Super Pumped

This book is a captivating ride (pun intended). Very hard to put down.

Mike Isaac was ostensibly the right person to write this book as he had been reporting on Uber for all of its years since inception. His 200+ sources and their inside scoops make the story very credible. Only by stringing together all of the public fallouts created by Uber & Kalanick himself, you start to understand how the sh*tshow year of 2017 was an unavoidable outcome of the “super pumped” bro culture that Uber perpetuated (except for - of course - Kalanick sadly losing his mom in a tragic accident).

What I like is that Isaac doesn't paint Kalanick as a con artist (which he isn't). Kalanick is just the ebullient and charismatic entrepreneur who hasn't been kept in check by his immediate environment and through Uber's corporate governance. The question is though whether without Kalanick flouting the rules we would've still been still stuck with the notoriously inefficient and customer-unfriendly taxi industry.