Wild Ride

Lashinsky, a Fortune journalist who had earlier written a book on Apple, reports on Uber during the Travis Kalanick period and the months around his removal in 2017. He interviewed Kalanick at length before the collapse, which gives the book unusual access to how the company's leadership described its own strategy.

The business material covers the mechanics: how Uber grew city by city with local general managers holding wide autonomy and large budgets, how it used driver subsidies and rider discounts funded by venture capital to buy market share, how it fought regulators by mobilising users rather than by negotiating, and how it approached the competitive fights with Lyft in the United States and Didi in China. Lashinsky takes seriously the argument that ride-hailing is a network business where density produces lower wait times and better utilisation, which was the basis for spending so heavily on growth.

The cultural material covers the values Kalanick installed, including principled confrontation and always be hustling, and the consequences: Susan Fowler's account of sexual harassment and the human resources response, the Waymo trade secrets litigation, the Greyball tool used to evade regulators, the executive departures, the Holder report and the board's removal of Kalanick.

The book was written while events were still unfolding and has the strengths and limits of that timing. It does not cover the Khosrowshahi turnaround, the 2019 public offering, the settlement of the driver classification fights, or whether the density argument for profitability was correct, which the following years partly answered. Lashinsky is also more sympathetic to Kalanick's strategic reasoning than most later accounts, which readers can weigh for themselves.