Podcast link: http://thedollop.libsyn.com/271-uber
But many pushed them as just good old American "disrupters" of a "stale" market.
That is until the first dirty underwear regarding office shenanigans were aired, and then the twittering classes did a one-eighty in their view of Uber. And from that point on the company has been circling the drain.
With all that being said, I probably won't be happy with the outcome of the lawsuits surrounding the shenanigans either. What will likely happen is Uber will get some hefty fines. But the people who will pay those fines are Uber's customers (and potentially investors). The more focus we can put on criminal and civil penalties for the individuals involved, even if that meant literally every person in the company, the better.
Pretending like Kalanick himself endorsed sexual harassment is ridiculous. We don't know whether he knew, how much he knew, or how involved he was. All evidence points to "the trail of information stopped at HR."
I think we like to pretend that startups should be completely moral and make no questionable decisions because of how awful companies have acted in the past. While it's true we shouldn't let history repeat itself, it's false to say that merely disrupting a market is worth criticizing. And this is what disruption looks like.
Balancing morality/ethics with winning is incredibly difficult. You can be an upstanding person, thrust into the CEO chair, and still screw up. Then all of your mistakes are magnified to ridiculous proportions and people claim it's a pattern of behavior that they spotted from the start, but everyone else was too blinded to recognize. Sound familiar? Not even in Uber's case -- it's a story that's repeated itself over and over.
The straightforward response is "Well, startups shouldn't act so disreputably then." I agree that you shouldn't do anything that brings harm to individuals, nor should you ignore a toxic culture at your company. But refusing to even try -- to say that if you're not perfectly honest or perfectly moral, that you shouldn't be allowed to build a company -- is a formula for letting the true snakes dominate the world. Honest people who make mistakes are better than assholes with a thirst for power.
But you have to let them be willing to admit that they've made mistakes. Kalanick has done this.
Kidding aside, at those levels you have to manage all of that. PR is probably just as important as the tech.
The five-minutes-of-hate culture and public lynching culture is dangerous and has to end. In a year some contrarian will post an article on Medium with the title "Kalanick was unfairly ousted" and it'll be posted on reddit/r/TIL and the tide will turn as all the people whose opinions are an expression of whatever made it to the frontpage of their favorite aggregators reverse their opinion to fit the status quo.
Irrespective of this fair/unfair argument, what stands out is how we have completely forgotten the platform that Uber laid out to disrupt our commuting experience, just like Jeff B did with Amazon Store!
I know it was not quite your point, but idolizing assholes like Kalanick - "they may be a bit flawed, but they are brilliant businessmen/women", quite prevalent in the US, ends up in a lot of companies run by sociopathic assholes.
Leave the fawning to sycopanthic media, please.
He hasn't been lynched, he hasn't been jailed, he hasn't had his riches taken away from him. He's been asked to endure one consequence of years of behavior that many, many of us don't approve of.
There's no "five minutes of hate" here, there's a lot of people in the world looking at someone who behaved badly, consistently, without showing any sign of changing their behavior, and saying "enough, you don't get to run a big business anymore".
Maybe you don't give a shit about the kind of business the guy built, and that's up to you, you don't have to give a shit, but acting like the rest of us are a lynch mob is a ridiculous misrepresentation of the situation.
1. He was so inept as CEO that he was unaware of all (it is a big list) the shady things putting the company he was the majority share holder of at risk that he deserves to be fired and have it crash and burn.
2. He was aware of the bulk of the shady things, that makes him complicit. As an endorser of Ubers lager pattern of behavior and over all toxic culture, he deserves to be fired.
There is NO way to defend Kalanick without sounding like a shill.
Accusations of shillage without evidence also isn't allowed here, for what it's worth. You didn't accuse, but the sentiment is annoying. I think "apologist" is the word you're looking for.
Your comment is like fallacy bingo. E.g. false dichotomies are rarely enumerated as "1" and "2", but I suppose that makes it easier to call out.
The most straightforward third option is that it's very hard to manage 14k employees or be aware of what all of them are doing. It's not a minor thing to overlook, but again, the information flow stopped at HR.
As for Greyball, it's possible that some lieutenant got it into their heads to use that program to evade regulators, rather than Kalanick himself. Remember, the program was developed under false pretenses.
The "Hell" program was developed to get insights into their competitor. Contrast this with their "Heaven" program which is a god's-eye view of every Uber on the road. They pushed it much too far by abusing Lyft's API, but collecting info about a competitor is a pretty standard thing for a startup to do.
The list goes on.
There is an old saying that we don't often use any more: "the fish stinks from the head".
On the other side we have this:
https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/nintendos-ceo-takes-50-...
Honestly who do you want to work for? Who should we be praising?
I know the choice is clear for me, and one that is very black and white.
Do you have an explanation for why Uber has been outed with so much more shadiness than most (if not all) other billion dollar tech companies?
Have they done more? Are they worse at PR? Something else? Do you dispute that they have been exposed for more shadiness?
And his "infamous" Miami memo, where he documents to the company what kinds of sexual activity between employees at the company are okay, and then follows up with a lament that "because he's the CEO, then he's not getting any employee action :("
And the fact that HR on several occasions had to tell him to tone down the sexual content of multiple communications, and I'm inclined to be a little more cynical than "poor wide-eyed Travis".
Nobody forced Travis Kalanick to found a company that couldn't work in the then-extant regulatory structure. Nobody forced him to work around the problem by just flat out ignoring the law and hoping he could lobby to get it changed before he got called to task for it. Nobody forced him to come up with a long-term profitability plan that required being able to eventually charge monopoly prices. Nobody forced him to try to undercut his competitors by doing an end-run around employee protections. He always had the option to go be an angel investor or something instead.
He chose a model which could not be done ethically and upon realizing that decided to pursue it anyway. I'm not certain what that makes him, but it sure doesn't make him a victim.
It's helpful to remember that we don't have a justice system. We have a legal system. That's a very important distinction, and it's why we see the law co-evolve with society.
If you're arguing that under no circumstances is it ethical to found a company that doesn't toe the letter of the law, then you've got a tough case. Are you sure it's ethical that you're not allowed to offer someone a ride in exchange for money?
This extends to other companies. Airbnb is a prime example. Aside from a few corner cases (one of the worst being SF), Airbnb has been a positive influence. And it never would've happened if they had been too shy to act.
You can argue it's unethical, but meanwhile the world rolls on. It's much more effective to accept it and to dominate the game. But you won't if you refuse to play.
The myth that sweeping statements like these are ever true needs to die.
Lots of people, even on Twitter, have been skeptical of Über for quite some time.
Uber has done a tremendous amount of really shitty things. And for most of it, there has been no "justice" served.
Furthermore, you're taking it as a given that Uber flagrantly violating local laws in order to launch ridesharing is a good thing, but not everybody will agree with that.
Furthermore, the fact that Uber led the way here still doesn't mean "justice" has been served for anything, especially since most of the horrible things Uber has done were done after Uber opened up the market (and past actions can never be said to provide "justice" for future actions).
We shouldn't let corporations unilaterally decide which regulations they want to follow; if they think some laws are unfair they should work to change them through the democratic process like the rest of us.
Exactly. 1.
You are probably right that Uber had all the attention and "fought" more.
I remember Scour. That thing was scummy as all get-out.