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Comment by pyrophane | Hacker News Reader

I dunno. Uber's "mostly assholes" approach seems to have gotten them pretty far. Perhaps the message is rather that you can be as awful and unscrupulous as you like because by the time it bites you you you'll either be long gone or far enough along to bring on Eric Holder and Arianna Huffington to rehabilitate your image.

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Even if you're OK with assholes at work, there's a big difference between assholes who break the law for personal gratification (sexual harassment) vs. assholes who are supposedly advancing business goals (setting overly-aggressive deadlines and overworking employees.)

You don't want the second kind because that's not how you build a sustainable business, but that's still quite different from risking your business so that some person can get personal sexual gratification.

You don't want either kind. Both prevent you from building a sustainable business.

That would be great if the point of a startup was to be a sustainable business.

The former seems obviously true, but the latter not so much. Many ruthless leaders (Gates, Jobs to pull the two obvious tech titans) have built sustainable businesses using these practices. It may not jive with the current narrative around performance espoused by HBR, but I'm not aware of any data around this.

Assuming "overworking employees" qualifies you as an asshole (not sure), it's not clear that a culture like that that pushes people to perform almost to their limit is not sustainable.

Has it? What do they actually have? They are losing money hand over fist. And their autonomous car program is in serious jeopardy.

We'll see, Kalanick has said that without self-driving in Uber's future they are dead.

that's the sort of statement that bay area CEOs say when they want something to happen. It doesn't mean it's necessarily true.

He did? That's a bold thing to state especially with so many car manufacturers trying to get into the same space who will have a far easier time undercutting Uber considering they own the manufacturing and maintenance on their vehicles (thus they have far more margin to play with).

IMO I think Uber will eventually have to be bought by a car company or they'll have to go for a premium market because GM and others already want to get into the same exact business and owning the manufacturing is going to make it a hell of a lot cheaper for them.

Source?

If he believes that he's an idiot.

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