What Makes Uber Run?

The transportation service has become a global brand, an economic force, and a cultural lightning rod. Here's how and why the architect of all this disruption, CEO Travis Kalanick, plans to keep on confounding expectations.

- Max Chafkin

Jordan Kretchmer remembers what Travis Kalanick was like before Uber was Uber.

Kretchmer was a 25-year-old college drop-out with a lot of ideas, and Kalanick had even more. He was in his early thirties, an engineer who talked like a sales guy, smart as hell and high on life. He wore a cowboy hat and referred to himself as the Wolf, after the cold-blooded, coolly rational fixer played by Harvey Keitel in Pulp Fiction. He was tireless—always on the move, always thirsty.

They met in 2009 at South by Southwest and bonded at an all-night “jam session” about the future of the Internet. That night in Austin was a sort of satellite version of the ’round-the-clock ideas salon Kalanick routinely held at his three-bedroom house in San Francisco. These gatherings were full of young people like Kretchmer who had come up through the wreckage of the first dotcom bust, before jobs in tech were thrown around like free T-shirts at a launch party, before venture capitalists regularly talked about startups as if they were mythical creatures. They were entrepreneurs who knew about hustle, who saw opportunity even in the muck of a desperate economy and were going to take advantage. This is what drew them to Kalanick, and vice versa.