Isabella Vincenza, one of CloudKitchens’ earliest employees, never imagined she would be suing her now-former employer.
Hired as a full-time salesperson in 2018, she became a mainstay at President’s Club dinners hosted by CEO Travis Kalanick at his Bel Air home throughout 2020 and 2021. These dinners were prized, invite-only events for top salespeople at CloudKitchens, a company that provides delivery-only commercial kitchens known as “ghost kitchens.”
The gatherings started with cocktails by the pool. Then the partygoers would mingle indoors until they sat for a chef-prepared dinner. Vincenza recalled Kalanick would greet her with a hug and praise her work. Sometimes, he would invite her to sit near him during dinner and they would chat throughout the meal.
“If you were the best salesperson, you were his favorite person because you were making the company a lot of money,” Vincenza told TechCrunch, adding that she was also CloudKitchens’ first female salesperson.
In August 2022, she arrived at one President’s Club dinner visibly pregnant. When she tried to sit across from Kalanick at the dinner, she recalled him asking her to move over. She said he hardly looked at her, would not engage in conversation, and didn’t say goodbye. Vincenza left the dinner unsettled.
“That was the beginning of me being a pariah,” Vincenza told TechCrunch.
She and another describe a “boys’ club”
Vincenza was fired in July 2023, a bit over six months after returning from maternity leave, according to her lawsuit and the company.
After receiving a right-to-sue letter from California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing in August 2024, she filed the suit in Los Angeles Superior Court. In it she named Kalanick and two other executives, CloudKitchens’ parent company City Storage Systems, and its associate company CSS Payroll as defendants. The suit alleges wrongful termination, sex discrimination, and a hostile work environment, among other claims. TechCrunch has obtained a copy.
Vincenza claims in her suit that she spent years “dodging all of her employer’s sexist curveballs,” that the “office culture was that of a boys’ club,” and alleges she received less pay and a smaller equity grant than her male counterparts. She also claims she was “retaliated against for standing up for herself” following her pregnancy and subsequent maternity leave.
The company rejects her allegations. “Isabella Vincenza had one of the highest salaries amongst hundreds of account executives, yet in the last year of her tenure at the company she was one of the lowest performers,” company spokesperson Devon Spurgeon told TechCrunch. Spurgeon added that an “internal company review” found Vincenza’s claims of discrimination “to have no merit and the irony of all of this is that the fabricated and fraudulent allegations were against the people who were her biggest supporters.” Spurgeon also denied that the seating arrangements for the President’s Club dinner were influenced by Vincenza’s pregnancy, and said seating was a reflection of the seniority of people in attendance.
Vincenza’s lawsuit echoes some of the allegations that led Kalanick to step down as CEO of Uber in 2017 after Susan Fowler’s viral blog post sparked an investigation into that workplace’s culture. The investigation revealed a culture so rampant with gender discrimination and workplace harassment that Uber fired more than 20 people later that year. While Kalanick himself wasn’t personally accused of sexual discrimination or harassment, shortly after the report and firings, Kalanick resigned.
In 2018, he bought a controlling interest in City Storage Systems, owner of CloudKitchens, became CSS’s CEO, and brought some ex-Uber employees along with him. By 2021, some employees felt CloudKitchens’ workplace was Uber all over again, with long hours and a boys’-club mentality; with one executive, the head of recruiting, resigning after an internal misconduct investigation, according to reports in Business Insider that year.
TechCrunch has viewed Slack messages from 2022, unrelated to Vincenza’s case, in which employees were cajoled for not being at work after 7 p.m.; male employees were openly messaging about another male employee having sex; and CloudKitchens co-founder Barak Diskin used a dating profile-style shirtless photo of himself for his Slack profile photo.
Female employees have sued CloudKitchens before. One woman sued alleging unfair labor practices like being forced to work overtime without pay, and being denied meal breaks. Another sued claiming gender and race-based pay discrimination (Kalanick was also originally named in this suit but was later dropped as a defendant). The first case was moved to private arbitration; the second was settled in 2023.
These women are not the only ones who found CloudKitchens’ culture difficult. One former employee who worked in the Los Angeles office told TechCrunch that people were frequently fired and employees worked to the edge of burnout, sometimes staying in the office until 2 a.m. This employee, whose identity is known to TechCrunch, asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation.
This employee also used the words “boys’ club” to describe CloudKitchens’ culture. Slack messages viewed by TechCrunch showed employees using the N-word in a public group. At one point, someone hung a photoshopped picture of Donald Trump on the wall, showing him as a muscled, bare-chested boxer standing in a ring, complete with boxing gloves and a championship belt, according to a photo seen by TechCrunch.
While Vincenza did not comment on those incidents, she did tell TechCrunch: “It was always a bro culture.”
Spurgeon denies the characterization of a boys’ club or bro culture, pointing out that women hold senior positions at the company, including the heads of HR, legal, and the enterprise sales team. She also said that the company has “no evidence” of Slack messages containing the N-word and that its policy is to “promptly” address and remove any inappropriate messages or photos brought to management’s attention.
Fired after going to HR
Vincenza’s lawsuit claims that in 2020, when Vincenza was a top sales performer, Jessica Morton — CloudKitchens’ head of business development and partnerships, and one of the other defendants in this suit — accidentally revealed on a Zoom call that two of Vincenza’s male teammates were being paid more than $20,000 more than Vincenza was. Afterward, Vincenza received a $5,000 pay increase. (Morton did not respond to TechCrunch’s requests for comment.)
In addition to the dinners during the years before her maternity leave, Vincenza remembers routinely being praised at all-hands meetings where the top salespeople were named.
“It was a big deal,” Vincenza said. “You were a leader. You were an example. And I was presented that way to the rest of the company. ‘Isabella is number one.’”
In January 2022, Vincenza informed her manager, as well as Kalanick, that she was pregnant and planning on taking maternity leave. Vincenza claims in the suit that her manager “insinuated” she could lose her job if she took leave, and reportedly asked how she was going to work while pregnant. While the company has a maternity leave policy, Vincenza says the company struggled to finalize details of how hers would be handled.
“Two days before I went on maternity leave, they couldn’t figure it out,” she said.
When she returned to work in January 2023 after her three-and-a-half month leave, the suit alleges Vincenza found that her largest accounts had been reassigned. The spokesperson says that her accounts were assigned to others in her absence but denies that the changes were punitive.
“Let me prove that I’m still number one,” Vincenza remembered telling herself after returning to work. For instance, salespeople were given a goal of closing at least one larger 5- to 10-kitchen deal — meaning signing a client that would rent multiple kitchens. One quarter, she says she was the only salesperson to land a 10-kitchen deal but received no public congratulations, nor an invite to the President’s Club, her suit alleges. Spurgeon says of the 10-kitchen deal that it never actually closed. “Nothing was actually signed. No funds were received by the company.”
Vincenza’s suit also alleges that Kalanick teased her once when she called home to check on her four-month-old during the day, and that leadership would call her or schedule meetings in the evenings and early mornings when they knew she was unavailable, which are also allegations the company denies.
Vincenza says she went to HR in early 2023 to discuss her overall treatment since returning from maternity leave and was terminated shortly after.
“She was not given any reprimands. She was not given a performance plan to review. The termination comes out of the blue,” Vincenza’s lawyer, Patrick Downes, a partner at Manteau Downes LLP, told TechCrunch. “This is really unheard of for a company of any size in California.”
The spokesperson denies this claim as well, saying Vincenza’s manager did have ongoing discussions about her performance.
As for why Vincenza decided to sue, given how difficult such lawsuits are to pursue, she says, “I don’t want other people to be treated that way at this company.” Then she added: “I don’t want this company to be that way for other moms, other women.”