Btw, I am an Uber employee, AMA.
I've helped 2 women find new work, moving from the chaos of Uber. Both saying variants of "the shit I took there was only offset by the stock's possible valur and the waymo stuff calls that into question."
Is the divide between men and women's experience there that intensely different, I wonder?
A lot of us are still here in hope that the folks like Saad, Gandahar and Kalanick who have left are replaced with people with an ounce of emotional intelligence like Frances Frey. Folks who are in a position and mindset to force the structure of the company to grow. Seeing Kalanick apologists like Saad leave is one of the best signs we might finally be ready to do that. It's going to be a long slow slog of 'losing' people like them until we're in a place where we're not actively villains, but I still think the company could do it or I'd be gone.
But it's striking what a very reliable classifier the union of 'man?' and 'yearsAtUber >>> (> 4)' is in figuring out who's vocally unhappy about Travis leaving. Perhaps I am simply suffering from availability bias and therefore don't know about all the satisfied and successful women at Uber speaking up that their experience is positive.
Did Kalanick really set up and encourage a bro Culture? Did he respect fellow employees as humans or was just running behind business success?
Travis had a deep empathy for the challenges of building successful products, and would offer tremendous grace and thoughtful advice to his team solving problems in the trenches. When projects went sideways, and we presented numbers that were less than stellar, Travis was both empathetic and optimistic while offering actionable guidance and a path forward.
"Bro culture" is a loaded term and the wrong one to describe the environment Travis cultivated. He had tremendous focus on the problems at hand and pushed his team to operate with a sense of urgency to solve them. If anything I think he cared too much about each individual problem, which propelled his teams forward but sometimes left him too deep in the details of his business rather than focusing on the big picture.
> Did Kalanick really set up and encourage a bro Culture?
No, not at all. He's a grown man and unbelievably serious about Uber.
> Did he respect fellow employees as humans
Yes. Always.
> or was just running behind business success?
I don't know what this means, but Travis Kalanick is absolutely the main reason that Uber has grown faster than almost any other company in history.
That's just awfully close to that "9 out of 10 people enjoy..." joke.