Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber
Mike Isaac drew on his years covering Uber for The New York Times to reconstruct the company's rise under Travis Kalanick, from the earliest pitches to Silicon Valley investors through the 2017 explosion of scandals that finally forced him out. Isaac walks readers through Greyball, the Waymo trade secrets fight, the Susan Fowler blog post, and the boardroom knife fight that ended with Dara Khosrowshahi taking over. His reporting is granular about deals, executives, and the culture Kalanick built inside the company. He also situates Uber inside the broader tech founder mythology of the 2010s. The book became the basis for the Showtime series of the same name.
What you might want to know about Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
The New York Times reporter behind the Uber scandal beat reconstructs the Travis Kalanick era.
Swisher has praised Isaac's reporting on Pivot and her other podcasts, calling Super Pumped the definitive book on the Kalanick era Uber and a model of tech journalism.
Isaac is unsparing about the culture but also careful with the facts, sourcing extensively and giving Kalanick and other executives room to explain themselves.
Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber was written by Mike Isaac, published in 2019 by W. W. Norton.
Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber is 400 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber takes most readers 6 to 9 hours to finish.
Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
