The Cult of the Founder: Inside a Silicon Valley Meltdown, with Mike Isaac and Jia Tolentino

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber, by Mike Isaac, reveals how blind worship of startup founders can go wildly wrong—a cautionary tale that ends in spectacular disaster. Join New York Times technology correspondent Mike Isaac and New Yorker staff writer Jia Tolentino (author of Trick Mirror) as they unpack the rise and fall of Uber, set against an era of rapid upheaval in Silicon Valley. Filled with toxic corporate culture, spying, backbiting, and litigiousness, Super Pumped is a page-turning story of ambition and deception, obscene wealth, and bad behavior that explores how blistering technological and financial innovation culminated in one of the most catastrophic twelve-month periods in American corporate history.

Mike Isaac is a technology reporter at the New York Times whose Uber coverage won the Gerald Loeb Award for distinguished business reporting. He writes frequently about Uber, Facebook, and other Silicon Valley giants for the Times, and appears often on CNBC and MSNBC. He lives in San Francisco.

Jia Tolentino is a staff writer at The New Yorker. Raised in Texas, she studied at the University of Virginia before serving in Kyrgyzstan in the Peace Corps and receiving her MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan. She was a contributing editor at The Hairpin and the deputy editor at Jezebel, and her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Grantland, Pitchfork, and other publications. She lives in Brooklyn.

Ticketed event. Discussion will be followed by audience questions. Copies of Super Pumped and Trick Mirror will be available for purchase