581–590 of 1001 posts
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> I dunno, my guess is that he was too set in his ways to make the leap from "CEO of a growth startup" to "CEO of a mature company". If you look at founder/CEOs who have made that leap, they all tend to be very young (Jobs, Gates, Zuck, etc) and had very strong teams behind them. And in Jobs' case, it took an absence from the company of more than 10 years…
Jobs got fired from apple. Edit: Downvotes for simply stating a fact?
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I dunno, my guess is that he was too set in his ways to make the leap from "CEO of a growth startup" to "CEO of a mature company". If you look at founder/CEOs who have made that leap, they all tend to be very young (Jobs, Gates, Zuck, etc) and had very strong teams behind them. Someone like Kalanick - who has run multiple startups to various exits - has been running startups all his professional life. His management…
Uber's valuation is still based on its growth. Therefore, it still needs to be a startup to justify this valuation and burn. I'd argue that a "mature CEO" is not a fit for Uber which needs to keep growing or die.
The valuation can be quite high if you assume that the value in the exponent is low.
But I personally think that the "autonomous vehicle revolution" is not going to pay off as well for Uber as they had hoped. It's becoming more clear that the market for autonomous vehicles isn't going to look like the market for human-driven ones -- and vehicle manufacturers are going to be looking to build their own self-driving auto services rather than sell self-driving vehicles directly to consumers.
Uber's biggest innovation was their app. Even complex apps like Uber are not hard to clone if you have any sort of budget. There's an assumption a lot of investors make about their brand value: it assumes that another, already strong brand does not enter the same market. Seeing as Tesla has made no secret of their intentions to compete directly with Uber in the ride-hailing space, I don't think that's a fair assumption. Would you rather call an Uber or a Tesla at this point?
And what does buying a Tesla in that scenario even look like? Do you buy a car and rent it out a la Airbnb when you're not using it? How much money do you get for that, and how much of a cut does Tesla get since it's their algorithms actually driving the car?
Don't get me wrong; the brand value is actually really high because hundreds of millions of wealthy customers worldwide know Uber. Even if the company fails spectacularly, someone will buy them for a few billion in a fire sale just for the brand.
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…
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:…
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…
Paying the driver directly still sucks. In the US you constantly deal with the "I don't take cards" bullshit and lack of simple feedback for when they take you on a scenic tour. I would be fine with taxis if I didn't have to interact with the driver at all when it came to payment and could provide feedback right in the app.
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I don't (yet) have an opinion on this, but it's important to note the other side of the coin... > Hope everyone's paying attention to the identity of these investors behind this horrid behavior. Travis is not without his flaws but he created an awful lot of value for them. He's been very well compensated for the value he's created. You don't keep a job because of what you've done in the past, you keep a job based on…
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.
And how many promising companies failed with their founders at the helm?
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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:…
I dunno, my guess is that he was too set in his ways to make the leap from "CEO of a growth startup" to "CEO of a mature company". If you look at founder/CEOs who have made that leap, they all tend to be very young (Jobs, Gates, Zuck, etc) and had very strong teams behind them. Someone like Kalanick - who has run multiple startups to various exits - has been running startups all his professional life. His management…
More like "CEO of a growth startup" to "fixer who can pull an over-valued startup out of a nose dive." That's a much tougher leap.
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You don't have a company yet if you're dependent on future investment.
Eh, I think that's taking it a bit too far. I think it's far to say you don't have a sustainable business model yet if you're dependent on future investment.
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Please don't further this narrative that sexually harassing women and his general brohaviour are good for business. They are not. There are ways in which being an asshole ay be good for founders (cf Steve Jobs). Kalanick is just an asshole, and even take-no-prisoner ask-forgiveness-later businesses run much better with a bit of attention to human decency.
has Kalanick himself ever harassed women? I'm genuinely asking, I haven't followed the Uber story closely but I thought the harassment accusations weren't aimed at the CEO. I don't think anyone's suggesting that sexually harassing women is good for business.
I've commented all over this thread (as a sister comment points out) because it appears there is a narrative that his attitude towards his employees misbehaviour is at least closely linked to the personality traits that allowed him to be successful. That can be seen, I believe, by the many comparisons to Steve Jobs, for whom it's accepted more widely that it was often hard to work for him because of his perfectionism, but that this was a necessary trait for his success.
The danger here is that people (mis)understand the situation and start excusing inexcusable behaviour, or even imitate it, because they think it's linked to success. It is not. You have to separate the strip-club-going bravado from the other law-breaking, which could at least in theory explain Uber's success.
Also, it's so disappointing to see so many people buy into the cult of personality of the Startup Founder. There's a lot of half-baked reasoning going on on why Uber's fate should be inexorable tied to Travis. So far, the two main arguments I've seen are "because Steve Jobs" and "he raised so much money for them". Neither one of these are compelling in explaining why Uber's survival prospects should be further damaged by a change at the top.
The only argument that's compelling to me is the concept that they've built their whole business on unethical assholery and it's going to take a lot of time and energy to reorient a big company around a different M.O. But even that's not very compelling, because it presumes that there aren't a whole lot of people already there who would flourish in a healthy, ethical work environment. I know a number of people there who feel that way.