“What Makes Uber Run: The Transportation Service Has Become a Global Brand, an Economic Force, and a Cultural Lightning Rod”, 2015-09-08 ():
Jordan Kretchmer remembers what Travis Kalanick was like before Uber was Uber. Kretchmer was a 25-year-old college dropout with a lot of ideas, and Kalanick had even more. He was in his early thirties, an engineer who talked like a sales guy, smart as hell and high on life. He wore a cowboy hat and referred to himself as the Wolf, after the cold-blooded, coolly rational fixer played by Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction. He was tireless—always on the move, always thirsty.
…Back in those days, if Kalanick liked you, he’d invest in your company, and if he thought your idea was big enough, he’d show up at your office one or two days a week and work for free. Kretchmer hadn’t screwed up the courage to pitch Kalanick that night in Austin, but he met Kalanick later that year to pitch him ideas. The one he was most excited about was called “Tweetbios”, and it basically gave Twitter users an expanded home page…Kretchmer spent the next 3 hours arguing with Kalanick until he’d settled on a Travis-approved big idea.
…I heard something similar from Ade Olonoh, the founder of another Kalanick portfolio company. “I’d send Travis an email asking, ‘What do you think about this job posting?’ and he’d send a page or two back, completely rewritten”, Olonoh says. “I know him as somebody really smart and driven and hungry and also very generous.”
…On the 4th floor of Uber’s San Francisco headquarters, there is a two-foot-wide walking track, delineated by a stenciled pattern of the San Francisco city grid, running around the perimeter of the open-plan office. It’s a quarter-mile long, and it’s where you’ll find Kalanick when his mind is in motion, which is to say pretty much all the time. In a typical week, he does 40 miles, or about 160 laps. “That’s just how I think”, he says, compulsively screwing and unscrewing a bottle of iced tea that he finished half an hour earlier.