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Don’t forget that the secret formula also includes a certain, shall I say, moral flexibility: https://gizmodo.com/portland-says-uber-targeted-more-than-a-...

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I had lunch with an early Uber employee (male) who told me 'wokeness killed uber'. He said the famous cultural issues "weren't real", an if TK hadn't been ousted they'd have destroyed Lyft completely in a few months.

A couple of months before the self driving car killed a pedestrian in Arizona, a drunk engineer from that team told me 'everybody is lying on their human intervention reports to the state, that's just how the sausage is made'

Late Uber produces seriously impressive technology and mature, reliable services. Early Uber was so errr.. problematic... that I'd be hesitant to wear that as a badge.

Susan Fowler killed Uber.

Everything Susan Fowler said was verifiable true. Thuan Pham himself confirmed the details in an all-hands. She didn't kill Uber at all. The reaction to it killed Uber. The culture got gutted by incentive changes and turned it into a promo-chasing culture which killed the engineering excellence it once had.

> The reaction to it killed Uber.

In other words, Uber killed Uber.

Look at her Wikipedia page. She tried stirring the pot at Penn, Plaid, and PubNub. And then Uber was the jackpot for her. She is clearly one of those people who makes a career out of suing their employers. This type of person is common in California. You can make a lot of money by working for a company, suing them, moving onto the next company, suing them, etc.

And yet it is still operating.

The cultural issues were overblown out of proportion with a clear agenda to bring Uber down. The delete Uber campaign was also pre-meditated to malign the company by associating it with trump election.

Yes the beginning was in late January 2017, involving a taxi strike at a NYC area airport and Uber's messaging around continuing to operate to serve the airport and surge pricing. That's how the delete Uber hashtag arose and it just continued with wave after wave of negative stories for the next few months.

The whole way things unfolded subsequently (due to several other pile-ons in following weeks, and eventually TK's ouster in mid 2017) still seems surreal to this day.

(I worked at Uber for ~5 yrs and remember this time period well.)

It wasn't Susan Fowler? I thought she caused all that mess.

Nope that was nearly a month after -- toward the end of February as I recall. #DeleteUber started when Uber turned off surge to an airport from a taxi strike. It was headline news already by the end of January: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/31/business/delete-uber.html And people somehow thought that getting rid of surge temporarily was a bad thing, or using that message to take advantage of the situation. (I don't know exactly what the rationale was, because it still doesn't make sense to me after all these years...)

this is a half truth.

everybody was lying on their takeover reports. EXCEPT Uber.

Uber was banned from California because they refused to lie, and refused to be made to look stupid compared to the companies who WERE lying, and who have literally decapitated multiple people while their vehicle was in control.

my time with Uber was rocky, and I had many qualms. I left partially because I didn't want to be part of the culture that produced Herzberg's death. but this specific thing is not one they should be criticized for.

the cultural issues were real. that's fair to say.

> and who have literally decapitated multiple people while their vehicle was in control.

Do you have more on this?

I only know that Uber killed a pedestrian.

Now Tesla has decapitated people. Particularly after Elon demanded that they stop using the radar to detect potential collisions. (He said it was too conservative, so they should only apply the brakes when both the camera and the radar detected an object.) The Model S drove under a tractor trailer, sheering off the everything from the bottom of the windshield up, and then continued to drive for quite a distance, until it drove into a ditch.

https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-tesla-florida-acciden...

I think you may have been given an official line. Uber loved claiming Lyft was using its dirty tricks in the early days too, even though Lyft was entirely incapable of that kind of thing

What were TK's strengths in this case?

I think the moral flexibility of the diaspora and the people who encouraged it for $ would be a way more interesting article.

From the linked article linked about 'Fast':

Earlier this year, NPR reported on how CEO Holland had his share of controversy in Australia prior to starting Fast. Holland’s former startup, Tow.com.au, which aimed to be “the Uber of towing,” failed in what at least one person described as a “disaster.” NPR’s article noted that Holland’s previous venture was embroiled “in a multimillion-dollar billing dispute with the Australian state government over towing and impounding fees that led to the startup’s liquidation in 2018.”

To be fair the laws those regulators were in charge of enforcing were unjust. A victory for modern day civil disobedience, even if it was to make a buck.

A lot was also in a gray area. In fact France ending up (I think very unfairly, but ofc I worked at Uber) passing laws specifically against Uber to make it retroactively illegal. Which basically was a tacit admission that is was OK by the rules initially. Obviously the idea of being able to "hail" a ride -- specific to you -- in near real-time was not really considered around the world when a lot of taxi rules and regulations were done.

So you ended up having insanity, like the necessity for even a black car service to "return to their base" after a ride, for time periods up to 1.5 hrs. Basically trying to nix the notion of efficiency in ridesharing.

We all know that nowadays most of those rules were battled back.

But the taxi industry and regulators had some very crooked ways which were really to the detriment of broader society trying to get places without having their own car.

On the other end you have Uber who passed all the costs onto the driver, subsidized drives through unlimited investor money to crush any potential competition etc.

There has to be a middle ground.

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