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Comment by kolbe | Hacker News Reader

Sorry to be crass, but fuck this. I hate Travis's attitude as much as anyone, but no man who has achieved something as great as Uber deserves to go out like this--at the hands of some board members who rode his coat tail to riches.

Reminds me of Apple marginalizing Steve Jobs. Fuck that. I want to see Travis face up to his immoral bullshit as much as anyone, but by Lyft pummeling Uber into the ground, not some cowardly vote from the board.

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The board didn't ride his coattails -- the board's money is the reason the company still exists.

Your argument about "coattails," and your Steve Jobs example, make it seem like you believe that a company exists for the benefit of its founders. That's true if the entire company is the founders in a garage making things, but it all changes once the company takes outside investment -- after that, the company exists for the benefit of its shareholders.

The board has a right to make sure the company is run well -- they company gave the board that right in exchange for the board's money. If the CEO is hurting the company, its investors, and its employees, it is good for the board to step in and prevent him from doing so, even if he was the founder.

If you think my argument is that the board doesn't have the legal right to do this, then you're very much misinterpreting my rant.

Going further, doesn't the board have a legal obligation to do what is best for the company and shareholders?

So this isn't snark: explain to me what Uber's done that's "great"? They burn VC money in a trash bin in pursuit of a business model that looks totally nonviable unless one achieves a monopolistic position or pays below-minimum-wage rates (as that seems to be what the race to the bottom is for drivers).

I'd bet that the overwhelming majority of those board members were rich before Uber and will be rich after Uber dissipates.

their drivers are the training set for their self driving cars.

thats how they want to become profitable.

drivers could be helping make better maps, but I doubt that uber is able to use a cell phone to really create a usable training set for self driving. If every drivers car had cameras and lidar, that would be different.

im not saying that the plan is particularly well executed.

Ahh yes, that self-driving tech that they totally 100% developed on their own and didn't steal from anyone else, right?

what difference does it make to me whether they stole from waymo or not? im not going to white-knight for google.

innocent until proven guilty, btw. some journalist writing something in a newspaper is not proof.

The difference being that if they were as unethical with other companies' tech as they were when expanding into markets and failing to protect their employees from harassment, then it could be an existential problem for the company. If their future relies on self-driving tech, which they never get a chance to implement because the only tech they have is stolen and they thus can't use it, they're fucked.

And the relevant legal standard here would be "preponderance of evidence", not "innocent until proven guilty" (which is a right for individual citizens in criminal trials). Corporations aren't fully people yet.

You can say it's a great waste if you'd like. But it is huge. Ubiquitous. World-changing. Uber will be in history books, whether or not it pans out as a valuable company: we'll see. But it has already earned its greatness, even if said greatness was just burning billions of dollars to transform our world.

Uber is going to burn billions of dollars and what change have they affected with it? That taxi companies now have phone apps?

You mean that we can now relaibly summon them to our location? That we can share rides via similar routes? We can cut out the medallion scam, where capital owners can rent seek off of driver's labor? Optimize routes to more efficienly move people and save energy?

... in markets where they can and do operate. Uber might be widely used in large cities but elsewhere it has little impact. Uber exists because American public transportation infrastructure is awful, nonexistent, or otherwise inefficiently designed. If they get to the point of running self-driving car networks then there will be much more to talk about. Until then they've only created a solution for a very small portion of the population.

I'm no fan of uber's ethical track record, but I've had the opportunity to use uber in both Indonesia and Poland, which was extremely convenient. In Poland in particular, I took a taxi from the airport before learning that uber could take me back. I learned while I was there that the taxi driver exploited me because I was a tourist who didn't know the local prices and he could charge 5x normal rates.

You're describing corrupt US markets with somewhat passive operators, but in the rest or the world the story is different. In Scandinavian countries each taxi company has an app, is fairly efficient, and it's just the matter of downloading a bunch of apps. In some Asian and Eastern European markets unlicensed cheaper gypsy taxis are an everyday thing, with a host of problems of their own, so arrival of yet another competitor is not really a game changer.

I can't tell if this is sincere or satire. :/

Yea I think this is really really really stretching things.

> I want to see Travis face up to his immoral bullshit as much as anyone, but by Lyft pummeling Uber into the ground

Why? What immoral bullshit?

Lyft is basically free-riding off Uber. Uber does the heavy lifting taking on the entrenched taxi companies who have insulated themselves from competition via local politics and regulation and Lyft swoops in once the hard work is done, trying to convince customers who have bought into the media narrative that they are the ethical alternative to Uber. I don't buy this narrative. These journalists have a vendetta against Travis that is not in my view reasonable. I will continue to use Uber if only to spite the press.

If not Lyft it'd be someone else though. There just aren't that many barriers to entry in this space.

> There just aren't that many barriers to entry in this space after Uber does all the hard work of dismantling those barriers.

FTFY.

"Why? What immoral bullshit?"

You can't be serious. Hiring private investigators to stalk journalists? Promoting sexual harassment in his company? Obtaining the private medical records of someone raped by one of their drivers?

"These journalists have a vendetta against Travis that is not in my view reasonable. I will continue to use Uber if only to spite the press."

So nothing wrong with sexual harassment, then?

The market is punishing Uber for a lack of basic human decency. Good.

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