Have guessed, ben meza ms. Rics not here today, the author of bitcoin billionaires. I know. He got really sick this morning and just absolutely couldnt makeld it, so i will talk a lite bit about t his book come just r those of you who are wondering. [inaudible] [applause] we are going to lead time at the end for ideas q a as well, to please be thinking that your questions from mike. Have an interactive conversation with you. Let me justit are, actually goig to start is by sing a words about the book before we just do the deep dive into mike and his book. For anyt of you havent checked it out yet its called bitcoin billionaires and its the story of the window lost twins and yes, you may remember them from the facebook story. They were the brothers at harvard who actually hired Mark Zuckerberg to help them t build out their social Network Platform at harvard. Mark was the software developer, the code, the engineer who help them build the platform but then he actually ended up spinning away from them and creating his own platform. They made a claim that they were entitled to some ownership from facebook because of the role that they played in seeding the original idea. They said mark stole the idea and so they were kind of vilified in the social network. Donate to look kind of snooty and arrogant and kind of a pain in the butt, but in this book, the book starts with t them getting their 63 million settlement from facebook from Mark Zuckerberg and then goes on to talk about how they used that money to invest can become some of the very First Investors in bitcoin. The end result is that they become the first two billionaires from bitcoin. They sort of narrowly escaped getting a ball with some of the underworld of bitcoin with the silk silk road and its a really exciting and pretty cool adventure from, it says a story of genius, betrayal and redemption. And so theres a few layers of the trail in this book and in the passing the last laugh. Its a really quick read. It will completely change your view of the winkle lost twins if you saw the social network. And he talks about that in the forward, how ben felt that it something to do because the social network was based on his previous book, so we said in some ways he was trying, he wanted to show them any newly after he learned a lot more about them. If you havent picked it up, i highly recommend come its a really great read and were sorry ben youre united. Hopefully youre watching on tv. Now were going to do a deep dive into super pumped the battle for uber and forth into that i want to just share a little bit about mike isaac with you. U. Hes the Technology Reporter for the New York Times. Hes based in San Francisco where he covers facebook, twitter, uber, and a lot of the Silicon Valley giants as their sometimes known and is uber coverage action one in an award for business reporting. So rockstar Business Reporter here with us. We really excited to have you, so please join me in welcoming mike with us here today. [applause] my plan with this conversation is to kind of tease out of mike for a little bit of an overview of this book how interesting it is and then we can talk a little bit about the applications for what he found for the story for the rest of the world. Maybe mike if we could just start off if you could just orient everybody for some people that may not know what the story is and what uber is if you could give the arc of it and we will take a deep dive into the pieces. What is the story and how did you get involved in even writing this book . Yeah so i think by now 2019 everyone has some knowledge of uber or how it operates in the world but back when i started covering the company in 2014 the news york times and i think it was this moment where ridesharing was quickly becoming a thing but there were no laws or real framework around it for people to know what to do with it. Entrepreneur Travis Kalanick was in some ways and archetype for the brash, think you would call him like Mark Zuckerberg meets the cam of very sort of aggressive but he found essentially a loophole in how people got around or didnt get around. Several weeks ago in 2010 and 2011 i was working at liars magazine and i had to leave 45 minutes early because i wouldnt know if the taxi would come and get me in the Public Infrastructure was really crumbling. Pushing a button on your phone to get a car didnt exist and this was a pretty revolutionary idea. For me when i decided to ride this it was wanting to sketch out how entrepreneurs know about ideas and maybe the limits of worshiping founders that rate the rules, the break norms and how it can be maybe a positive thing for change but also how it can go really really badly. Can you give us that basic arc. The uber launched as a ridesharing app kind of like everything is going awesome and then what happens . Yeah i mean there were periods where i think most people, they kind of know the uber went through a weird time so maybe they found some nebulous level are people i talk to her like i know it happened and i dont really know why and its very convenient for a lot of folks have gotten into it over the years. I think the arc of the company was they created an uber cat when the iphone was just coming out and when smartphones were suddenly becoming something that everyone could use and there were singlepurpose apps to do all sorts of stuff that were becoming popular. I think it immediately resonated with people because they were so easy to call a car to get to. The idea for travis the ceo was essentially pour as much money into the ideas possible because we need to be in every city not just in the United States but around the world because there is no real barrier to entry. Other people could do the same thing. They dont have what is called a moat so to speak which is the ability to protect your business that was what they did. They ran literally billions of dollars and just started pushing in every city as quickly as they could. I think normal folks for the most part were charmed with the idea that you could call a car really easily but they also pushed completely past regulators and brought in a lot of markets. This is the story of the rise in the epic fall. Uber came out and they raise billions of dollars but then the story and with Travis Kalanick being ousted as ceo. Its pretty dramatic. Its not like a Mark Zuckerberg tale where he still the ceo. He is still the hero. This thing has a dark side. I think the book, its an uber book but its really about the state of tech right now where we are with Technology Coverage and how text impacts our world. I think probably from the late 90s up until a few years ago tech coverage, tech reporting was largely revering young founders who are coding the next billion dollar app like eating a bowl of rahm and in college dorm room. The mythology around the next billionaire entrepreneur is a very popular story itself. I think that has changed. I think you could probably tell me but its changed a lot and its some of how the dark side can operate. Whether uber getting assaulted or murdered in a vehicle or foreign manipulation of information on facebook and twitter and social networks. I think its worth exploring the secondary effects that are not positive to understanding it. I want to dive a little bit deeper into that conversation and i want to start by having you paid a little bit more of the picture of Travis Kalanick for everyone. There are a few things out of the book that help to anchor the conversation. In the book mike mike right even when founders were bending the rules and even laws they were treated as iconic philosopher kings. Many believe the founders were made remaking the world making them smarter and more logical meritocratic efficient and beautiful delivering it much improved version of an upgrade on life and elsewhere in the book you talk about travis any say in kalanicks you entrepreneurs were worried of the praise they received. Can you just start the story for everybody. Who is this guy and what was his worldview and how did he see himself . It was the person that created the culture of the company . He really did fit a lot of the stereotypes. Right now there was this i would say aggressively libertarian view of just sort of way where in a pure meritocracy and a lanky build themselves up and you too can create the next big company. He has kind of like a similar pass to some other entrepreneurs he was doing coding early on with serial entrepreneurs with different startups and one of them was like a protoversion of the napsters where you can download all the stuff. He got sued by the record industry and the movie industry for cordoba billion dollars and that did not end well. Then he did another company that was like he only made a Million Dollars on that which made him like middleclass in Silicon Valley i guess. So by the time he got to uber i think you have a little bit of a chip on the shoulder. He had been betrayed by some of his investors with this started but still he wanted to prove that he could build his next great thing. It was also opposed financial crisis right around that time so anxious traits were dropping. Capitol was flowing into the valley a lot more in startups were becoming somewhat more easy to build. I think a lot of things had to happen at once to make uber happened when it did and there were a lot of different startups at that time. The iphone was on web services which made it easy for startups to get up and go on their own and then just insane amounts of money given out. We are going to talk more about that in a second. You portrayed him as someone who has a lot of ambition. He certainly had a competitive side but what you havent touched on is the immaturity that he exemplified as the 40 plusyearold woman reading this book im mike oh my gosh this is like a man boy. The parties in the inappropriate behavior. One of the things that exemplify that mean the book was where you contrasted amazons leadership and suppose with the Company Values created for uber. I think like most companies have principles are guiding philosophies. Amazon was something that travis was obsessed with what he was obsessed with jeff bezos and he wanted to create uber and amazons image. Yet these 14 corporate values like fairly benign stuff. Travis version of that was to run it through a roast the translation engine, right . Some of them were always be hustling was one of them. Always be hustling, be an owner not a renter, and make magic, champion mindset winning which was a Charlie Sheen think that he adopted for himself. My favorite one was super pumped as a Company Value. Not only a Company Value but something they use to evaluate their employees on and hire employees. H. R. People would mark off your level of super pumped sadness. To see if you are doing a good job. I dont know exactly how you measure that. He was just kind of a grown man child with billions of dollars to build the company and its image and i try to be fair but i do think there is value that was delivered their antique creates this enormous company that changed how transportation works entirely but also there were no real boundaries around how he did that or what his behavior was like. Everyone that was even attached in the first place was ready to get rich when they went public and sold the company or whatever lets talk about that. Heres another from the book. Travis kalanick and his executive team created a corporate environment that looks like a mixture of animal house and the of wall street to. This toxic start culture was the result of the young leader surrounded by yes men and accolades given nearly unlimited Financial Resources and operating without serious ethical or legal oversight. The company engaged in spying backbiting and litigiousness is a struggle for power and supremacy over multibillion dollar empire. Concepts like breaking the law worked up applicable they believed when the laws were in the first place. Can you give a couple of examples . I was really shocked by the things they were doing with the police and the public servants. They were actually messing with apps on their phones so Law Enforcement officials couldnt actually catch uber drivers. Can you talk about that . One of my favorite interesting parts of the book is does anyone know what the word gray balmy and . Did you ever hear about that . You remember back in 2013, uber is kind of a given. People can get off the plane and look for an uber or whatever. When they are expanding the city there was no Legal Framework for any of this. Cities didnt know what to do. Often in particular there was a knockdown dragout battle here. Folks were kind of put off by uber in the way they came in aggressively and had to put a lot of billboards up posturing that they knew better and we should be here or whatever. They have these battles with local transportation officials and Law Enforcement they were trying to stop uber from coming in. In portland the transportation folks are like if you come in here we are going to start calling the cars and pulling your drivers over impounding cars and giving your you tickets in stopping this. We are messing around. Ubers a response that was a they hired a very large corporate espionage contractors to follow transportation officials around and sort of figure out in some cases where they lived and what their credit card numbers were or different ways to tag them to their uber app. What they did was tag them with the codenamed gray ball. If you are a gray ball, lets say if you are transportation official trying to call an uber you hit the button and the car might be on the way and it may immediately cancel and stop working or it shows the service is too busy and no one can actually come. So basically they are trying to shut the service down when its coming in and they arent able to catch any of the officers. The plan worked so well the city had no idea this was happening to them. Uber decided to create an internal playbook and an internal Wikipedia Web site to teach the rest of their employees how to do this. When we reported on this in 2017 a lot of engineers in the valley were like thats a really creative solution to a problem. A lot of lawyers i talk to work thats probably obstruction of justice. They believe and i really believe they believe this. They believe that the laws were written unjustly or lobbyists were mobilized to benefit the incumbents in transportation. They were acting out of value number six which was principles. There were principles behind it even if he didnt agree with what they were. It was very clear that travis. To me means would be justified by the ends but the end of the day uber was spearheading a revolution in transportation in an industry that was dominated by the cat mafia and he would ultimately be the hero with all the shady stuff that would be brushed under the rug. With that finally see this is a better way. There is a legitimate argument to some people in the industry that this was true. This is here now and a lot of people really enjoy the experience and there are a lot of people who in Silicon Valley will say sometimes you have to push through to get to a better place. I dont know if i agree with all that. Thats certainly one of the Big Questions for all of us. Just in business any time you have a Major Business innovation that could be in a gray zone thats what the financial crisis revealed. Kind of the ugly stuff that uber and thats really around how women were treated and sexism. It wasnt just the employees it was the entire company culture. In one party they were brought in as an auction in the interesting thing is its a turning point for uber when things start going down. Its an open letter written by former female engineer about her experience at uber. Can you talk a little bit about the role of sexism in this culture and how in that letter and what was the Tipping Point into uber starting to freefall . I think uber was on the leading edge of a lot of social movements that were going to materialize. 2017 was a nightmare year where things started coming out. The culture from the beginning was again they were giving unlimited money. They raised 3. 5 billion from the Saudi Investment Fund and they continued raising mutual funds and were ready to give them as much money as they could that resulted in in 2015 they spent 25 million flying everyone out to have a huge party in las vegas in the desert where they hired beyonce to perform privately for 6 million inequity which quickly dove and value. One performance which was an hour for life so beyonce do the all right. I think that made it into song on her last album. If you look at the one of the last song she did on her album is something about equity and that was that uber deal. But it was very much this culture like we just want you to get your numbers and we want you to grow your office or whatever and then we can turn a blind eye to Everything Else with it thats throwing coffee mugs are systematically treating women unfairly throughout the company. One woman employer talking about was proposition on the first day player Engineering Team manager. Was just a real, i think the culture of harassment but ignored largely because it didnt matter what you did as long as you made your numbers. It might be messy getting their and a lot of that was by design. The corporate challenge is how do you maintain a scrappy startup mentality while sailing into a Big Tech Company . Facebook is going through that now privy of 35,000 people working there and they have a lot of internal struggles going on right now. Travis and coals philosophy was we arent going to build things that make it a little too corporate and maybe that was positive in was positive in some eyes but also played out in a lot of negative ways. You have a funny quote about that.