Wild Ride: Inside Uber's Quest for World Domination - Hardcover

Lashinsky, Adam

 
9780735211391: Wild Ride: Inside Uber's Quest for World Domination
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0735211396 ISBN 13: 9780735211391
Verlag: Portfolio, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

In your pocket is something amazing: a quick and easy way to summon a total stranger who will take you anywhere you’d like. In your hands is something equally amazing: the untold story of Uber’s meteoric rise, and the massive ambitions of its larger-than-life founder and CEO.

Before Travis Kalanick became famous as the public face of Uber, he was a scrappy, rough-edged, loose-lipped entrepreneur. And even after taking Uber from the germ of an idea to a $69 billion global transportation behemoth, he still describes his company as a start-up. Like other Silicon Valley icons such as Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, he’s always focused on the next disruptive innovation and the next world to conquer.

Both Uber and Kalanick have acquired a reputation for being combative, relentless, and iron-fisted against competitors. They’ve inspired both admiration and loathing as they’ve flouted government regulators, thrown the taxi industry into a tailspin, and stirred controversy over possible exploitation of drivers. They’ve even reshaped the deeply ingrained consumer behavior of not accepting a ride from a stranger—against the childhood warnings from everyone’s parents.

Wild Ride is the first truly inside look at Uber’s global empire. Veteran journalist Adam Lashinsky, the bestselling author of Inside Apple, traces the origins of Kalanick’s massive ambitions in his humble roots, and he explores Uber’s murky beginnings and the wild ride of its rapid growth and expansion into different industries.

Lashinsky draws on exclusive, in-depth interviews with Kalanick and many other sources who share new details about Uber’s internal and external power struggles. He also examines its doomed venture into China and the furtive fight between Kalanick and his competitors at Google, Tesla, Lyft, and GM over self-driving cars. Lashinsky even got behind the wheel as an Uber driver himself to learn what it’s really like.

Uber has made headlines thanks to its eye-popping valuations and swift expansion around the world. But this book is the first account of how Uber really became the giant it is today, and how it plans to conquer the future.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

ADAM LASHINSKY is the executive editor of Fortune, editorial director of the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference, and co-chair of the Fortune Global Forum. He wrote the 2012 New York Times bestseller Inside Apple, and he appears regularly on Fox News. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and daughter.

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Chapter 1

A Wild Ride Through China

Travis Kalanick sits in the back of a chauffeur-driven black Mercedes making its way through the traffic-clogged streets of Beijing. It is the dead of summer in 2016, and the sky above the Chinese capital is thick with pollution, the air muggy and still. As CEO of Uber, the world's most valuable start-up, Kalanick has been visiting China about every three months for three years now. All the travel from his home base in San Francisco is part of a money-draining and quixotic gambit to replicate the global success of Uber's disruptive ride-hailing service in the world's most populous country.

Kalanick has spent the previous three days in Tianjin, a megacity on the Yellow Sea, two hours southeast of Beijing. There he was a cochair of the World Economic Forum's (WEF) New Champions meeting, the so-called summer Davos. Weeks shy of his fortieth birthday, Kalanick was the toast of Tianjin, where he enjoyed the considerable fringe benefits of his newfound worldwide prominence. The California start-up he runs has been around a mere six years, yet at the off-season international gabfest he scored an audience with the second most powerful government official in China, Premier Li Keqiang. Kalanick appeared on WEF panels moderated by Western and Chinese broadcasters, gamely attempted to flip a traditional pancake over an intimate dinner with the managers responsible for Uber's local operations in Tianjin, and huddled with his entrepreneurial peers. Among them was Lei Jun, founder of the highly valued Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi. Lei's penchant for bold claims and his company's controversial business model of selling ultracheap phones make him as notorious in China as Kalanick is everywhere else.

Already, Kalanick's trip is a success, judged at least through the prism of the image-enhancing mentions he has racked up in the Chinese and international press. Li, the Chinese premier and an outspoken promoter of entrepreneurialism in China, called Kalanick a "pioneer." He said this in English, a flattering flourish and tidbit the Uber CEO's China-based minions dutifully fed to the local press. Indeed, Kalanick's every utterance on this trip is making headlines. Asked during a WEF fireside chat if self-driving vehicles would make the human-driven kind obsolete, Kalanick threw off one of his signature and controversial one-liners that combined insouciance, boastfulness, and don't-mess-with-me humor. "You might own a car like maybe some people own a horse," he deadpanned in front of an admiring audience. "You know, you might take a ride on the weekends or something."

As he leaves Tianjin and in the privacy of his human-driven vehicle on the road to Beijing, however, his cocky good cheer gives way to prickly tension. In fact, Kalanick has a full-blown crisis on his hands. He joins a conference call with a team of Uber executives in three countries on two continents. A team of communications executives dials in from San Francisco. Others call from Seoul, South Korea. Two executives are in the car with Kalanick, both critical to Uber's Asian ambitions. One is Emil Michael, Uber's chief business officer and the CEO's all-purpose right-hand man, to whom on this very trip Kalanick has delegated the role of engaging in high-stakes and secretive negotiations to sell Uber's China business to its chief rival, Didi Chuxing. The other is Liu Zhen, the head of strategy for Uber China and its best-known Chinese employee. Liu is also a first cousin of Jean Liu, the former Goldman Sachs banker who is president of Didi and whose father founded the computer behemoth Lenovo.

The purpose of the call is to discuss whether or not Kalanick should travel as planned early the next day to Seoul for a most unusual appointment. In late 2014 a Korean prosecutor indicted Kalanick, holding him responsible for what the South Korean government deemed to be Uber's illegal taxi service. This service was a version of the company's popular UberX service in the United States, in which amateur drivers use their own cars to serve passengers. Kalanick agreed to appear in court to answer the charges. The plan, worked out by Uber's legal team after protracted negotiations with the Korean prosecutors, is for Kalanick to plead guilty to what is effectively a misdemeanor-and then to be immediately released.

From a legal perspective, appearing in the Seoul court is low risk. Prosecutors have assured Uber's lawyers that Kalanick would be given a suspended sentence, making him free to leave Seoul. And that would be fine with the CEO, who is well accustomed at this point to picking fights with regulators and other officials the world over. Since it received its first cease-and-desist letter from the city of San Francisco in 2010, Uber has been clashing with adversaries from Seattle to New York and Paris to Delhi and beyond-often with its pugnacious CEO stirring the pot with inflammatory comments to the media and outrageous tweets. What's more, South Korea wasn't all that important a market for Uber, with restrictive laws preventing the company from operating all but the highest-end limousine version of its service there. Uber's motivation in settling the case, therefore, wasn't so much about commerce as about eliminating a pesky and embarrassing thorn in its CEO's side.

As the car snakes its way through snarled Beijing traffic, however, Kalanick becomes increasingly agitated. He's concerned that what ought to be a simple legal proceeding instead has the potential to turn into what he terms a "shit show" on the ground in Korea. Repeatedly, he queries his public-relations and legal advisers about the ramifications of the local media learning that the renegade CEO had alighted in Seoul. The goal was to cause as little ruckus as possible. To achieve that outcome, Uber has chartered a private jet, which stands at the ready at an airfield in Beijing to whisk Kalanick in and out of Korea without the press catching wind of his appearance. And yet someone, likely in the prosecutor's office, has leaked word that Kalanick will appear next day. Kalanick envisions the worst possible scenario for his and Uber's brand: photos of him being handcuffed and paraded through a Korean courtroom, an Asian perp walk at precisely the moment he was working so hard to project an image of leadership in China and the rest of Asia.

When it comes to protecting his image, no detail is too small. Kalanick wants to know, for example, how many doors there are in the courtroom-the better to understand effective escape routes. How ironclad is the promise to release him immediately? Would he be able to clear customs quietly in the private-aviation terminal? Opinions fly on the line as executives talk over one another, including the CEO. At one particularly heated moment Kalanick instructs his man on the ground in Seoul, Uber's top business-development executive for Asia, to "stop interrupting me."

It will be hours before Kalanick decides to skip the court date and instead instruct his Korean lawyers to request, for the fourth time, an extension. It is a calculated risk. Angering a Korean judge might make Kalanick permanently unwelcome in Korea. And yet the bet pays off, at least in the short term. His failure to appear earns brief mentions in the Korean press and is ignored everywhere else,...

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Verlag
Portfolio
Erscheinungsdatum
2017
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0735211396
ISBN 13 
9780735211391
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
240
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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