Super Pumped _ The Battle for Uber - Mike Isaac Page 0,10

Long before the breakout success of Uber, Kalanick had been seen as an entrepreneurial failure. When pitching new clients on his enterprise products, door after door was closed in his face. When one company was nearly acquired by a tech giant, the opportunity was snatched away at the last minute. And when one of his closest advisors and investors betrayed him early on in his career, it didn’t keep Travis from building another new venture shortly thereafter. One friend described him as a pit bull that spent its life getting kicked by its owners—no matter how beaten down Travis was, he never, ever gave up.

Later, when an interviewer asked his parents where Travis got his stubbornness, Bonnie raised her hand.

“Working for a newspaper, I was used to sales rejection all the time, so I knew what that was like,” she said in an interview in 2014. “But I had hope, since he is very determined and he will not back down when he felt he was right—he’s tenacious.”

Donald, without a doubt, was the left brain of the family. A civil engineer by trade, Donald spent much of his career working for the City of Los Angeles, where he contributed to projects at Los Angeles International Airport, as well as other parts of the city.

Donald’s marriage to Bonnie was not his first. He married once before at twenty-seven, to a younger woman, in a pairing he would later call a mismatch. He had two daughters with his first wife, half-siblings to Travis and Cory. Even after remarrying, Donald maintained a positive relationship with his ex-wife. “Peaceful,” he’d later note.

Donald considered himself an analytical thinker, a champion of logic, rules, and complex systems. Instead of father and son football games or having a catch, the two bonded by working together on Travis’s grade-school science projects. The two once built an electrical transformer together. Travis liked to call him a tinkerer—and he was.

“I liked to build things,” Donald later told a reporter. “I thought it’d be nice to be driving by a structure and say ‘hey, I had a good part in building that.’ ” He went to junior college before transferring to receive an engineering degree. He felt at home surrounded by math, by numbers.

Donald was tough on his sons, and had high expectations for them. He also introduced them to the world of computers. Early in Travis’s life, his father brought home the family’s first computer, giving Travis the ability to practice programming for the first time. He learned to code by the time he was in middle school. Travis ultimately never mastered coding languages—he preferred thinking through product and user-experience issues—but the early connection to technology would stay with him. Travis loved efficiency and hated waste. He appreciated how the rise of software and the internet allowed old, ineffectual, and broken systems to be overturned and rebuilt anew. Code and programming enabled anyone willing to learn and work hard a chance to change the system—to change the world.

Travis took traits from both Bonnie and Donald in equal measure.

A precocious child, he picked up his father’s skills with mathematics, impressing others with his ability to speed through arithmetic in his head where other classmates needed pencil and paper. His mother’s sales talent rubbed off on him as well. Travis and Donald were part of the YMCA’s Indian Guides youth troop, where Travis was a top seller for the group’s annual pancake breakfast fundraiser. Travis spent hours outside his neighborhood grocery store, pitching shoppers on their way inside to donate to his troop’s fundraiser. He was charming, persistent, tireless, and competitive; his parents eventually had to drag him home in the evenings.

He maintained that competitive edge as he grew older. At Patrick Henry Middle School—only a half-mile drive from his home in Northridge to Granada Hills—Travis was naturally athletic. Travis ran track, played football, and shot hoops. At eleven, an article in his mother’s newspaper praised him for being a basketball player with a 4.0 grade point average. His prize: an enormous trophy—larger than the ones that teams received for winning the regional championship.

“Success in athletics doesn’t happen by accident; it requires hard work and discipline,” the award presenter said of Travis and his classmates at the time. “When you learn the art of discipline, that’s half the battle.”

Despite these talents, middle school was not easy for him. Older kids began to pick on the wiry youth for his intelligence, or for not wearing the right clothes or not knowing how to