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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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.

>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.

(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...

>"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.

> 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?

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...

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

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