The Fall of Travis Kalanick
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
For $200k for being lectured for a minute, I'd have a lot of openness (of my wallet) and forgiveness too.
Most of the time that I see someone with a company logo on their shirt I do not readily assume they work at that company.
Personally, most company swag I've worn once or twice and then throw in the Goodwill bag. So it's possible there's some random folks wearing a $NoNameCo shirt, but I'd wager they're just as likely recycled into something else.
I've gotten one single shirt from a hackathon I considered wearing based on their well designed logo, but the entire back is covered in sponsors rendering the entire thing garbage.
Beyond that, I prefer to order t-shirts with my own design; $random-company swag frequently ends up as home/nightwear for either me or my SO.
I couldn't really give a shit what I look like most of the time, however, so your mileage may vary. But I don't have to buy t-shirts...
I'm shocked that, as an employee, there's no "company store" where I can buy an extra $Company coffee mug, t-shirt, polo shirt, etc.
Often times the internal schwag is made by name brand outfits. The stuff they give out can be lowest bidder stuff. Also designs can be somewhat different for the internal vs external versions.
That said, perh for many smaller cos both are one in the same.
Taking sabbatical was his definitely big mistake. But with his parents situation he was also at the weakest point which VCs took full advantage of.
Overall, I am firmly in Kalanik’s side. Stupid VCs always want to get rid of founder who is in to long term and replace him with someone who would get exist fast. Kalanik was media’s punch bag for things he didn’t intended or even didn’t do. But world needed him, industry needed him. Without him politicians and unions would have eaten away any such companies before it became bigger. Lyft is now ripping fruits seeded by Uber. Without his audacity, Uber wasn’t possible.
Anyone know what it’s like inside Uber today?
In some places the CEO is a distant figurehead, and whatever his or her values, the day-to-day experience is more dominated by your local crew of < 20 people. In other places, culture is truly pervasive. I feel like the reporting is saying that culture is pervasive at Uber, but it would be interesting to hear an inside perspective.
Why in the world would you think it needs a peacetime CEO?
Peacetime in business means those times when a company has a large advantage vs. the competition in its core market, and its market is growing. In times of peace, the company can focus on expanding the market and reinforcing the company’s strengths.
In wartime, a company is fending off an imminent existential threat. Such a threat can come from a wide range of sources including competition, dramatic macro economic change, market change, supply chain change, and so forth. The great wartime CEO Andy Grove marvelously describes the forces that can take a company from peacetime to wartime in his book Only The Paranoid Survive.
Uber not only deliberately and flagrantly breaks the law, but it developed systems to prevent police and regulators from doing their jobs.
Uber is like someone who wants to rob banks until he gets rich, and then use the money to stay out of jail and transition into legitimate business.
She seems to be a unique talent who seems genuine from her interviews. I'm curious how she is viewed within Uber and what impact she may be having.
It’s a very unique opportunity for us because she is an expert on what makes companies great. Not just culturally but business strategy too. Having her as a key member of the team is an advantage that t companies don’t have because whereas other people are figuring things out on their own, she actually studied it and taught it.
I hope she stays a long time to help mold this company into one of the greatest companies.
Harvard only?
E.g., for a long distance company fear was the cell phone. ($22B revenue to $8B in a five year stretch)
2. Not competing in self-driving.
Frances Frei is a former Harvard Business School professor and arranged for several HBX classes from Harvard professors on business strategy that were very interesting and helpful. Having her as a guide as to how a great company should be behaving is a huge asset.
TK was great and built the entire industry but he overstepped his abilities and became his and Uber’s worst enemy.
I’m assuming after the SoftBank deal closes many long time employees will be gone. And why shouldn’t they, they are worth millions at this point, but only number in the hundreds. And this happens to all companies in the same situation, like google, Facebook, Dropbox, etc.
Overall the pace has slowed dramatically and has a big company feel. But the majority of people, myself included, are fiercely proud of the work that we do and the product that we have built.
The food could be better, though. Maybe after we become profitable? (This is an internal joke to all Uber employees)
Which classes?
The only way to solve THAT problem is purging the tech bros. Sorry, a big name new hire won't address the situation I experienced. Period.
my interviewer was 15 minutes late to the call, didn't even know what position i was applying for, didn't ask me at all about the assignment they made me do, then ended my call early because they had to be somewhere. already knew i didn't get the job but didn't even get back to me until a month later.
person still works at uber. pretty high up now. i guess i'm glad i didn't get farther given all that came out afterwards.
Honest question. How do you know it's a company-wide culture issue if you haven't worked there? In my experience, teams at Uber are pretty insular with only occasional interactions outside their groups.
I also believe I was the target of an information-hunting initiative within uber, which was revealed publicly last year. I believe I was only interviewed to gain as much information about the company i was working for at the time. The recruiter was not listed on any uber database, and may not have even been officially a recruiting lead. after several probing questions about the company i was working for at the time, it became pretty clear the atg group had more of an interest in gaining info on the company rather than hiring me. extremely unprofessional. but that wasnt even the worse part.
I do have a copy of an email about the newest policy governing competitive intelligence gathering from Salle Yoo (head of legal) from late august 2017. Skimming through it, what you described would be in blatant violation of probably half of the document. Not to mention that it flies in the face of basic human decency.
It was very shocking why they were asking very specific technical questions regarding how the company I was working for at the time was addressing. Let's just say it relates to the infamous Uber-Waymo case. That was my red flag, about 30 min - 1 hour into the whole interview process.
Something is up with SF Bay Area corporate culture. There are many taboos -- things you just don't do -- which I only saw broken in my career once I arrived in the Bay Area.
You needn't hold any particular view to post here and relevant personal experience is always welcome, as long as discussion remains thoughtful. Your more factual comments in this thread have been fine.
I got in just a month before TK stepped out, shortly before the Holden report, and Liane Hornsay and Frances Frei joined. Since then, the company implemented a crisis hotline where you can anonymously report abuse, it ran courses about what's considered inappropriate behavior, and there's a huge overhaul going on with regards to the cultural values and the performance appraisal process. Frances was particularly vocal about the inadequacy of the top 3 bottom 3 system that was in place before.
I mentioned this before elsewhere, but when Liane had a board member step down the afternoon after he made a sexist comment in a all-hands meeting, it spoke volumes about how serious they were about setting new norms at Uber.
I also recall seeing an email a few months ago that basically said that whoever was working on any competitive intelligence project involving spying was to halt all further work effective immediately. The culture of doing things right is definitely becoming a thing.
>"Even in top-level conversations where Kalanick appeared to be absent, other executives and board members suspected that Huffington was serving as his proxy. The founder of the Huffington Post was a constant presence at Uber’s offices, making suggestions that seemed to promote her new wellness company, Thrive Global Holdings LLC. For example, she wanted to put “nap pods” at driver hubs and give drivers meditation wristbands. Huffington’s company received $50,000 in consulting fees from Uber. The perceived self-dealing didn’t go over well internally, and she had the money returned, according to a person familiar with the matter. A spokesperson for Huffington says that Thrive provided services at cost, and that Huffington refunded the fees when events required her to take on a more active role at Uber."
What if the pay day never comes? How will it look when your resume says you stayed at Uber well after everything has been revealed?
Source: know quite a few Uber employees.
People historically went to work in any number of unethical organisations, including industrialised mass murder, human experiments, knowingly poisoning or defrauding people..the list is endless, and it was just any other job to them.
The structure of an organisation means nobody feels individual ethical responsibility, they are just doing their job after all.
In fact, I would say most corporate employees feel like that about the large anonymous bureaucracies they work in, but there is still a good number of people for whom this is unacceptable, the type that ends up saying no to hush money, the type that whisteb-lowers, the type that ends up being shot for part of a resistance against a dictatorship, and so on.
People again and again do this even though it often has terrible consequences for their personal fate, and I think this is the exact same kind of person who does not want to hire or work with the other type, the one that just does their job.
Hiring is already enough of a mind game with without adding "worked for a company the tech press loves to shred every chance they get" to my list of worries.
Wow tell me what company you're recruiting for. I'll make sure to never apply there. This is really priveleged thinking, I've worked for Google, Amazon, and Uber, and two start ups. Let me tell you the engineering culture aren't all that different across all orgs I've worked at. It's really simplistic and naive of you to take what you hear on the media as truth. It's only "widely regarded" because Uber is under heavy scrutiny, because of the industry we operate in. Tell me what company do you work for? If all of media put a magnifying glass over you and all your coworkers, I'll gauarntee, you'll soon be widely regarded as toxic. If your company is even remotely successful, I'll gauarntee that the media will find or spin up a business malpractice of some kind.
Right. It's not as if journalism has been a paragon of ethics and civic mindedness of late.
Uber has many good, decent people, but there is definitely some guilt by association.
Guilt by association is just you being naive.
You might be right.
But there are many people making hiring decisions who are just as naive as I am, so the Uber brand doesn't help.
I’m extremely proud of the work I’ve done at Uber. I have no worries about finding my next job. I have a laundry list of companies who have contacted me since Jan 1, 2018, including FANG.
If the company doesn’t want to hire me because of where I work, I’m happy to not work for anyone who makes snap judgements based on resume line items. That’s basically like excluding people because of the city they grew up in, the school they went to, or the football teams that they support. I’m happy never working for or alongside people like that.
My cohort of friends, many of whom are hiring managers, won’t even patronize Uber, much less hire someone who voluntarily worked there without demonstrably showing signs of serious soul searching about the ethics of the company.
3,000 engineers is not particularly out of line. It's certainly not ludicrous. It's a very large, global business, that is likely to get a lot bigger yet.
Still nothing to scoff at.
Obviously it isn't. You don't choose the city you grow up in, and you have a limited choice over the school you go to. Football team is perhaps the closest in your list - if you support a team that has repeatedly cheated to win games then perhaps it's not unreasonable to judge a person based on their loyalty to that team.
To be clear, I'm not actually that convinced in the argument to not hire Uber employees based on their employment record. But we should at least represent the argument correctly.
Given that your name is "uberemployee"... and that your comment history shows you are for lack of a better term an uber jingoist, I have to ask...
How do I know you're not some HR shill trying to do damage control?
/I say this half jokingly
> For Uber, that would create extra demand at the airport, which meant it could charge more—but this would probably cause a backlash. That had happened before when the company let its “surge pricing” algorithms do their thing. So the New York managers decided to be good citizens and suspend surge pricing for the night.
> If the company wasn’t price gouging this time, maybe it was trying to break up the JFK strike.
That's actually the opposite of what disabling surge pricing does. It makes sure that drivers aren't paid enough to bother picking up passengers there, so it protects the strike.
People are idiots. Uber should start a campaign featuring polar bears cruising around or something (or maybe make fun of trump on their twitter account if they have to save money) instead of trying to fulfill the publics demands.
If you walk into a gas station and they say "sorry, we're out of gas" - no worries, try the next place.
Whereas if they said "we're low on gas, so you have to pay $100 per gallon", there would be public outcry. People would fill up then refuse to pay. People would be forming a mob outside the station.
Rational? No. But it's the way people think, and companies need to adapt to it.
I wouldn't exactly call that a "fall". A lot of bad behavior but it seems like that behavior is being rewarded handsomely.
And that was an unforced error, by Silicon Valley. It was in their DNA. They didn't have to give Travis Kalanick, a guy they despised and never trusted, for good reason—They didn't have to give him all that venture capital.
But they saw him as an expendable probe, so they cynically gave him money, to see how much law-breaking he could get away with in the name of their disruption activities.
That was hubris—and nemesis is well on the way."
- NEXT17 | Bruce Sterling | Live from 2027
Thus the $5 splurge for an Uber instead of the $2 bus hypothetically becomes the $10 Uber with no alternative short of driving yourself.
I'm not super convinced by this argument but it is a reasonable argument. Especially given that Uber wields billions in venture capital specifically to systematically underprice both regular taxis and public transit options.
Fewer people ride public transit when ridesharing is available. Ridesharing actually substitutes more for public transit than for driving, which means it puts more people into small vehicles and creates more pollution and congestion. Whether you see it in growing Denver or not, less riders ultimately means less fares, less funding, and less service.
This sounds like grade-A bullshit. At best rideshare services reduce the use of personal cars and compete with taxi services, but they can't or won't compete with mass transit.
Moreover the upper or even middle class aren't exactly the target market of public transportation services. If anyone was switching from public transportation to rideshare services, that would be the class you assert is being oppressed, which makes absolurely no sense.
You state with no evidence whatsoever that rideshare services "can't or won't compete with mass transit" while the truth is that millions of people decide between the two on a daily basis. In places like NYC and SF where transit is viable, it is widely used by the lower, middle, even upper middle classes. It has become much more prevalent to simply take Lyft to work every day (some employers just pay for it) which leaves less people on MTA or BART. That hurts funding for maintaining extremely expensive public transit systems which often leads to cutbacks in service during tough times as "we can't support the long hours with so few passengers"
Yes some of the lower class benefits from ridesharing (in the short term at least) and I acknowledged there were two sides to the argument. But ultimately if people get some cheap rides for a few years but then have to choose between expensive rides or degraded public transit, then they've almost certainly lost out unless driverless cars or some other innovation saves the day.
It doesn't make sense to say ridesharing "can't or won't compete with mass transit" when its literally the main thing it competes with.
Instead I can get door to door service with Lyft for between $3.90 and $4.10 for the first person and an additional $0.90 for the second person. This means I typically come out slightly ahead with Lyft with two people and its way more convenient.
Its great... for now. Who knows how long it will last at these prices?
This is just talking about the daily commute. Say I want to go to the airport. Its $12-14 in a Lyft usually and about the same for two people on BART. Even if I had a bus pass for work, I'd still need to pay for either BART or Lyft and Lyft saves at least 45 minutes (including 15 minutes of walking to get to a station) for an approximately equal price so it ends up being a no brainer until prices go up.
Obviously if you go large distances then a commuter rail pass or maybe a bus pass would make more sense.
You hardly count as mass transit traffic if your only use is sporadic and it covers close to a walking distance.
According to Google, sfmta fares are $2.25 per adult. Those fares however are for single trips for sporadic users. Those are don't represent mass transit users. People who use mass transit with some relevant frequency use it with enough to justify paying for a monthly pass, which sfmta's goes for between $68 and $80 a month.
Please don’t start a conversation with a rude tone and then cite incorrect info to “correct” the facts that I provided.
As I’ve already mentioned, Lyft and Uber have frequent rider passes too so it isn’t fair to compare a single Lyft ride to the cost of a monthly bus pas per ride.
Monthly passes have also gone up $12-14 compared to what you cited. The bus is a great deal if you pay prices from 5 years ago ;)
To avoid traffic, to avoid parking problems, to avoid driving drunk, to avoid leaving your car unattended in a dubious neighborhood, to avoid parking costs, etc...
I suggest Polanyi's The Great Transformation if you want to find out more about this.
And, well, they actually make money.
The fact that money making overlaps significantly with oppressing the underclass is not the fault of Silicon Valley, though SV isn't doing anything to help. It's a side effect of the fact that we are in an extremely demand constrained economy.
Demand constrained economy is a fancy pants way of saying "everyone is broke so they can't buy anything so why make anything for people to buy?" Below the upper middle class, nobody has any expendable income. That means there are few customers for things designed... well... for customers. That means entrepreneurs can't make money selling things to people unless they're luxury goods, and that's a tough market to break into. (Juciero wasn't such a dumb idea from this perspective. VCs aren't stupid. It was a gamble on creating a new luxury market for the top ~10%. Better executed it might have succeeded.)
As a result Silicon Valley (along with every other industry) must turn elsewhere for customers. Elsewhere is advertisers, propagandists, oppressive regimes, etc., hence surveillance capitalism. The other alternative is to try to find ways to crush margin ("disrupt" as its been redefined to mean) out of some existing industry, which usually means slashing wages and killing jobs and ultimately making the demand constrained economy problem worse.
The ultimate blame for this situation goes to Washington for pushing supply side economics in a demand constrained economy and to New York for abandoning productive capitalism in favor of financial gambling and bubble inflation.
I encourage you to watch the talk, if you're willing to stomach his gen-x sensibility. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2O_fxmrP_Q
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> that means entrepreneurs can't make money selling things to people unless they're luxury goods
"[Moore's law] is ending. It hasn't quite ended yet, but in ten years it'll be obvious that it's over.
Apple is selling jewelry. That's what they sell.
And there is no singularity of California. There is.. I mean Intel could not make it pay. I mean I saw them struggle to keep Moore's law alive.. they were heroes about it - it didn't work."
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> The ultimate blame for this situation goes to Washington for pushing supply side economics in a demand constrained economy
"The mausoleum for Moore's law. They couldn't make it pay under the Washington Consensus, and their version of global neo-liberalism. They just couldn't make it pay.
So now Silicon Valley is becoming Detroit, because that's the logic of American industrial development. Tech has lost its charmed life. Even the Apple AppStore has died.
It's quite like the space race after the American moon landing, or it's quite like the end of a Californian Gold Rush. This is California's DNA, and time passes for everyone, and consequences always arise.
Stuff that seems revolutionary and disruptive in 2017 is mostly frills for rich people."
Do you happen to know that California is still dealing with the environmental effects of the gold rush?
Uber the company may have been egregious in many ways, but along with Lyft and the iPhone and their interpretation of the TLC laws they were able to bring competition to a much needed market and displace the old monopoly that taxi owners had. Which by the way, were much worse on their employees than Uber ever was.
It's also important to note that the experience of using Uber/Lyft is much better than a taxi: 1. You can get back lost items 2. You have some idea that the driver picking you up is professional 3. You have recourse against a bad ride 4. Likewise, it's a two way street, as a rider the driver now also knows that you are going to act appropriately 5. Convenience of being picked up where you are 6. Convenience of not having to explain how to get a to place that isn't often frequented by taxis 7. Convenience of never having to take your wallet out 8. Overall better quality cars, both in terms of comfort and safety since they are newer and more well maintained
But "destroying the taxi cartels" wasn't a good thing, because it replaced an imaginary taxi mafia (that supposedly spanned cities) with a single taxi mafioso that's a global corporation. Uber tried to paint itself as an underdog fighting the establishment, but the truth is that in this battle, it's Uber who was the only large player. That's how they won, too - they could strategically allocate funds to beat taxi networks on a city-by-city basis.
I'm not going to defend all taxis. I happen to live in a place with nice cabs, but I've heard plenty of horror stories from elsewhere. But - ironically, as I warned years ago, back before Uber was a frequent guest of newspaper headlines, but right about time when their rotten-to-the-core culture became visible in their dishonest and unethical behavior - this is a story of unleashing a monster. We should have slain it long time ago, before it got the chance to grow. Alas, here we are.
This is simply bullshit, through and through. Uber, at best, is just a middleman that provides billing services. Those performing the service are local corporations that are free to pick whichever billing service they want. In fact, after Uber started to cover my region the local cab companies were quick to setup a competing service. With them, other multinational ridesharing services started covering my region as well. In two occasions I took a ride whose driver stated he also worked through two Uber competitors.
This is a huge improvement over the old cartel system.
That's the bullshit they try to sell to the taxmen. It isn't how it works in reality, though.
This has been coming down the pike since at least 2012, in days when Sidecar was still a big deal. One good practice all the world religions and philosophies worth a damn tell us: Keep checking your level of smug. Put a dipstick into your smug-sump and read off the level, because it is directly correlated with your douchebag index!
If you have a problem with wages, then you really have a problem with the whole economic structure of our society. Most of those companies couldn't exist if they paid their grunt workers more so it's not like they have much of a choice.
But the argument Sterling seems to be making seems like it more naturally would apply to the working class; while the underclass may be oppressed and SV may play a role, the way he ties Uber in just doesn't seem to connect to underclass as opposed to working class oppression.