MikeIsaac

He did not like it, though I didn't expect him to.

It was funny, folks I talk to who are close to him said they thought i was much fairer to him than they thought I would be, which I agree with. I thought doing the book would be a chance to give a deeper dive into what TK was like throughout the ten or so years he built the company, rather than just at his worst in 2017.

Still, can't win everyone over! Sure wish he would have talked to me for the book...

I really like this question!

I think everyone probably has a bit of "fake it till you make it" in them, at least until they build the confidence of finding that they're at home where they work, or wherever they need to do it. I certainly have that feeling every time I start a new job! (This is why I haven't left the NYT in like 7.5 years)

Agree there's a line, and it's difficult to see. I'd imagine the people around you begin to let you know when you've stepped over it, unless that is you've surrounded yourself with an unhealthy cohort of folks. That probably speaks to a larger company culture issue, which is hard to know until you're inside a company.

I always ask around in the Valley to get the scoop on different companies, because everyone talks around here about what it's like to work at different places. Look before you leap, I guess!

Very good question.

I often wonder how Dems who parachute from past administrations into tech companies square some of the ethos with what they were pushing for previously.

A few things:

1. There is a very well-trodden and lucrative path from the White House to Silicon Valley, and that's not going to stop. Head of Comms at any big Unicorn on the path to IPO is practically always staffed by someone formerly of a presidential admin.

2. Even post-administration Dems with a capitol D aren't all what I'd call leftists, but Obama-era Dems are far more centrist than where the party seems to be today. (Or at least some portion of the party.) Still, you don't see Robert Reich joining Doordash or whatever, so it's not for everyone!

3. Some folks genuinely believe some of these labor models are good or at least inevitable, and sign up for what they see is the future.

4. I think some of them like the challenge.

5. I think a boatload of money and the fact you get to move to California instead of DC helps a lot, too.

For what it's worth, I still stick to my NYT ethics policy while I'm doing any outside projects. It's a good rule of the road so things don't get complicated later. Plus, I really do believe in the tenets we abide by at the Times.

As far as one informing the other: I've been wanting to do a Facebook book for years now, but the time hasn't been right for one reason or another. After Super Pumped, the next project was always going to be Facebook, I just needed to take a year off to chill (and not think about writing all the time) before I dove in to the next thing.

The timing ended up working out with the showrunners, who were fortunately interested in what I was doing next. But I would have done this project regardless, if that helps answer anything.

I answered a bit of this in a different question, but I do find the surge of interest curious now, and don't think it's going away any time soon. It's very difficult to do tech shows and movies right in a way that can break things down for people in a digestible and interesting way. I think the SP showrunners did this quite well — and hired a technical consultant to get the details right — but again it's going to be interesting to see how it continues going forward.

It's on journalists, to be clear, to keep the paths separate. We aren't screenwriters, we're doing journalistic work that may or may not be adapted at some point. But adaptation should be nowhere near the forefront of one's mind while doing the work of story collection.

For me, at least, I've always tried to report and write in a visual way — people appreciate scenes, color, building rooms and meetings and situations in their mind's eye — because I think that's how people remember things. And that can ultimately lead to different ways of other people telling that story on the screen.

All of the Vegas stuff you see in the show was real. Verified by internal folks in the company.

There was an angry twitter thread from an ex-uber guy who swore up and down that he did none of that stuff, but he seemed to not realize that the company had thousands of workers and many of them got up to a lot of insane stuff on that employee outing. I had folks texting me how funny the thread was because the guy clearly had no idea what was going on.

I think part of why folks in Hollywood were attracted to the story was exactly because some of the things that happened throughout uber's history were so wild. They faced a LOT of challenges, even outside of the sphere of what went wrong inside the company in 2017, which I thought were really worth depicting onscreen. Especially the violence the drivers had to encounter in different countries.

What most folks don't understand is just how difficult it was to build this company. which I think the show gives a better idea of.