This is no excuse to sue their investee. WORST VCs ever. This will serve as a cautionary tale to avoid working with benchmark.
I would 100% have expected Sequoia to sue me after I took their money if I had done the same.
We are not kings. At some point misalignment with your board is your responsibility. This isn't some Series B spat.
Consider his mental state during this time. He lost his mother for crying out loud and all these things were happening at the same time. Now the VCs want to pile on to that with a lawsuit. I lost my mom 3 years ago and I wasn't in a good place for months. I'm surprised he was able to even function whilst the weight of the world was on his shoulders.
I'm not saying that he should be CEO again just yet (he can take a break and recover) but to sue him at this time like he wasn't directly responsible for the billions they're now so eager to cash out on...?
Don't forget the toll entrepreneurship can have on someone's personal life: you know it from experience and you can also read on how Travis had to move back home in the early days because things didn't work out with initial projects. This is why I would always give first priority of investment to someone like Vinod Khosla who says, 'in 30yrs, I have never once voted against an entrepreneur in a board meeting'. He goes further to criticize most of these VCs as incredibly unsympathetic towards entrepreneurs because they don't know the pains of building a company. Benchmark are exactly the type of VCs Vinod Khosla warns entrepreneurs to avoid.
> I would 100% have expected Sequoia to sue me
Don't know much about Sequoia but I have never seen an article where they've sued an investee.
But Uber has grown to impact an incredible number of souls. Gurley et al. have a serious fiduciary duty to exercise here, one not just aligned with their own greed.
Separately, Khosla is not a paragon of founder-friendliness despite his public attestations. No VC is. It is silly to think that 100% alignment can ever exist with an investor — they legally cannot abdicate their voice entirely. At some point Travis needs to recognize that he consciously took risks that diluted his power in exchange for funding. Had he run a profitable business that would not have needed to happen. You can't have your cake and eat it, too.
There's no evidence he hasn't been anything but. I choose to trust him. If I had to choose between a VC leaving a company and the founder CEO leaving, I'd rather the VC left which is the mantra that Khosla advocates for. Before you say the VCs money is at stake, remember also the founders' and employees' sweat equity is also at stake - you can always make more money, but when time is gone, you can't recover it.
And there is, of course, evidence that Khosla is not 100% founder-friendly, as there is data for every other VC and every other founder out there. Every conflict is gray.
But choose as you wish, of course. That's capitalism.
I wonder how often Kalanick has used that phrase.
There are different intentions in lawsuits; You seem to think they're seeking damages, but it seems more likely they're just trying to prevent the torturous interference of uncertainty he is causing as news breaks that he wants to be CEO again.
Leaks of backchanneling directly affect their investment and exit strategy. Whether he is CEO, on the board, or "a trusted advisor" the investors and company want to have an appearance of solidarity and confidence.