Six contenders to be Uber's new CEO
thehill.com
thehill.com
1. Successful ones who have to be convinced that they should risk their reputation and take on the headaches at Uber.
2. Less successful ones, where you have to convince the current Uber decision makers to give them a shot.
I think the field is narrower than this article suggests.
the ones from category one might have difficulty knowing what to do - unless we're talking about the lyft CEO they know success from something other than uber. that might not necessarily be good.
the ones from category two might have the same trouble as one, but add to that that they will have to compete/convince the board of probably every little move.
and if they don't do something fairly dramatic, fairly quickly, the good people at the mid and lower levels will start to flee for greener pastures.
They seem somewhat arbitrarily selected. I don't think it is credible to suggest, for instance, Sandberg. I don't think it is remotely plausible that she would be interested in the position.
It would be interesting if the reporting revealed a little more about the decision/justification.
Despite all the public hand-wringing, Uber's problem isn't all the bad press. The problem is that it's an immature business that hasn't figured out how to make money yet. It doesn't matter how progressive the captain is or how happy the crew is or how much fanfare the trip gets if they still steer the ship into an iceberg.
Maybe the theory is that the head of a company that big doesn't really need to know the problem domain, just be a "good manager"? That's hard for me to believe; it certainly hasn't been true at any scale I have experience with.
Uber is a startup that doesn't make money (actually loses quite a bit per ride), has just been rocked by a major scandal and doesn't posses any sort of tech or business process that is really unique. There is nothing that Uber does right now that another startup could just copy.
They lose money on each ride, and it's incredibly unclear how they will make money outside of trying to run taxis companies out of business by subsidizing fares with VC money and then jacking up fares when there is no more competition.
She also has lots of experience dealing / managing a strong-willed founder with all the equity control.
I really don't know anything about her personality and style, but if she's the super ambitious Mayer-type, I think she'll go for it (assuming she sees a path forward when she gets to see the behind-the-scenes numbers).
If you look at the numbers, all they need to do to reach profitability is increase fares by 7% without increasing the driver's cut.
I'm not suggesting they can just do that overnight without impacting their competitive position, but it's not "incredibly unclear" to me.
Raising fares 7% may get them to profitability, but does it get them to the point where a $70 billion valuation is justified?
Not saying Uber will go down the same path as FB but I am pointing out the flaw in your logic.
a) name recognition in the industry
b) past experience managing large companies
Whether they failed or not is almost irrelevant.
Boards would vote for an arguable incapable Marissa Mayer over some super successful but unknown higher middle manager from Google because she is perceived as less of a risk.
I mean, take a look at Leo Apotheker at HP - he was a complete fall-guy.
What? Apotheker wasn't a fall guy - he made plenty of awful, horrible decisions all on his own, like the Autonomy purchase and his ruminations about divesting the PC business.
I highly doubt Sandberg would want this job, and I highly doubt that Mayer can turn around a company.
1. She was a good person, and went out of the way at times to make employees feel good.
2. She was a terrible boss, who would pass edicts like "our cubicle walls will be cut to 50% of their tomorrow", and pass it off as "because natural light is better for you".
3. I believed as an employee that she cherry-picked data to support pet beliefs like hiring at selected schools, banning remote work and closing satellite offices.
4. She had a preference for ex-Googlers/ex-Google APMs
She would definitely bring positive change in terms of the scandals, but any competent HR department that has the company's long term interests in mind can do that, no?
Re 4: You have your preference as well, so does Google, IBM, Yahoo and the small law firm where I work. Everyone does when it comes to hiring.
Re 4: I am sorry, I meant to complete that sentence with "when it came to hiring execs, or buying companies".
She hired some (what I saw as) very poor execs who were once at Google, one of whom got a 60m severance package for underperformance.
On the other hand, Instant Search was another edict of hers, which required months of massive planning and engineering, until it became usable and wouldn't bankrupt the company, but I'm glad she came up with it.
This was when the vast majority of the company was on git, and the holdouts were typically lazy or understaffed.