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Uber Founder Travis Kalanick Resigns as C.E.O.

nytimes.com

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Re: Uber Founder Travis Kalanick Resigns as C.E.O.

#261
post #41

This 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…

why can't they just stop the burn rate, most drivers won't jump ship and they can have a skeleton crew? or does this prevent them paying back investors?

Re: Uber Founder Travis Kalanick Resigns as C.E.O.

#262

Earlier 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…

> The whole reason they could raise so much money was that they showed as they reduced rates, they induced more demand.

I've yet to see an Uber driver who started rolling in cash after the rates were dropped. 100% of my anecdotal conversations (and that's not 99.9% rounded up, but a straight up 100%) reminisce about the good ole days.

Re: Uber Founder Travis Kalanick Resigns as C.E.O.

#264
post #73
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't kid yourself for a second that investors are kicking Travis out because of a moral imperative.

No, they're kicking him out because the public is coming to see it as a moral imperative that Uber needs to be held accountable in some way for their behavior. I don't really care if the investors have or follow their morals, as long as they are in some way strongly incentivized to behave in that manner. We can't make the people have morals, but we can strongly encourage them to act like they do.

The investors could have gotten away with much less, certainly without firing him, from a PR angle. I say this as someone who hates Uber with a passion because of the senior management's sliminess, and who no longer uses Uber because of it.

My guess is that there are also much deeper issues here. And things like the Waymo deal indicate that there may be a whole slew of other slimy behavior that will end up hurting Uber more in the end. My guess is that we don't know the depths of poor decisions at Uber.

Re: Uber Founder Travis Kalanick Resigns as C.E.O.

#266
post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The board lacked the power to fire him. He controls most of the company. They had persuasive power, sure. But if he had wanted to dig in and refuse to leave, he could have.

But then he probably would have a hard time raising more money.

This is the part that I think people are missing. Uber has a tight runway and burns a ton of cash every year. It needs focus, execution, and some more time (aka $$) to push this thing over the edge into profitability and IPO readiness. This means that Uber may need some money in about a year if it isn't IPO ready by then. Someone here mentioned that at their current burn, they have less than a year of runway left.

So while Travis holds the majority of the voting power, he doesn't hold a ton of real-world cachet because of circumstance around the company. Uber is in a relatively fragile period in it's journey and no one at the top can afford to disagree right now so he has to mostly do what the big chunk of investors collectively tell him to do. The hope is that they can stay calm, run on autopilot without Travis for a bit and guide this cruise missile right through an IPO if everything goes according to plan. Since the investors effectively control the supply of additional capital, they are in a unique position of power here relative to Travis.

I think Uber's downfall is a bit exaggerated in the rest of these comments here. They'll go through some troubling times, but they just need to stay calm, and guide the ship. A lot of the pieces are already in place thanks to Travis, but Uber doesn't necessarily need him to oversee the next milestone the same way they needed him the past couple of years of insane growth.

Re: Uber Founder Travis Kalanick Resigns as C.E.O.

#267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone think that Amazon could be eying Uber but waiting for them to lose value? Seems like it would be a natural fit for their delivery network especially considering their recent purchase of Whole Foods.

Amazon already has Flex. Source: I'm a software engineer in that team. Uber is way too expensive at this point.

At this point, sure. In all likelihood, the actual operating business is more fairly priced in a fire sale. Free up overhead by trimming down the "eat the world" grandiose plans, cut growth-for-the-sake-of-fundraising subsidies, add some haircuts on bondholders, and you've got something that will reasonably work.

Re: Uber Founder Travis Kalanick Resigns as C.E.O.

#268

Founder CEO's do not resign, they are fired. The article skips over the board entirely, but Travis must have been blindsided by his co-founder Garret Camp and early CEO Ryan Graves for this to have transpired. The board likely threatened to fire him unless he resigned, because there's no way Travis walks away because of this investor letter. It's more than likely the letter just provided the air cover his old friends…

The board lacked the power to fire him. He controls most of the company. They had persuasive power, sure. But if he had wanted to dig in and refuse to leave, he could have.

>> The board lacked the power to fire him

That sounded right, but I was curious where that gets quantified. You can find the information in Uber's Articles of Incorporation. Not sure if this is the most recent copy, but here's a version from 2013...

http://orfe.princeton.edu/~alaink/SmartDrivingCars/PDFs/Uber...

The stuff about voting rights and board members starts on page 16.

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