Lack of cohesion in Uber's search for a new CEO | Hacker News Reader

Lack of cohesion in Uber's search for a new CEO

recode.net

86 pointsrmason82 comments

Possibly the most incompetent board of directors in the past decade. Can't reign Travis in, couldn't avoid all of this by forcing Travis to get an adult COO like Sandberg, fire him after he takes a break to mourn his moms death. They should all resign as well. A boards job is to reign in the CEO's bad tendencies. Really what have any of them accomplished by being on the board? Is there anything they can point to? And on top of all of that, their busy leaking news instead of picking a CEO...

> Really what have any of them accomplished by being on the board?

They provided high-level guidance of a company that went from non-existent to $70Bn valuation in 7 years.

I'd be very curious to know what boards you approve of.

Aren't most board members the same people who decided on that valuation, ie, the investors?

The same can be said of Travis if not more yet he is out. So why should the board remain?

Because the shareholders have not decided otherwise.

I don't usually argue with downvotes, but I'm going to make an exception. The board decided that a change of CEO was requiered. Who has the power to decide a change in the board is required? HN commenters?

The shareholders who in this case are represented by the board members. In a public company, an activist investor can bring the votes and force a change in the board. Similarly, a majority investor could technically sway board members to vote out another member (as long as it's allowed in the bylaws)

That was exactly my point. This piece by Matt Levine is relevant (https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-04-24/board-vot...):

"On the other hand, you know, the buck has to stop somewhere. But where? The CEO is an obvious answer, and he is gone, but the buck is still moving. It might get the board. What's next? Should the shareholders fire themselves, for failing to catch the problem in time?

There is a traditional model in which the board of directors represents the shareholders: When management messes up, the board gets angry on behalf of the shareholders; their dudgeon becomes its dudgeon. The modern model is increasingly that the board is identified with management: When management messes up, the shareholders get angry at the board; their dudgeon turns against the board. The modern model might be more accurate in describing the relationship between many boards and managements. But you want a balance between dudgeon and continuity. If the managers mess up and the board gets rid of them, it can demand that the new managers fix the problem, and hold them accountable for doing it. But if you get rid of the board too, then who stays around to make sure the problem gets fixed?"

I guess the question is, what kind of competencies would one expect to find in a board. Board seats are typically filled by "money people." I think most boards have a good understanding of accounting, investment, fundraising... If they have founders, employees or specifically recruited outside managers they might have a good understanding of product or market strategies.

But, managing crisis like this?

In principle, boards can remove and replace CEOs but this is such a rare occurrence. There's no lower stakes equivalent to it. They don't have to remove and replace more junior managers. Competencies in an area you never touch on... in a scenario most board members have never seen... it would be a kind of fluke if they happened to be competent at this sort of task.

> I guess the question is, what kind of competencies would one expect to find in a board

I've been looking into this in the context of English NHS Trusts. Here are a few things I've found useful.

https://nhsproviders.org/media/1057/we-need-to-talk-about-bo...

https://www.leadershipacademy.nhs.uk/resources/healthy-nhs-b...

Effective challenge on a unitary board: http://www.frontline-consultants.com/announcements/effective...

There was quite a lot of work in the UK about effective boards after the Guinness scandal, among others.

For better or worse, they accepted investments with limited power to influence the company.

Incompetence is ousting the CEO that grew a company to $70B with no succession plan. FWIW, the only two boardmembers involved in the ousting were Benchmark and TPG. Let this be a warning to anyone ever considering either for a board seat.

> A boards job is to reign in the CEO's bad tendencies.

A board's job is to rein in the CEO's bad tendencies.

I'm shocked, shocked I tell you, that a guy that founded a massive company and drove it to unparalleled success only to be forced out while in the early stages of mourning his mother's unexpected death (and caring for his severely injured father) has not gone quietly into the night.

I think the passenger rape records issue was the straw that broke the camel's back and he had to go, but I don't think it needed to be done the way it was. Sure, there's a decent argument that he only has one speed and would be meddling regardless (as he supposedly was while he was supposed to be "on leave"), but doing it the way they did made Travis lashing out once he'd had a bit of time to process it an absolute 100% certainty.

You're completely eliding all the scandals and scummy behavior by various members of Uber under his watch. And while I sympathize with what his family is facing in their personal tragedy, that it occurred at the same time those various scandals came to a head is merely a coincidence in timing, if an unfortunate one for Kalanick.

Check the first sentence of the 2nd paragraph - I agree that he needed to be replaced due to the multitude of issues. I just think the execution of it was very poor coming within a week of his mother's death.

Remember, he was already "on leave" - whether he was honoring it or not. By public accounts, he wasn't. So the board said "ok, he's not going to change, let's remove him." My argument is they should've given him a couple weeks and then sat him down and had the "the well has broken, we need a new face for the good of the company, please support this" talk. Instead, they blindsided him at a hotel that he'd flown to halfway across the country to try to help the company (recruiting a COO) while his father's still severely injured. Had they done it in a more humane way, they might have been able to secure more cooperation in the long-term, and they could've begun to quietly get their ducks in a row during that 2-3 week grace period before giving him the ultimatum. Instead, they executed it at a moment of maximum weakness for him, which got the job done in the moment but set themselves up for him to go scorched earth in the long-term, undermining the whole exercise. Again, I do think they needed to fire him, but they'd bought a bit of time with him "going on leave" and I think it might have been more effective had they leveraged it rather than going for the immediate KO.

Perhaps we would've ended up here regardless, but maybe not.

It seemed like uber was receiving weekly PR body blows up to that point. Bad stuff.

If you decide to fire somebody, does it ever make sense to wait? Not layoff, but firing an individual. If it's come to that, you pull the trigger. it's just messy, a reasonable period or mourning is different between different people and it's not clear that he was actually doing that anyways. Weeks will matter to the future valuation for the new CEO.

The way you fire someone reveals the kind of leader you are.

Can we address the fact that Travis not honouring his leave was him calling for the resignation of a board member who practically personified the issues surrounding Uber at the time?

>Earlier in the day at an Uber staff meeting to discuss the company’s culture, Arianna Huffington, another board member, talked about how one woman on a board often leads to more women joining a board.

>“Actually, what it shows is that it’s much more likely to be more talking,” Mr. Bonderman responded.

Bonderman was fired for that. What more is there to say?

So you are shocked that a company that has shown little inclination for subtlety and discretion did something that lacked sensitivity?

> My argument is they should've given him a couple weeks and then sat him down and had the "the well has broken, we need a new face for the good of the company, please support this" talk.

If we think that the board had not already had that talk, several times, months before... that's a sign that the board's even more incompetent.

I'm still surprised that I never see Robin Chase's name floated. She's a successful serial transportation entrepreneur, and even wrote an op-ed outlining a vision for Uber post-Travis: https://www.google.de/amp/s/www.wired.com/story/what-ubers-n...

Decent chance she wanted the job (and penned the op-ed with that in mind), but the feeling wasn't mutual.

I would doubt Uber's board wants a "serial entrepreneur". Uber is going to be a $12-15B (revs) company this year, potentially with an impending IPO. That's two orders of magnitude larger than Robin Chase's experience at ZipCar. I would bet they're looking for someone with experience at (growing) companies in the $15-30B range, probably from a logistics-centric industry.

Non-AMP link because it's faster: https://www.wired.com/story/what-ubers-next-ceo-needs-to-say

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-07-28/libor-pho... is vindicated!

> Who will be the next chief executive officer of Uber Technologies Inc.? The shortlist includes "fewer than six candidates," and they seem to be pretty big names: Meg Whitman of Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. has turned Uber down, and Jeffrey Immelt of General Electric Co. is in the running. It is hard to know how attractive an opportunity Uber is for someone who has already run a much bigger and more profitable public company, and you could imagine a lot of quick "no's" from that list. I hope it's like "Meg Whitman, Jeffrey Immelt, Jeff Bezos, Barack Obama and ... wait ... Travis Kalanick ... how'd he get on this list?"

They might as well re-phrase the question to "Who wants to go the prison?" :)

WHAT UBER'S NEXT CEO NEEDS TO SAY by Robin Chase

https://www.wired.com/story/what-ubers-next-ceo-needs-to-say...

BTW Robin Chase is probably a great candidate to be CEO of Uber.

I don't really understand why the author of the article is worried about the CEO not being a woman... Seriously, who cares? It's not going to look good for who ever takes over and there are a lot less woman candidates. Uber will be lucky if it makes it to 2019 IMO.

Would give them 6 months, but half the valley invested in them.

Kara Swisher writes "Ew" in news articles. Her work is devoid of substance and just pushes an agenda that is populist and will get her likes from the largest group of people on Twitter

Yup, this doesn't contain any quotes from well placed sources or anything like that nor delivers any new information about, say, Meg Whitman's candidacy. Totally devoid of merit.

There is no better evidence of her bias against Travis and Uber than how she conducted herself in her interview with Adam Lashinsky. Here's the full transcript:

https://www.recode.net/2017/7/16/15980006/transcript-journal...

She isn't a journalist. She's an activist pushing an agenda, facts-be-damned. Long gone are the day's of Walter Cronkite's "And that's the way it is."

This is a much broader trend in contemporary media. The line between news and editorial has been all but erased.

Yes, I agree. However, it's one thing to occasionally give an opinion in the course of practicing journalism and something entirely different to steer the conversation towards the message you're trying to push. Kara wasn't even subtle about it this interview. Her bias was not just showing, but on full display for all to see.

It's really unfortunate because the individuals in the general population don't really get the facts and an opportunity to each come to slightly different conclusions. It's journalist malpractice to tell people what to think, since that's not journalism. That's propaganda.

Agreed. I wish they would just state the facts, and avoid the SJW nonsense. I don't care about the author's thoughts on identity politics - I just want the substance of the story.

Calling out the prime goal of remedying a toxic sexist culture in an article that is being written because of said company's toxic sexist culture isn't identity politics nor SJW, it's reality.

Here's reality: kowtowing to leftist media pressure in the name of making a company more 'sensitive and diverse' (i.e., hiring people for any reason other than their competence, such as their addition to 'diversity'), will kill it. Full stop. Ridesharing is quickly turning into a low margin, commodified business, and the more time Uber wastes with this nonsense, the more of an edge its competitors will gain on it.

Unfortunately, your observation applies to all American companies.

Diversity can contribute value in many contexts, but diversity for the sake of diversity is a distraction. Homogeneity can also contribute in many contexts as well. Homogeneity and diversity exist on a spectrum and the right balance between those two depends on what you're optimizing for. There is no silver bullet.

That all said, the only diversity that really matters is diversity of knowledge, experiences, opinions and thoughts. Not all experiences, opinions and thoughts are relevant to the task at hand. Diversity of identity is generally a poor proxy for the type of diversity that has utility.

I guess you just must have been momentarily distracted when you reached the part in the article in which she explicitly states why: "While gender of a leader should not matter to dispatching such appalling behaviors, the symbolism over the appointment of a female CEO at Silicon Valley’s most toxic-bro startup is unquestionable."

That quote seems to have some sexist elements itself.

It doesn't when this entire drama is due to the company's sexist and toxic culture.

sexism + sexism != sexism?

The sexist part is the implication that every man is "bro" somehow... that only a female CEO could count as a symbolic change in leadership.

That isn't being implied.

And an "unquestionable" symbolism is not the same as "the only possible" symbolism.

The only unquestionable symbolism would be hiring a female CEO?

You're exhausting if only because you try to place the comments of others into a linguistic box of your own creation, not theirs.

There are undoubtedly many things Uber could do that would be "unquestionably symbolic." Hiring someone else with a history of sexual harassment would be unquestionably symbolic. Nowhere did anyone say that hiring a female CEO is the only unquestionably symbolic act they could do. But it is one of them, and in that hypothetical instance, the symbolism would be positive.

And no, it isn't the only unquestionably positive act they could do.

I don't see the implication at all. The culture of the company can be "bro" without every single employee being "bro". By your logic all the women working at Uber would also have to be "bro".

Are you implying the only possible solution for that is a women? That itself is very sexist.

Indeed, my point exactly.

I will bet you any amount of money that you care to wager that Uber "makes it to 2019."

Your criticism of company is one thing but thinking that they are not lasting longer than 6 months is a complete oversight on your part of how dominant they are in market or how many new markets they are trying to enter. No one cares about their management troubles outside silicon valley and rightly so. Consumers care about product and convenience . I agree with the part that they should aim for competent candidate not female candidate but thinking they are not making it into 2019 is just laughable.

It's a nice article that summarizes the current turmoil of Uber well if it's all accurate. I don't understand the need to make the article political thought with the references to Trump and Anthony Scaramucci, there's just no relevance.

I don't think the mention of Trump was political - it's undisputed that his presidency has been plagued by leaks so far. The mention of Scaramucci seems to be closer, I don't understand the relevance of it.

There isn't an interim CEO and the company is currently managed by committee.

The board is waffling around and doesn't seem committed to finding a replacement, even interim.

I'd say that Travis K isn't the only one planning a Travis K comeback.

This happens when people can't communicate enough.

worst part is, the BoD can't seem to decide on enough strategy to sustain the momentum Uber has built up. It's more in their incentive to pick someone short-term to get through IPO-ing to some degree, than you can be sustained by the public market if nothing else.

None of you have any idea what travis offered on a personal level or did on a daily basis in the fight to build a brand and open new markets.

No cohesion here either, just more twitter zeitgeist groupthink.

It's a tough problem. Uber's success is due to the CEO being an asshole. Yet that's become a problem.

How about Peter Thiel? He's a strong enough personality for the job. He's gay, so the women at Uber don't have to worry. Thiel was at one time talked about for a job in the Trump Administration, but that's now a worse option than running Uber. He's on a few boards and nominally runs a not-very-successful hedge fund [1], so he's more or less available.

[1] https://www.quora.com/What-went-wrong-with-Peter-Thiels-hedg...

(a) we don't know that uber's success is due to travis being an asshole. could simply be an (unfortunate) correlation.

(b) "He's gay, so the women at Uber don't have to worry." wtf? being gay is orthogonal to being a misogynist, much less preventing organizational misogyny.

I don't think I've ever met a gay misogynist, much less heard of one.

Milo Yiannopoulos?

I must admit I'm only vaguely aware of him. Which of his stances are misogynistic?

Not such a strange concept. I have no opinion on the subject, but other people do: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/the-gay-communit... https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/nov/06/misogy...

If women have no confidence in Uber's ability to deal with sexism then Thiel, with his "diversity myth" writings, pride in Paypal's extreme monoculture and stated belief that extending the franchise to women rendered his preferred form of capitalism politically impossible is about the last person you'd hire to fix that. (It wouldn't be a politically savvy move even if he did actually have a good idea of what went wrong and how to fix that). There's a bit more to fixing an organization's perceived deeply sexist culture than not actively participating in the molesting of women.

I would have to agree. I haven't heard anyone suggest that Uber's CEO was personally harassing women. He just allowed a culture to develop where people could get away with harassment as long as they were sufficiently important to the organization.

Thiel being personally unlikely to harass women is not really an important consideration because the same is probably true of all of the other candidates.

> Uber's success is due to the CEO being an asshole.

That's simply not true. Uber's success is due to being in the right place at the right time and executing well in the early years.

The combination of smartphones and widespread trust in online reviews as a system of enforcing good behavior were what made ride-sharing as we know it possible. Uber understood the real value prop - a seamless, low-stress way to take a car from A to B is what matters; a feel-good community "sharing" vibe only gets you so far. And they developed their business in a smart way - it's a commodity product, so you have to become the default in people's minds (like Xerox or Polaroid before), that means build brand awareness and saturate as many markets as possible as quickly as possible.

TK being an asshole is orthogonal to their success. There's a good argument to be made that it actually has held them back and limited their success. Given the size of the market why are they only a $70B company instead of a $200B or $1T company by now?

Why was Travis an asshole? What did he exactly do?

There's a line of reasoning for such a statement:

- TK - asshole - doesn't care about legality or ethics - does questionable things to gain an unfair advantage - company succeeds quickly in the short term - karma eventually catches up to him - karma crushes the company

It is very debatable at every point, but it is there.

Uber's success rests on three major illegalities - violating labor law by treating drivers as independent contractors while telling them where to go and what to do, operating an unlicensed taxi service, and not doing adequate background checks. It took an asshole to realize that with enough VC funding you could get away with that at scale.[1]

[1] http://money.cnn.com/2016/08/11/technology/uber-lawsuits/ind...

>He's gay, so the women at Uber don't have to worry.

Genuinely, these comments always open my eyes to how and why the toxic cultures pervasive to tech still survive and thrive in our industry. Anywhere else, I'd have to expect this to be a joke or a troll - but no, it is a dead serious discussion regarding whether being a homosexual male grants you automatic impunity to having prejudices or bias. It isn't like the Kalanick committed every action of misogyny at Uber. The reason it's especially concerning is that it's a systematic cultural disease there perpetuated by the inaction and/or encouragement of management.

> whether being a homosexual male grants you automatic impunity to having prejudices or bias.

Totally agree with you on this, but I'm curious why you're also not calling out those who are suggesting the candidate should be a woman, as if being a woman grants you "automatic impunity to having prejudices or bias" as well.

All individuals regardless of identity are capable of having prejudices or biases.

I'm not calling those people out because I'm not reading the riot act on everyone I disagree with regarding Uber's search for a CEO, I'm disagreeing with the person who commented above me. I think there are arguments to be made that appointing female CEO could culturally disrupt Uber in a way that might encourage more equality, but I agree that those arguments can't base on the idea that being in X demographic immunizes you to X prejudices.

>"Uber's success is due to the CEO being an asshole."

It seems to me like you might be conflating being bold with being asshole. I'm pretty sure they can be mutually exclusive. It's quite possible to make bold business moves without being an asshole. Examples of bold vs asshole:

Taking on the entrenched taxi medallion oligopoly is being bold.

Making sexist jokes in an interview with a magazine(or at all)is being an asshole.

Making an entry into the Chinese market is being bold.

Berating a driver who is voicing concerns about falling fares is being an asshole.

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