Isabella Vincenza, one of CloudKitchens' early employees, never imagined she'd end up suing her former employer.
Hired as a full-time sales rep in 2018, she became a fixture at CEO Travis Kalanick's President's Club dinners at his Bel Air home in 2020 and 2021. These dinners were invitation-only events exclusively for the top salespeople at CloudKitchens, a company that provides “ghost kitchens,” or delivery-only commercial kitchens.
The get-together began with cocktails by the pool. Afterward, attendees mingled indoors and sat down to a chef-prepared dinner. Vincenza recalled that Kalanick greeted her with hugs and complimented her work. At times, he would seat her close to him during dinner and chat throughout the meal.
“If you're the best salesperson, you'll be his favorite because you'll bring a lot of benefits to the company,” Vincenza told TechCrunch, adding that she's also CloudKitchens' first female salesperson.
In August 2022, she attended a dinner at the President's Club while visibly pregnant. She remembers that when she tried to sit across from Kalanick at the dinner, he asked her to give up her seat. She said he barely looked at her, didn't engage in conversation or say goodbye. Vincenza left the dinner feeling uneasy.
“That was the beginning of my becoming a social pariah,” Vincenza told TechCrunch.
She and another person described it as a “boys' club.”
According to Vincenza's lawsuit and the company, she was fired in July 2023, a little over six months after returning from maternity leave.
She filed the lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court after receiving a notice of right to sue from the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing in August 2024. In it, she names Kalanick and two other executives, CloudKitchens' parent company City Storage Systems, and affiliate CSS Payroll as defendants. The suit alleges wrongful termination, sex discrimination and a hostile work environment. TechCrunch obtained a copy of the lawsuit.
In her lawsuit, Vincenza alleges that for years she “fended off all of her employer's sexist surprises,” that the “workplace culture was like a boys' club,” and that she received lower pay and fewer stock grants than her male colleagues. She also claims that she “was retaliated against for speaking up” after her pregnancy and subsequent maternity leave.
The company denies her allegations. “Isabella Vincenza was the highest paid of hundreds of account executives, yet was the lowest performing in her final year at the company,” company spokesperson Devon Spurgeon told TechCrunch. Spurgeon added that an “internal investigation” found Vincenza's discrimination claims to be “baseless and, ironically, fabricated and fraudulent claims made against her biggest advocate.” Spurgeon also denied that seating arrangements at the President's Club dinner were influenced by Vincenza's pregnancy, saying the seating reflected attendees' seniority.
Vincenza's lawsuit overlaps with some of the allegations made in 2017 when a blog post by Susan Fowler sparked an investigation into workplace culture and led to Kalanick's resignation as Uber's CEO. The investigation uncovered a pervasive culture of sexism and workplace harassment, and Uber fired more than 20 people later that year. Kalanick himself was not personally accused of sexism or harassment, but he resigned shortly after the report and firing.
In 2018, he bought a controlling stake in CloudKitchens' owner, City Storage Systems, and became CEO of CSS, bringing with him several former Uber employees. By 2021, some employees felt CloudKitchens was like Uber, with its long hours and boycott mentality. That year, Business Insider reported that one executive in charge of recruiting had resigned after an internal fraud investigation.
TechCrunch viewed Slack messages from 2022 that are unrelated to the Vincenza case, including one in which employees were discouraged from coming to work after 7 p.m., one in which male employees openly messaged other male employees about having sex, and one in which CloudKitchens co-founder Barak Diskin used a shirtless, dating-profile-style photo of himself as his Slack profile picture.
Female employees have sued CloudKitchens before: One woman alleged unfair labor practices, such as being forced to work unpaid overtime and not being given meal breaks, and another alleging wage discrimination based on gender and race. (Kalanick was originally named in the suit but later removed as a defendant.) The first suit was moved to private arbitration, and the second was settled in 2023.
These women aren't the only ones who found CloudKitchens' culture difficult: One former employee who worked in the company's Los Angeles office told TechCrunch that employees were frequently fired, worked to the point of burnout and sometimes stayed in the office until 2 a.m. The employee, whose identity is known to TechCrunch, asked not to be identified for fear of retaliation.
The employee also used the term “boys' club” to describe CloudKitchens' culture. Slack messages seen by TechCrunch showed employees using the N-word in public groups. At one point, someone had taped a Photoshopped picture of Donald Trump to the wall, according to photos seen by TechCrunch. It depicted a muscular, shirtless boxer standing in a ring, wearing boxing gloves and a championship belt.
Vincenza did not comment on these incidents, but told TechCrunch that “it's always been a boys' culture.”
Spurgeon pointed out that the company has women in senior roles, including as head of human resources, legal affairs and the enterprise sales team, and denied the allegations that it is a male-dominated club or a man's world culture. She also said the company has “no evidence” that the N-word was included in Slack messages, and that it is the company's policy to “swiftly” address and remove inappropriate messages or photos that are reported to management.
I was fired after going to HR.
According to Vincenza's lawsuit, in 2020, when Vincenza was the company's top salesman, Jessica Morton, CloudKitchens' head of business development and partnerships and one of the other defendants in the suit, accidentally let slip on a Zoom call that two of Vincenza's male teammates were paid more than $20,000 more than Vincenza. Vincenza then received a $5,000 raise. (Morton did not respond to TechCrunch's request for comment.)
In addition to those dinner parties in the years before her maternity leave, Vincenza remembers being regularly praised at company-wide meetings where the names of top salespeople were announced.
“That was a big thing,” Vincenza said. “You were a leader. You were an example. And that's how I was introduced to the rest of the company: 'Isabella is number one.'”
In January 2022, Vincenza told her manager and Kalanick that she was pregnant and planned to take maternity leave. In her lawsuit, Vincenza claims that her manager “intimated” she could lose her job if she took time off and asked how she would work while pregnant. While the company has maternity leave policies, Vincenza says she struggled to work out the details of how her maternity leave would be handled.
“Two days before I went on maternity leave, they couldn't figure it out,” she said.
According to the lawsuit, Vincenza discovered that his largest account had been reassigned when he returned to work in January 2023 after a three-and-a-half-month leave of absence. A spokesperson said his account had been reassigned to someone else while he was away, but denied that the change was punitive.
“I'm going to prove I'm still number one,” Vincenza remembers telling herself when she returned to work. Salespeople, for example, were given goals to close at least one big deal for five to 10 kitchens, meaning signing with a client to rent multiple kitchens. In one quarter, she was the only salesperson to close 10 kitchen deals, but she wasn't publicly congratulated or invited to the President's Club, the suit says. Spurgeon says none of the 10 kitchen deals actually closed. “None were actually closed and the company never received any funds.”
Vincenza's lawsuit also alleges that Kalanick teased her when she called her home during the day to check on their 4-month-old baby, and that executives called her and scheduled meetings with her in the evenings and early mornings even though they knew she would not be home – allegations the company denies.
Vincenza says she went to the human resources department in early 2023 to ask about her overall benefits upon returning from maternity leave, but was fired shortly thereafter.
“She has not been disciplined, she has not been provided with a performance plan, and the firings are out of the blue,” Vincenza's lawyer, Patrick Downs, a partner at the law firm Manteau Downs, told TechCrunch. “This is truly unprecedented for a company of any size in California.”
A spokesperson also denied the allegations, saying Vincenza's managers had ongoing discussions about her performance.
Vincenza said she decided to sue because she “didn't want other people to be treated like that by this company,” given how difficult it is to bring such a lawsuit, adding, “I don't want this company to treat other mothers, other women like that.”