Uber Founder Travis Kalanick Resigns as C.E.O.
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
IPO? No way. They'd have to publish audited numbers. What's leaked out is bad enough. The real numbers have to be worse. Notice that leveraged loan in 2016.[2] All the details of that have to be disclosed in the prospectus for an IPO.
[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/uber/funding-rounds [2] https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/07/new-reports-confirm-1-15b-...
Do you have a source for this?
If true, this seems far more likely to be a cause of Uber's death than Kalanick resigning. That, and the valuation being as insane as it is, which is also Kalanick's fault, which as you point out, makes it hard to find greater and greater suckers.
Perhaps they'll be better off all around without Kalanick, assuming they can get the business side on track and get the burn rate under control, and perhaps make their business sustainable rather than a gigantic handout of VC money.
[1] http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/growth-vs-profits...
Also known as losing money on every ride but making it up in volume.
In fact, the central concept of venture capital is premised on the idea that businesses start out unprofitable but become profitable as volumes scale.
To what extent any of this is the case for Uber is worth debating. So feel free to have that debate, and bring forth new information or new arguments that support your thesis.
Particularly not if you can't set up an operation in an Western city with expensive taxi services without losing money on every ride you operate even before centralised overheads are taken into account.
From their 2015 financials, it looks like revenues have been consistently higher than cost of sales.
Source: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/11/can-uber-ever-deliver...
According to financials from 2015, they have higher revenues than cost of sales:
www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/11/can-uber-ever-deliver-part-one-understanding-ubers-bleak-operating-economics.html
This suggests to me that marginal rides are profitable, even if they aren't profitable enough to cover fixed costs of software development or investments into new geographic markets.
And if you're subsidising rides below cost because you're trying to grow your market and you have piles of VC cash so you don't care that you're burning through money, then eventually you're going to run out of that money and will be in trouble if you can't raise any more.
Time will tell whether Uber was building a sustainable business or just burning through VC cash.
Winners don't quit, so Uber is dead to capital now: it was always based on maximum evilness and all the stuff about disrupting and ridesharing was mere window dressing.
Note to capital, wherever it is: this is what you get when you go by personality rather than studying the fundamentals of a business. You can't simply pick the most toxic individual or company, claim they're going to kill everybody else, and then prop them up with valuation. The valuation didn't fail but your pet Dr. Evil did, and that was your proxy for maintaining the 'killer' behavior. Unless or until capital can be personified as evil AIs that cannot die, this was never really an optimal strategy for capital.
From their 2015 financials, it looks like revenues have been consistently higher than cost of sales.
Source: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/11/can-uber-ever-deliver...
Quick Forbes link I found https://www.forbes.com/sites/ellenhuet/2014/07/02/ubers-newe...
Nonetheless, my impression is that this is more the exception than the rule, based on the financials I linked to earlier.
Yup, that sounds about right.
I'm not saying this will ever offset their increasing losses, but that is what always seemed the long term goal of monopoly.
> I thought the whole point of subsidizing rides was(as OP comments pointed out) to raise demand, both for drivers and riders, they first entice both ways with the promise of lower rates and higher payoffs, then slowly increase their cut of the pie against the driver's payoff and increase the rates on riders.
Right, and by the logic that decreasing prices raises demand, increasing prices will decrease demand.
That's my point, and the point of critics that are often ignored. Their customers will bail the moment they start getting charged the $25 their $10 ride actually costs. And that increase will be to break even. Not make any money. Just break even.
Uber will never achieve a monopoly. There are buses, bicycles, and used cars for $1500. People aren't going to pay $600 per month on a ride hailing service. I've already ditched Uber, and so have many of my peers, in favor of alternatives that save money. And that's without significant price hikes yet.
The fundamental economics of having a private driver have not changed. An app doesn't change what it costs to pay someone to drive you everywhere. I hate being critical because it's often a waste of time, but Uber is sincerely one of the worst investments that Silicon Valley has ever produced.
I'm not sure if you're disputing OP's idea that Uber subsidizing rides is (at least in part) of an effort to kill the taxi industry, but my logic is, if you don't have any competition, why wouldn't you raise rates?
While transportation is something everyone needs, I'm (as priviledged as I am in my salary) not going to pay $20 for an uber if it's $2 on the bus.
I'll take uber when it's $10, compared to $2.
They could possibly raise their rates some, but to answer your question specifically: because there are other factors involved in their price/demand/profit/market share equation, besides just competition.
People won't pay to use the service if Uber charges what it actually costs to deliver it. They're heavily subsidizing each ride. When you pay for an Uber, they're basically giving investor money to the driver to cover your fare for you. Investors have been paying for your transportation over the past few years.
At some point, they have to actually make money, and the only way to do that is to raise prices. The issue is no one will stick with the app at higher prices. I've already abandoned Uber/Lyft/others for a $300 bike and a bus pass, because it's much cheaper and much healthier. If they double or triple their prices, which is about what they'd have to do just to break even, lots of people will be following suit.
The self-driving car game was supposed to save them, but I don't think they're guaranteed to win that fight. Tesla seems further along than anyone, and I have far more faith in Musk's ability and track record of executing than I do in Travis (or whatever committee is replacing him). Not to mention every automaker is working on self-driving cars right now to boot.
Uber has no guarantee they'll dominate that market, and considering they can't even break even in their current market, I see them as a ticking time bomb.
Agreed. I'd argue that existing car-sharing companies like Car2Go are better positioned to dominate the "self-driving taxi" market. They've already solved the challenges of owning and maintaining a shared car fleet profitably. The day self-driving technology is ready, they'll already be miles ahead of Uber.
edit: I forgot what green name means... green btw...
Newly created HN accounts are colored green so members can recalibrate before responding to troll-like contributions from new accounts (I think).
I think we need more of it though...
This is true for almost any good.
I've yet to see an Uber driver who started rolling in cash after the rates were dropped. 100% of my anecdotal conversations (and that's not 99.9% rounded up, but a straight up 100%) reminisce about the good ole days.
And I have a really hard time believing companies plan to fail.
It's a very clear case of dumping, or whatever it's called in English. Unsustainable low prices, suffocate your competitors, raise prices.
[1]https://medium.com/@thisTenqyuLife/nobody-will-talk-about-ub...
Such a great quote
Sounds like a '90s startup. Companies acting like this en masse was what caused the 2000 crash. Uber isn't going to make it out of this alive, and they're going to take the rest of the industry with them. I think the whole culture of VCs looking for "unicorn startups" is going to go away when the unicorns all die.
What matter are: Cash In Bank, Cash Coming In, Burn Rate.
Kalanick has serious issues but he's demonstrated unquestionably forceful (and polarizing) leadership that mere "managers" will never be able to replace.
I've been bullish on Uber despite all their mistakes and internal issues because at the end of the day, the guy at the top was irrationally emotionally committed to _winning_. Now I am a bear on Uber.
No, but that's not the point. How quickly we forget that we don't need dude bros to create a hostile environment for women. That GitHub situation was created by a woman, one who wasn't even an employee. We really don't give women enough credit.
Toxic work environment is everywhere. Remember the spreadsheet that Googlers started to compare salaries? I'd argue the Apple-Google-X pact to not poach one another is worse than anything Travis could imagine.
If there was crass behavior at Uber, I'm inclined to be more lenient because I think it is at a more primitive level than a well thought out plan to increase shareholder value by illegal collaboration to push down worker cost. If these people who criticize Uber really care about their employees, they will start publishing all details about how much salary and benefits and whatever money each employee makes.
Talk is cheap. Actions speak louder than words.
Look at Google; they're firmly business-minded and have often butted heads with regulators and so forth, but most people like google, not least because of that 'don't be evil' branding and and their habit of giving people Nice Things.
If your margins are razor thin. You have to be ruthless. That permeates to your culture.
Do you things are any better at Amazon, Foxconn or other warehouse places?
That has nothing to do with sexual harassment. And to imply that the two must be linked is false.
Does 'highly demanding environment' == 'Harassment' to you? If yes then you have far bigger problems. Any demanding mission ever might be out of reach to you per your value system.
Work conditions, overall demands of productivity et al will be brutal. And that ultimately gets to cause all sorts of other problems. People who just can't catch up with all the rush ultimately feel discriminated.
Non sequitur. You're also generally espousing some pretty reprehensible ideas. We as a society do not take the view that business success overrides all soft concerns, especially with regard to their employees. If ruthlessness and discrimination is the grist that your mill requires, find another mill.
Also please avoid working in management.
This is obviously wrong. Have you ever bought a iPhone? Or any other Apple product. Have you ever ordered anything from Amazon.
How do you think Walmarts and Targets of the world can sell you things for so cheap? Behind all this there is some guy being sent through some real hard ships.
As a consumer you have already made that choice.
The reader will note that this is a classic example of the 'tu quoque' fallacy[0].
My answer to that is then there is something fundamentally wrong with your business model. Basically, what is the point in running a business under which such conditions are the norm?
Any demanding mission ever might be out of reach to you per your value system.
This is fallacious. Of course there are times when struggle is necessary. A rewarding life (however you define reward) certainly requires an investment of effort, and at time that effort will be very difficult. Sometimes we are faced with very trying circumstances such as natural disaster or war or serious economic insecurity, and we have to work very ahrd to survive.
But a key word here is sometimes. If you deliberately construct such an environment where survival and advancement are only possible through 'brutal' work conditions and demands of productivity, then you are actively making the world a worse place, because you are establishing such brutal conditions as a norm and implicitly telling people that their life choices boil down to slavery or death. Why would any sane person want to create the conditions of slavery? Slavery is a condition of life that people rationally wish to escape.
There seems to be this attitude that if people are not constantly driven by necessity then they'll get too comfortable and lazy and never do anything. This is not borne out by the evidence. Some people would, not least because they're constantly bombarded with messages to consume, consume, consume whenever they can as a relief from their economic anxiety. But few people are fundamentally motivated by gluttony. Given the opportunity most people opt to develop their capabilities and contribute or create rather than merely consume.
Choosing to promulgate brutal working conditions is essentially promoting brutality as your preferred model of social organization. That's basically a displacement of sadistic and/or masochistic impulses into the economic sphere. You may very well feel that nothing of value happens except under harsh compulsion, but that seems to both ignore all the evidence to the contrary (an irrational bias) and abdicate responsibility for the consequences (since brutality is well-understood to result in wholly avoidable injuries).
It seems to me that your value system rests on some rather extreme assumptions that are not justified by the available evidence, and insofar as it imposes compulsion on others rather than being used to motivate yourself, it's intolerable. Put another way, if you only feel alive and productive under conditions of harsh necessity, that's your business. But as soon as you insist that this is the way of the world and that others must get with it or be cast aside, you're infringing upon the freedom of others. And at a social level, through regulatory process, experience of litigation and so on, we've agreed that the creation of such conditions is not an acceptable means to pursue arbitrary ends.
As usual : 'Value'. All these affordable iPhones and seamless Amazon deliveries happen because they have a work culture that optimizes for every single $. I agree with your premise that these are not for everyone. But this is precisely why we have freedom. Nobody should sign up for a job they think is too hard for them.
As we talk there are doctors who are training by the clock, sleeplessly working towards becoming surgeons. This is necessary for various reasons. If it were any easy, people would become bad doctors with less training. This is bad for society. The fact that work conditions are harsh- that isn't wrong or discrimination or even harassment. The very demands of the job are such.
The top percentage of any profession are this way. That comes with the job. You just don't go and say why don't they make it easy to me to be the next Zakir Hussain. Mr Hussain has set pretty high practice benchmarks practicing his instrument pretty much his whole life. Was it worth for his to have undergone all that pain and punishment to get there? May be that fits into his value system.
If you want to beat Jeff Bezos you have to at least perform at his level or higher. You just have to chose your mission based on the mileage you think you have.
Edit: you did say 'almost'.
The company is what is pertinent to the discussion :)
"Mr. Smith: I move my finger one inch to use my turn signal. Why are these assholes so lazy they can't move their finger one fucking measly inch to drive more safely? You wanna know why?
DQ: Not particularly.
Mr. Smith: Because these rich bastards have to be callous and inconsiderate in the first place to make all that money, so when they get on the road, they can't help themselves. They've gotta be callous and inconsiderate drivers too. It's in their nature."
Anecdotally, famous Nordic startups include Spotify, Skype, Mojang (behind Minecraft), King (behind Candy Crush, Farm Heroes), Rovio and Supercell.
1. Nordic countries have more über wealthy per capita.
2. Nordic countries are social democracies.
Then he draws the conclusion, with no corroborating evidence, that these two things are inextricably linked. No data to link these two points at all. Nordic countries in general have a high GDP PPP, and that is probably not solely (or at all) due to being social democracies. Scandinavian systems need to be efficient due the nature of their environment, e.g. they have a lot of land and not a lot of population, and fairly harsh climate (e.g. poor farming conditions). I would almost argue that "being cold" is probably a better indicator of national wealth per capita than "being a social democracy" (though admittedly, I haven't done thorough research either). I mean, look at Canada. Look at the non-farming bits of the US vs. the farming bits. Look at North versus South Italy. etc. Industrialization is more efficient and effective in regions where alternative methods of production weren't great in the first place.
For reference, here is the population density of the nations he was comparing (in people per km^2):
Iceland - 3; Norway - 16; Sweden - 22; US - 33; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_territor...
The US has 11x the population density of Iceland. Easier to have shared wealth when each person in your country can have 11x the land they could have in another country (with the caveat, of course, that this only applies if you are an industrialized nation).
I mean, just look at one of his "indicators" - billionaires per million people. By that metric, iceland is at that top. But there is only a single billionaire in iceland. Statistically, then, it's easier to be a billionaire in iceland. In practice, however, that is not the case. Things like population subsets need to be considered. In the US, you have a very large population, which is obviously going to impact per capita stats. However, you need to ask what proportion of those people are actually pursuing wealth in a way that could ever result in becoming a billionaire. e.g. a grocery bagger, probably never to be a billionaire. A plumber? Same. A hippy in a commune? Same. No data has been shown to adjust for lack of competition. At the end of the day, you have to look not at the total population, but at how many people are actually competing to become uber wealthy. Because, while attaining wealth isn't a zero-sum game, it certainly isn't an "everyone wins" game either.
Scandinavian countries have a very high proportion of jobs that don't really have a cap on upper income, such as software/game development, banking, music production, etc. because they have exceedingly efficient economies (as he actually touches on).
However, there is not clear reason to believe that they are efficient because they have social democracies. In fact, the converse (they became social democracies because they already had efficient economies) is just as likely, if not more so.
Can you elaborate on this supposed link between population density and shared wealth in developed nations? I don't understand the logical underpinnings of your argument. Developed countries almost by definition are less reliant on local geography.
Moreover, I don't see how space metrics are even relevant here. Iceland may technically have a lot of available "land" - but more than half the country lives in Reykjavik. A similarly lopsided urban / rural population distribution holds true in other Nordic countries.
My point about geography and population density needs to be related to my point about industrialization to make any sense.
It is this: Nordic countries have modern economies weighed very heavily towards industrialization/mechanization, but most importantly, they are efficient. As you say, they also have a "lopsided urban / rural population distribution", which is a much better way of saying (thank you) what I was trying to say: Nordic countries have land, but it's not good for the classic wealth generator - farming. This is why the population is focused in urban areas and is not spread out. However, luckily for places like Iceland, modern cities don't really care how good the land is for farming. An oil refinery doesn't care about the health of the soil. A modern factory doesn't care if the terrain is a bit rocky. Solar panels don't care. Mines don't care. etc., etc. Basically all modern industry is fine in a place like Iceland.
This an unexpected and immense boon to making a modern industrialized nation efficient, because on the one hand, you have major population centres with not much in-between (due to the lack of farming), which is in itself efficient, because areas you need to service with public services are greatly reduced. But on the other hand, you have plenty of space to put modern things like factories or new cities or what have you.
Compare this to the US, the country with more arable farmland than any other country on earth. Sure, the US has big population centres, but they are spread out, and many of them are still driven by rural economies. This greatly reduces efficiency, and is generally why the spread out states seem to be further behind the small / densely populated ones.
I've included the percentage of population that is urban below for comparison, according to The World Bank, from 2015. Also, I think it is slightly different when the rural population is doing something like fishing (Nordic) vs farming, but I won't go into that here.
US - 81%
Sweden - 86%
Iceland - 94%
Comparing anything to the US is a little bit silly though, because the US is comprised of 50 states, all of which are quite a bit different from each other. For instance, I bet the uber wealthy per capita in say California or New York is much, much higher than the Nordic countries. So the obvious answer to this video is probably "move to New York or California if you want to make a lot of money". I will say that would probably require more initial capital than a nordic country, but if you have the initial capital, then your chances are probably better. SO THE ACTUAL ANSWER IS: Get a great education and livelihood in Norseland while you're young, get some seed capital, and move to Cali/NYC/etc to really start making bank.
Obviously if you want to become a billionaire, you're not going to move to Plano, TX. Yet Plano is affecting the per capita stats.
I'd rather have a real work life balance (it's not so called, it's very real) than any amount of abuse working for a US style startup would throw at me.
Most of my colleague would as well.
To have the disdain for life you seem to display you must live in a very distant place from a sane version of reality.
Sweden has a population of 9.8 million yet it has produced Skype, Mojang, Spotify, King, Klarna [0]
Australia has 2.5x the population but only two unicorns. The UK and London market themselves as the capital of unicorns in Europe yet with 6.5x the population they have either the same number of unicorns or just four more (depending how you count them).
That is remarkable for a country like Sweden, especially when considering the strength and size of the Swedish expatriate community in tech around the world (many tend to leave).
In terms of similar results, I think only Singapore is in similar or better unicorn per capita territory.
[0] http://www.technologist.eu/sweden-the-land-of-unicorns/
[1] "unicorn" isn't the best measure since it is a private valuation and you can get different answers depending on who you ask, but most people would recognize those Swedish startups as being successful.
We are technically a UK incorporated company, headquartered and half our staff in Sydney and many of our staff and customers in the USA.
I still consider us Australian though.
I see many clever companies where I live in Melbourne - however I am saddened by what I perceive as the neglect the government is showing for the tech sector, especially startups; I'm looking e.g. at how share options are taxed. I believe there's a lot of lost opportunity here.
Skype is Estonian.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/stories/skype/skype-chapter-...
For human rights issues, yes, I tend to agree.
Morals are relative.
I don't know how old you are, but public morality towards sexual harassment just in the U.S. has changed in my lifetime. (For the better, although it is currently ugly and messy, as these changes always are.)
Even attitudes about what constitute harassment vary by culture between similar cultures. Compare Italy and Germany.
If you peal back the layers, probably most rapid growth, hard driving large companies have left a wake of upset and screwed over people behind it. Nobody "gives" you a hundred billion dollar company.. Uber's leadership was just particularly inept at pivoting from "scorched earth" to a slightly less savage strategy.
This will be an interesting pivot to watch, I've been kind of betting with myself when will the first week come with no news or good news for uber. I thought they'd have spun up the pr machine months ago, talking about co2 saved by carpooling or something. Giant company, currently fixed runway, all eyes on it and damaged culture. If uber doesn't die, the next CEO is a superstar.
Here in India, I go by the office cab to home everyday. I generally chat with the drivers as to why they don't drive for Uber/Ola etc. The answer is they need to make a good 1300 rupees on a round trip to be profitable, at a minimum of 6 trips per day. A trip with Uber/Ola etc costs 300 rupees(With pool). But even then!
So that's like these people need to start charging a minimum of 5x extra to make profits. At that price these people are no longer a viable means of transport.
To be profitable you need to back to the yellow taxi medallion thingy all over again.
EDIT: Fix a mistake.
So if the (now edited) original intent was exponential, "more like 10x than 1x (or 100x)", then calling 5x an oom is fine. If the intent was linear, then yes, rounding 5x to 10x is 100 percent error (difference/actual). :)
I'm headed in the opposite direction and reinstalling the Uber app tonight. This is a very convincing capstone to a 180 degree course correction away from everything I disliked about Uber. I also hope Travis can learn and come back and lead the company again in the future.
They are not. There are ways in which being an asshole ay be good for founders (cf Steve Jobs). Kalanick is just an asshole, and even take-no-prisoner ask-forgiveness-later businesses run much better with a bit of attention to human decency.
I don't think anyone's suggesting that sexually harassing women is good for business.
It also is weird that matt4077 repeatedly contrasts Kalanick with Steve Jobs in this thread, despite Apple having been accused many times of mean culture, sexism, harassment and cover-ups too.
https://www.recode.net/2017/6/7/15754316/uber-executive-indi...
I've commented all over this thread (as a sister comment points out) because it appears there is a narrative that his attitude towards his employees misbehaviour is at least closely linked to the personality traits that allowed him to be successful. That can be seen, I believe, by the many comparisons to Steve Jobs, for whom it's accepted more widely that it was often hard to work for him because of his perfectionism, but that this was a necessary trait for his success.
The danger here is that people (mis)understand the situation and start excusing inexcusable behaviour, or even imitate it, because they think it's linked to success. It is not. You have to separate the strip-club-going bravado from the other law-breaking, which could at least in theory explain Uber's success.
Honestly, this feels like a white-wash. Jobs was exceedingly demanding, but that's hardly unique. Jobs was also dishonest, secretive, and simply cruel to the people around him. This comes up over and over, even in his non-business interactions.
I agree that it's an error to lionize Kalanick's behavior. But it's also wrong to say that Jobs' behavior was radically different, or that Kalanick's party-boy bravado is clearly separable from his disregard for the law. Realistically, I think we'd be better off admitting that an urge to ignore boundaries usually applies across many topics.
If Jobs was more capable Kalanick, I don't think that was a function of his nastiness somehow being more noble. He seems to have simply brought a lot more skill to his task.
Like any good late-stage US capitalist, he outsourced it.
so he was standing over watching with approval as his employees were accosted? I doubt it. I think what's more likely is he didn't know about the extent of harassment (or didn't care, if you want to be cynical) and the initial HR non-response was likely just a really poor quality HR department designed to manage PR rather than solve employee problems. Organisations are more than just their CEO and while you can lay plenty of blame on him for allowing such a poor quality workplace culture to evolve, that doesn't necessarily mean that he's a big fan of sexual harassment in the workplace.
I bet you do, because nobody in their right mind believes that, and you are obviously attempting to cast the notion that a CEO might know what happens in their company as absurd.
Or do you also think that others believe oversight committees on BoDs literally stand over the managers and nod or grimace?
If he didn't know what HR was up to, he was incompetent.
> that doesn't necessarily mean that he's a big fan of sexual harassment
And... exactly nobody I've read here or anywhere else has asserted that. If you want to argue, do so in good faith.
If he didn't know what HR was up to, perhaps he wasn't the director in charge of HR? You can't expect a CEO to know 100% of what's happening in a larger company.
> And... exactly nobody I've read here or anywhere else has asserted that. If you want to argue, do so in good faith.
> ... managed HR's nonresponse to it.
your quote seems to imply that he went out of his way to make sure HR did nothing about the harassment. I'd be inclined to argue incompetence (or just a lack of ground-level micromanagement) over malice.
Unless the facts on the ground are very different than what we've heard, Uber HR had a policy of protecting some people accused of harassment because they were highly valued. In other words, a decision somewhere was made that policy was to prefer key-player retention over the risk of lawsuits, because, obviously, that sort of policy is pretty much guaranteed to lead to lawsuits[1].
I have a great deal of difficulty imagining the HR exec who doesn't realize that - that would be beyond incompetent, well in to senility[2]. I also have difficulty imagining the HR exec who will personally take on the risk of mandating policy about balancing disparate business risks (slowing down by losing productive harassers vs. lawsuits and bad press). That can end careers, and anyone capable of landing a management job at an Uber is exceedingly unlikely to take that risk without taking it up the food chain.
Finally, I find it remarkable that so many people are willing to credit the man with extraordinary genius in business execution while simultaneously arguing his incompetence when it happens to absolve him of shitty behavior.
And with this, I'm done with discussing things I didn't say.
[1] Moving on to speculation, making that choice makes perfect sense in an environment with a value system emphasizing winning at any cost and burning down anything in the way. If they thought first-mover advantage was literally everything and they thought they had enough money to weather any resulting legal problems, that's the rational choice. And especially if you think you're the smartest guy in the room and can get away with it. Not unlike hypothetically deciding to gaslight regulators or steal IP from competitors or invade medical privacy to discredit opponents. For example.
[2] I don't know about other states, but in California, HR for firms over some number of employees are legally required to ensure employees have been trained on sexual harassment law. I'm sure it takes other forms, but generally we get to watch these awful law-firm Flash videos of cartoons being either awkward with or awful to each other, and then have to answer questions about which actions are harassment in order to make sure we paid attention.
Nowhere has he said this. You're conflating two very different issues. No one is disputing that he is an asshole, etc. OP was making a different point.
I'm sort of baffled by seeing someone say this in a comment that's supportive of Steve Jobs. Are there tons of "the human decency of Steve Jobs" stories I've missed? Because I would have said that I've never heard of Jobs showing even a scrap of that, and it worked out pretty well for him.
The things happening under Jobs were different than the things happening under Kalanick, sure. But I don't see where that's a function of anything like decency - it just looks like a cultural difference in what kind of inhumane hostility was happening. Jobs was a perfectionist, but he was also manipulative, cruel, and dishonest in ways totally distinct from that.
Uber may or may not take over the world at some point, but Uber needs another round of investment in the next 18 months just to survive. If the existing investors refused to play ball, they could kill the next round, which really would kill Uber.
And here's another important moral of this story for founders: Kalanick has a controlling interest in Uber, so on paper, nobody could have removed him as CEO by shareholder vote. But despite complete control over the vote, you don't really own your company if you're dependent on future investment.
No matter what the cap table says, if you're not profitable, it's not really yours yet.
– Dune, Frank Herbert
- God Emperor of Dune, Frank Herbert (a prescient book on social feedback loops, my favourite in the series)
-- Erich Fromm ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu-7UDT0Xe4&t=1m34s )
> The danger of computers becoming like humans is not as great as the danger of humans becoming like computers.
-- Konrad Zuse
And when Picasso said that computers are useless because they only provide answers, was he just being witty, or pointing at an abyss, knowingly or not?
It is what we mean when we claim someone is "incapable of <x>" such as murder. It does not mean they do not physically possess the means, but rather that they lack the psychological impetus to do so.
Say you can kill a man, but irregardless of the threat to their life said man would refuse any and all of your orders, who can then be said to have 'control'?
In the end control means the ability to influence outcomes. There are many metrics, and for some choice of metric the capability of destruction is control.
More relevantly, a person who is both capable and willing to restrict your freedoms, potentially even unto death, has more control over you than a person who doesn't.
This isn't abstract theory. This is a description of "government". Would you pay any attention to the people claiming to be "the government" if they didn't have credible mechanisms for backing up their demands?
It is preferable that government not be solely founded on this power relation. It shouldn't be considered "sufficient" for good government. But it is certainly "necessary".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_on_violence
It's why "non-coercive government" is an oxymoron.
Another is that the board could have threatened to sue Kalanick for violating the loyalty and duty obligations that corporate officers have to shareholders - e.g. for suppressing systemic sexual harassment, withholding details about the Otto acquisition, etc.
I also don't think the examples he cited are violations of those duties.
Suppressing systemic sexual harassment violates his duty to report management problems to the board. Same with any meetings with Otto's founder a week prior to them leaving Google and founding Otto.
http://www.businessinsider.com/sears-ceo-will-pay-40-million...
They could smell the liquidity ...
I think they made a huge mistake in pushing Kalanick out, but I'm an outsider. There is surely something dark at play here, that we don't know about.
If there's a next round, it will probably involve a big haircut for the early-stage investors.
No, they could be crammed out by later investors' liquidation preferences. Depends on how down the down is.
Though these two types of events are obviously correlated (a down round makes a smaller exit more likely) they are not the same and should not be confused. A financing at a valuation that is a billion dollars less than the last round would be a down round, but a sale of the company at that same valuation would still far exceed the liquidation overhang.
Stop growing maybe, but going bankrupt and shutting down?
Uber's problem is taxi companies have lower overhead because among other thing their drivers sometimes get hailed by people at street level. Which means their either taxi prices are lower and people stop using Uber or they pay drivers more and drivers mostly stop working for Uber.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/ubers-revenue-profit-and-loss...
> someone is going to eat the valuation hit
Liquidation preferences mean earlier investors (and employees holding Common Stock) take the hit of a down round.
Let's say Company X has 9,000 shares of common stock outstanding. It raises $1 million at a $10 million post-money valuation with a 1x non-participating liquidation preference. Its cap table is thus 1,000 shares of Series A preferred stock on top of 9,000 shares of common.
It then raises $10 million at a $50 million valuation with similar preference terms. Its cap table is now 2,500 shares of Series B preferred stock on top of 1,000 shares of Series A preferred stock on top of 9,000 shares of common.
Let's contemplate a $100 million exit. Everyone converts to common at $100 million / 12,500 shares, or $8,000 per share. Series A bought at $1,000 and thus sees an 8x return; Series B bought at $4,000 and thus sees 2x.
Let's contemplate a $50 million exit. Everyone converts at $50 million / 12,500 shares, or $4,000 per share. Series A gets 4x; B comes out flat.
Let's contemplate a $25 million exit. Series B does not convert. Instead, it demands its 1x liquidation preference and gets $10 million. This leaves $15 million on the table, or $1,500 per share. Series A converts and sees its 1.5x return; B comes out flat.
Let's contemplate a $15 million exit. Series B does not convert and gets its $10 million. This leaves $5 million on the table, or $500 per share. Series A does not convert and demands its $1 million. Series A and B come out flat; common gets $4 million / 9,000 shares, or about $444.
Let's contemplate a $10 million exit. Series B gets its $10 million and comes out flat; everyone else gets screwed.
Let's contemplate a Theranos exit. Everyone gets screwed. Turtleneck doesn't go to jail.
TL; DR Later stages are least volatile. They get screwed last, but also see upside last. Lower rungs' returns pay for this safety.
>"Let's say Company X has 9,000 shares of common stock outstanding. It raises $1 million at a $10 million post-money valuation with a 1x non-participating liquidation preference. Its cap table is thus 1,000 shares of Series A preferred stock on top of 9,000 shares of common."
Can you walk me through the math. How does one arrive at 1K of Series A preferred from 9K of common stock? How is that being derived? I'm not following.
Also what is meant by "post-money" valuation? I'm assuming there is a corresponding "pre-money"?
Lastly by "coming out flat" you mean made whole again i.e recouped their initial investment?
Thanks.
> Can you walk me through the math. How does one arrive at 1K of Series A preferred from 9K of common stock? How is that being derived? I'm not following.
At time t=0 (probably at founding and when hiring its first few employees) Company X issued 9,000 shares of common stock. At time t=1 it decides to issue 1,000 shares in a series A offering (most likely to VCs and outside investors). They are separate events.
1000 shares x $1000/share = $1m raised for the company in the series A.
> Also what is meant by "post-money" valuation? I'm assuming there is a corresponding "pre-money"?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-money_valuation
In this case, pre-money valuation of Company X = $10m - $1m = $9m
> Lastly by "coming out flat" you mean made whole again i.e recouped their initial investment? Thanks.
Yes.
And there aren't too many NYCs in the world.
I would assume that would also depend on how much of their fixed costs they can shed in conjunction with that. Uber may not die quickly but it could still die slowly if they lose the ability to move forward because they had to cut too much of their R&D and sales infrastructure to get to that positive number.
Plus such a massive layoff would be a big red flag to customers too. By Uber's nature, a particular ride isn't a long-term commitment, but I think people would start looking for a stronger-looking horse even so. One of those differences between homo economus, who every time they need a ride rationally examines all their options regardless of the future and realizes that as long as Uber can complete this ride the internal state of Uber doesn't matter, and homo sapiens, who will take into account the fact that Uber doesn't seem to be doing well even if doesn't rationally matter at this particular point.
Uber is far more expensive in NYC than other cities such as Chicago.
Now that Uber has allowed tipping and since there is a rating system, everyone must now tip otherwise risk getting low ratings which effectively makes NYC rides even more expensive than they had been.
Most people don't own cars in Manhattan so that they either have to take mass transit or use Uber/Lyft/Taxi. There are many elderly on fixed incomes that have trouble ambulating (moving around) where lower cost taxi service is important.
In NYC at least, Uber doesn't need all of that corporate overhead and perhaps they should spin it off into some low-overhead operation.
- There is already a rating system for drivers, and riders, so this isn't a "will be" thing, right?
- The rating system is not currently blind, as far as I know. Certainly riders can see drivers rating, and I believe drivers can see riders rating as well.
Those 4 can handle everything backend related too?
Uber only works if there are enough drivers so that I can always get a ride. If I get told that I have to wait 30 minutes for a ride more than a tiny handful of times I'm uninstalling the app. Growing organically in region would be very tough since it would take too long to get enough drivers in place that users could rely on the service and conversely drivers would be unwilling to sign up because not enough users where bothering to use the service.
More than a team of four can manage certainly.
It does not, however, take a constant number of engineers to maintain the infrastructure that lets a single engineer push a feature to millions of users. (P/I)AAS can help, but you still need people to monitor performance, find regressions and bugs, and track them down.
There is always demand for Uber/Lyft just because there isn't a taxi cab nearby 24/7. How is that difficult to understand?
There's certainly a market for app/phone jailable cabs because there isn't one within street hail range at all times, but regular cabs have been phone hailable forever (it's the only way to get one outside of a few major urban cores) and are increasingly app hailable. Aside from regulatory supply restrictions (flouting which may not be sustainable) there's no real basis for a market for alt-taxis as anything but interchangeable competitors supplying the same substitutable commodity as regular taxis.
For me, this wasn't particularly true, especially in San Francisco. The dispatch was unreliable and slow.
Other areas, sure!
Now that the idea of phone-trackable dispatch has become commonplace, regular taxi companies are starting to do this too.
With Uber you also get know the fare upfront, the time of arrival, no need to tell them your address, there is a driver reputation filter, passenger insurance and it's safer than normal cabs in many countries.
Not the same thing as a phone call.
Even if they cost more I have no idea how I'm going to get around when I travel. The other options are so disgusting I'm not going back to that.
I would use them even if prices went up 30%.
There are a few costs like background checks that may go down when they stop expanding, but fewer than you might think.
Uber demand is definitely elastic.
I don't understand why that would decrease overhead?
I also don't understand why the other aspects of overhead (dispatcher, offices, taxi lots) don't add up to more than Uber (whose only cost is servers and support)
Turns out the car service business isn't very sticky at all (even the drivers work for multiple companies...). Drivers start to leave and the downward spiral begins. They just couldn't get to self driving vehicles fast enough - which may be why they were trying to borrow technology from Google.
When Uber started and raised its first investment rounds, self-driving cars were too far away to be part of a business plan. I doubt the latest investors take that view either - spending billions per year until self-driving cars happen is a way too expensive way to build up a fickle user base who will switch the moment a competitor offers 10% lower rates.
And when self-driving cars do arrive, there is no reason to believe that Uber will have exclusive access to them. Google and other software companies will be licensing the technology to anyone who pays for it, car manufacturers will be selling cars to anyone who pays for it.
It may kill taxi driver as a career, but there is no defensible advantage to Uber compared to Lyft, Hailo, Taxify, and so on.
Uber as a play on driverless cars is a smokescreen to distract people from the fact they have little advantage over other companies and can't for the life of them turn a profit.
At this point why doesn't Uber just lay off a HUGE portion of their staff and kill the R&D. It's hard to imagine if they downsized significantly and quit investing in self driving cars, that they couldn't tip the needle into profitability.
Isn't that a fairly common move for a startup? Burn money to get off the runway, then downsize to stabilize?
And when will that be exactly? This entire thread is overflowing with nothing but fantasies of Uber dying - basically raw emotional hatred - and little else.
Eight years on, they've never had a serious problem with raising capital and there's no evidence to suggest they'll struggle to do so now. The absolute last problem that Uber has right now, is money.
Except that there are no shortage of people who have maintained this view long before Uber's CEO was asked to resign and before Susan Fowler's blog post. Also there are also plenty of people who have commented here that believe Uber's prospect without Travis Kalanick as CEO are not good and also believe he should not have been removed.
>"Eight years on, they've never had a serious problem with raising capital and there's no evidence to suggest they'll struggle to do so now."
You might want to look up the term "irrational exuberance":
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/i/irrationalexuberance.asp
"drivers start to leave" where are they leaving to?
As it is, Uber doesn't need to do too much to hit break even. Some central costs cut, and a slight rise on price.
That creates a bit of a puzzle for industries with very thin operating margins that want to make significant investments in R&D. Generally they don't do it. That is why innovation at the Grocery store or in Long Haul trucking is so slow. From an engineering point of view, they are ripe for disruption, until you bring in an accountant to tell you that the disruption doesn't pencil out. Uber, like everything else, said to hell with it we're going ahead anyway. So how can they make things pencil out?
One option is to raise unit revenue in the future, which in an industry that's currently competitive means driving out the competition. IMO Uber was originally targeting this. But it turns out -- and really anyone could have told you -- that what Uber is doing isn't technically difficult. The heavy lifting is smartphones, GPS and Maps, whose availability made Uber/Lyft possible. Uber doesn't own any of the key technologies that make Uber possible, nor do they have a track record of being able to tackle really hard technology problems. They've had huge problems scaling and when Uber started using its own maps, it was a disaster. Bad maps is the #1 problem with Uber. Lots of new competitors have sprung up already that give basically an equivalent user experience, so Uber is not going to get real pricing power.
The next option would be "Lower unit costs in the future", But so far, that means spinning tales about self-driving cars, which is way beyond their technical ability as well as decades out even for those that have the chops to pull it off. IMO this only works because the latter round investors are naive about technology and the current investment climate is conducive to reaching for yield.
So while it's perfectly possible for Uber to continue existing as a concern, I don't think it's possible to satisfy their investors, and this means, unfortunately, that Uber may not make it. Many companies engage in a lot of self-destructive acts to meet unrealistic profit or growth goals set by investors, but in this case, Uber has only themselves to blame for setting these expectations. This is a shame, because I prefer Uber to Lyft and think they've created enormous value for both riders and drivers.
So yea when billionaires are paying your taxi fair to try and drive the local taxi firms out of business naturally they're everywhere.
But when that cash runs out the necessary price hike could just as easily drive them out of business. It's not like the drivers have any great loyalty.
We really need pro-competition legislation to stop this sort of predatory capitalism.
That's a non-sequitur
This conclusion refers to the idea of VCs(billionaires) subsidizing rides in order to remove the entrenched player(taxis.) How is that a non-sequitur?
I think the confusion stems from saying pro-competition legislation will prevent competition.
$5 per hour per driver goes to Uber
Assume 80,000 drivers (half of # U.S. Uber drivers) drive 8 hours a day, 7 days a week
52 weeks in a year
5x8x80000x7x52=$1,164,800,000
So about $1.1 billion just in the US. The only expenses are at headquarters (engineering, operations, design, legal, marketing, support) and the tiny field support offices they have in each city (local, entry-level employees).
It's not actually dying and it's not going to die.
Routinely skeptics here will point out that Uber is selling a $1 service for $0.75 (or a similar invented sum). Said skeptics then intentionally, comically ignore that Lyft is and has been doing the exact same thing and has radically less capital & valuation to play that game with. The name of the game is: last company standing; that's going to be Uber because they can afford to be and Lyft can't. It's that simple.
The downside of this approach is that Lyft doesn't have anywhere near the upside potential that Uber has. If Uber pulls off all of its ambitions it will be larger than Lyft could ever dream of being. The upside for Lyft's more humble goals is that it's chance of reaching them are much larger.
Unless Uber is willing to change its DNA and scale back its ambition, give up on its long term goals, and stay just a basic ride dispatching service then your analysis is incomplete. However perhaps this scaling back is what the CEO change is fundamentally about.
If internal, I gusss that's true. But we don't hear much about Lyft's internal workings. We don't know the morale of workers or how productive the company is.
About controlling costs - that's why I mentioned losses. Lyft is only in the US yet its losses are worse than Uber. It makes Lyft looks worse to me. Has Lyft said it is profitable anywhere or even break even?
But then Uber's insane valuation is not helping itself. I guess both companies are in bad positions, hard to say which is worse. And I agree it will be interesting to see how Uber does over the next year with new top executives.
Has Lyft said it is profitable anywhere or even break even?
The CEO said in a recent Forbes interview that their losses are currently coming in "under budget" and that they have a definite path to profitability. Make of that what you will.
And yeah agree with Kalanick and Uber by extension seem to be only content with winning everything. They only gave up on China after spending a ton of money and clearly not being able to win. Luckily they were able to get a decent stake in Didi from the merger and leaving China.
The drivers certainly care.
Travis offended and insulted the drivers, while Lyft is chugging along quietly. As long as people have brand loyalty to them (which they sure do), they'll win the ridesharing battle as it's looking like Uber is teetering
Yeah... that's why they have so much investment from car companies... ;-)
Not sure what "its" is, but characterizing Lyft as a lifestyle business seems absurd. It's not as highly leveraged s Uber is, but that's one of the few companies I can think of that one might consider more aggressive.
I'm blown away that you have to read more than half way down all the comments to get to this observation. It should be an automatic reply every time someone echoes the fantasy that Uber runs out of money and Lyft is magically left to take over. I don't understand the mental gymnastics and contortions one needs to make to arrive at this absurd idea.
Why "win"? There's no moat. I suppose there will be patents, but those expire or can be worked around.
More likely is that whoever gets there first will make all the mistakes that others can learn from. Every major car company has a self-drive effort now. Apparently Tesla, GM, Ford, and BMW are pretty far along. Lyft has a few partnerships here. It's only a matter of time before most cars drive themselves to some degree.
self driving hardware+software is much more complex than just writing some software... a non player can't trivially get into the game just because someone else have higher advancement
No mass produced self driving appliances that any dumb human can use improperly. The industry won't take that chance of a poor impression and destroy public's confidence all together.
In urban/high density locations, a ride hail company leveraging driverless vehicles can make a killing.
Not even sure if I installed Uber last month when I got a new iPhone.
The thread link is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14456973
Well, if you're spending more than your revenue, that is the eventual outcome if money stream from investors dries up.
Uber doesn't really have many physical assets that could be liquidated. Their value is entirely based on profitability. Which is currently negative.
In some cases this lack of maturity is particularly striking.
I think it's far to say you don't have a sustainable business model yet if you're dependent on future investment.
Even a company that is fully owned, with a sustainable and profitable business model, needs to ask the question "can I lose all this?" every day.
If the metric for "you don't have a real company" is you could potentially lose it, then nobody has a real company.
If you look at founder/CEOs who have made that leap, they all tend to be very young (Jobs, Gates, Zuck, etc) and had very strong teams behind them.
Someone like Kalanick - who has run multiple startups to various exits - has been running startups all his professional life. His management style likely works very well at a startup, where failure is assumed so risk tolerance is high. At a startup, you need a field general leading the troops into battle.
But at a large, maturing company, you need a different skill set. Risk tolerance becomes a negative attribute once the company grows so large you can't control the risk anymore. Rather than a field general, you need a therapist capable of massaging the egos of the executive team and the board of directors. The job becomes more strategic and political -- execution is assumed, and failure is no longer an option.
I don't think Kalanick is that guy, and I think the board finally convinced him of that. But if I was an investor, I'd still be happy to listen to his next startup pitch...
And in Jobs' case, it took an absence from the company of more than 10 years…
Edit: Downvotes for simply stating a fact?
Edit: I imagine it's this interview at AllThingsD[1]. Ed jumps into this topic right off the bat.
He was an asshole of monumental proportions before and after. I am so far removed that I am a poor judge, what would be a good place to look into this.
I'd argue that a "mature CEO" is not a fit for Uber which needs to keep growing or die.
The valuation can be quite high if you assume that the value in the exponent is low.
But I personally think that the "autonomous vehicle revolution" is not going to pay off as well for Uber as they had hoped. It's becoming more clear that the market for autonomous vehicles isn't going to look like the market for human-driven ones -- and vehicle manufacturers are going to be looking to build their own self-driving auto services rather than sell self-driving vehicles directly to consumers.
Uber's biggest innovation was their app. Even complex apps like Uber are not hard to clone if you have any sort of budget. There's an assumption a lot of investors make about their brand value: it assumes that another, already strong brand does not enter the same market. Seeing as Tesla has made no secret of their intentions to compete directly with Uber in the ride-hailing space, I don't think that's a fair assumption. Would you rather call an Uber or a Tesla at this point?
And what does buying a Tesla in that scenario even look like? Do you buy a car and rent it out a la Airbnb when you're not using it? How much money do you get for that, and how much of a cut does Tesla get since it's their algorithms actually driving the car?
Don't get me wrong; the brand value is actually really high because hundreds of millions of wealthy customers worldwide know Uber. Even if the company fails spectacularly, someone will buy them for a few billion in a fire sale just for the brand.
Autonomous cars are a side bet. A few hundred millions in R&D that would also attract good talent and nice PR for Uber.
But I don't think investors were stupid enough to invest billions into Uber based on that bet. Specially considering the fact that anyone who gets that technology first can make it big and Google had a few years of head start.
You realize that nobody will care as much about most of the things they currently care about when buying a car. Performance? Mileage? Handling? Horsepower? Fucking irrelevant if I'm chilling in the back seat and my car is just getting me to where I need to go.
So what still matters? Price. Comfort. Amenities. The upsell becomes the main sell. At a certain point, Tesla isn't even selling "cars" so much as it's selling mobile offices to one segment, and mobile living rooms to another segment. I could also see Tesla finding a way to place the burden of price elsewhere and offer effectively "free" cars to consumers. For instance, leasing or selling fleets to employers. Or to cities. Or to Uber. Or to Amazon.
Uber, on the other hand, sees a world in which nobody owns a car, nobody drives a car, and everyone hails an automated car whenever and wherever. Like that scene in Minority Report.
Both of their strategies are banking on the idea that cars, as we currently understand and experience them, will eventually become pure commodities. The difference is that Tesla is seeking margin and Uber is seeking volume. The cliche that Tesla is Apple and Uber is Amazon is sort of true in that respect.
That's why ultimately, I feel Uber will end up being the Expedia/Priceline of the self-driving car industry. If you don't control the means of value production, you become a middleman. There's a reason they were working on their own self-driving tech rather than licensing from someone else -- everyone who is actually building this tech likely told them "go shove it, we can recreate what you do far easier than you can recreate what we do".
Tesla has a brand value higher than any other car. It's not an app that can be easily replicated. The dynamics are not the same as Uber.
You'll notice a common thread throughout Elon Musk's "big bets" (Tesla, SpaceX, etc.) He is extremely conservative with operational spending, and all of these companies are very capital-intensive. Just look at the difference between a "Tesla Store" (small, maybe 3 or 4 employees, cars can be stored offsite wherever is cheap) and a normal auto dealership (huge, dozens of employees, majority of expensive real estate is used for parking cars). The Tesla store is very efficient compared to the auto dealer.
When you have high capex, it makes it easier to fund your company through debt rather than equity since those loans/bonds are backed by capital assets with a non-zero liquidation value.
Sure in large walkable cities with constantly circulating fleets car ownership might go away. For those of us in the suburbs who HAVE to drive everywhere, not so much. Even waiting 5 extra minutes for every errand (optimistic, given that my most recent lyft took 10-15 minutes to arrive) adds up fast. Let alone going out into the rural areas where Uber/Lyft scarcely exist and the nearest human structure can be miles away.
I could, however easily see a model where people rent their self-driving car out to Uber/Lyft when they're not using it. Driver fees would be gone, and they could take a greater cut that might even put them towards profitability.
2) Configurability
Anyone who is price sensitive won't want to pay the hourly rate to have a car sit in their garage all day/night doing nothing. Nor will they want to pay the up front cost and/or interest to hold a controlling share in the vehicle.
And configurability means you can take a 2-seater when you are going to work, take a 4-seater to lunch with you coworkers, take a hatchback to the farmers market to pick up your groceries, and then an SUV to the mountains, preconfigured with a roof rack with your ski rentals already on it, sharpened and waxed, and then take a mobile office for the drive home so you can get some work done, and a mobile bedroom for your trip down to LA so you can catch up to sleep.
But yes, the wealthy will still own private cars because they can have it waiting, just like private planes. Also, cooties.
Driving is a day-to-day task. My time's already short, if I have to add an extra 5 minutes waiting for pickup every time I want to go anywhere (once again an optimistic estimate, it would likely be closer to 10), on a busy day that's a minimum extra hour a day of time I've lost just standing on the sidewalk. Margin matters, even an extra 15 minutes a day adds up to over 90 hours a year.
Also these rental services/configurations will hardly be free. So the cost of the car/maintenance isn't eliminated entirely. For my situation, given that I've been driving the same car for the last 11 years, and it was ~16k when I bought it, plus maybe an average $1200 a year in insurance, and maybe an average of $300 a year in maintenance that means I've spent an average of $2,954.54/year over the last 11 years on car ownership. And that number is only going to get smaller unless I buy another car.
But in this scenario I'm losing a minimum 90 hours per year on the margin. If those were work hours, then at my current take-home rate I can decrease that number down to around $1065/year going forward. Given that I'm likely going to make more money as the years go by, these continuous rental services are going to have to be awfully cheap to be worth it for my situation, and I don't think I'm too far from the average.
Now sure, if you're buying a new car every 4 years like some people do then it might be worth it. Or if the cost of insurance is prohibitively high in your given location. Or if your job sucks and you just can't afford a car. Or if you actually need a broad variety of vehicles on a regular basis. There are lots of factors that go into it, but for anyone who's middle class or better I don't think it'll supplant ownership entirely. Or maybe it will and I'll just be with the sour-grapes number-crunchers in the corner ranting about margin to anyone who'll listen. :)
Nope, but they will be commoditized. If you have a car that all you have to do is pass it an API key and a location, there's not much value a ride sharing service can add to that -- which means there will probably be a bunch of them. Which means that the price to the consumer should be something close to [ (marginal cost of ride) + (depreciation cost of ride) ] * 1.03. And the cost side of that will benefit from scale for the business, but not the consumer.
Basically, once it's commoditized, it will cost you more to do it yourself than to pay someone to do it for you. Just like with currently commoditized services like AWS, there can still be good reasons to do it yourself -- but those tend to be special cases rather than the norm.
> But in this scenario I'm losing a minimum 90 hours per year on the margin.
Err, I'll play along. If you were in an autonomous car (or even a current ride-share), you could just work while en route rather than drive. I'm willing to bet you spend more hours sitting in traffic today than you ever would waiting on a car to arrive.
As for the rest, keep in mind we're comparing renting an autonomous car vs owning an autonomous car, not renting an autonomous car vs driving. So the actual rides are equivalent. The time difference is me getting in my car and telling it where to go vs me hailing a car, waiting 5-10 minutes for it to arrive (where my capacity to do any meaningful work is basically nil) and then tell it where to go, a minimum of 3 times a day. Maybe up to 12 times a day on a busy day. That's not an insignificant time loss over the medium/long term.
Granted it's all hypothetical and the actual value of the time lost would be highly situational, but it would be one of those small daily time-sucking inefficiencies, like walking into the other room to get paper towels as opposed to just putting a roll in the kitchen. When you do them every day, those add up.
By definition rental is going to be more expensive than ownership.
I don't doubt that companies will have fleets of cars for their employees, etc, but personal vehicles are not going to go away.
young people, old people, and homeless people.
Everyone else needs a car frequently.
> but personal vehicles are not going to go away.
For the vast majority of the population, yes, they will go away.
Look at the quality of the interior of the average cab and you will see why a lot of people would prefer to own.
Mileage is a critical component of cost of operation, and of range without stopping, which are pretty much (along with capacity and comfort) the things that matter most if you aren't driving and the car is just taking you from A to B.
That's even true if you don't own it (even the cost factor, since that—assuming an efficient market—still controls what you'll pay to use it.)
More like "CEO of a growth startup" to "fixer who can pull an over-valued startup out of a nose dive." That's a much tougher leap.
What has he done besides Red Swoosh? btw, Red Swoosh was sold to Akamai and then later disassembled when they realized there was no "there" there.
Would wait to see what'll happen to his equity before take a bet, but gonna guess will be sold high and eventually rebought after the crack when K will try to step back in at a better condition, with less stakes and more hard cash.
How does a company so big not make a profit/could possibly go bankrupt?
My current understanding is companies either focus on growth (at a loss) or choose to focus on profit (with the risk of competition overtaking them or decay over time).
But lets say they go bankrupt in 1 year, couldn't they just switch to "profit mode"?
If there is no "profit mode" ... then why are people investing in the first place?
They are thinking more along the lines of "how can we make 10 billion dollars per year, for the next 150 years." Think General Electric.
That's why they require huge amounts of money from investors, so they can aggressively grow to a size where other companies can't touch them.
The huge amount of capital is sort of like a moat.
When you're larger, you have something called economy of scale. Which means you have enough resources to do stuff the smaller guys can't do.
When you're larger, you also have something called a data advantage. Which means you know so much more about your customers, you can predict things and make decisions the smaller guys can't.
Well that they might have to try and do now. But usually it is hard to move to 'profit mode' - you upset your customers when you start to charge double. The idea is that before you do that you have either killed of the competition or your competition 'moat' is so big that everyone wants to keep using you because of $reason and so you can charge what you like.
>If there is no "profit mode" ... then why are people investing in the first place?
Nobody is ever sure if any startup will get to 'profit mode' you simply look at their market / numbers etc and if you decide to invest then you hope the startup can figure it out. This is the investing gamble.
Consider Facebook and Google. Together they're worth over a trillion dollars. Now ask yourself: what's the combined net worth of the second-biggest search engine and the second-biggest social network? Nothing close.
In a business where being second or third place is pretty good, you can switch to profit mode as you please. But Uber's valuation only makes sense to me if it lets them dominate a market like Google or Facebook does, setting prices and terms for the industry. I think that if they switch to profit mode, people will start to value them like a normal business, which would mean a giant drop in valuation.
I presume that's why board members supported an aggressive jerk for so long: Kalanick has been undeniably good at seizing territory, and if one sets aside little things like morals and externalities and long-term consequences, one could argue that aggressive jerkiness is exactly what Uber has needed.
Honestly, this market never struck me as one where dominance was even possible, so the investors' theories never made sense to me. But that's my best guess as to why they've been allowed to keep burning money like this.
Stay. Wait... wait.... go fetch!
Companies at this stage in an ultra competitive market (not talking about ride sharing, but self-driving) need their founders to lead and grow. It is just too early and critical to bring in a professional CEO. See Apple.
Just look at the numbers in this article[1] - they need scale economics of two times the cost of the driver of the cab to archive GAAP profitability, which, obviously, is impossible even with self-driving.
[1] http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/11/can-uber-ever-deliver...
Yahoo for example is coasting along at a market cap of 53.40B down from its high of over $125 billion[1]. In 1999 dollars. Is it "dead"?
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/yahoo-market-cap-over-time-20...
But if they cut it too much, they'll stop growing.
The problem is they need to sustain their 70 billion dollar valuation for investors to be happy.
To be worth 70 billion they have to be either:
Growing at a very fast rate (which requires a very large burn rate to sustain)
Or be generating billions in profit each year. Even with a cut burn rate, they aren't going to be generating billions in profit. So they won't be worth $70 billion.
People will stop using Uber if the wait times get really long, which they will if most of the drivers leave.
Their profitability problem isn't just one of opex. They don't have margin, either.
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/11/can-uber-ever-deliver...
My main takeway: revenues are higher than their cost of sales. In other words, they are earning money on marginal rides served. Not losing money.
To me, this suggests that profitability is plausibly achievable if they end subsidies into small markets and drastically cut development costs.
I suppose there's some tipping point of "very valuable" and "not that badly behaved" where the argument is actually valid (see: all the Steve Jobs references in this thread). But at that point I guess the ethical solution is to make it very clear what new hires are in for, and pay a healthy "dealing with this person" bonus (see: Steve Jobs, again).
Uber has been pushing hard on self-driving cars (I mean, in the long term, it strikes me as their only viable business model, so it makes sense). By my best estimates, salary for delivery drivers for Amazon packages run somewhere between $6B and $10B per year (for comparison, if I remember correctly, Amazon's revenue is somewhere around $35B/yr). Automating delivery could be a HUGE deal for them, and an opportunity to scoop up a major player in the autonomous driving space might look very appealing.
Then again, with Washington State throwing the doors open for autonomous testing, Amazon could likely develop their own system on their own turf for less, even if Uber's valuation goes WAY down.
Counterpoint: businesses in good shape don't just drop CEOs. This move might just help it die slower.
How could Uber, barring wholly incompetent leadership, completely implode?
And many/most Uber drivers also drive for Lyft. There's no harm in leaving both apps on and grabbing a more-elusive (but higher) Uber fare when one comes along.
It's actually would be a major news point I think. Whether or not Travis sells his shares is what's gonna be decisive of his position in the company and possible future ambitions.
The lender takes the risks as to share value and liquidity. If presented early in Uber's climbing valuation curve, it probably would have looked like a good opportunity to lenders.
I don't think Kalanick had much to do with it. He created the product, but it pretty much sold by itself -- similar to how Zuckerberg created Facebook, which sold by itself.
I'm very optimistic about this change. To me, Kalanick, and the culture he bread, were toxic to Uber.
I'm reminded of how Microsoft's share price jumped by 12% the day Steve Ballmer's retirement plans were announced. Microsoft has been on a major run ever since. Let's hope that we see something similar here.
Uber has lived in Unicorn land thus far. The potential to turn a profit has buoyed them but that cash bubble seems to be running out of fumes. They could sell for 1/10th of what they raised money at. Time will tell.
It's a bad time for Travis to be handing over the reigns because he clearly hasn't built a command team to takeover and the fraternity atmosphere is toxic enough that as these new leaders step in I'm afraid the middle management will view them as "illegitimate" leaders.
Time will tell. I hope for the sake of all the people who hold Uber stock as part of their compensation that they get a pay day but it's a gamble.
Nope, This is wrong. Kalanick stood in front in the fight against the City officials and Taxi unions across the globe. Uber could've been done and dusted had it been left as a product to be sold by itself. Kalanick pushed Uber up high against the current of water, which is not exactly similar to running a Social Media Company.
If anything, there's a proportion of people who supported local government rules and existing taxi services over the American interloper, a counter-balance to the anti-union and anti-municipal crowd.
Please be mindful that the American experience does not translate globally, even to other english-speaking western countries!
And regardless of that, it doesn't matter: by the time Uber started operating in Australia (or any non-US country, for that matter), they already had a history of pushing hard against existing norms. Uber would have never even gotten to the point where expanding outside the US would have been possible if it hadn't been for Kalanick.
Sure, he's a jerk, but to claim that he had nothing to do with Uber's expansion after launch is just absurd.
'Software company, Not a taxi company' argument was used extensively to circumvent license and medallion regulations. On top of it they used VC money to drive down the prices by 4x-5x.
Several tens of thousands of drivers in every state in every country they went to got shafted because of these moves.
So yes he was very brutal and ruthless upfront. You can't replace that kind of human quality easily.
Your wages will dilute to a point it will be hard for you to make a decent living.
Don't kid yourself, this fight was fought by lawyers and lobbyists.
Uber financed one side of this fight, but seeing as the outcome of this fight was critical to Uber's business model, that wasn't some genius insight, that was self-preservation.
It's called execution...
Haha don't know where to start. Facebook could have gone to shit in so many ways just like all the predecessors like Myspace and Friendster, but they made all the right decisions and won. Same goes for Uber.
Kalanick's right decisions are now based on how much he was lying when he said he hadn't divested the slightest bit from Uber. I'm guessing that everyone read his character well, and that he was in fact lying on a massive scale and has many lifetimes worth of stashed-away wealth. Right now, winning for him means avoiding prosecution and jail (probably easy to do) and Uber is over, already.
So Uber lost, and anyone still clinging to Uber has lost (but there will be amazingly few of those). It's the frog and scorpion fable, really. Travis isn't the scorpion, and Uber isn't the frog. Uber is the scorpion and Wall Street is the frog.
Nobody would seriously argue that there's no difference between the two because Uber doesn't exist yet in 'stock' terms. They need to translate the initial investor enthusiasm into an IPO, so short/long spells out the likely climate for said IPO.
I am talking about how execution matters, because parent said Uber just worked on its own to get where they have, just like Facebook worked on its own to get where they have. None of these are true.
My comment has nothing to do with wall street or shorting or whatever concepts you bring up.
Facebook may have won. I think you'll find Uber didn't win, because Wall Street needed Uber to remain the Travis Uber, in spite of any laws or limitations, and that's clearly no longer true.
People do move, and the convenience of one app to hail taxis everywhere is appealing. But then again, people don't move that often that installing the local taxi app is too much of an assle.
This is not the case for 100% Internet based businesses like Facebook.
So they're really completely different models and therefore the competitive landscape can't resemble each other. It's more fair to compare the Uber-Lyft dynamic to rental car businesses like Enterprise-Hertz.
The reason I compared Uber's success to Facebook was because demand for the product was so great, it was viral. It's hard to mess up a product that is so incredibly popular.
Perhaps Instagram would have been a better example to communicate my point. Its initial success was clearly not anticipated even by its founders, and its success continued despite numerous hiccups and screwups in its early days. I posit that its founders ability, which was clearly limited (by their own accounts), had much to do with its success.
But it was a premature optimization because those responsible for turning 'viciously competitive evil guy' into raw capital failed to acknowledge that he'd screw them in turn as soon as he needed an exit strategy. You simply cannot turn to childish human dominance battles as a model for what will work in large systems and interdependent markets.Even propping up your 'pet winner' with near-infinite capital won't save you forever.
The irony is that in growing, FB traded down that cachet -- but managed to transition from cohort value to network value fairly successfully.
This is an argument I've made for years, I'm happy to see that I'm not the only one -- danah boyd has mentioned it several times as well.
I'm not saying Zuck didn't execute well -- the advantage still could have been blown (and I've only just learnt of a similar network started IIRC at Columbia University which didn't go as well). But for all the things Zuck can claim, building Harvard's social appeal is not one of them.
We don't know exactly how much influence Zuckerberg had in all the decisions. For example the common theme for years was for there to be uproar after any major feature or change.
Like the news feed that is now ubiquitous. A worse company might have feared the backlash and slowed down on features and growing the news feed.
I assume Zuckerberg was also fundamental in acquiring Instagram and Whatsapp. Instagram is worth tens of billions now. Whatsapp has 1.2B or so monthly users. There were many comments on how overpriced and silly the Whatsapp purchase was. But most of it was in stocks and the cash at the time may have been a lot ($4B), but Facebook gets that much per month now. Whatsapp tripled its users since its acquisition.
A lot of tech people disliked the Messenger split off. But that seems to be working out for the business too. It is becoming its own platform now and can also boast 1B+ users per month.
Maybe anyone would've done all this. I don't know. But I do know it was Zuckerberg in charge when all this occurred.
They will change the company's current culture. Slow down the pace of growth to try to adjust what is wrong. Probably focus on where they have margin to operate. This is clear in Gary ( Uber Co founder) text on Medium.
"In a highly competitive market it is easy to become obsessed with growth, instead of taking the time to ensure you’re on the right path. Now is that time… to pause"[0]
This is death. I mean, it's sensible talk, in another context it would be seen as enlightened, in a larger sense it's the right answer.
Uber aren't IN another context. They depend completely on Wall Street continuing to think they are the biggest shark that ever sharked, and now that's ruined and the only big investment opportunities are in betting AGAINST Uber. Most likely the smartest money is already out.
This is death. Shouldn't be, in a more sensible context, but it absolutely is. You can't tell Wall Street 'it is time to think sustainability' when they bet on you eating the goddamn world for them.
I'll grab my popcorn, this will be fun to watch.
If they cut ad spend and raise costs, then their growth story stops and other competitors have a window to move.
The go-to reading (at least a few years ago) for handling the difficulties of burn rate at a high-growth company is 'Mastering the Rockefeller Habits' by Verne Harnish, the chapter on cashflow. I think 'The hard thing about hard things' also talks about how this situation can kill your company if you're unlucky or unprepared
Traditional firms will generally prefer debt to equity as you will generally get a better shareholder return on debt. VC backed firms do not usually raise debt -- even if it is preferred -- because they are viewed as too risky by banks. When VC-backed firms raise debt it is because they are transitioning out of high risk to the stability of a established and predictable firm.
In some Nobel-winning economic theories the best capital structure is all debt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modigliani%E2%80%93Miller_theo... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_structure
If the only thing about this loan that makes it "leveraged" is its interest rate of 5% then that is probably preferable to equity and not a red flag.
Highly unlikely. Why? Investors who stomach multi-billion dollar annual losses will probably just shrug off the recent bit of trouble. If the choice is to either write off $15 billion or to give another couple to help the company go through a rough patch (what a buying opportunity!) I think I know what investors are going to do.
Kalanick's head has now rolled (not that it really hurts him much personally though, it's probably even a relief for him) but seriously a whole nother level of crap would have to happen with Uber before investors start getting comfortable with the thought of letting go those $15 billion.
Bear in mind that the company's growth has been driven by its ability to run a very, very highly-performant backend -- and that's in turn a matter of getting the very best engineering talent on board.
Some, perhaps most of that talent is already pissed off about the fratty work environment and questionable leadership decisions. Recently, their options exercise window changed from 30 days to 7 years[0].
Angry employees + management turnover/uncertainty + limited runway + new rule that basically you don't lose your options when you quit = I'm officially an U-Bear.
On a related topic, I think people's schadenfreude for Travis is getting out of control and he's becoming a bit of a totem for everything that's wrong with SV....while his issues are largely self-inflicted ("boob-er" / treating drivers like crap on camera / etc), all the hatred directed toward him seems excessive in context. The guy just lost his mother, maybe cut him some slack?
[0]: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/2017/05/16/uber...
Agree this is good for Uber employees and I'm happy they have significantly less of an impediment to leaving than most other workers at pre-exit startups.
My gut tells me that Uber's financial performance won't change
The Yellow Cab special interests paid off politicians so that there was a limit of 13,000 Yellow Cab medallions for 8.5 million people. The price of the taxi medallion was $1.2 million. While people in Manhattan could get a taxi, there were no taxis in Brooklyn, Queens, Bronx, ... Because of the artificial limit on medallions which only benefited medallion owner but not New Yorkers, a driver leasing a cab for a 12 hour shift could pay $125 just to lease the car.
When Uber and Lyft came, the rates were lower, one could use Uber Pool to have even lower rates and save on greenhouse gas. Now taxi services have some availability outside of Manhattan. Now many Yellow Cabs are idle and the value of the medallions went for $1.2 million to about $700,000 or less.
In NYC, the Yellow Cab medallion owners tried to get the mayor to put restrictions on the growth of Uber/Lyft, but New Yorkers protested.
Uber/Lyft have increased customer value, lowered greenhouse gasses while not forcing drivers to pay excessing leasing fees for vehicles.
> not forcing drivers to pay excessing leasing fees for vehicles.
Err, the cheaper rates were due to uber subsidising rides with VC money, which was unsustainable. Uber also did start a leasing program for drivers.
The cheaper rates in NYC which are extremely high compared with the rest of the USA were because there was no $125 / 12 hour lease fee because there were no medallions.
Medallion owners would get mortgages (like houses) for the $1.2 million medallions and the high lease fee paid for the medallion mortgage. In fact the other special interests besides Yellow Cab medallion owners were credit unions who financed these mortgages.
A $125 / 12 hour lease fee comes to over $90,000 per year.
By not having to pay these excessive expensive leases, drivers could be paid less money and still make a profit. Drivers who leased the Yellow Cabs still have to pay for gas. Lower costs for taxi service means more time with customers in cabs. Everyone wins except medallion owners and credit unions with the mortgages and politicians bought off by these special interests.
This comes out as 8640 hours per year, which is 360 days.
So we're talking about the income a taxi owner can get from a medallion.
What an individual taxi driver had to pay to work is a much lower number. Typically a full time job is around 2000h/year.
As explained elsewhere in the thread, Uber does not and has not ever competed with medallion taxis for their main product (Uber X/Uber Black) in New York City. Uber's direct counterpart would be the for-hire cabs which are also regulated by the TLC, and are not required to have medallions.
Uber is already subject to the exact same requirements of the TLC that their predecessors were - Uber drivers in NYC have to have a valid TLC license. So there is literally no difference in supply-side regulatory cost there.
1. http://toddwschneider.com/posts/analyzing-1-1-billion-nyc-ta...
Whether or not they fill the same requirements, they made it so easy to get a car that it was easier than standing on a street corner and hailing a yellow cab.
And aside from that, they added accountability. Yellow cab drivers were rude, the cars were moderately clean at best, and generally took opportunities to rip people off. I remember leaving my phone in a cab around 2008, I immediately called it and the dude picked up, said he was around the corner and to meet him outside. He was more than willing to give me my phone back- for $60 and had a shit eating grin on his face. I had the same thing happen in an Uber about 5 years later- the guy dropped the phone off at my house free of charge with a smile.
There is a reason that NYC taxi medallions have pretty much halved in cost since Uber started here- because they are directly competing with yellow cabs!
I very clearly do.
Rather than respond to the anecdotes, I'll point out that I was rebutting the original claim: that Uber was cheaper because it (unlike medallion cabs) does not have to pay for licensing fees. Uber does pay for licensing fees, just under a different classification. More importantly, that's exactly who Uber's competition is on the drivers' side, which is exactly what OP was talking about. Uber drivers are generally people who have driven livery cabs for years and either split their time between Uber and other livery cab services, or have switched over to Uber for livery cab driving.
When talking about the price, it's more accurate to compare Uber to other livery cabs, and to say that Uber has caused the share of livery cabs in the overall cab market in NYC to increase, rather than to look narrowly at the medallion market, and ignore the regulatory field that they are in, ignore the costs of that regulation, and ignore all of the direct competition on the supplier side.
It is not about licensing fees, it is about that because of the medallions, taxi drivers had to pay $125 / 12 hours for the lease. Before Uber/Lyft those medallions which were restricted to 13,000 for a city of 8.5 million (as well as many visiting tourists, business people, and in a city where many don't own cars), the price of a medallion was $1.2 million. After Uber/Lyft the price decreased to $700,000 and many Yellow Cabs are idle. Prices are lower, service is far better.
But if your point is 'Uber was primarily successful because they found a way to get around the medallion system', then I don't think so.
The reason being, livery cars were around long before Uber, are much more comparable, and they also did not have to deal with medallions. So, why didn't livery cars put the taxis out of business a long time ago?
I think the real reasons for Uber's success are:
1. Livery cars were a hassle to arrange. Uber solved this by using smartphones with GPS.
2. Livery cars were slower to pick you up. Probably because there weren't enough drivers on the road. Which is probably because there weren't enough riders. Uber solved that catch-22 by subsidizing the rides to jumpstart a positive network effect.
Accountability and a feedback loop- if the guy did try to rip you off somehow, prior to Uber, you really had very little recourse. There is a process to lodge a complaint in NYC, but it involved paperwork, showing up to a hearing (which you will have to take time off of work for), and then maybe something might be done.
You kind of touched on it, but also just some kind of visibility into when exactly your car will arrive. When Uber was new in NYC, wait times were much longer, generally 10-15 minutes, which I didn't mind much because that's probably about how long it would have taken me to find a cab, and I could finish my drink inside the bar/restaurant and finish as the driver pulled up. This has actually gone downhill a bit over time- So many times I pull up the app to see a half dozen cars within 4 blocks of me, and then when I actually try to reserve, its a 7-8 minute wait. Or they accept the trip but then I guess got a better offer on Lyft or something and is just heading in the wrong direction- meaning you have to cancel and then fight with Uber over being charged a cancellation fee, which usually isn't too hard to do, but its just a hassle and a way drivers can currently beat the system.
I feel like a decade from now people are going to still be repeating this same old line.
It also seems awesome. Why wouldn't I want VCs to give away a bunch of money to its customers?
No, it is not going to run taxis permanently out of business. All you need is a car to do that. If this is really true, as soon as prices rise, another taxi company can start back up again and take market share.
Uber is still losing money hand over fist. It has to come to an end at some point, either when they finally raise prices or they just go bankrupt.
> It also seems awesome. Why wouldn't I want VCs to give away a bunch of money to its customers?
A couple reasons:
1. VCs don't "give away money". They invest, with the expectation that their investment will be returned many times over. Given that it is explicitly Uber's goal to have a monopoly on transportation, you can extrapolate what that means for their intended pricing strategy if they ever manage to take over.
2. While taxis may or may not be an example of this, it's important to realize that VC-backed dumpi^H^H^H^H^Hpromotional pricing can destroy existing businesses even if those businesses were competitive and sustainable. For example: wash.io, which I commented about here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13608376#13608798. They shuttered a whole bunch of laundromats in SF, which was all for nothing since they went out of business anyway. That's not a healthy dynamic.
That's insane.
Same goes for trying to hail a cab from the streets. Empty cabs would drive past you because they wanted to only drive passengers to the airport. I'm glad they are all going out of business.
Calling for a cab was extremely unreliable here. You could easily wait for an hour (because any driver coming to pick you up could, without ill effect for him/herself, stop to pick somebody up on the street). Some cabs took credit cards, some didn't. Some claimed to take credit cards but then "the machine was broken" so you had to pay cash.
Uber improved on every single aspect of the customer experience. And they did it while offering lower prices for the consumer.
However: to me, they haven't proven it's a viable, long term model. I highly doubt that they are paying their drivers enough to cover the cost of wear and tear on the cars (many/most of the drivers I see with Uber and Lyft are doing it full time, so they are crazy if they aren't factoring in the cost of the car and maintenance as part of their cost). And AFAIK neither company has proven they can make money.
So: this industry was due for a shakeup.
But it needs to be done by a company without rampant management problems, and it still needs to prove that there is a viable, long term business model that works for the company, the drivers and the consumers.
[edit: and, yes -- long term, there won't be drivers in these cars. But Uber has to find a way to survive until then, and I don't believe they can burn cash that long]
Since Uber/Lyft has no problem attracting drivers at the rates they pay, this argument rests on drivers being financially ignorant enough that they don't notice they're losing money doing it.
This type of thing sounds like the usual American "let the market sort it out" that other western countries don't have. Taxis are already government controlled (via taxi licensing) so why aren't they required to accept credit cards, as they are in Australia?
Well, to be fair, it's "let the market sort it out while severely restricting the market through regulation" which while I wouldn't say is the usual, isn't as uncommon as it should be. Either one has it's place, but together they generally don't work well...
Paris also probably has laws against longhauling, doesn't mean Parisian cabbies don't do it to naive tourists.
Edit: And yes, some people (including me) do take the position that the market should be left to decide which payment mechanisms to accept (just like most people do in every other context -- who wants a law saying bakers have to accept credit cards?), so long as they're declared before the transaction, and there's (legally) free entry/exit into the profession. It's a strawman to characterize someone as being okay with changing the accepted payment methods after the fact.
I'm not saying peopl are ok with changing it after the fact: I'm saying the government should do what government is supposed to do and serve its citizens, in this case forcing taxi companies to accept credit cards.
Market/self regulation generally trends to work in two ways: the well off get to crow about how government regulation isn't needed, and the less fortunate don't get to use that service because they're never the prime market for business, but they don't have a soap box so the other side keeps barking on about how good it all is.
And no one gets stuck in an unfamiliar area while low on blood sugar?
>I'm not saying peopl are ok with changing it after the fact
Yes, you were! You brought it up specifically in the context of cabbies who refused CC after taking on a fare with signs and machine saying they could pay that way. If your point was just that "being able to pay with CC is nice so it should be mandated", then you shouldn't have pointed to the after-the-fact case as a danger.
>I'm saying the government should do what government is supposed to do and serve its citizens, in this case forcing taxi companies to accept credit cards.
And you're failing to ground it in any way that doesn't generalize to forcing arbitrary merchants to accept arbitrary payments, while focusing the majority of your rhetoric on grandstanding about "hey, I just think governments should help the people" instead of a concrete justification for how this helps the people, or any recognition of any downside of such a mandate (which you were able to see in the case of bakers and CCs).
>Market/self regulation generally trends to work in two ways: the well off get to crow about how government regulation isn't needed, and the less fortunate don't get to use that service because they're never the prime market for business, but they don't have a soap box so the other side keeps barking on about how good it all is.
Again, you're assuming your policy helps the poor and anyone who opposes it just doesn't understand it, instead of actually elaborating on the substantive mechanisms. Tomorrow you'll be right back lecturing us that credit card acceptance hurts the poor because merchants have to distribute the fees over all customers, including the poor unbanked who can't get one, and I'm just too privileged to see that.
How about confining your remarks to the pros and cons of various policies without dragging motives and demagoguery into it?
Though they also have apps now.
There is a lot of potential for such reductions to happen in urban areas. Shameless plug - the potential for pooling using Uber data is shown in Figure 8 (https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.06635)
Unlike AirBnB which does break NY City and NY State laws, Uber has been following regulations that are imposed by the NYC Taxi & Limousine commission (e.g., screening drivers, etc.).
An estimated 160.000 cars driving for Uber in the US, many of which doing so as a full time job will pollute less. Right. Riiiiight.
Unlike AirBnB which breaks NY City and NY State regulations, Uber does follow NYC Taxi & Limousine Commission rules imposed on them and Lyft and other services. But in NYC, the Mayor's unsuccessful efforts withstanding, we aren't trying to restrict market entry and basically asking that Uber drivers undergo the same screening as Yellow Taxi drivers.
Read this part of the article:
"Uber made a particular effort to deploy the tool in cities where it faced opposition from local regulators or rival taxi and transportation companies. One of those cities was Portland."
NYC did not bow to pressure from rival taxi companies and they did follow the law cooperating with NYC Taxi & Limousine Commission (again, unlike AirBnB which directly broke NY City and NY State laws and was sued by the NY State Attorney General). Uber was never in trouble with the law in NYC nor NYS and the only time it has trouble are with entities that try to block competition from the regulated monopoly.
Citation required.
There are situations where ride services would encourage public transit utilization (last mile services), but I'd guess those are far from the dominant use case.
There is absolutely no proof whatsoever, that people sharing a vehicle increases greenhouse gas. Citation is required that it would.
Public transportation better serves: the poor, those without smartphones, people with small children, people in trafficked areas, the handicapped...
Uber/Lyft fails on all of the above in most areas it serves, and potentially decreases overall public transit use (which hurts funding overall).
By your argument, because Uber/Lyft provides better customer service overall compared with Taxi service which is why they are commanding such a large market share, that is a bad thing because people are taking more cars over mass transit as a result.
Uber pool might lower the amount of greenhouse gases compared to everyone using individual Ubers, but that is a drop in the bucket compared to the increase from people using Uber instead of public transit
But it's MORE greenhouse gas generated than if all passengers took the subway.
Why not argue for doubling taxi fares and banning Uber, equivalents altogether and force anyone without a private vehicle (which is the majority of people in Manhattan and perhaps even NYC) to take mass transit? It is a silly argument. Because Uber is provider better customer service at a lower cost, that is a bad thing? Really?
And even more in bad faith is your constant assertion that people who are not fans of Uber are somehow against poor people. Your entire second paragraph is filled with this. Based on that, I could easily say that, because of your comments of Uber love, you’re a huge fan of the kind of office culture that Susan Fowler wrote about. Would it be accurate? Probably as accurate as your assertion that those who are against Uber is against poor people.
According to some estimates I've seen just constructing a car is equivalent to 3-4 years of carbon footprint of driving it[1][2].
You might say "buy used!". I would, but over the entire economy it would add up to the same amount, the net demand for new cars would increase.
1. https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t...
2. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/green-living-blog/20...
The Guardian article is very deceptive:
"... the emissions from the manufacture of a top-of-the-range Land Rover Discovery ... may be as much as four times higher than the tailpipe emissions of a Citroen C1."
Did you see the trick they pulled there?
They took carbon emissions from manufacture of a large vehicle (Land Rover Discovery), and divided it by the tailpipe emissions of a very efficient small vehicle (Citroen C1) in order to concoct a large-sounding, but ultimately meaningless comparison "4 times higher". You may as well compare the manufacturing emissions of the Land Rover to the tailpipe emissions of a cow.
But even assuming your point about manufacturing emissions, while you don't buy a new vehicle yourself because of your use of ride services, the cars used for ride services will be replaced more often, because they are more heavily utilized, and hence will have to be replaced more often.
> cars used for ride services will be replaced
> more often.
According to EPA statistics a typical car gets used for 100-200K miles[1], for taxis that number seems to be easily 2x or 3x larger[2]. So for the same amount of moving people from A to B taxis are mor CO^2 efficient.
Of course there are all sorts of secondary effects you're not taking into account. Once people don't own a car because they have something like Uber available to them, they're more likely to use a bike or public transport for a trip they'd otherwise take by car. Just compare somewhere like NYC to LA in terms of how much CO^2 a typical person emits while going about their day.
I don't know what the exact numbers are, but this is a lot more complex than what you're making it out to be.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_longevity#Statistics
2. https://www.quora.com/How-many-miles-does-a-NYC-taxi-do-in-i...
I've decided to solve this by 1-starring and no-tipping any driver that fails to yield to a pedestrian, drives in a bike lane, or exceeds the 25mph speed limit at any point in the ride (so, like, all of them), but of course, I take a cab once every three months, so that won't do much.
If we really want to reduce greenhouse gases, a better approach might be:
1. Properly funding the MTA (congestion charging)
2. Widening sidewalks, especially in Midtown
3. Grade-separated and camera-enforced BRT lanes and/or surface rail with signal priority.
4. Proliferation of bike lanes.
5. Charging market rate for all street parking.
Uber and Lyft have have increased car traffic in New York: http://nyc.streetsblog.org/2017/02/27/its-settled-uber-is-ma...
At least in Uber/Lyft you can rate a driver, there are many taxi drivers in NYC who drive rashly and don't do those things you listed and yet if you don't tip they will explicitly ask you to.
To me, the following are the most important things to use a ridesharing app:
Not paying any tip (In Yellow cab, many drivers demand for tip if you don't tip them)
Rating the drivers (It's a positive thing depending on how you view it)
Booking when you are drunk (While there are some apps that let you book yellow cabs we all know how bad those apps are)
Uber as a company or Lyft as a company may be disliked for some of the things they do, but ride sharing is a positive outcome. If the above three points are there for yellow cab, I will happily use them anytime. The way a driver drives is not something specific to uber or lyft.
Those positives will be brought about regardless of who it is, so lets make sure it isn't a company who acts as egregiously bad as Uber.
Uber final product is good for society. And other companies can provide the same product (in my city, São Paulo, there are other 3 good companies in the same space).
Uber practices as a company are toxic for its employees and some of the toxicity leak to society.
If such calculation was possible, I believe it would show a net positive impact in society. But a company with good practices and the same product would have an even larger net positive impact.
As a society, I believe we should not settle for bad companies making good products, that's why I believe all the protests are legit.
We have generally forbidden dumping barrels of spent oil in rivers, for example.
Likewise, a non-capitalistic system can forbid or not pollution.
And this is again a failure of government, not capitalism. As an analogue, you cannot say that socialism is a flawed system purely because of what happened in russia-you must not mix up economic and political philosophies.
And on the contrary, I absolutely do hold the failure of the Soviet system against central planning and command economies, even socialist ones. Given that, I find democratically-executed socialism using markets for prices (some consider this market socialism) much preferable.
http://www.sandman.com/images/oldpolewires1sm.jpg
They were government regulated until that didn't work, then broken up. After the subsequent deregulation, the monopoly is in the process of re-creating itself now.
Telecom monopolies are not by government intent by rather by regulatory capture.
As a capitalist, I hella want to exclude others from the market. If I can get the government to do this for me, then I'm willing to pay the lobbyist fees to make that happen. In the IP space the only reason I'm willing to slave away at invention is the possibility of a patent, a right to exclude, a limited monopoly.
As a capitalist, the absolute last thing I want is a free market. Thiel puts it this way: competition is for losers.
On the other hand, software patents.
By allowing it to willfully break laws in dozens of countries, contributing to lowering standards of living and high stress at work, tracking users at all times, having a hostile workplace, then becoming the most important provider of such services in the world?
Yeah, that's totally capitalism doing its work, and not the painfully obvious "throw VC money at it until it works" scheme, right
As a previous comment pointed out, Uber created a consumer surplus of almost $7 billion in 2015 alone.
So you are saying that the investors, i.e. the capital, pressured Kalanick out for reasons of profit rather than due to pressure by the state in the form of multiple lawsuits. You are mistaken.
In particular, there is no evidence that Uber's naughty bro culture is any less profitable than a mature egalitarian culture. Lack of profit wasn't why Kalanick was shown the door.
The Waymo lawsuit is still very much up in the air. Kalanick's involvement is already public: he collaborated with Levandowski to acquire a team of self-driving-car engineers and their work over 8 months. The key demands of the Waymo legal team were rejected in their injunction. Judge Alsop did not see a clear nexus between the Waymo designs and the Uber lidar, referring the matter to trial.
Based on what? Uber isn't public, they aren't forced to release any information on their ride sharing, and what info they do release isn't subjected to any real verification.
The only article I see is based on "number of app downloads" - that has literally no relevance in the number of rides they're servicing. I've got Uber on my phone and I haven't used it in 3 months and I don't see that changing anytime soon. They didn't lose me outright as a user, but they, for all intents and purposes, lost my business.
Capitalism by itself looks at profit. In the United States capitalism is held in check by a legal+political+free speech system. A company (Uber) is not held in check by more capitalism; it is not held in check by competition. As an aside, this breaks down with regulatory capture.
When VW cheated on its emissions testing it was not checked by a more efficient and competitive Tesla. It was held to account by a legal system external of capitalism.
And Travis was not held accountable by a legal system - his investors (i.e. capital) asked him to step down.
I think we're all saying the same thing, it's just your conclusion is incorrect.
Which reason would that be? Which reason is there for a investor to ask a CEO to step other than to protect his/her investment?
Capitalism is about future profits, by definition. I can't invest money in Apple in 1997. I have to invest it today, and my only concern is what happens after that investment. The Uber boarding kicking him out is entirely a capitalist reason. They've invested money, and his presence will (they believe at least) negatively affect the return on that investment going forward.
Your only concern may be what happens after an investment but you'd be foolhardy not to take past performance into account. Undervalued (Apple in 1997, return of Steve) is one thing. Throwing good money after bad is another.
$2.8B is just a ton of money to lose and for a startup it's insane (thinking of Amazon but Uber's losses dwarf Amazon's early losses). Frankly, I think the board is using this as an excuse to do now what they should have done a couple of years back. Boards are human. They aren't homo economicus incarnate. Ascribing rationality to the outcome of a board meeting because capitalism makes no sense. Really, they lost $2.8B last year.
No one is suggesting that. When people say "this is capitalist of the board to do" they're talking about the individual board member profiting from a successful exit. Put more simply - investor puts $1 in Uber on day 0 and expects to make $100 on day 1,000 and makes a $99 profit. They're axing TK because they want to make their $99 return on investment.
Did the courts say that Kalanick is barred from being the CEO of Uber? Or, is it the case that Kalanick's actions have put Uber at risk fines and further litagation?
My (admittedly uninformed) take on the situation is that Uber's investors weighed the costs and benefits and determined that Kalanick needed to go. While the regulatory environment probably influenced the decision, it wasn't the government calling the shots.
It was apparent that Didi had achieved the network effects necessary to overcome Uber in volume. Both companies wanted to focus on revenue so it was savvy of Didi to purchase UberChina so they could reduce ride subsidies.
I think that the success of UberChina, along with Yum! and Wal-Mart, demonstrate that it is possible to prevail in the difficult Chinese market.
What were the differences?
It was used as an example to illustrate that Didi did the little things that remove friction for its customers. Didi also recruited drivers in smaller cities; its coverage was superior to UberChina's.
Yesterday, Uber co-founder Garrett Camp wrote "Uber has become a global service providing roughly 15 million rides per day across 500 cities" at https://medium.com/@gc/ubers-path-forward-b59ec9bd4ef6
The most recent estimate I could find on Didi Chuxing is 20 million rides per day as of October, 2016 as stated at https://www.techinasia.com/china-didi-chuxing-20-million-dai...
It's reasonable to assume that Didi has noticeably grown since October 2016, but none of these numbers are easily verifiable externally to these companies.
(Lyft's market share is unclear to me, but perhaps 2 million rides per day, more or less?)
It seems to me that to be successful in certain countries requires skills that don't translate internationally - for example, understanding the quirks of one big country, or negotiating the political situation.
See: http://freakonomics.com/podcast/uber-economists-dream/ or http://www.nber.org/papers/w22627.
> So we found that in 2015, if you extrapolate to the whole U.S., we found that the overall consumer surplus added up to almost $7 billion. So people spent about $4 billion on Ubers, but they actually would have been willing to spend about $11 billion. So for every dollar people spent on Uber, they got about $1.50 worth of extra joy that they would have been willing to pay on average above and beyond what they did pay. And to put it in a context just how big this consumer surplus is, the total amount of money that went to what Uber calls the driver partners, the people who are driving the cars, was something like $2.5 billion. So the consumers got more than twice the benefit of all the money that went to the drivers. And Uber itself only got to keep about $1 billion.
Of course, none of this makes Uber immune to criticism for the way they operate as a company. And there are sufficiently many alternatives that, even without Uber, society is likely to continue reaping benefits from ride-sharing as a technology.
If Uber raised their prices, the average real value would drop from its current real value of $2/hr, to...
Hell if I know, but it could well be negative.
Note that it doesn't follow that Uber would make more money simply by raising prices -- consumer surplus measures the amount Uber could make by charging each user their "true" value, but if Uber simply raised prices, then they would lose demand.
However, Uber is actually starting to use price discrimination (i.e., charge different users different prices based on their characteristics), which would eliminate consumer surplus [1].
[1] http://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/uber-s-ne...
I think it's a good think to break down monopolies and open up competition.
What's even the point here? You're aware that no one has to protest a company they don't know or use. And that "you can't protest one if you don't protest all of them" is a fallacy.
I really don't think they could've broke into the market by asking politely; it took some fire in the belly. However, the side effects are pretty devastating as well.
So you're basically saying that stuff like treating women like shit was NECESSARY to provide a good "taxi" service?
None the less, let's not pretend yellow cab other taxi livery companies never mistreated any of their employees (male, female, lgbtq, etc.)
Mistreatment is not an uber only specialty.
Users got a better experience from Uber, but it's not clear it was at the expense of the service side of the population being treated worse than they were treated by the incumbents, therefore all other things being equal Uber would still be a net positive.
The alternative isn't the legacy system, which nobody's saying is better. The alternative is an Uber with decency (even if still bold to break into regulated markets). Or an Uber competitor.
No, but its possible they were two facets of the same quality. While the aggressive, see-what-we-can-get-away-with attitude is useful (and probably necessary) in fighting the entrenched local monopolists who have local government protecting their vested interests, it turns out to be a serious liability with respect to workplace norms and stealing of trade secrets.
its also revealing that you would even bother entertaining this idea. why not just say "yea. they shouldn't do that."? im pretty sure there are companies that have "disrupted" industries that were not filled with toxic culture.
In other words you're here to scold me.
> it shows a need to explain a bad thing by saying that a good thing caused it.
It does no such thing. It explains the nuance of someone else's argument which I thought was being misconstrued. That is, a thing can have positive and negative aspects.
> while i wont deal with the substance of the argument (which i personally reject), its my experience that this argument's format shows up an awful lot when there is a bias that someone has to bend reality to preserve.
Huh? That is to say "I will ignore your argument (but dismiss it) and jump ahead and make value judgements about your motivation and biases."
> its also revealing that you would even bother entertaining this idea. why not just say "yea. they shouldn't do that."? im pretty sure there are companies that have "disrupted" industries that were not filled with toxic culture.
What I find revealing (and amusing) is that you admit you are ignoring the plain meaning of my post, but prefer to look for thoughtcrimes in the subtext.
They broke into markets with disregard for the law, often it backfired, often it didn't.
Allegedly(as it is being investigated) they also "stole" IP from Alphabet in an attempt to get ahead in the self-driving gold rush.
They repeatedly ignored several sexual harassment reports in order to protect someone who they referred to as a "high performer", in the name of growth, they could not afford to lose a high performer.
In the startup/VC/unicorn hype world growth is king, it comes before profit, revenue, employee wellbeing, customer satisfaction, business and work ethics.
Uber is not the first guilty of this, it's just the extreme case.
There are many entrenched, incumbent interests that try to make money not through healthy wealth creation but by trying to appropriate wealth through politics (e.g., granted monopolies) which to some degree the taxi industry was.
Uber and its competitors did a great service to many people and ultimately really angered monopolistic incumbents.
Leaving any motorcycle safety conversations aside, I think Uber has been the sacrificial jerk of the rideshare industry. Lyft probably would have attracted some of the same issues if there hadn't been someone more brash and more willing to flout their law breaking ahead of them.
Now Uber's explosive expansion and the resultant "they're gonna do it anyway, may as well accommodate 'em" reaction of the regulators has more or less normalized the good parts of the rideshare industry. Lyft and perhaps other competitors-to-be can benefit without taking nearly as much flak. Hopefully you're right in terms of the ability to provide a much bigger net positive in that situation.
Uber is the pace car and the police pulled him over, Lyft saw this and applied their brakes.
And no, we don't use horses anymore.
*Smokey (as in the bear) being CB slang for highway police due to the hats.
Leaving aside broader questions, I think we can take a guess at what happens after Uber gets pulled over. Someone will take their place. What soneca said above makes reasonable sense.
OTOH, I'm not sure how useful this culture of rebuke and scolding really is. I think it's a bit extreme to wish for regular corporate collapse because of scandal. Reform needs to be an option here. Then again, maybe an occasional sacrificial lamb is good for making the other lambs ride slower. If it doesn't really matter who it is, may as well be the jerk.
The outer boroughs, and every neighborhood in the city, has had car service options for decades, where you call a phone number (or often walk to a local storefront stand) to get a ride.
This is the exact market segment that Uber has entered. Literally. There wasn't and still isn't a restriction on the number of TLC car service cars on the streets.
This idea that there "were no taxis" in the boroughs and now there are is ridiculous. There weren't many yellow cabs before and there still aren't. There used to be thousands of TLC cars before and there still are. Except now people use an app instead of calling Arecibo or Carmel.
Street hailing was and still is prohibited, both for Uber and for phone style car services.
The massive innovation, of course, is the use of a smartphone app for hailing, which made it technically possible to create the market that we see today. Uber, Lyft, and the other companies that built internet enabled hailing solutions certainly do deserve credit for building out that innovation, but that change was just an obvious outgrowth of the technological change to everyone having a handheld always connected small computer. It was inevitable.
The dynamic you're describing for NYC just doesn't really fit the facts. Nor does the idea that a lot more people taking a lot more rides in cars is reducing greenhouse emissions, but that's another matter.
The few times I tried to take those services the service was horrible, horrible.
Now, thankfully, Uber is available and they have much better service and they have a single identifiable reliable brand and they take credit cards.
Uber pool where unrelated riders ride in the same car are going to have less greenhouse gas than riders taking separate cars. This is logical.
I am writing this from Brooklyn, where I have lived for about 20 years.
> Before Uber there was no hailable service.
There still isn't. Street hails are only from medallion cabs, plus the green outer borough cabs which came just a little bit before Uber showed up and are still around.
There wasn't street hailing before and there isn't now. This isn't complicated. You used to use a phone to get car services before and you still do now. The laws and the dynamics of that aspect really didn't change much.
The innovation is that now your phone has a computer in it and GPS so you press a button and use an app instead of talking into the thing to a dispatcher guy in an office. It's a technological change that happened.
> I don't take these services much in the outer boroughs
As mentioned, I live in the outer boroughs, Brooklyn specifically. You should come check it out sometime, there are about three million of us here. We got along pretty well before Uber, we just called Arecibo. They were fine, and still are, I use them to get to the airport now since the drivers are way better.
Pricing is honestly pretty similar now to what it was five years ago, with very short trips being a little cheaper on Uber/Lyft than they were in the old system. Plus all the promos and so on.
It's way better now to just press a button on the phone, and have your payment info stored, and all that. No question about that. But those are technical innovations.
Your argument is that their innovation had to do with changing the dynamics of supply and demand in a restricted market. But that didn't really happen, and to the extent it did it was because smartphones made it possible. Steve Jobs probably has more to do with the declining price of medallions than Travis Kalanick.
> Uber pool reduces greenhouse gases because multiple unrelated parties can ride in the same taxi instead of using two different vehicles. Elementary.
Unless they were previously taking the subway, of course. The world isn't quite so facile.
That said, even Manhattan has had phones for black cars. I've routinely called Dial 7, Carmel, and Skyline on different occasions on demand (primarily when it's raining, when it's really hard to get a yellow cab), and had no issues. I still do so when Uber surge pricing is ridiculous for my tastes.
In the LES where yellow cabs can be scarce, you had Allen Car Service and Delancey Car Service (who I'd call for airport runs).
The reliability of these car services was pretty good. They'd call you if they were delayed or were otherwise late. (Drastically different from San Francisco, where the taxis were pretty much a terrible crapshoot experience)
When Uber started to take off in NYC, some of the feedback I heard was "I get to look like a bigwig", when in reality, anyone can get a black car, and if you think it makes you look more important... it doesn't.
My point is, there's a lot of talk of "Uber was revolutionary" and "before Uber there was nothing!", when the sad truth is these folks never bothered to look?
I mean, anyone who's lived in NYC for some time can tell you the numbers for Carmel or Dial 7 in a heartbeat, and some may even be able to recite the jingles from their ads.
Uber was just yet another dispatch car service, but with an app.
I mean, anyone who's lived in NYC for some time can tell you the numbers for Carmel or Dial 7 in a heartbeat, and some may even be able to recite the jingles from their ads.
I do think you're understating the importance of discoverability.
I lived in Morningside for three years. (This is in Manhattan, by Columbia University, for you non-New Yorkers.) I'd never heard of the car services you mentioned. Even though I could easily access yellow cabs, after a few awful cab rides to / from the airport, I would have been pretty eager to try out something different.
My point is, maybe I was ignorant, lazy, should have asked around, whatever. Clearly you are a savvier New Yorker than I was. But Uber/Lyft makes the process of getting a reliable, enjoyable experience way easier as a newb, or tourist, or lazy person who doesn't bother to find a Real New Yorker, or whatever. That would have provided real value to me.
I am so happy to never have to call Arecibo again. And now that Lyft service is good out here, happy not to use Uber either.
Things I miss about those pre-Uber days:
- The drivers knew exactly where to go just off of an intersection. If you told them you were going to Tompkins and Hancock, they'd get you there often without needing to ask any clarifying questions. Now drivers have no idea where anything is.
- Music in cars from the driver's collection. Hearing random cumbia or ghazals or hip hop. It made you feel like you were in New York. Now drivers are catering to a generic millennial audience and all I hear is bad top 40.
- Overall just how human the interactions with drivers felt. I once had a driver come up into a house party with us, and ended up having a very weird/memorable night. Now everything is sanitized and rarely do I get a driver from Uber or Lyft that is willing to even have much of a real conversation for fear of getting a bad rating.
I don't miss the need to negotiate price or the need to pay in cash. The apps are also cheaper for the most part. I do miss the gritty New York.
And a map confirming your pickup & destination, and a payment system. Yeah, not much different than talking to a dispatcher with your phone /s
Nope. No innovation here... /s
Taxis were notoriously bad. They'd intentionally take slower routes to run up the meter, refuse passengers trying to go to locations the drivers don't want to go (despite this being illegal), etc. Not to mention this is all made more attractive due to our failing decrepit subway system.
The smartphone app innovation you speak of was not inevitable. Taxis indeed had a monopoly, and thus had absolutely zero incentive to developing an app. The competition induced by the ride sharing services destroying them is what incentivized them to finally launch an app, but I don't have it on my phone nor do I know anyone who has, and it's probably inferior to that of its competition.
Their first hailing apps was simply an extension of this, but it used the phone's gps, and you would press a button in the app for "a taxi, now, here", but the underlying systems were at least already there.
After Uber entered the market, they made their apps better, and you can now attach a payment method to pay through the app, and there's gps tracking of the car you're waiting on, same as Uber and similar.
But Stockholm never had a medallion system or other caps, and there's no monopoly, but there is some sort of oligopoly where some companies get better access to major taxi destinations such as airports and train stations. As usual, healthy competition is the key. :)
We're talking about something called livery cars which have existed forever and were also very widely used before Uber as well. You used to arrange for pickup using your phone. You still arrange for pickup using your phone.
The car, the driver, and the laws surrounding both are essentially the same as they were before. What's actually changed is your phone.
This distinction is quite different in cities that aren't New York, where there were taxis and nothing else, and Uber has in fact created a new category of private car transportation service. But here in NYC the non-taxi car service market segment existed already and was vibrant, the parent comment claiming they broke some kind of monopoly is just incorrect.
> the parent comment claiming they broke some kind of monopoly is just incorrect.
Are you saying taxis are not a monopoly? Or are you saying ride sharing apps did not break the taxi monopoly? If taxis were a monopoly, and if we are not using taxis now because of ride sharing apps, then it would seem ride sharing apps broke a monopoly.
Add to that the incentives induced by the rating system and fares determined before you hail the ride, and you also get a far superior riding experience.
So no, the innovation here wasn't just that the hailing is done via an app. This alone would not have spurred the dramatic improvements we've seen.
Decrepit I'll give you, and even a low grade, but failing?
From Wikipedia:
2016 subway ridership: 1.76 billion = 147 million per month
2016 global Uber ridership in October: 40 million
Not the same league.
The subways could improve, but I prefer them (and walking) by far to taxis and cars. I guess I just don't have experience since I take maybe one or two taxi rides a year and have never used car services. You seem to take them much more.
I actively avoid the subways as much as possible, especially in the summer when the stations are uncomfortably hot/humid. I mostly walk, ride Citibike, or take Uber/Lyft. Luckily I'm able to do this because I live reasonably close to my office in Manhattan.
Uber Pool has been a godsend because it's so cheap. I can often Uber to/from the office for about $.50 more than the price of a subway side. Granted traffic in the city is horrible so it's not all sunshine and rainbows - my Uber Pool today from midtown east to west of Penn Station took absurdly long due to standstill traffic, but at $2.03 I'm not complaining, and I'll take any excuse to avoid the subways.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/12/nyregion/subway-complaint...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/05/nyregion/subway-delays.ht...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/31/nyregion/why-is-subway-se...
https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-cuomo-challenges-m...
When Uber started in SF, the experience of getting a taxi was very frustrating. There weren't enough cabs, the cab drivers were over the top rude, they refused to take credit cards and were aggressive about tips, if you called a cab they would never show up, and they were (and still are) expensive. It was not necessarily about the app, it was just that it was reliable -- you could get a car when and where you needed it and not having to pay in the car made the experience far superior.
At the very same time, there were all these black cars rolling around the city and picking up passengers somewhat illegally. That experience was not great because you often had to negotiate a high rate, but this was mostly because there were no taxis available. In other words, there was a bunch of supply that could be utilized.
I think those conditions made Uber particularly ripe to work in SF and once it did, that proved that it could work elsewhere as well.
The app was also a huge benefit, but in context, I actually think it could have been just as useful in the beginning if you could have texted your address.
It goes to show that for something to be great, you have to get a lot of things right at once. :-)
In practice, it has replaced lots of Yellow cab journeys too.
Straightforward evidence: the large drop in the value of a medallion in NYC.
But just talk to New Yorkers. Lots of people use Uber instead of Yellow Cabs.
Uber's great in that they give competition to an entrenched monopoly of Yellow Cab.
But put Uber in a monopoly position anywhere and you'll see the rates skyrocket.
There needs to be a number of forces in the ride sharing market to keep prices down.
The vast majority of people have been criticizing Uber for breaking laws related to fraud, stalking and harassment, and a generally toxic workplace culture.
The product that Uber offers is good (and no one other than taxi medallion owners is really arguing that). But they've gone about delivering it in an unnecessarily bad way.
Even if we grant that Uber is a huge overall social good, it is clearly not sustainable at its current pace. Uber's burn rate is the highest in history, and the C-suite is barren. The board clearly felt that TK couldn't get Uber out of this mess. And the board, at the end of the day, only cares about long-term share price.
But focusing only on the benefits and avoiding discussion of the costs or new problems that something creates is sales talk; internalizing sales talk leads to cognitive bias.
"while not forcing drivers to pay excessing leasing fees for vehicles."
In the same way someone who owed money to the company store didn't have to start doing that, but due to predatory terms, once they did, things get pretty out of hand. And since Uber/Lyft are the ones who dictate those terms, they are to blame.
For one thing, because cabs were so bad, Uber was able to do a lot of stupid and scummy things yet still be way better than cabs.
Also, it had an interesting effect PR-wise. For a long time, whenever I heard something negative about Uber, I just assumed it was taxi industry shills making up ridiculous lies. Because there definitely were taxi industry shills going around (online, newspapers, etc.) and making up ridiculous lies about Uber. Later I understood that some of the negative stuff I was hearing about Uber was a huge lie and some of it was totally true.
Reducing greenhouse? Relative to what?
This is all one needs to read http://nyc.streetsblog.org/2017/02/27/its-settled-uber-is-ma...
Also, the overall increase was 3 to 4% according to the report. In NYC we keep hearing how subway ridership has been increasing every year. At any rate, a decrease of 10 million trips per year out of 1.7 billion is hardly significant.
Also, this simply states that perhaps we should be regulating private vehicular traffic in these areas, not restrict traffic that helps the public (and provides employment for low-skilled people).
The uber/lyft traffic increase issue is throughout the world.. not just in a specific part of NYC.
https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-on...
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/20/business/media/uber-emil-...
Let's look at the flip side here. They "disrupted" an industry by repeatedly violating the law and undercutting the competition by subsidizing nearly 2/3 of the cost of fares using investment funds. Is that innovative? I'd argue that nearly anyone could disrupt any industry with such a model, regardless of the actual merits of anything else they'd built.
Add on to that their horrible corporate culture, their seeming support of industrial espionage, and the underhand tactics they use to take advantage of their drivers.
It was smart of them to take on a corrupt, broken, and outdated system, because it allowed people, like you, to whitewash so many of their flaws and transgressions.
Last weekend, I was in Budapest. There is no Uber in Hungary (anymore), but the main taxi company (Fötaxi) has its own app which works brilliantly.
I honestly see no "moat" around Uber in markets where (large) taxi dispatchers have the insight to build a ride-hailing app.
It's only a matter of time before we are back to square 1, or rather, square 2.0:
* licensed, regulated taxis, either independent or through dispatcher * all connected to an (api-)interconnected ecosystem of ride hailing apps * payment to driver directly (cash or card), tipping discretionary * receipts emailed to rider afterwards, with annotated map and start- and end time
This will weed out dishonest drivers, and will benefit honest drivers.
Uber's only differentiator in well-organised urban markets is its app.
The turning point for Uber's decline will be when NY and London mirror Uber's functionality in their own apps, with the benefit (in London) of cabs being allowed to use the cab lanes (or, in Amsterdam, the bus lanes).
This sort of reminds me of Usain Bolt in Beijing, actually. He lived on McDonald's chicken nuggets, not because he's averse to trying new things but because he couldn't risk anything upsetting his stomach during competition. For him, eating was instrumental, so he wanted predictability.
Even if you immersive travel, there are times when it's really useful to know what you'll get.
EDIT: Alternatively, convince the taxi companies to open up their API. Then you can have one app that selects the correct API based on your current location.
What year is this? $YEAR_OF_BILLBOARD_INVENTION + 2?
> Alternatively, convince the taxi companies to open up their API.
I still feel like one company will take over. You cannot build a good product by federating APIs across different municipalities, governments, continents, (planets?).
The small journeys around town aren't as likely to be as valuable, it's usually the longer airport fares which will make up the majority of taxi spending for people away.
Lower cost is also a factor, relative to local taxis.
I would be fine with taxis if I didn't have to interact with the driver at all when it came to payment and could provide feedback right in the app.
Sounds like a free ride, to me. In my city cabs have to accept credit cards by law. This means if the machine is broken, the cab is unfit for service. If a driver refuses to take a credit card, you don't have to pay them. If they're rude about it, you can call 911, there's a whole division of the PD dedicated to dealing with cabs. The threat of having an officer show up and a possible fine or suspension is probably enough to "fix" their machine.
A rating system is actually superior to getting the government involved.
A ride experience where I don't have someone threaten me while I call 911 is worth some money to me.
Second, none of these apps I have seen thus far even attempts to make it easier for the user to add payment methods. Each time I need to put in my credit card information? Twice if I am on business? Nobody has taken advantage of Apple or Android pay integration.
I don't consider myself a heavy cab user, but I probably take at least ~200 rides a year, and unless the city is regulated (credit cards) I am using Lyft.
Don't worry, once there are enough apps someone will figure out how to scrape and aggregate the info. The same thing happened when airlines and hotels started putting booking info online except at the time it was websites instead of apps.
Ride hailing is extremely fluid. Must be real-time. Must be able to provide GPS coordinates of the user to the service in question.
I don't think you'll see an aggregation app until there is some ride hailing standard that is adopted by the various providers.
But what does that API look like? What are the MVP operations required to make a successful ride hailing API? Will that API provide realtime location info of the driver, or allow payment, or <insert myriad of questions here>.
Without a standard, the Taxi API landscape will be a mess.
> Apps like "Transit App" will just integrate them all
This is a pretty major oversimplifications of this issue. Sure, this is technically possible, but it sounds like a horrible solution.
Bringing in the considerations about the actual API design, this also means that user experience may vary wildly depending on which service they're interacting with.
Can != should. If aggregating many systems is the future, we should push for a technical solution that doesn't suck.
Not having some API standard is usually how it's done with many services nowadays, and the market/comparison apps have to integrate multiple APIs. Big deal.
Again, I should reiterate: I'm not arguing that it can't be done or that it's not possible. I'm arguing that the result will be subpar. Let's remember that the parent discussion is about the creation of a system that rivals the Uber/Lyft experience. If you want to do that, someone (probably someone big like Google as suggested in another comment) is going to have to influence the design of these APIs so the end user experience is a consistent/good one.
There very well may be one ride hailing app to rule them all, but implementing it will be an entirely different beast.
Most people only go to another city once or twice a year, so it's not a significant issue for them.
Personally, I use other apps when in NYC, but fall back to Uber when I'm somewhere else and can't find a local app.
Is that so? I'm not aware of anybody that never goes to another city multiple times per year and that includes infants and the elderly.
There, now we've both shared our experiences!
I've got acquaintances from all over the planet though, and even there most people travel with some regularity to other cities. Holidays, family visits and so on, and then of course there is business travel which I would assume is one of the larger customer groups for Uber/taxis.
However, as an example, when Uber and Lyft left Austin, one of the companies created locally (RideAustin) to replace the gap does allow payments via Apple Pay. Very convenient, and they also give you the option of rounding up to donate to a charity of your choice.
I guess it's just up to all the other options to realize what people want.
Apple Pay is great if you're immersed enough in that ecosystem, but otherwise? Uber and Lyft store CC info, allow for easy deletion, and take PayPal. I'm glad Ride Austin exists, but they still seem to be several laps behind on letting you give them money.
London black cabs have been available by app for a while (Hailo). The main reason people use Uber is that it's about 30% cheaper.
Common users aren't also aware that Uber is cheaper mostly because of their own subsidies. If this is gone soon feels like it'll only hasten Uber's demise.
The thing I find interesting is that MyTaxi is loosely coupled with the drivers. There is no obligation to pick up MyTaxi fares, you can go about your business as a cabbie and take MyTaxi fares when business is slow. Seems to work quite well for the drivers.
This morning I had to wait probably 15 minutes before a driver took my MyTaxi order, but considering how bad the phone-dispatch service is in Berlin I call that a win.
Everything else is very Uber-like: electronic receipt, pay in app if you like, tracking of the car on its way to you (more or less).
Oh, and two very neat features: you see your cabbie's full name (this feels safer to me) and you can save them, after rating, to a "favorite drivers" list, which I assume the service will use to help improve customer satisfaction.
As much as I don't like uber, surge pricing can be a really helpful feature that I would like to have with cabs as well.
I suppose it might be useful during shift change?
> cabs being allowed to use the cab lanes
> (or, in Amsterdam, the bus lanes).
From talking to a few drivers (just asking them about Uber) my understanding is that at some point in Amsterdam Uber was just hiring pretty much anyone with a car as a driver, but then The Netherlands cracked down on it, and now they're all as legit taxi drivers as any other taxi.
So I believe you're posting on the basis of out-of-date information when it comes to Amsterdam.
Uber's decline in Amsterdam will be not only when the local market provides apps of equal caliber, but when they match Uber in prices, it's way cheaper than taking a taxi over here.
Most of Kalanick's trouble started with Susan Fowler speaking out. Please believe women when they report harassment in the workplace. Many of their reports may not be as clear cut as Mrs. Fowler's.
That being said, kudos to anyone courageous enough to speak the truth even at the risk of vilification.
That's sounds like giving accusers too much power, especially if it leads to firing. It's not as if people don't lie.
He says on the same line.
Do not believe every word anyone says as the absolute truth of an event. Evidence, corroboration, attempts to be objective -- these are all the rights of the accused.
Believe the complainant but do not assume they are correct. Our memories are the movies based on real events.
Take measures based as though the complaints are made in good faith.
If you assume them true then you would act as if the investigation has already taken place, and determined that they are true. If you're going to act like that why would you need an investigation?
If complaints or concerns are raised in good faith then you have no need to mistrust the representation and instead can look to the facts and context of the situation.
Believing someone is not important, understanding the sequence of events that led to them speaking up is.
Responding as if someone is acting in good faith means that
- you believe that
- they believe that
- they are true
On the other hand, if you believe someone it means that
- you believe that
- they are true
Using "believe" to mean the first situation only makes everyone's meaning less clear.
That should give you pause when you claim (incorrectly) that a such a narrow usage of language is correct.
All three points lead to different actions and the one in the middle seems to be the most appropriate.
Which is to say, do more than just investigate. Take action as though the complaints are true, although not necessarily all the action you would take if you knew the complaint to be exactly factual.
You should always investigate, even if (to borrow your formatting)
you believe that they believe that their statements are false
and are making a bad faith accusation. It would still be correct to investigate if that was your belief. If you believed that the accusations were entirely factual, then perhaps the immediate step would be to fire someone. But if instead you simply believe that the person is accusing someone of something in good faith, something has already gone wrong and there is a problem. Even if no one did anything wrong.
To put it in terms that might be more familiar, every complaint is an incident and should involve a (blameless) postmortem that asks how the system failed such that someone felt the need to complain. And action should be taken in response. Sometimes, the system failed in such a way that it allowed a malicious actor to do a bad thing, and that malicious actor should be reprimanded, independent of the postmortem.
Believe the accuser when writing the postmortem, and begin incident response as soon as possible. Investigate fully before reprimanding a potential malicious actor.
What's that supposed to mean?
You don't have to assume truth, just believe they mean their account, you assume good faith. Believe them and allow that belief to start the process of uncovering what the truth is.
There's a reason Listen & Believe is a thing and it's not because anyone is saying "you should have unquestioned faith in what someone says".
"Believe" has always implied to me "understands to be true". How can I believe anything based only on the words of a single person? (Except trivial things like believing that they said something to you)
I have primarily heard the phrase "listen and believe" used by people who think it is impossible for certain kinds of people to understand the experiences of other kinds of people.
Following that argument, the claim is that if you assert an experience I am not capable of understanding then I must accept it, for I have no grounds to refute it.
This has always seemed like unquestioned faith to me, for I think any argument should be able to stand on it's own merit. Maybe I am missing some nuance to the argument, or perhaps there is more going on, but in any case 'believe' seems to be the wrong word.
I'm using the usage that social and case workers use when they talk about believing victims.
So... frankly, I don't really care what HN thinks of the usage.
Note, again, that nothing you said is counter to the "good faith" usage. You're assuming they are speaking the truth as they see it. That's all.
That's how any investigation that involves eye witness testimony works.
It's also the recommended practice for improving reporting and investigation so, again, don't really care what HN thinks about the term: the experts in the field recommended it.
Here's a relevant scenario: I'm a man, I hold a managerial position and I have to choose between hiring another man or a woman as a one of my direct-reports. Let's say both contenders have the same qualifications, they're both equally fit for the job, but then, I, as a manager, start thinking that if I hire the woman she will then possibly think of filing a sexual harassment complaint down the line in order to take my job. Remember the "believe" part, which means that the sexual complaint doesn't even need to be backed by anything real, because most of the times after the complaint has been made public the damage is already done for me, as a male manager, no matter what the investigation finds (if it manages to find anything). So I choose the man over the woman as my direct-report.
The more general point would be, be aware of the second order effects of changes you promote. For example, revocation of innocent-until-proven-guilty would almost certainly reduce the chances of people who have blown the whistle of being hired again, as they would present a much higher risk to prospective companies, regardless of whether their claims were true. The fact that they would blow the whistle at all would serve as a huge red flag.
Of course, I don't actually know the incidence of sexual harassment at workplaces, and have no idea whether false reports are even an issue. I strongly doubt they are, but I can somewhat understand male managers fear of them, given that they can ruin careers and marriages. As much as sexual harassment is a problem, I don't think assumption of guilt is an appropriate or long-term effective solution.
b. Because the costs of a false negative is forcing someone to continue working for/with someone they clearly feel uncomfortable around.
(compare to crimes, where it's much easier to protect the victim even without any sanctions against the accused)
Anyone accused of sexual harassment should have a chance to give their side of the story and an investigation should be performed, but the company should act based on what HR believes happened, not just what HR can prove happened. Neither the accuser nor the accused has the presumption of being right or the burden of proof.
Also note that it is in general impossible to prove that something did not happen, as opposed to proving it did, as things that did not happen have no evidence of their occurrence by definition...
This is incorrect. "Innocent until proven guilty" and "preponderance of evidence" are not two levels on one scale. They are distinct legal principles which can be applied at the same time or separately. Both, however, relate to the burden of proof and differ between criminal and civil trials, which is probably the source of the confusion.
Crudely: one standard is about what happens without sufficient evidence, the other is about how much evidence is sufficient.
---
The burden of proof is a general concept of which party in a trial must prove their claims, and to what standard. "Presumption of innocence" is one possible answer to "which party", while "preponderance of evidence" is a possible answer to "what standard".
The party bearing the burden of proof for an issue is the party which must provide evidence. Simply: if everyone at the trial rests without offering any evidence, whoever bears the burden of proof loses. In criminal trials, this is the presumption of innocence you mention. In civil trials, the matter is more complicated, but in effect the plaintiff bears the (initial) burden. In asset forfeiture cases, infamously, the government bears the burden in the initial trial (against the asset), but the owner bears the burden of proof as a third-party claimant if they want their property back.
(It's emphatically not true that neither side has the burden of proof in civil trials. There is always a burden of proof when a claim is being made, to determine what happens if no evidence is provided. However, civil cases frequently involve affirmative defenses, in which each party bears the burden of proof for the claims made by that party. Both, not neither.)
The standard of proof, meanwhile, is the hurdle which must be cleared by whoever bears the burden of proof. It's how convincing their claim must be to be accepted. In civil cases, yes, this is a "preponderance of evidence", interpreted as the claim being more likely than not. In criminal cases, this is "beyond a reasonable doubt" - that's on the same scale as preponderance. Other standards exist outside of trial settings: in various contexts US law employs standards like "some evidence" and "reasonable suspicion".
---
I'm not (just) being pedantic here. If we're talking about borrowing a legal standard for deciding against someone in a dispute, I think it's very important that we're clear on what we mean.
It's possible to vary both the size and placement of the burden. We could believe the accuser (burden on the accused), but hold the accused to a mere "some credible evidence" standard for their defense. We could believe the accused and demand evidence "beyond a reasonable doubt", or lower that to "preponderance of evidence", or even further. Or we could even use some standard not borrowed from the courts.
But right now, almost no one clarifies what they mean. The results of moving the burden will be very different from the results of lessening the burden, and it's important to understand what we're proposing.
Innocent until proven guilty is the standard for depriving someone of their freedom, not their job. If the harassment rises to the level of sexual assault, it's the standard the prosecutor will use. Otherwise, it's irrelevant in the context of sexual harassment.
A well-run company will have proper procedures, processes in place to deal with work place issues.
Management and all staff will also be required to take training on a continuous basis.
Professionally managed organizations don't walk around "believing" this or that or spouting off "innocent until proven guilty" and such
:)
This is miserable. Unless the definition of sexual harassment changes every 6 months, you should not be forcing employees to retake these training sessions.
Fry: "I heard one time you single-handedly defeated a horde of rampaging somethings in the something something system"
Brannigan: "Killbots? A trifle. It was simply a matter of outsmarting them."
Fry: "Wow, I never would've thought of that."
Brannigan: "You see, killbots have a preset kill limit. Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own men at them until they reached their limit and shut down. Kif, show them the medal I won."
I'm pushed to think that the "media" didn't report on it too much because the problems were economic. But as an average media company, that story doesn't sell, it doesn't interest the average reader, so they don't report it that much. Then the sexual harrasment scandal surfaced and _that_ is when the media jumped on board, because everybody loves getting political and hearing about scandals and feminism and all those kind of controversial topics.
If anything, the scandal damaged Uber's public image, but that is a superficial problem in proportion to their disasterous funding model and general financials.
This meme is often repeated in context of sexual harrassment (workplace or otherwise). How do you square that with the fact that women are as capable of laying and misleading as men are? How do you square that with "innocent until proven guilty" when accusation are leveled against another individual or company.
Sure everyone is capable of lying but P(harassment occurred | report of harassment) is much greater than P(harassment did not occur | report of harassment).
Care to put some real numbers on that?
Let's say a person in your company tells you their boss is sexually harrassing them. You're on reasonably good terms with both the accuser and the accused.
Some responses you might make in this case:
- Deflect. Pretend you didn't hear it. Or, if pressed: "This isn't something I know anything about. You'd better take that up with them. Or maybe you could talk to HR?"
- Express skepticism: "Well, I don't know if you're lying or not. Sounds like a he-said she-said situation. Sorry."
- Express emotional support: "That sounds terrible! I'm sorry you're going through this, and I appreciate that it must be very hard for you to talk about this. How can I help?"
- Provide logistical support: "Let's get to the bottom of this."
- Express complete solidarity: "That bastard! We're going to nail them right to the wall for this. Right. To. The. Wall."
- Express complete solidarity for the accused: "How could you say this about them? They're a good person! They would never intentionally harass you. It must be a misunderstanding!"
Now: which responses might fall under the sentiment of "please believe women"? Which wouldn't? Which responses violate your ethical norms?
Seems to me, if you're purely caught up in the legalism of the situation, I'm guessing your response is going to be "skepticism," whether you want it to be or not.
All companies will have a process for handling harrassment claims and process for resolving them. Accusations should be directed to HR (or suitable designated party at the company). If the harrassment continues you may have to involve the legal system - that's what it's there for.
They go to HR and a week later they're let go – no real explanation given. (Hey, it's at will employment here in CA.) Or, as happens at Uber, nothing happens, and your coworker continues to complain about harrassing behavior (if they're even talking to you at this point). What do you do now?
My point is: the real world is messy, and doesn't come with cut-and-dried definitions and solutions. Processes can help some, but true neutrality comes at a cost. Corrupt and sexist agencies in your company can continue to operate with aplomb. Your relationship will be damaged with coworkers who have had this happen to them – to say nothing of how it damages them when they have this happen and all of their coworkers look nervously away. It can poison your relationship to the company and all the good people that work there.
I read "please believe women" as an invitation to get involved in a constructive way, and I fervently disagree with you that you as a coworker can only make things worse. You can offer emotional support, so your coworker knows you're there for them. If you have pertinent information, you can offer it. You can hold your company's feet to the fire to make sure they're handling it appropriately. And of course – since I didn't specify the gender in the scenario – you can do the same whether the people involved are male, female, or anything in between.
That is the sort of belief we're talking about, a serious investigation with the assumption the person reporting it is not lying. The investigation itself could of course result in not sufficient evidence being found. It's really not that complicated.
That has the nice property that it's illegal, the whistleblower can get compensated, but only if they already have the means to wage a legal battle.
Alternatively, look at the public scrutiny of police shootings. However you personally feel about them, there is a section of the population that sees them as a miscarriage of justice that is playing out in the public square. People look at the extremely low (non-existent?) conviction rate of officers and see either a police force operating without consequences or a remarkably well-mantained and well-monitored police force.
Obviously there should be an investigation, but history tells us that it is very easy to fool ourselves into believing we've done a "fair" investigation which will not look fair to outsiders or victims. No malice is necessary, but it is frequently endemic anyway.
Investigations don't help much in these cases. The pressure isn't to find (often non-existent) evidence, it is to commit to the shitty process of trying to get people to care about you a painful part of your life.
no evidence? no problem. guilty until proven innocent based on the gender of the accuser.
One of the problems with this unilateral statement is that if this becomes the new norm, then women can just level accusations and be believed. Men get fired or have other consequences.
It is never a good idea to have a policy of sweepingly and uncritically believing some category of people over another. That is actually the problem we currently have, only it is generally white men who get believed, no matter what they say, while women and poc get ignored, dismissed, etc. Consider how poorly that is currently serving women and poc and maybe stop to wonder if you would want to be on the receiving end of that.
Your remarks make it clear that you have enormous privilege and you imagine you cannot lose that advantage. Consider the possibility of losing it. Just as a thought experiment. Your smugness is deeply rooted in your assumption that you will always be privileged. And I don't even know where to begin here in telling you how sick and twisted that is.
In a weird way, it deeply reinforces the current sick system. And if you did get your way, you could well lose the thing you currently cannot imagine losing.
I am not for having a Lord of the Flies social order and simply shuffling around who the default victims are. I would like to treat everyone better, not simply make the current victims the next generation of abusive tyrants.
They pressure him into taking a sabbatical, then two days in they pull this cowardly act of firing him remotely. Not only was it a cowardly act, but it was the wrong thing to do for the business. It will lead to an epic destruction of value.
Worst business move since Apple's board (with John Sculley's behind the scenes string pulling) fired Steve Jobs. How well did that work out for Apple's shareholders at the time?
Travis Kalanick needed to change but do you really think that running Uber by committee is going to work? Guess it's time to try Lyft.
It's business. Travis ought to understand that.
> Hope everyone's paying attention to the identity of these investors behind this horrid behavior. Travis is not without his flaws but he created an awful lot of value for them.
He's been very well compensated for the value he's created. You don't keep a job because of what you've done in the past, you keep a job based on what you can do in the future.
If Travis had been smart enough to create two classes of stock like Mark Zuckerberg and the Google founders he'd be calling the shots, instead he's out of a job.
And how many promising companies failed with their founders at the helm?
Better than abiding by an epic destruction of values.
My guess is that there are also much deeper issues here. And things like the Waymo deal indicate that there may be a whole slew of other slimy behavior that will end up hurting Uber more in the end. My guess is that we don't know the depths of poor decisions at Uber.
Secondly, it doesn't matter. Many people cared about the morality, and it was enough to make a difference.
Exactly. I would be wary of these specific folks. I bet you they would do the same to any founder in a heartbeat.
Travis has had to make a lot of hard decisions to get Uber where it is. These decisions have at times cost him goodwill of the public but I think they are (were) worth it for the long term.
> Travis has had to make a lot of hard decisions to get Uber where it is. These decisions have at times cost him goodwill of the public but I think they are (were) worth it for the long term.
For sure. But it will take a few years to know if that's actually a good place; at present, it doesn't look that way (but it's too early to tell for sure either way).
But who cares about that? He created and maintained a culture that systematically abused people and covered it up.
Fuck the investor value. People were harmed. This was the only ethical move they could make regarding Kalanick.
Travis helped build an incredible company, but his disregard for the law, for his employees' well-being, for basic decency threaten to tear all of that down. Just in the past six months:
* Susan Fowler's blog post exposed a terribly broken HR system and a culture of sexual harassment that reached the very top. This has huge legal implications in addition to the obvious moral and ethical ones.
* Waymo's lawsuit could shut down Uber's self-driving car program, into which they have put hundreds of millions of dollars. There may be evidence that Travis colluded with Levandowski to steal Google's self-driving techonology.
* Uber is under investigation at several levels of government for their Greyball program to hide from law enforcement.
* On top of all this, Travis was videotaped cursing at a driver who complained about pay rates.
At this point, Travis had to go. It's going to be hard for Uber to recover from all this, but this is the first step. I hope that this becomes a lesson in SV that there are consequences to this kind of behavior, and that at some point the adults will step in.
- Waymo: the judge has not ruled yet, and there is no evidence revealed to the public which implicates Uber. There is lots of evidence implicating Levadowski.
- Greyball: I can see investors forgiving this as a necessary play to fuel growth.
- Cursing the driver: a private conversation, neither here nor there.
That said, there may be issues that are not public, and the sexual harassment problem alone may be enough. Senior leadership was rapidly leaving. We don't know what the full Holder report said.
But uber is still lagging behind Waymo/Lyft in the self driving technology. They were desperate to catch up, hence the acquisition of lewandowski's new company in the first place. Now that path is no longer viable regardless of the verdict.
Whoever becomes the new CEO will have to be laser focused to make their auto pilot program work somehow. Without that, Uber has no path to profitability.
They really should have done what lyft did, building partnership with companies like Google/Waymo and GM instead of trying to build their own auto pilot program from scratch.
Sadly, Uber's board sounds more likely to be the kind of disaster that controlled Yahoo, HP and so many other faded stars from the valley.
Looks like Apple's decision not to invest was well played.
^^ this is why I never stopped using Uber.
Yes his assertiveness and drive got them where they are, but sometimes companies do need to grow up.
Jobs was a consistent asshole expecting perfection. That is way different than emboldening a climate of harassment, degradation, etc. that took place under his watch. Having recent external c-level hires quit due to the revelations of "culture" speak much.
I hope Uber can continue. As someone who travels internationally on business, it's quite useful. Seeing him go, it's just one more example. Pincus felt screwed through how Tribe.net went through, set himself up in a sheltered position at Zynga and through a combination of "management style" and problems at the company had to step down.
The cultural issues made public between Zynga and Uber are way different, but in both cases you had CEOs that structured the holdings such that they could retain power despite turmoil.
Sometimes the turmoil is too great.
My last international trip, I used Lyft.
> Travis himself has exhibited poor public behavior that was recorded by an Uber driver
Do you have any evidence of this, or is this hearsay?
If you're referring to the video I suspect you might be - have you actually watched it?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejZL5Flwmjc
All I see if a bitter, vindictive man try to ambush the CEO of Uber on a night out - who then actually sits down and tries to explain his reasoning to him for several minutes, before giving up, and being "stuff this" and getting out.
> he created an awful lot of value for them
I hope everyone pays attention to the identity of the people that invests in his next company.
Kalanick is a bro on an ego trip who stumbled upon a business. But harassing women, and all his other flaws, are not what created uber.
Steve Jobs' flaws actually served Apple. The worst he's been accused of is driving people hard to achieve the perfection he sought.
And colluding with other tech companies to fix his employees' wages.
If we are angry about Kalanick sexually harassing people (as we should be), Steve Jobs mentally/emotionally harassing people is as bad. There is no difference, don't make it seem like it is okay or that it was "good for Apple".
I'm not primarily interest in defending Steve Jobs, although I think his reputation may be a bit overblown, and largely based on a few anecdotes from rather early in his career.
But the repeated reference to him shows how people are equating the two, which is just terribly wrong, at least in as far as it concerns the sexism at Uber.
Because from the stories I know about Jobs, a credible case can indeed be made that he was slavedriver in search of perfection, and that his nastiness contributed to his success.
For Kalanick that may also be true in regards to Uber's repeated trouble with local law regarding employment and licensing. But the sexual harassment charges simply have nothing to do with it,
Nobody else is going to buy it, and this is death for Uber.
But the reason anybody's fool enough to trigger the apocalypse is because THEY will be in charge and assume that's the answer. If they were on the outside looking in, they would have a very different opinion.
Valuation != value
Maybe some things matter more, like, not fostering an environment where sexual harassment is tolerated.
The article skips over the board entirely, but Travis must have been blindsided by his co-founder Garret Camp and early CEO Ryan Graves for this to have transpired. The board likely threatened to fire him unless he resigned, because there's no way Travis walks away because of this investor letter. It's more than likely the letter just provided the air cover his old friends needed to send him packing.
edit: For those replying that Travis has control of the board, please cite your sources. Being the majority shareholder using dual-class stock is a much different thing. Shareholders elect board members, but you can't remove investors' board seats, that language is boilerplate in financing documents.
Uber does not need the backing of the investors from the letter to remain solvent. With the exception of Fidelity, these aren't big players. Hundreds would take their place immediately given the chance.
So while Travis holds the majority of the voting power, he doesn't hold a ton of real-world cachet because of circumstance around the company. Uber is in a relatively fragile period in it's journey and no one at the top can afford to disagree right now so he has to mostly do what the big chunk of investors collectively tell him to do. The hope is that they can stay calm, run on autopilot without Travis for a bit and guide this cruise missile right through an IPO if everything goes according to plan. Since the investors effectively control the supply of additional capital, they are in a unique position of power here relative to Travis.
I think Uber's downfall is a bit exaggerated in the rest of these comments here. They'll go through some troubling times, but they just need to stay calm, and guide the ship. A lot of the pieces are already in place thanks to Travis, but Uber doesn't necessarily need him to oversee the next milestone the same way they needed him the past couple of years of insane growth.
That sounded right, but I was curious where that gets quantified. You can find the information in Uber's Articles of Incorporation. Not sure if this is the most recent copy, but here's a version from 2013...
http://orfe.princeton.edu/~alaink/SmartDrivingCars/PDFs/Uber...
The stuff about voting rights and board members starts on page 16.
Shareholder meetings operate on one-(voting)-share-one-vote, so a majority shareholder ultimately controls the composition of the board. But if one of "his" directors, who his shares elected, breaks ranks and votes to fire him, simply owning the shares doesn't allow him to immediately override that vote. Kalanick could have voted out the board members opposed to him at the next shareholder meeting, and voted in sympathetic ones, who then might rehire him as CEO. But that's a different question than whether he could win any board vote simply by virtue of owning a majority of voting shares. Shares don't directly have board votes, they just elect directors who have board votes, who usually vote with the interests of the shares that elected them, but might not always. Besides exercising their personal judgment, directors also have independent legal responsibilities that may in some cases make it prudent for them to vote to fire even the person who put them on the board.
Of course they do.
_delirium already said it, but it bears repeating since so many are confused.
The future of automobiles and transportation is still being swirled about, and it feels like Uber's downfall has blown the game WIDE open, ready for anyone (maybe Uber, maybe Lyft, maybe Tesla, Google, Apple, an automaker) to just step in and take all the riches.
Also, it wasn't even close to profitable.
But it's almost certainly not possible to do it with the same CEO. A leave of absence is not sufficient.
If you ever worked with her, you will clearly see shes a female type of Kalanick; the only difference he seems to love party, sex and alcohol and couldn't care about sexual harassment at his company; meanwhile Huffington is known for backstabbing employees (co owners too) and always gossiping behind others back just for fun and treat people like crap in general. In both examples, a normal company would not be able to thrive; and also look what happened with Huffington Post under her tensure; even AOL ceo did not want to work with her at some point.
Bottom line -- removing Kalanick is like rearranging seats on Titanic.
I can understand why some people might see this as a feature, but that's severely misunderstanding why people use services like Uber.
In Brazil, Uber required drivers to accept cash payment having seen that it was successful in other countries like India. Suddenly carjackers realised that Uber cars were basically cash machines on wheels and so armed robbery, murder and mayhem ensued.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/brazils-love-affa...
Nobody gives a fuck about "Libre", I just want to get a fucking ride.
I have no idea who LibreTaxi is for, if anyone, but their marketing page makes me want to run a mile. Uber and grab have been a revelation for me in SEA and I use them exclusively.
You can't automatically assume that closed systems are a bad thing.
> No Credit Cards
> Negotiating the price with a driver
No COO, CFO and CMO for such a long time means the CEO was not doing his most important job: creating a high-functioning executive team.
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2017-uber-leadership-gap/
You might think they're still strong in operations, but company-destroying risks rise every day the the leadership suite is in turmoil like this. And that's just internal risks: what about their competitors and antagonists?
Amazon have started from a very different place, but apart from the user accessible vehicles they are nearly at the same point, with their recent efforts in Prime, groceries, etc.
I wonder whether Amazon will open up that infrastructure further to other companies. Arguably "fulfilled by Amazon" is already starting to do that.
With Travis gone, the only people who will believe that's still the case are whatever committee is at the steering wheel. They will think they're great and totally capable of being as ruthless and fierce as Travis, which is why they are creating that situation. No other investors will agree: you can't replace someone like Travis with a committee.
IBM's recent demise, Lehman Brothers going down under, Enron, Arthur Anderson / Worldcom, the dismantling of Japanese mega conglomerates by the GHQ, Apple's 90's turnaround, the death of workstation companies, deregulation of US airlines, are all orders of magnitude more impactful than if Uber dies and Lyft prevails.
Somebody should let them know!
Certainly on a downward trend of late but ~80BN in revenues last year is far from dead
Uber is in 100 more US cities than Lyft and 81 countries where Lyft isn't. I find that in large parts outside of the USA "Uber" is synonymous with ride sharing.
Uber bookings revenue is doubling each year[0], net revenue growth is outpacing growth in losses[1] and they claim to be profitable on a per-city basis in early markets[2]
Direct comparisons: Countries 82 (Uber) vs 1, Bookings: $20,000M (Uber) vs $1,400M, Growth: 100% (Uber) vs 250% (Lyft), Net revenue: $6,500M (Uber) vs 700M, Losses: $2,800M (Uber) vs $800M (Uber has much better margins and margin growth), Valuation: $70,000M (Uber) vs $6,000M, Revenue/Valuation: Uber 3.5x Lyft 4.28x
Not an insurmountable task, but Lyft have a long way to go and no track record or operations outside of the USA.
[0] http://fortune.com/2015/08/21/uber-bookings-double/
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-14/embattled...
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com.au/uber-profitable-in-hundre...
Also, it's so disappointing to see so many people buy into the cult of personality of the Startup Founder. There's a lot of half-baked reasoning going on on why Uber's fate should be inexorable tied to Travis. So far, the two main arguments I've seen are "because Steve Jobs" and "he raised so much money for them". Neither one of these are compelling in explaining why Uber's survival prospects should be further damaged by a change at the top.
The only argument that's compelling to me is the concept that they've built their whole business on unethical assholery and it's going to take a lot of time and energy to reorient a big company around a different M.O. But even that's not very compelling, because it presumes that there aren't a whole lot of people already there who would flourish in a healthy, ethical work environment. I know a number of people there who feel that way.
It's such a strange idea--that out of the seven billion people on the planet, only one is capable of leading [Company X]. Who really believes this?
There are glaring organizational problems at Uber, and I truly hope removing Travis from the head helps turn their toxic culture around.
>In the letter, titled “Moving Uber Forward” and obtained by The New York Times, the investors wrote to Mr. Kalanick that he must immediately leave and that the company needed a change in leadership.
>In the letter, in addition to Mr. Kalanick’s immediate resignation, the five shareholders asked for improved oversight of the company’s board by filling two of three empty board seats with “truly independent directors.” They also demanded that Mr. Kalanick support a board-led search committee for a new chief executive, and that Uber immediately hire an experienced chief financial officer.
>"“I love Uber more than anything in the world and at this difficult moment in my personal life I have accepted the investors request to step aside so that Uber can go back to building rather than be distracted with another fight,” Mr. Kalanick said in a statement.
Apparently a 10-executive committee of indeterminate duration wasn't going to suit the board's needs. Taken along with the immediate CFO search, it sounds like Uber simply does not have the time to let Travis sort out both Uber's culture issue and his own personal issues before things start to go sour. Unfortunate timing as I think that, had the accident not happened, Travis would have been able to turn things around. When it rains, it pours.
I'm seeing a bunch of references in these comments to when Steve Jobs was fired from Apple.[1] A more relevant reference might be when Jobs stepped down to treat his cancer. He named one interim CEO--Tim Cook--and fully empowered him to run Apple.
If it was Travis's idea to leave a 10-person committee in charge, that is the sort of insecure, bad decision that would set off investor alarm bells.
[1] This is actually not a great comparison to Travis. Jobs was not CEO when Sculley fired him, and in fact had never been CEO of Apple. He was one of 3 founders, each of whom was arguably crucial to the early success of Apple--Jobs, Woz, and Mike Markkula, who did serve as CEO and sided with Sculley in firing Jobs. Apple subsequently grew 10x under Sculley.
To be honest, from what I've read, the two men don't seem to be similar at all except in the fact that they both founded spectacularly successful/revolutionary startups. Jobs might have been incredibly rude but he did not promote a culture of sexual harassment...that is just a different kind of aggressive culture. He was more about pushing people to unreasonable limits, not giving due acknowledgements etc.... all of which are reprehensible, but nowhere near as terrible as sexual harassment.
Like you mention, it seems EXACTLY the result of an insecure man trying to make himself irreplaceable rather than an adult understanding the reality of the situation and the actions required to save his baby (Uber).
Kalanick's brohaviour has nothing to do with economic success. You absolutely do not need to harass people sexually to be successful, and that idea must die, fast.
In fact: If you promote such a culture, you're giving up the opportunities that employees with different backgrounds, motivation, ad loyalty can bring to the table.
So, if economic success ONLY depends on eliciting investment from these people, then you need to be dominant and brutal in every perceivable way, including sexual harassment, to signal that you're successful. This is far from new.
If success also involves building a functioning company, you've got to look beyond investor bros as a metric, and this is where Uber hasn't shown quality.
Edit: HN discussion of Susan J. Fowler's original blog post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13682022
Questions I'd be interested in your thoughts on:
- does it actually change corporate behaviour?
- is it a good thing that press (which it seems is sometimes influenceable) can effectively hire and fire by continued pressure?
(And please note that's not whether this case was wrong, but whether it opens the possibility of intentionally targeted public campaigns to remove someone from a company sponsored by unstated private reasons. And those are genuine, not rhetorical, questions.)
That remains to be seen, obviously. But a constant in the reports about Uber was that unscrupulous behaviour (e.g. obtaining the medical records of a rape victim) was enabled by the CEO. One might presume that a change in leadership will mean better behaviour. It will also probably mean that Uber can start hiring for all the C-level positions that are currently vacant, bringing in fresh blood and a different way of doing things.
> is it a good thing that press can effectively hire and fire by continued pressure
That is an argument that is as old as the oldest printed pamphlet. I'm not going to argue it here, but I'm glad that the press reported on wrongdoing by high-ups at Uber, and I'm glad that users and investors responded to that information.
If it holds people in power accountable for their actions, then yes, it's a good thing. I agree using the press may be a double edged sword, but if businesses and governments fail to keep their executives and personnel from harassing their employees, then what other recourse is there?
And yes: even as a private company, you're not immune from scrutiny of your action by the public. Your company is part of society, depends on the institutions, and can't ride roughshod over established norms of behaviour without also accepting the consequences.
All CEOs make mistakes even great ones like Gates with antitrust or Zuck calling users dumb-fucks. They weren't kicked out, they instead were allowed to come into their own.
There's a distinct fire that a founder has for the company they founded. You can't hire that. Without this fire at the early stages of a company, the company will likely lose out to competitors like Lyft.
A hiatus is one thing but kicking a founder out is simply bad.
Mark my word and take that to the bank. This was a bad move.
How often do you hear VCs talk about how much they're on the founder's side like Vinod Khosla. At almost every turn, you'll hear Vinod go on about his reverence for founders. He does however add that this is not always the case. Sometimes, he says, founders must be asked to leave. When Vinod tells you to step aside, I think he'd most likely be right because you know his intentions aren't malicious. Do I think it had gotten to that point with Travis? My answer would be no.
The reason it's courage involved in such a situation is because, against all external pressure, he maintained that he thought it would create friction. I can see that and some people may disagree - and those people can use Lyft, but at the end of the day, most people use Uber the way it is because of a certain experience that's possibly inexplicable to them. They just like it. Travis and his team have created this experience.
If there's no courage and conviction, then Uber becomes indistinguishable from Lyft. I honestly don't think the next CEO will have as much courage to say something like, 'we know automation is coming and we have to be on top of it regardless of any negative feedback. If we don't, it won't matter because someone will do it anyway...'
Time will tell and I think it will tell the same story I've told here.
A woman for Uber CEO would be a good signal -- if the best candidate for the job happens to be one. Didn't Marissa Mayer recently resign from her job, and be available?
Even if you want to see Uber dead, there are more humanitarian ways.
edit: nevermind, Kara says no. https://twitter.com/karaswisher?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwc...
Yeah they may start losing money every quarter.
"Some people don't like to take responsibility for their own shit. They blame everything in their life on somebody else."
Think about this the next time you're tolerating bad behavior on the part of your employees. A number of people lost their jobs in the resulting firestorm but that fire reached right up to the top.
Think about this the next time you're considering investing in a company where the leadership team plays fast and loose with law. Disruption is important, but principles are just as important. If the leadership team gets their advantage by not following the rules that others do, watch for them to not follow the rules that they should as well.
Also, I think investors forced him out by saying they will finance next round only if Kalanick is gone. And they need more investment, because losing $2bn a year makes them run out of cash soon and inevitably.
Still - Kalanick and his co-founder friends have a control over a board, so theoretically Kalanick can get his ass back as CEO as soon as he wants. If he wants...
The Kalanick-VCs deal might have another background. To cut those $2bn annual losses, Uber needs to change financially. Those changes will hit customers (prices will increase) and drivers (their pay and benefits decrease). So Uber needs an interim manager to introduce them - a "bad guy", who can take the "blame" for it. A change, that will not hit Kalanick's reputation.
But it's all good. Uber will continue to grow. The service is just too good.
But go google and you'll find quite a few anecdotes that do make it seem as if he has a strange hangup with women himself.
Apart from in SF, I've never found Lyft available anywhere I've been (although I understand it is operating on other parts of the US).
To momentarily sing-praises of Uber: the same app, the same login, the same card just works internationally pretty much where ever I have gone on work and vacations regardless of currencies etc - morals aside it is a slick service - but so far I've not been able to use a single Lyft ride because they dont seem to be available apart from the US.
Please come to London & the EU Lyft! I dont want to use Uber due to their well-publicised issues but there is no alternative apart from "old world" solutions.
This is not meant to cast doubt on the problems at Uber highlighted in these reports.
However, It seems like the drip of negative information was intentional, perhaps with the goal of having him resign.
Uber was guilty in the public eye almost immediately.
Even today the media narrative is that this is good for Silicon Valley culture as a whole. Implicit in this line of thinking is that most SV companies have the same culture problems. I find that to be troubling and largely incorrect.
Perhaps the lesson here is that if you set out to disrupt powerful interests across the world, you better have your own house in order, otherwise they will disrupt you.
I hope this encourages more people to publicly report systematic cultures of sexual harassment.
Because certain people like Uber board member David Bonderman have a really hard time getting it through their thick Neanderthal skulls that they shouldn't make crude sexist remarks about how women talk to much, while on stage at a company all hands meeting whose topic is how the company is turning over a new leaf to address their systematic culture of sexual harassment. Even if it's hilariously ironic because it was actually a man who just couldn't keep his big fat mouth shut.
https://www.recode.net/2017/6/13/15795612/uber-board-member-...
Salutation!
They just showed a complete lack of care in so many situations... Shows that ignoring the rules can certainly pay off.
Bloomberg in April reported[1] Uber's cumulative cash burn at US$8 bn since its founding in 2009. You can argue that Travis Kalanick presided over rising valuations but so far there is no evidence of an increase in book value per share. Conversely that cash burn risks being crystallized as "value destruction" if revenue growth stalls.
The alleged personnel issues, the lawsuit, the bad press -- they are history and the firm has no choice but to cope with them. But failing to improve net margin can be quickly fatal and if that is happening then the other issues remain relevant. TK, who also presided over those, becomes part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
[0] http://paulgraham.com/pinch.html [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-14/embattled...
He should have been fired by the board for the results of the Otto acquisition and the handling of Waymo lawsuit, and that was probably a much larger factor.
I wonder who will take his place, and, more importantly, I wonder if Uber will continue winning.
Does he deserve to be complimented in any way shape or form?
No... Not in the slightest.
I think the question is can uber continue winning without being toxic to staff (drivers, women, I'm sure there are others), maybe stealing (waymo lawsuit), and building tools to avoid the law....
The answer is I don't know, but it is going to be hard to recover from.
The only people that benefited from his achivement were the investors. Considering where Uber stands at the moment they might not ever see a return on that.
If creating value gives you some sort of moral pass then we shouldn't have any sort of issues with epipens being more expensive, or martin shkreli jacking up drug prices... after all they did it in the name of creating value.
The problem is were never going to know how much of the success your praising is tied to the awful behavior that you say we should be critical of.
Were talking about the lance armstrong of CEO's. The collective behavior is corporate doping, lying cheating and stealing to get to the top isn't the path to sustaining success.
The writer has it backwards. Investors would mark down an asset because it's worth less. The asset doesn't lose value by virtue of being marked down.
It does in public markets. See sell offs, corrections.
'The asset' in my statement obviously refers to shares in Uber. Those aren't 'in public markets'.
Moreover, even if I were talking about assets in general, including those traded in public markets, my statement is still true. If company A buys shares in company B, and company B's share price subsequently goes down in value, then company A may mark down their own holding (i.e. reduce the value they report in their accounts) to reflect that new reality. But that reality (the lower public market value) preceded the mark down. So the mark down cannot be the cause of the reduction in value.
In simpler terms, 'marking down' is an accounting activity, or one of financial reporting. It's writing down what is. It's creating the reality. That's why it's called 'bean counting'. The beans exist before they are counted.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13747414#13749264
I do wish it hadn't happened, though, I would have preferred if the company could have healed with him still managing to stay in control.
I see this happen so many times, a company takes too much investment, the CEO is replaced, then the company dies within a year...
Why is something like Uber called ride-sharing to begin with? I'm not sharing my ride with anyone that coincidentally wants to travel (more or less) the same route as me. I pay somebody to drive their car first to me, and then some other place.
This is called a taxi or cab [1], there Uber is a taxi company.
At least in Germany, there used to be actual ride-sharing systems, of which the best one used to be mitfahrzentrale.de, where people would advertise what route they were planing to drive (and when) and other people could "book" a seat on that route. I don't know if some others still exist, I haven't used them in years.
There are a number of ride-sharing services, the self-proclaimed biggest being blablacar.de, previously known as mitfahrgelegenheiten.de, I believe.
We also have a multitude of car-sharing services, where if you subscribe, you can look for a free car parked somewhere, and then drive it wherever you want within a certain area. Examples are car2go, DriveNow, and I believe Starcar and other rental-car companies also have services like that.
Uber actually had to pull out of several german cities because of taxi-related regulations. Taxi-drivers in those cities need to obtain a license, which drivers for Uber obviously don't do. So (some german) institutions also view Uber as a taxi company.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2015/10/30/9648676/uber-germany-ham...
Something like this is nearly always a power struggle. That the accusations may be valid is just showing that the people attaining power have a higher chance in this situation. It doesn't change the fact that it is a power struggle.
So who are the people taking over? For an news paper that shouldn't be hard to figure out. Who are the three new guys? They are 100% sure linked to the group taking over. They are certainly not "neutral". Who is likely to become the new CEO? This guy is certainly the leader of the coup or a puppet.
you should read this very interesting (but simplified) exploration of power talk for a general idea of why this article was written the way that it is:
https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/11/11/the-gervais-principle-...
So what you're saying is that I shouldn't have such expectations towards the reporter. The reporter may or may not be smart enough to look behind the curtain, but his official job is not to look behind but to present the "objective" official grand narrative. Talking about the actual power struggle would expose him since it may be considered unprofessional and un-objective, as well as hurt his trust relations with people who give him inside info. So the most naive but objective report may actually be written by the smartest reporter. New point of view. Thanks!
However no model is able to provide completedness. They either always lack some significant amount of reality, or create significant amount of fantasy on top. That was proven by different scientists in the 1930s and is explained quite well imo in Goedel Escher Bach. I don't remember the details but at least one of them was a Mathematician who basically delivered the proof that Math can't solve all the problems that Math tries to solve. It is impossible.
> In recent months, Ms. Huffington has become the public voice of Uber’s board as the company has tried to overcome scandals over its workplace culture. She has forged a friendship with Mr. Kalanick. And behind the scenes, she has been a driving force in recruiting an Uber board member and executives.
Uber's play was that they could subsidize that through private investors in order to scale. But now they have to find, hire, and compensate basically the whole tier of upper management, while still burning operating money. I'm not a business major, but that's probably REALLY not good.
I'm surprised I haven't read about it in another comment yet, but this is screaming for a company with good management and a stash of solid reputation/PR/marketing to come get a really good deal. Maybe Facebook because the culture wouldn't clash as much as my next two: apple and Google? Apple has the cash, and needs an entry into automotive while we wait for the apple car. Google/Waymo+Uber immediately settles the lawsuit, puts uber back into moat territory with self-driving, and gives google some people on the ground to compete with Amazon in last-mile?
It's clear that the lynch mob of armchair activists will no longer be satisfied when action is taken against the individuals who are directly at fault; they tend to drag everybody they can into this mess and attempt to hold them accountable.
Travis aside, you can't expect engineering managers to ignore what happened and risk their career because somebody in H.R might screw up.
1. You must get involved if you hear anything that could be remotely questionable. Otherwise, you will be the guy who ignored all of the signs and enabled the culture. 2. If you get involved, and it turns out to be nothing, you are now harassing a co-worker. It was just an office relationship, and things went sour? It's your fault now. 3. Don't get involved? You are an enabler and must be punished.
I was reading a thread on Reddit last week (Things you can no longer do at work, or something like that) and apparently some men are scared to close the meeting room door if they are left alone with a woman these days.
Amazing world we live in today.
I had 1k stolen from my bank account via Uber and after my research showed...
- THey knew about these hacks happening ...about ten or more people a day
- Their PR was it's the users fault for choosing a weak password vs. doing a press release letting users know they need to change their passwords and offering 2 way verification
- You could not and probably still can not outright and quickly cancel your UBer account. No you have to send a message and I waited days to severe all any ties with them.
This happened to me and 1000s of others in 2015 per my search on Twitter then. Then in 2017 you see just how horrible this organization is ... it does not give at ratz ass about anyone who is not a KalaNick bro including employees, customers, drivers.. basically all groups it needs to operate and succeed.
Still wanting it to go down in flames and my 1k back into my bank account!!!
Being a good guy as requirement for being CEO is a 21st century thing.
...and if that's a 21st Century thing, so be it.Maybe you should do 21st-century things like being a good guy, considering this is the 21st century.
If this is true then he is his own worst enemy, and I find it very sad when anyone - no matter how big a jerk you think they are - is trapped in a repeating pattern of negative and destructive behavior.
To be clear: I am not absolving him of his behavior, I'm just observing that the culture comes from the founder and his wounds run deep.
[1] Scour filed for bankruptcy, Red Swoosh was acquired after enormous struggles to keep the company afloat.
I think their burn rate is almost surely the result of subsidizing expanding markets. I can't imagine established markets being anything but ludicrously profitable.
Disclaimer: I don't necessarily like Uber, I've never even used them and I know almost nothing about their (former) CEO outside of headlines.
This seems like a narrative to cover their attempt to get more power in the company... Clearly Kalanick has appointed directors on board that are on his side, which is exactly what he should do and the point of shareholder's appointing directors... Of course, investors want their people
With a new seasoned exec, I predict Uber will stabilize, IPO at some point and becomes the Yahoo of the industry. It won't be the next Google, Amazon or Facebook (all led by founder CEOs), that's for sure.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-06-15/jack-ma-s...
The hard part of cloning Uber as a company is building both sides of the market. It's almost impossible to do without a clever strategy and tons of cash.
But then I thought, well, Travis still controls a majority of the votes and he's still on the board.
Others out there who have also been avoiding Uber because of all the bad press, I'm curious how you are thinking about this.
It's also interesting that the five shareholders mentioned in the NYTimes article want 2 "truly independent directors". What does that mean? Depending on how many board seats there are, maybe two votes aren't enough?
Is Marissa Meyer the only woman y'all know?
Will be interesting to see who replaces him and whether the company actually changes.
And you have crazy valuation which is threatened by your company's culture?
Ah, the modern times!
So brutal to be fired from the company you founded and built via a FedEx.
Being a jerk company?
Thanks, but no thanks. I'd rather ride a bullock cart, than avail services of such a company.
Wait, what?
Steve Jobs was an asshole at times, but that behaviour was always about driving people hard to create what he considered a perfect product.
Kalanick's brohaviour has nothing to do with economic success. You absolutely do not need to harass people sexually to be successful.
I hope to God you don't show up for jury duties.
Yes, you can modulate the strength of your belief but they're all beliefs that the statement is true. The great-grandparent comment (the one whose meaning this discussion was about) was implying something other than belief in the truth of the statement.
"I believe you" can mean you believe what the person is saying WITHOUT it meaning you take it to be 100% factual.
In this circumstance, it can mean you believe them (as in, trust them) but you're not "convicting" anyone of anything. But you ARE giving them the comfort of "trust."
It's fine for people to say "I think he did it, but the prosecution didn't prove it, and so I found him not guilty."
Believing a colleague when they come to you with ANY complaint does not mean you're going to pass judgement, or you even have to. It means listening and doing that in a way that does not discourage future complaints.
Your attitude towards them -- listening etc -- is a completely orthogonal matter to whether you believe in the truth of their claims.
There seems to be this wishy-washy notion of "belief" that's causing confusion in this thread, where "believing" is equated to "not being judgemental".
That's not "belief". Believing X means thinking that X is true. What you're really talking about is taking an agnostic position.
In this mindset you've setup a guilty until proven innocent framework because in your mind you already believe to be true any accusations leveled at someone.
When someone levels an accusation, the only belief you should hold is that it's a serious accusation that needs further investigation because someone has risked a lot by leveling it.
Believing anything that comes out of someone's mouth to be true when there are massive consequences to their words is unethical.
>It's fine for people to say "I think he did it, but the prosecution didn't prove it, and so I found him not guilty."
You cannot believe someone to have done something and personally believe that the person is not guilty. They may not be guilty under the framework of the law, but you are still treating them as guilty in your mind. If you worked with the accused and you had a strong sense of ethics, you would never treat that person the same way again, even though the accusation may have been proven to be fabricated.
It is unethical to take accusations at face value that will ruin people's lives.
It would not be healthy for anyone involved to actively show skepticism towards them.
If you do not show some level of skepticism, you default to a state of belief. As in, you believe your colleague at face-value for the complaint brought to you.
We're _not_ talking about convicting someone of a crime. We're not talking about taking immediate action on that belief.
Well, no, you default to a neutral state of receiving information, sans judgment.
Also it is not true that if you do not show skepticism, you default to some specific state. You could hold any number of opinions without showing skepticism -- what you are showing the other party is irrelevant. "Showing" or expressing belief is not the same thing as believing.
>As in, you believe your colleague at face-value
If you are pretending that you believe your colleague while silently reserving judgment or judging disbelief, you do not believe them in any meaningful sense of the word. You are disguising your judgment of what they are saying so as to not cause further conflict -- i.e., acting. That is very different from believing what they say or even 'believing at face value'.
If they say "X touched me inappropriately" and you say "I believe you" meaning "I trust you", then that means "I trust that you are telling the truth".
(Actually, what I think you're really talking about is a kind of social nicety, what is in reality a white lie. Where people will say "I believe you" as like a kind of gesture of good faith towards a person. Like indicating that you're not going to be biased against them. But it's not actually a statement of belief. In other words, it does not have a meaning in terms of a type of belief).
E.g. in some of these situations you are actually lying to the person (in a mild way) and not actually expressing a belief at all.
An analogy. I might say "I went to the store", but actually I was at a friend's place, and I said this because I wanted to come across a certain way.
It is not that the statement "I went to the store" has these two interpretations. The notion of going to a friend's place isn't a different interpretation of that statement, it is just that I'm not telling the truth.
Of course - and that means you still think (to some degree of conviction) it is true. The original context that spawned this discussion was implying some sort of interpretation that did not involve a belief of some sort in the truth of the statement.
> I can believe your testimony to me in good faith, but understand it may not be accurate.
If someone says "X touched me inappropriately", and you respond "I believe you" then this response means "I believe your statement" not "I believe your testimony was in good faith". (Or it is a kind of white lie, as discussed elsewhere in this thread).
That's true, but this is literally how 99% of human interaction works out.
My dad might say "Hey, can you help me with something on the house in two weeks?" and I don't even know what day yet, so I'll say "Of course, would love to!"
It's... not a 100% completely honest response, but it's the polite one. Rather than saying "I have no idea because I lack information, please tell me the date and I'll get back to you."
In reality, I say sure, I commit, and as more information is acquired we adjust the situation: just as would happen in the original scenario.
White lie or not, it would be inappropriate and needlessly damaging to reply to your colleague in such a way "I have no idea if what you're saying is true, sorry, but I'll look into it."
"I believe what you're saying, so I will follow up."
Or,
"I believe what you're saying, so I will take immediate action on those persons."
http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/do-i-have-wrongful-te...
Yes, we can all make factually true, but totally irrelevant arguments that don't change anything.
A person does not have the right to be trusted, but can expect to be taken seriously on a claim of harassment if they have earned trust or if they provide evidence to back up the allegation.
You can be declared guilty by preponderance of evidence, of course, but still you are innocent until proven guilty.
The UK police had to back off from a similar policy that the after high profile investigations that were dropped with no criminal charges being made. They now take complaints seriously and try to keep the confidence of the complainant but don't start off with unconditional belief from the outset whilst still proceeding, at first, on the basis that the allegation is truthful but testing the accuracy of the allegations and the evidence with an open mind.
As an exercise, ask a few men and women you know if they've ever been harassed or attacked at work. If they didn't report it, ask them why.
The power dynamics are significantly different though, I don't feel at all in danger, I'm a 6'2 man who lifts weights in his spare time, so it's more of an annoyance than anything truly worrying. I understand that this person may go on to harass the next person who fills my role, but I simply have too much personally riding on the outcome of the present to leverage it in that way.
I'd certainly be pretty worried if someone in a position of power over me was doing anything of the sort. Even if you don't have to worry about the individual literally overpowering you (Which in itself would be a tough thing to prove you were not the aggressor if you are a muscular 6+ footer and had to push off an aggressive advance)
Any feminist will remind you that sexual harassment isn't about sex, it's about power. With more women in positions of power these days expect the number of harassment cases where men are the target to rise.
FFS, dude. Men hold the vast majority of power in our society. No cards are stacked against them. No old fashioned norms are still levied on them everytime a woman speaks to them. They aren't constantly reminded by our culture to be gentlemen or look handsome or bring home the bacon or do anything they don't want to. To say "think of the men!" here is either willfully ignorant or just being a dick.
If you "believe women who report sexual harassment", and more specifically, if you believe women who report sexual harassment in "less clear cut" scenarios than Susan Fowlers, then you are deliberately stacking the deck against the specific men who are accused of sexual harassment, some of whom will invariably be innocent. How much comfort the fact that other people with the same genetalia tend to fill the boardrooms provides to the accused, I will leave to your imagination.
> They aren't constantly reminded by our culture to be gentlemen or look handsome or bring home the bacon or do anything they don't want to.
Men aren't reminded constantly by their culture to do things they don't want to do? Where do you live, because it sounds like paradise to me.
> To say "think of the men!" here is either willfully ignorant or just being a dick.
It's neither. It was an attempt to puncture what I saw as misguided rhetoric. A good old WhatAboutTheMen is an efficient approach because the commenter's default reasoning for not "just believing" men would likely mirror mine for not "just believing" women. And so I don't have to spell it out for them.
Saying "just believing" isn't the best phrase the OP could have picked but neither was your rhetoric. It just contributes to the divide between men and women.
We can imagine utopia and then imagine how we would treat people in that setting. That seems to be what you're doing. But if we're not actually in utopia, then we really are tipping the scales in some way. And that does suck, and sometimes that means that one group is going to be treated unfairly, but often it's about the lesser of evils.
I'll do you the honor of not questioning your sincerity without even making an effort to address any specific thing you said. Seems like an almost...pusillanimous...thing to do.
> We can imagine utopia and then imagine how we would treat people in that setting.
I am not suggesting a solution to the existence of injustice, which is what a utopia would entail. I am merely pointing out that simplistic rhetoric about believing accusors will not solve the problem.
> But if we're not actually in utopia, then we really are tipping the scales in some way. And that does suck, and sometimes that means that one group is going to be treated unfairly, but often it's about the lesser of evils.
And there we part ways. Adding up all the bad stuff that happens to one group, comparing it to all the bad stuff that happens to another group, and saying "if this makes the bad stuff in the big pile smaller, then having more bad stuff in the small pile is acceptable collateral damage" is not a good approach. Applied in the large it would quite likely lead to two much bigger piles. I know you probably don't recognise that as what you're doing, but your reasoning is far too simplistic given the complexities of the problem.
edit: fine, apparently people get downvoted if they're not pedantic.
"and saying "if this makes the bad stuff in the big pile smaller, then having more bad stuff in the small pile is acceptable collateral damage" is not a good approach. Applied in the large it would quite likely lead to two much bigger piles."
Show your work. Why is that "likely" to lead to two bigger piles?
There's a word for that, you know.
> Show your work. Why is that "likely" to lead to two bigger piles?
If we both agree that we want fewer incidents of harass ment, a higher fraction of harassers punished, fewer false allegations, and fewer incidents of innocent people being punished... then that's a pretty complicated problem, right? Now multiply that by the number of potential harassers and harassees in the world. My "work" is simply the observation that a complicated problem isn't solvable by simplistic rhetoric. Of course, given the climate, that spiraled, as it does.
blackrose is exclusively thinking of rich and powerful men when framing his argument.
[edit: removed paragraph]
This is a lot of aggression, and it makes me think that you are just as closed to alternative viewpoints as those with whom you are discussing this topic. I think you should completely re-evaluate your approach to debating this in the future.
I'll take the downvotes for this, but I think certain stances people are spouting on this thread are aggressively perpetuating the poor societal values I've been arguing against. They're aggressively playing down the consequences of their sexist mentality and normalizations. And because I'm a not-impoverished white dude who doesn't worry about being persecuted for my opinions, I expressed them.
(Also, the "selfish dick" part isn't meant to be taken personally. Many people are selfish, and own up to it, and wear the badge proudly. That's great. But to argue for sexism under some pretense of a noble cause is bullshit.)
You need to understand that the way you engage others on the internet is harmful to your viewpoints. You honestly come off as hostile and even childish. You're fabricating complete strawmen and attacking them. I honestly have to question whether or not you have some sort of personality disorder, given how upset you get over things that the people you are attacking have not said or even implied. You also seem to be extremely self-loathing, and you want to project that onto others.
> You also seem to be extremely self-loathing, and you want to project that onto others.
These are funny sequences of statements.
Anyway I wasn't attacking you; I was arguing against the ideas presented, that we should "think about the men!" first when we're discussing women reporting sexual assault. The paragraph I deleted implied that anyone who holds this worldview either hasn't ever listened to a woman or is self-centered. I could've put it better, but frankly I was tired of arguing.
And I was fixing the record because you said "blackrose is exclusively thinking of rich and powerful men when framing his argument." Which is false, and I believe I offered good evidence for in my simple example.
This is really a stretch in logic, and the oxymoronic "some of whom will invariably be innocent" gives away your motives on this topic.
Parent comment was saying we should give a little more credibility to reports that women make about sexual harassment in the workplace. It's a pretty good idea that would make everyone's lives better (even ours, the men!). But if your reaction to that mild suggestion is hostility and misleading arguments, you're contributing to the problem and encouraging more "manly" behavior that necessitates women's blog posts and company culture course-correction.
It's not even a tiny weeny little stretch of logic. It is self-evident to anybody who is thinking clearly about the matter.
> Parent comment was saying we should give a little more credibility to reports that women make about sexual harassment in the workplace.
No. Wrong. Parent comment said "believe women who...", not "give a little more credibility to reports that women make about sexual harassment". Do you understand how those two statements are different? Your one doesn't even make sense. Crediblity is "the quality of being believable or worthy of trust". Credence is probably the word you were thinking of. I don't think I'm smarter than you, but these sorts of mistakes do go to show that you are not thinking clearly.
> It's a pretty good idea that would make everyone's lives better
Not the falsely accused. They are men too, right?
> But if your reaction to that mild suggestion is hostility and misleading arguments, you're contributing to the problem and encouraging more "manly" behavior that necessitates women's blog posts and company culture course-correction.
The suggestion is not mild. My reaction was not hostile. My arguments were not misleading. I'm not contributing to the problem of some men being sexual harassers, except perhaps at some absurdly theoretically removed degree, which would leave me damned for pretty much any I comment I could make. I'm not encouraging manly, or even "manly" behaviour. My comments don't necessitate women's blog posts, if by that you are referring to Fowlers call-out. The latter is in fact an absurd charge against me on a personal level, as I'm sure you would recognize after mature reflection. That I necessitate company culture course-correction is likewise absurd, though flattering.
Luckily we have the power of inference and ability to understand what statements mean even when people use different words -- unless, of course, we have an axe to grind, which is what I'm seeing here in your comments.
Your counter arguments haven't convinced me. But it was nice discussing this. Hopefully others will see this thread and make their own decisions.
Power isn't based on gender, it's based on wealth. Do you think abuse of power will suddenly end once the majority of wealthy individuals are women instead of men?
The point is that yes, for these reasons and many others, we should "believe women when they report harassment in the workplace."
Name the other sources of power in the United States in the year 2017. Whatever you can come up with, none of it is as significant as wealth.
>The point is that yes, for these reasons and many others, we should "believe women when they report harassment in the workplace."
You did not answer my question. Do you think abuse of power will suddenly end once the majority of wealthy individuals are women instead of men?
As your question doesn't really have anything to do with our debate, I respectfully decline to answer. It was nice talking.
Happy to hear any difficult and unrealistic social pressures you think we regularly face today.
I just wanted to say that it seems to me like you are speaking about broad generalizations and that is not the same thing as speaking about real people or individuals. Also, that your generalized idea of men is based on the premise that that general man is a wealthy and powerful person, but this is not the case for most men.
It's one thing to say women have substantially more cards stacked against them on average. But it's another to say men have no cards stacked against them.
Your position is particularly harmful to feminist aims, because one of the core feminist teachings that we need to get through is this:
Don't assume a woman is a certain way because of stereotypes. Between group differences are smaller than within group differences.
Women can be less sporty than men on average, while still almost half of women are more athletic than the average man.
Similarly, women can have more cards stacked against them on average, while still nearly half of men have more cards stacked against them than the average woman.
The place we need to get to, which I believe intersectional feminism advocates, is to understand each person and situation individually, and consider that there are always many axes of oppression operation simultaneously.
To address your assertion directly: that a male victim of sexual harassment has no cards against him, consider this:
The flip side of "boys will be boys", a meme used to let rapists go unpunished, is "boys must be boys", a meme that men always want sex and therefore if he had a drunken hookup he must have wanted it. This goes far beyond the less accepted (though still frighteningly effective) meme of "she was drunk so she must have wanted it". Women are not presumed to want sex all the time.
I consider that a card stacked against men. We have precious little shared framework for thinking and talking about the times we don't want sex. It's not equivalent to the deck of cards that is patriarchy, but it's a card.
I think feminism will profit greatly from taking a stance on how people should be treated better, rather your stance, which is a stance on which people should be treated better (women).
I still believe WATM is usually a derailing technique used to distract from discussions of women's rights, I just don't believe that in the current climate it benefits the feminist movement to respond to them as such. It doesn't take much effort to say "sure, men too" and doing so reinforces other key feminist rhetoric.
Anyway, yeah, of course everyone has different circumstances. I didn't mean literally no men, just as the grandparent comment didn't mean literally believe all women. I was speaking generally in order to be comprehendible to a guy speaking generally and hypothetically.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14600895 and marked it off-topic.
print "{something} may or may not take over the world at some point, but it needs another round of investment in the next 18 months just to survive.".format(something='any Ponzi scheme')
python 2, 3 are nice... got loads of libs... just that they don't have enough static typings to help me around :(
But... most library definitions are quite lacking... if only some big company would volunteer to fill that huge gap... (hope MS gives some luv! just like they did with Typescript + DefinitelyTyped)
With regards to it's use, in my observation I don't think it's used so much as a weapon against an argument as much as perhaps a weapon against the self congratulatory and rather shallow nature of online protest. I didn't always feel this way but it seems that whenever the term is brought up you have a number of posters who feel it's incredibly important that it be known, to complete strangers on an internet message board, that they are the good guys and are sincere in their beliefs and actions.
In any case, I'm not very smart so I could be wrong in my observations.
If you have a substantive point to make, please make it thoughtfully; otherwise please don't comment until you do.
In my defense, I felt at the time it was relevant, due to the fact that he berated that cab driver one time. (Which was filmed) and mentioned Ayn Rand to the 2 blonde's he was with in the cab. That was the reference.
However, its your house, and I respect the houses wishes, and will avoid making CEO Masturbating jokes ever again.
Cheers!
It's a taxi company with an app. That's it.
I mean, given their business practices, I am not surprised if their culture turns out to be toxic. I just don't see the reasoning behind blaming him for sexist men in the company, if he never supported such actions.
Yes, from all accounts it's pretty clear that he condoned and even promoted an arsehole culture.
> Were steps not taken to remove the harassers, once the incidents came to light?
Basically, no. Now, years afterwards, a few heads have finally rolled -- but only after it snowballed into a major (international, not just US-national) media scandal. But not back when the incidents first came to light, no.
> How can the CEO watch over every social interaction?
1) By delegating to a HR department with instructions to follow the law. Which instructions they might have had on paper, but obviously not in actual fact, given the real prevailing culture there.
2) So it comes back to, again: By making it clear, in words and example, what the working culture is supposed to be like. So that potential victims can be assured they won't get harrassed, potential harrassers can be assured they won't get away with shit like that, and the HR department can be assured they're supposed to go after the harassers and support the victims, not the other way around.
I don't know, this all feels so obvious I am compelled to question your grounds for asking. Are you really claiming you didn't know this, or couldn't figure it out for yourself? Because even asking the question smells a bit fake; like concern-trolling in support of the culture Kalanick's fostered.
Fear this inter connected world. Fear the power of language.
Also, it will be awesome if instead of another Uber created there will be an open pool of ridess/seats available and people can use the platform of their choice. A la airline ticket booking model (of course the exact same approach will/may not work) or the bus ticket booking approach. Also, airline industry isn't hyperlocal.
With that said, who should lead Uber?
Not sure I'd use 'cash cow' to describe something that bleeds cash to the tune of billions of dollars a year.
Some deep cuts wil likely occur to make the company "more efficient" and "focused on core competency" etc...
Laura's post from feb stated that on the ops/sre/infra team alone they had ~126 engineers, though I don't know if that includes managers... but it made it sound like there were many layers of managers, thus all the infighting
So can't they cut some of this?