‘Super Pumped’ Series Is Superhero Story for Billionaire Fans

“Are you an asshole?” Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) asks a young man in the first scene of the “Super Pumped” series. Aspiring startup employee, the young man hesitates to respond. He doesn’t know that the right answer to being admitted is “yes”.

Created by Brian Koppelman and David Levien, of “Billions”, and based on the book “The War for Uber”, by journalist Mike Isaac, the production shows the rise and fall of the former CEO of the company. He resigned in 2017 after scandals involving breaches of user privacy, sexual harassment and a toxic work environment.

The seven episodes of the season, aired between February and April this year, start from the startup’s founding in 2009 to address the controversial figure of Travis Kalanick, startup culture and Uber’s explosive growth in the 2010s.

While the idea of ​​creating a “friction-free” shuttle service came from the other co-founder, Garrett Camp (Jon Bass), it was Kalanick who made the company flourish. The transportation app is now worth US$ 45.5 billion (R$ 219 billion).

UberCab, as it was called until 2011, was a ride-hailing service in which only black, luxury cars were allowed. Even before the popularization of smartphones, the company operated through a website. The evolution of the app’s interface can be seen at uxtimeline.com/uber.

Due to a legal dispute with taxi drivers in San Francisco (USA), the company changed its name to Uber, without the “cab” (taxi, in English). After all, the purpose of the startup is not to offer cars, but a new technology, explains Kalanick in the series.

In 2012, the launch of UberX, a cheaper ride with popular cars, began to attract new passengers and drivers. At this point, the application becomes the main source of income for many of these workers.

“Super Pumped” also shows that, to get where it is, the company dealt with competition from the startup Lyft – against which Kalanick played dirty -, won a US$ 250 million investment from Google and convinced Tim Cook to keep the app on the market. App Store even after breaking Apple’s privacy rules.

The company’s heyday, however, is little explored in the series. There are, for example, no scenes that give magnitude to the rapid growth in the years following the adoption of UberX. In 2016, the app already had about 50 million active users.

An Uber driver only has a role to play when Fawzi Kamel (Mousa Hussein Kraish) posts a video on the internet in which he appears arguing with Travis Kalanick about the sharing of fares for rides.

Public relations crises, the company has plenty. The plot highlights episodes of sexist comments from the CEO, spying on users to evade public scrutiny (tactic known as Grayball) and the viral post by former employee Susan Fowler, who denounced the way Uber dealt with sexual harassment.

But instead of focusing on telling a single part of the story well, the series wants to cover, at the same time, the evolution of Uber, the life of Travis Kalanick and the corporate culture of Silicon Valley.

The montage that refers to the didacticism of Adam McKay (“Don’t Look Up”, “The Big Short”, “Vice”) and the cartoonish narration by Quentin Tarantino even manage to give a comic breath to some moments, but it doesn’t add much to the story. of a man passionate about his company.

There is also the attempt to show a supposedly cool side of Silicon Valley, which borders on embarrassing. For example, the first steps of Uber’s expansion are shown as video game stages, characters break the fourth wall to tell jokes, and profanity is said with the sole intention of making those characters more youthful.

But “Super Pumped” gets lost once and for all when it puts corporate history aside to humanize Travis Kalanick. Despite the effort to paint the former CEO as an antihero, the protocol way in which the series explores his personal life and Uber’s internal conflicts only show a heroic side.

In the series, Kalanick’s relationships with family, investors and girlfriends only go to show that nothing could stop him. Even stumbling, he always excels. The production could offer a new facet of Silicon Valley protagonists, but it ends up becoming a superhero movie version for startup enthusiasts.

The executive is ambitious, egocentric, debauched and not afraid to challenge hegemonic figures in the sector. At times, this persona even refers to former President Donald Trump, to whom Kalanick was an economic adviser for two months.

A recurring theme in books, movies and series, Silicon Valley is no longer the technological paradise of ten years ago. The founders no longer have the strength that Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Travis Kalanick once had. Telling the story of such an executive in a simplistic way only makes the series look dated.

Films like “The Social Network” and “Steve Jobs” explore the relationship between founder and company without falling into archetypes. Series like “Succession” and “Severance” address corporate culture while creating good characters. “Silicon Valley” turns to satire once and for all. “Super Pumped” tries to mix the three approaches, but ends up failing on all fronts.

Travis Kalanick left Uber in June 2017 and shortly thereafter sold 90% of his shares in the company. Today, his fortune is estimated at US$ 2.8 billion (R$ 13.4 billion). After his resignation, the app started to encourage tips to drivers, an option that the former CEO has always been against.