Kara Swisher's podcast had an excellent episode on Uber that did a great job surveying this firestorm, and defending Travis' business direction, without exonerating his leadership's many flaws. Definitely worth a listen.
Uber Founder Travis Kalanick Resigns as C.E.O.
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Re: Uber Founder Travis Kalanick Resigns as C.E.O.
#182Somebody in Lyft must be opening a champaigne right now.
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Re: Uber Founder Travis Kalanick Resigns as C.E.O.
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
Uber bought market share by subsidizing rides. That can't go on forever. Or much longer, without more capital. They're already borrowing heavily, having run out of equity sources. The business model hype is supposed to be that they push taxis out of business, then raise rates. Or self-driving cars will somehow save them. Both are unlikely. [1] http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/growth-vs-profits...
Completely ridiculous. The model was not to raise rates in the future. The whole reason they could raise so much money was that they showed as they reduced rates, they induced more demand. They also had data showing increasing lifetime customer value. I recommend reading Brad Stone's The Upstarts. If they can have higher profits/customer while having lower rates than other companies, then they actually have a moat. I…
They don't have any kind of advantage apart from being first mover in the states so no guarantee they will take all the market share in the short term and in the long term if and when AI driven cars come they will be out muscled by car manufacturers who can put millions of cars on the road in a year when they go all in.
Re: Uber Founder Travis Kalanick Resigns as C.E.O.
#184This may kill Uber. Kalanick is a jerk, but he created that insane valuation. Uber has less than a year of runway left at their current burn rate. Unless they can find a bigger sucker than the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia,[1] they're going broke in 2018. (That "undisclosed amount" in 2017 isn't a significant investment on Uber's scale.) IPO? No way. They'd have to publish audited numbers. What's leaked out i…
> Kalanick is a jerk, but he created that insane valuation.
I don't think Kalanick had much to do with it. He created the product, but it pretty much sold by itself -- similar to how Zuckerberg created Facebook, which sold by itself.
I'm very optimistic about this change. To me, Kalanick, and the culture he bread, were toxic to Uber.
I'm reminded of how Microsoft's share price jumped by 12% the day Steve Ballmer's retirement plans were announced. Microsoft has been on a major run ever since. Let's hope that we see something similar here.
Re: Uber Founder Travis Kalanick Resigns as C.E.O.
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
Believe. Do not take action against individuals without investigation, but at organization levels, take measures as though the complaints are true.
No that's ridiculous. Take measures based as though the complaints are made in good faith. If you assume them true then you would act as if the investigation has already taken place, and determined that they are true. If you're going to act like that why would you need an investigation? If complaints or concerns are raised in good faith then you have no need to mistrust the representation and instead can look to the…
>Take measures based as though the complaints are made in good faith.
Which is to say, do more than just investigate. Take action as though the complaints are true, although not necessarily all the action you would take if you knew the complaint to be exactly factual.
You should always investigate, even if (to borrow your formatting)
you believe that they believe that their statements are false
and are making a bad faith accusation. It would still be correct to investigate if that was your belief. If you believed that the accusations were entirely factual, then perhaps the immediate step would be to fire someone. But if instead you simply believe that the person is accusing someone of something in good faith, something has already gone wrong and there is a problem. Even if no one did anything wrong.
To put it in terms that might be more familiar, every complaint is an incident and should involve a (blameless) postmortem that asks how the system failed such that someone felt the need to complain. And action should be taken in response. Sometimes, the system failed in such a way that it allowed a malicious actor to do a bad thing, and that malicious actor should be reprimanded, independent of the postmortem.
Believe the accuser when writing the postmortem, and begin incident response as soon as possible. Investigate fully before reprimanding a potential malicious actor.
Re: Uber Founder Travis Kalanick Resigns as C.E.O.
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lyft? That is just another corporate-controlled centralized system. I'd much prefer something along the lines of http://libretaxi.org/
> No credit cards. Drivers get paid directly with cash. I can understand why some people might see this as a feature, but that's severely misunderstanding why people use services like Uber.
Also, payment is very culturally specific.
In Brazil, Uber required drivers to accept cash payment having seen that it was successful in other countries like India. Suddenly carjackers realised that Uber cars were basically cash machines on wheels and so armed robbery, murder and mayhem ensued.
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/brazils-love-affa...
Re: Uber Founder Travis Kalanick Resigns as C.E.O.
#187Is there an available API/service that does the trip tracking part of Uber? Of any technical challenge that would present a bunch of clones popping up, I can see that being one of them. The rest is just generating an invoice and accepting a credit card payment. Obviously, not to scale, but for small-medium-sized locales, it could suffice.
There already are lots of Uber clones. You can buy Uber-clone code to start your own.
The hard part of cloning Uber as a company is building both sides of the market. It's almost impossible to do without a clever strategy and tons of cash.
Re: Uber Founder Travis Kalanick Resigns as C.E.O.
#188If Uber ends up going down in flames, unable to recover from the scandals and lawsuits, and Lyft prevails, it will be the most incredible change of fate in the business world this century or perhaps longer. The future of automobiles and transportation is still being swirled about, and it feels like Uber's downfall has blown the game WIDE open, ready for anyone (maybe Uber, maybe Lyft, maybe Tesla, Google, Apple, an a…
It will also be a tragedy. With Kalanick gone, Uber is already behaving like a conformist, viz. the recent headlines (1) "Uber co-founder: We’ve been too obsessed with growth" (what?); (2) "Uber is (finally) rolling out tipping" (just awful). That sounds just like Lyft and Lyft is not a worthy rival in any sense of the word.
Why Lyft is not worthy rival of uber? Pretty much wherever you can find uber in USA, you can find Lyft. And considering they have taken way less money from investors than uber and still doing as well tells me that Lyft's executives are not doing that bad after all!
Re: Uber Founder Travis Kalanick Resigns as C.E.O.
#189As a former Uber employee (left 6 mo ago) this is shocking. Can't imagine who will step in...
What are your thoughts on Fowler's assessment of the company, the scandals, and Kalanick himself?
Re: Uber Founder Travis Kalanick Resigns as C.E.O.
#190This may kill Uber. Kalanick is a jerk, but he created that insane valuation. Uber has less than a year of runway left at their current burn rate. Unless they can find a bigger sucker than the sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia,[1] they're going broke in 2018. (That "undisclosed amount" in 2017 isn't a significant investment on Uber's scale.) IPO? No way. They'd have to publish audited numbers. What's leaked out i…
I'm curious how much Kalanick has already taken off the table. That may be a motivating factor in his decision. If he has already pocketed hundreds of millions, he may understand that this could well be the death of the company, but just isn't motivated enough to fight these investors and is willing to let them burn the company to the ground. I wouldn't go as far as to say he doesn't care anymore, but being forced ou…
Kalanick has stated publicly that he has not sold a single share - so he has actually taken no money off the table whatsoever.