491–500 of 1001 posts
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Firing founders was tried in the nineties and it always resulted in failure. Guess the Uber VC's need to painfully relearn that lesson? If Travis had been smart enough to create two classes of stock like Mark Zuckerberg and the Google founders he'd be calling the shots, instead he's out of a job.
You're going to face a lot of harsh criticism if all you can focus on here is VC and profit.
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You guys are talking about Uber dying, but I cannot fathom how this is possible from just the user's perspective. Uber seems to be everywhere, people take Ubers or driver for Ubers every day. How could a company this big fail? Stop growing maybe, but going bankrupt and shutting down?
It's a relished fantasy that Uber is dying or is going to die, because so many people in tech circles hate Uber and Kalanick. It's not actually dying and it's not going to die. Routinely skeptics here will point out that Uber is selling a $1 service for $0.75 (or a similar invented sum). Said skeptics then intentionally, comically ignore that Lyft is and has been doing the exact same thing and has radically less capi…
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You're right, but I think that's exactly how/why Uber's investors were able to convince Kalanick to step down. Uber may or may not take over the world at some point, but Uber needs another round of investment in the next 18 months just to survive. If the existing investors refused to play ball, they could kill the next round, which really would kill Uber. And here's another important moral of this story for founders:…
That's one probable story. Another is that the board could have threatened to sue Kalanick for violating the loyalty and duty obligations that corporate officers have to shareholders - e.g. for suppressing systemic sexual harassment, withholding details about the Otto acquisition, etc.
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Uber doesn't make enough from fares to be profitable, they use investors' money to heavily subsidize them. Once the investor money runs out, Uber won't be able to pay drivers unless they jack up prices considerably. Once they are no longer price competitive, customers will move to other services. Turns out the car service business isn't very sticky at all (even the drivers work for multiple companies...). Drivers sta…
Come on, self driving cars was never a solution for Uber in the medium term. Cabs are in the midst of normal traffic, not even highway or anything. No way this will work good enough within the next 15 years
But then I thought, well, Travis still controls a majority of the votes and he's still on the board.
Others out there who have also been avoiding Uber because of all the bad press, I'm curious how you are thinking about this.
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Uber doesn't make enough from fares to be profitable, they use investors' money to heavily subsidize them. Once the investor money runs out, Uber won't be able to pay drivers unless they jack up prices considerably. Once they are no longer price competitive, customers will move to other services. Turns out the car service business isn't very sticky at all (even the drivers work for multiple companies...). Drivers sta…
> Once the investor money runs out And when will that be exactly? This entire thread is overflowing with nothing but fantasies of Uber dying - basically raw emotional hatred - and little else. Eight years on, they've never had a serious problem with raising capital and there's no evidence to suggest they'll struggle to do so now. The absolute last problem that Uber has right now, is money.
Except that there are no shortage of people who have maintained this view long before Uber's CEO was asked to resign and before Susan Fowler's blog post. Also there are also plenty of people who have commented here that believe Uber's prospect without Travis Kalanick as CEO are not good and also believe he should not have been removed.
>"Eight years on, they've never had a serious problem with raising capital and there's no evidence to suggest they'll struggle to do so now."
You might want to look up the term "irrational exuberance":
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/i/irrationalexuberance.asp
A few weeks ago, I posted on HN about my experience in Hamburg (no Uber in Germany. The local taxi authority has its own app which works equally well, if not better). Last weekend, I was in Budapest. There is no Uber in Hungary (anymore), but the main taxi company (Fötaxi) has its own app which works brilliantly. I honestly see no "moat" around Uber in markets where (large) taxi dispatchers have the insight to build…
>London mirror Uber's functionality London black cabs have been available by app for a while (Hailo). The main reason people use Uber is that it's about 30% cheaper.
Common users aren't also aware that Uber is cheaper mostly because of their own subsidies. If this is gone soon feels like it'll only hasten Uber's demise.
Susan J. Fowler's blog post started the snowball that led to the firing of a $70 billion startup's CEO. I hope this encourages more people to publicly report systematic cultures of sexual harassment.
Because certain people like Uber board member David Bonderman have a really hard time getting it through their thick Neanderthal skulls that they shouldn't make crude sexist remarks about how women talk to much, while on stage at a company all hands meeting whose topic is how the company is turning over a new leaf to address their systematic culture of sexual harassment. Even if it's hilariously ironic because it was actually a man who just couldn't keep his big fat mouth shut.
https://www.recode.net/2017/6/13/15795612/uber-board-member-...
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> it pretty much sold by itself -- similar to how Zuckerberg created Facebook, which sold by itself. Haha don't know where to start. Facebook could have gone to shit in so many ways just like all the predecessors like Myspace and Friendster, but they made all the right decisions and won. Same goes for Uber.
No no, you've got it a little bit backwards. Right now, the biggest profits for capital are in being bearish about Uber and shorting Uber. This is in the nature of amoral capitalist investment: all the right decisions are 'supporting and enabling Uber' right up to the point where the bubble of valuation pops and then the only right decisions are 'bailing and running away from Uber'. Kalanick's right decisions are now…
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That's one probable story. Another is that the board could have threatened to sue Kalanick for violating the loyalty and duty obligations that corporate officers have to shareholders - e.g. for suppressing systemic sexual harassment, withholding details about the Otto acquisition, etc.
This would never have happened.