Tim Cook Could Fix Silicon Valley Tomorrow. Why Doesn’t He?
When I heard Epic Games was going to war with Apple over the app store, I didn’t think of Fortnite.
I thought of Travis Kalanick, the co-founder of Uber.
Kalanick has recently been portrayed as the embodied avatar of the worst traits of Silicon Valley upstart CEOs — crudely misogynistic, utterly without respect for privacy, encouraging a deeply toxic workplace — with a startling God complex.
Literally: in Kalanick’s Uber, employees infamously had access to a “God mode” they could use to spy in real-time on the movements of everyone from ex-partners, to politicians, to celebrities.
Mike Isaac’s page-turner, Super Pumped, details Kalanick’s rise and fall painstakingly. But one thing Isaac’s book uncovered that received shocking little attention is the single person in front of whom Kalanick’s God complex entirely deflated: Apple CEO Tim Cook.
“[Kalanick] knew what an App Store lockout could mean for Uber. His startup was now valued in the tens of billions of dollars, and the iOS downloads accounted for a majority of Uber’s business. Taking Uber off every iPhone in the world would kill his company. (Emphasis mine.)”
Kalanick was, of course, right to have been afraid. We live in an increasingly app-based economy…
