, sent once and then again to four times as many people, the Las Vegas party, the expensed strip-club visits, and the high performers protected from HR complaints all show that what the CEO does for effect, employees adopt as how things are done.
Behavior at the top spreads, and other people don't keep the original context. A general manager who saw the CEO treat cease-and-desist letters as negotiating opening bids will reasonably treat other rules the same way. An engineer whose harasser is protected because he performs well learns what the company actually values. Kalanick said he and his team were "good people doing good work." The Holder report, the firing of more than twenty employees, and a $7 million settlement with 480 current and former employees say the work was mixed and the people varied.
K
The Doctrine and Its Bill
Each of Kalanick's operating beliefs produced a result and a cost.
| Doctrine | What it built | What it cost | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|
| Launch first, argue the law later | Hundreds of cities in a few years | Greyball, Ripley, a federal inquiry, the loss of the London licence in 2017 | Tactic, not culture |
| Founder voting control | Speed and protection from investor meddling | No check on behavior until a 40% bloc forced him out | Risk |
| Frictionless payment | A product people loved | Drivers' income; a reputation as the cold competitor next to Lyft | Risk |
| Personally pricing early cities | A repeatable launch playbook | Founder time, recovered later | Scale |
| Localize completely in China | Uber's top ten cities by rides | About $2 billion, exchanged for 18% of Didi | Scan |
| Stealth at CloudKitchens and Atoms | Eight years of work without public scrutiny | Recruiting and brand awareness given up | Scale |
Tactic: For any aggressive behavior you use deliberately with outsiders, ask what your most junior manager would do if they copied it internally, and whether you'd be comfortable seeing that in a newspaper.
Principle 7
Control is a loan, not an asset
In 2016 Kalanick won the right to fill three board seats at his discretion. In September 2017, after he had stopped being CEO, he used two of them to appoint Ursula Burns and John Thain without telling anyone, expanding the board from nine to eleven. Legally he could. In practice it brought on a lawsuit, wiped out his remaining goodwill, and sped up the SoftBank governance changes he was trying to block.
The lesson is that formal control only lasts as long as the people around you accept it as legitimate. The voting structure, board seats, and limited disclosure were all real powers on paper. But they depended on employees showing up, executives staying, and investors not organizing. When those things stopped, the contractual control didn't save him. The executive team threatened to quit together, his server access was cut, and the minority bloc organized and won.
Khosrowshahi's slide, "There cannot be two CEOs," made the same point. Kalanick still had legal authority and had lost the actual authority to run the company. He kept acting as though he hadn't.
Tactic: Measure your control by how much your team and board would back you without the voting structure, and treat any gap between that and your legal power as a liability.
Principle 8
Not all friction is waste
Kalanick resisted tipping for years on design grounds: a tip interrupted a seamless payment. As product reasoning it was consistent. As business reasoning it was wrong. Lyft allowed tips, drivers resented their absence at Uber, and the refusal fed the image of Uber as heartless. Uber added tipping on the day he resigned.
The broader point is that a marketplace has more than one user, and something frictionless for one side may be costly for the other. For a rider, the tip button is a small inconvenience. For a driver, it's income and recognition from the person they just drove. Removing it optimized for the side with more choices and took something from the side with fewer, the side the business depended on for supply.
Founders who build for elegance should ask whose experience they're optimizing. Sometimes friction is how a product shows that a person on the other side matters.
Tactic: For every point of friction you plan to remove from a two-sided product, check what that friction gives the other side before you take it away.
Principle 9
In a foreign market, change everything, including your theory of power
In China Kalanick did what he rarely did at home. He treated the market as new, rebuilt the product around local maps and payments, branded it the People's Uber, and accepted that in China "progress must be in harmony with stability." He took a local partner for about 7 percent rather than the 50 percent others expected. He was willing to adapt not only the product but his basic stance toward government.
It wasn't enough to beat Didi, which copied quickly and had more money. But when it was clear the cost would keep rising, he sold Uber China for 18 percent of the winner and stopped the losses. Fortune called it "a shrewd capitulation." Losing on good terms is a skill too.
The less obvious takeaway is that his willingness to defer to Beijing shows that "principled confrontation" was a choice. He could have taken a cooperative approach in San Francisco, Paris, or London and didn't. Founders should recognize that their aggressive stance is a decision they're making in each market, not a fixed part of their personality.
Tactic: Before entering any new market, write out how power actually works there and what kind of company would look stabilizing to the people who hold it, then design your launch around that, not around what worked at home.
Principle 10
Diligence moves at the speed of the stakes, not the race
Uber bought Otto for about $680 million because it believed losing the self-driving race would be fatal. The pressure of that race shortened the diligence. Uber took on a founder whose former employer had already gone to arbitration with him, and who, as the case later showed, had downloaded thousands of confidential files. The result was a $245 million settlement, a public apology, a criminal case, and a program that was shut down two years later. Amit Singhal's hiring went wrong in a similar way. Kalanick didn't know about the Google allegation, but a fuller reference check would likely have turned it up.
In a race, speed feels like everything. But one bad hire in a critical role can cost more than losing the race would have. Uber's autonomous future did eventually arrive, through partnerships, long after the Otto deal fell apart.
The more critical the hire or acquisition, the more the diligence should resemble a regulator's review rather than an investor's quick look.
Tactic: For any acquisition or senior hire that would carry a strategic program, give one person whose job is to argue against it full access to the diligence and real authority to delay it.
Principle 11
Use silence to escape your own reputation
After Uber, Kalanick ran the opposite kind of company. He gave it the dullest possible name, City Storage Systems, kept employees from listing it on LinkedIn, and stayed in stealth for eight years while building real estate, software, and robotics across about thirty countries. He described this as following a detailed playbook for not attracting attention. The reason was practical. His name brought a hundred headlines a day, and he didn't want decisions shaped by what the press would write.
Stealth isn't secrecy for its own sake here. It's a way of separating the work from the founder's reputation until the work can stand on its own. When Atoms announced itself in 2026, it did so with real assets, thousands of employees, and a $1.7 billion round, which gave the narrative something solid behind it. Kalanick also used the time to settle who he wanted to work with: "once you've succeeded, you get to work with the people you choose to work with."
For a founder with a damaged reputation, the way back may be years of quiet building before reappearing with something hard to dismiss.
Tactic: If your name has become a liability, build under a deliberately forgettable brand until the business's results can carry its public story.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Travis Kalanick, letter to Uber employees announcing his leave of absence, June 13, 2017For Uber 2.0 to succeed there is nothing more important than dedicating my time to building out the leadership team. But if we are going to work on Uber 2.0, I also need to work on Travis 2.0 to become the leader that this company needs and that you deserve.
— Travis Kalanick, to David Senra, 2026If you're doing it really well, I like to say that the only constraint on our imagination is management capacity.
— Travis Kalanick, 'Unfinished Business,' July 22, 2026As a young unproven entrepreneur, you work with whomever is willing to work with you. But once you've succeeded, you get to work with the people you choose to work with.
— Travis Kalanick, with Ben Horowitz on The a16z Show, 2026If you don't fight for the best idea, then what idea are you fighting for? You're fighting for the mediocre idea.
— Travis Kalanick, UCLA Newsroom, October 2015UCLA taught me how to think like an engineer, how to break problems into pieces and put it all back together.
Maxims
- Your first lawsuit becomes your operating system. Whatever harmed you early will shape every structure you build later, so look at it on purpose.
- Scarcity is fuel, not a home. The habit of feeling you won't eat tomorrow drives a startup and becomes dangerous at scale.
- Do the core economics yourself until you can write them down. Delegation that works comes from personal experience turned into a playbook.
- Turn your users into your constituency. A regulator facing voters behaves differently from one facing a company.
- Watch the rate, not the problem. If problems arrive faster than you can solve them, no single scandal is the real cause.
- A tactic repeated becomes a culture. Whatever the founder does for effect, the organization learns as normal.
- Voting power is borrowed from the people who follow you. When they stop, the contracts won't protect you.
- Friction can be how one side of a marketplace knows it matters. Check before you design it out.
- Confrontation is a choice you make in each market. A founder who can defer in Beijing can also choose to defer in San Francisco.
- Excellence is the capacity to take pain. Make sure the pain you're taking is yours and not someone else's.
