RaveSan Francisco ChronicleIt would be easy for a book about Uber to go off the rails...Yet Mike Isaac deftly turns a history of the company that threatens to kill off the taxi business, defied governments from San Francisco to São Paulo and epitomized the modern \'unicorn\' into a gripping, well-told narrative ... If you want to understand how Uber became so big, so fast, it’s in this book. If you want to learn how the #DeleteUber movement took off and customers and drivers came to hate a company they loved, it’s in this book. If you want to know how Travis Kalanick rose to an unassailable position running the world’s most valuable private tech company and then was toppled, it’s in this book ... exposes the human quirks and frailties of a valley in love with algorithms ... The book is, like its subject, rough around the edges. A careful reader will notice a footnote that mentions an executive who has never been introduced, a misplacing of a venture-capital hangout in Palo Alto instead of Menlo Park, or a reference to Microsoft offering $1 billion for Facebook (it was Yahoo that made the lowball offer). Most of the errors come in the setup, where we get introduced to the milieu that gave birth to Uber. The chapters that deal with Uber’s crisis, where it seems like Isaac had camped out in the air ducts of the boardrooms he writes about, are more polished ... That criticism aside, I can think of few books that tell a story of a startup so thoroughly and objectively ... Uber is an exciting tale from the plain facts, and Isaac recognizes that it requires no inflation.
