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Uber has had its fair share of bad PR over the past few years, and the company won’t be at all stoked with the release of New York Times reporter Mike Isaac’s new book, titled Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber.

We’ve already touched on some of what Isaacs has to say, with excerpts published ahead of the book’s official release yesterday, but now those quick off the mark have had a chance to read it in its entirety.

WIRED runs through a review of sorts, picking out some interesting nuggets, but we’ll just touch on a few highlights about former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick’s obsession with Amazon:

Kalanick was obsessed with Amazon, idolized Jeff Bezos, and had carefully studied the tech giant’s 14 core principles, like Customer Obsession, Bias for Action, and Think Big…

“The list read like Amazon’s corporate values run through a bro-speak translation engine,” the journalist Mike Isaac writes in Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber. The book, out this week, traces Kalanick’s trajectory from floundering startup founder to the envy of Silicon Valley to the epitome of tech evil, and with him a decade of excess and self-delusion.

Isaac’s meticulously reported account still finds jaw-dropping new lows, like an executive in Thailand shoving a female employee’s face in a pile of cocaine or Kalanick writhing on the floor of a meeting room at the Le Meridien hotel in downtown San Francisco after Bloomberg published a leaked video of the CEO berating a driver.

You will find a rather entertaining account of Kalanick’s career-ending meltdown here, for those who are interested.

We promised six books for those who want to learn more about the inner workings of Silicon Valley, so let’s get down to business.

The first book is the one we have mentioned above – Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber – for obvious reasons.

Further reading, as laid out by WIRED, includes…

Temp: How American Work, American Business, and the American Dream Became Temporary – Louis Hyman

An essential guide to demystifying the sudden ubiquity of the gig economy and putting Uber in its proper historical context—as a company that took advantage of social changes already in place in order to make its labor practices seem inevitable.

Available on Amazon here.

Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work – Alex Rosenblat

Over four years, Rosenblat interviewed drivers in 25 cities in the US and Canada to expose the way Uber “gamified” work using notifications and bait-and-switch tactics to keep drivers on the road.

Available on Amazon here.

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup – John Carreyrou

A fast-paced, fascinating journey into the elaborate scams of Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes, whose sense of manifest destiny rivals Kalanick’s.

Available on Amazon here.

You could also watch The Inventor, the doccie about Holmes and Theranos.

The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World – David Kirkpatrick

To understand the religiosity behind the “cult of the founder,” read Kirkpatrick’s all-access pass to Facebook in its glory years, back when board member Peter Thiel was pitching the social network as the best hope to promote tolerance in a globalized world.

Available on Amazon here.

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future – Ashlee Vance

Vance brings both skepticism and awe to bear on the circuitous rise of Silicon Valley’s most uncensored founder—an inadvertent lesson in self-mythologizing.

Available on Amazon here.

There, Silicon Valley enthusiasts – reading list sorted.

You may also want to watch the series Silicon Valley, as recommended by Bill Gates, which offers its own unique insights.

[source:wired]