Understand Horse Racing - Uber Edition
Review of the book on UBER by Mike Isaac
Hey Bheem,
I am sad that our bankers are not the bravest bunch . But, at least they didn’t pull things that UBER did. This time i am writing a story from the startup land, which is also a story about a person who was too brave for his own good. But in essence, it is a review of a good book that is about being Super Pumped.
Super Pumped by Mike Isaac is a book that everyone who has some time on their hands should read. If you are someone like me who is also interested in tech, startups and venture capital, then reading it becomes mandatory.
My Startup journey has been me trying my hand and being completely burnt a couple of times. But after reading the book, I am still coming to terms with what shit could be pulled around by being a darling investment of few elites: the venture capitalists.
Analogy
Investments into startups could equate as a bet being placed on a rider and horse in the race. Rider, horse and race? Quite a peculiar set of words, you must be thinking.
Allow me to present my analogy and to understand it well, you need to know the basics of venture business. VCs ( Venture Capitalists) are symbolic of people wagering on horse racing.
So, in our analogy we have riders who are our beloved founders and horses which are their prodigal ideas/startups. There is somewhere in your mind a thought forming, we don’t know any startups with only one founder. Don’t worry, even in startups with multiple founders there is only one who acts the CEO. Hence, this analogy looks stretched but lets rolls for the time being, it will all make sense very soon.
Preparation for the Race
When you visit a racecourse, you might witness the horses have blinkers on their eyes to keep them running straight ahead. In the startup world, this is the single metric that the startup hinges on, Product Market Fit. Our startup, UBER found it fast enough. Mike dwells deep into the origins of the idea, you will be surprised to know that the original founder wanted to build UBER because of a scene from James Bond movie. And that founder is Garett Camp, not Travis Kalanick (TK from here on) .
Back to racecourse, the riders ridding the horse don’t have such blinkers. There are riding to win the race with the horse. Yet, in the case of UBER, our rider ( TK ) tied blinkers to his eyes as well. These blinkers were his sheer perseverance to defeat others, privilege, revenge and ego. The final race is yet to finish but at the moment UBER is one of the worst performing stock after its IPO( Initial Public Offering ) since 1975 at Wall-street.
How did UBER end up here ?
Mike Isaac takes us through many races TK competed through this startup with the sole goal of winning at any cost. He was responsible for enabling the company to skirt law. He was involved in doing shady stuff that impacted many lives at no cost or adverse affect to him. All of this was tolerated and allowed because his startup and him are the rider and horse pair on whom huge wagers were placed by the venture capitalists.
If you never gave UBER more thought than a transportation service that provides you riders in a cheap & efficient way, then you should read this book to know all about how it came into play.
This is the brilliance of Mike, he is considerate of his readers by not meandering the lanes of technicality of the idea or premise, he rather takes you to the centre of the action that ensued. Mike follows the classic technique of premise and action sequence for every new entrant entering the story in the book as we go along.
All throughout, you will be having this question nagging in the back of your mind: How are these talented people acting so stupid? And all of it for what ? To achieve one arbitrary goal, that kept changing anyways, which was envisioned by a single person?
Is that reason enough to tolerate all the transgressions against ethical behaviour that ensued in the company. A list of their transgressions :
Launching in cities without a permit.
Ghosting the regulators by showing them dummy cars ( Greyball )
Accessing everything from your mobile devices.
Making fake ride request on your competitors apps.
Prevalence of sexual harassment and abuse.
Hiding data breaches from users.
Hiring spies to surveils competition's executives.
Hiring corrupt Personal for running a new business.
Treating drivers as just means to an end.
This might be baffling for the outsiders but was business as usual for all the insiders.
Review
Silicon Valley is touted as a magical place. A place where being rationally unreasonable is a prerequisite to build any startup. In a dog eat dog world where raising venture is existential for your business and building things at scale are all part of the core of what keeps this city a coveted spot for any aspiring entrepreneur to come, there are going to be few who bank on this environment to fuel their vision for the world. One such story is of UBER.
The UBER gang thought that their ways and means were all justified because they were principled during their initial days against the corrupt Taxi industry. Later, they did it because TK said it. The whole ‘UBER X’ was a total rip-off of their competing service Lyft in US. TK sent a member of their team to spy on Lyft and then built it themselves to beat Lyft. They didn't go out to disrupt the TAXI industry to start with, they did it to beat their competition.
Another thread that you see throughout is the sheer ugliness at display. Not hidden or unsaid, rather full frontal. And, when the founder is ugly to use dirty tricks to outsmart rivals, competitors and partner drivers. In the end, he is privy to his own treatment at the hands of his own venture capitalists, when he is ousted from his own company even when he had taken all precautions to be never in this situation. The thing is we all know how the story has ended, with the departure of TK from the the company he built back in 2017. It's the details that make it an another story altogether. Definitely worthy of a read.
All in all Mike does a commendable job of stitching the whole story together chronologically with each role being given a reason and rationale behind their part in the story. My parting thoughts circle back to the starting of this post. In the end, the horse was kept in the race by kicking the rider out and the rider didn’t see it coming because he had his own blinkers on.
Regards,
Vivek
Duologue is an effort by Vivek and Bheem to have a dialogue about varying topics.
If you liked what you read, you can subscribe to our newsletter.
Share it around if you find any of this piqued your interest or might be interesting for your peers.