Uber Founder Travis Kalanick Resigns as C.E.O. • Hacker News Board

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

#661

Post by camelite » Wed, Jun 21, 2017, 2:52 PM UTC

kevinburke wrote: post #598

dixie_land wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to default to believing people that report harassment unless I can find credible evidence it didn't happen. I hope to God you don't show up for jury duties.

Different standards should and do apply in criminal trials ("innocent until proven guilty", "beyond a reasonable doubt"), civil trials ("preponderance of the evidence"), and the workplace, where anything goes.

Should "anything go" in the workplace? Your phrasing doesn't make it clear if that's what you believe.

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

#662

Post by rrdharan » Wed, Jun 21, 2017, 2:53 PM UTC

nodesocket wrote: post #102

"The investors made their demand for Mr. Kalanick to step down in a letter delivered to the chief executive while he was in Chicago..." So brutal to be fired from the company you founded and built via a FedEx.

Better than via UberRUSH amirite?

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

#663

Post by camelite » Wed, Jun 21, 2017, 2:53 PM UTC

xutopia wrote: post #550

camelite wrote: post #83

Should we believe men too when they're victimised by women, or is this a one way deal? What if it's a man and a woman accusing each other, or two men or two women. What if the dude is a historically oppressed minority?

Listen to victims.

Meaningless rhetoric which skips the part where you determine who the victims actually are.

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

#664

Post by Exuma » Wed, Jun 21, 2017, 2:55 PM UTC

dfabulich wrote: post #100

Animats wrote: 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…

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:…

Can you explain how these large companies operate, explained like I'm a golden retriever?

How does a company so big not make a profit/could possibly go bankrupt?

My current understanding is companies either focus on growth (at a loss) or choose to focus on profit (with the risk of competition overtaking them or decay over time).

But lets say they go bankrupt in 1 year, couldn't they just switch to "profit mode"?

If there is no "profit mode" ... then why are people investing in the first place?

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

#665

Post by parzivalm » Wed, Jun 21, 2017, 2:56 PM UTC

camelite wrote: post #653

blackrose wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> or is this a one way deal? FFS, dude. Men hold the vast majority of power in our society. No cards are stacked against them. No old fashioned norms are still levied on them everytime a woman speaks to them. They aren't constantly reminded by our culture to be gentlemen or look handsome or bring home the bacon or do anything they don't want to. To say "think of the men!" here is either willfully ignorant or just bei…

> Men hold the vast majority of power in our society. No cards are stacked against them. If you "believe women who report sexual harassment", and more specifically, if you believe women who report sexual harassment in "less clear cut" scenarios than Susan Fowlers, then you are deliberately stacking the deck against the specific men who are accused of sexual harassment, some of whom will invariably be innocent. How mu…

Seems to me that the some of whom will invariably be innocent will be significantly low.

Saying "just believing" isn't the best phrase the OP could have picked but neither was your rhetoric. It just contributes to the divide between men and women.

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

#666

Post by futhey » Wed, Jun 21, 2017, 2:57 PM UTC

There is another option: Perhaps Travis is just “going away for a while”, to return when things have quieted down.

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

#667

Post by jonnathanson » Wed, Jun 21, 2017, 3:00 PM UTC

exelius wrote: post #583

emilsedgh wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Uber's valuation is based on a formula that looks something like (raw brand value in an autonomous car world) - (burn rate)^(number of years until autonomous cars are widespread). 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 t…

Tesla's taking a very long view. They are thinking about what the world will look like when autonomous cars are ubiquitous, and then working backwards from some of the pretty gnarly realizations that sink in when you do that sort of thinking.

You realize that nobody will care as much about most of the things they currently care about when buying a car. Performance? Mileage? Handling? Horsepower? Fucking irrelevant if I'm chilling in the back seat and my car is just getting me to where I need to go.

So what still matters? Price. Comfort. Amenities. The upsell becomes the main sell. At a certain point, Tesla isn't even selling "cars" so much as it's selling mobile offices to one segment, and mobile living rooms to another segment. I could also see Tesla finding a way to place the burden of price elsewhere and offer effectively "free" cars to consumers. For instance, leasing or selling fleets to employers. Or to cities. Or to Uber. Or to Amazon.

Uber, on the other hand, sees a world in which nobody owns a car, nobody drives a car, and everyone hails an automated car whenever and wherever. Like that scene in Minority Report.

Both of their strategies are banking on the idea that cars, as we currently understand and experience them, will eventually become pure commodities. The difference is that Tesla is seeking margin and Uber is seeking volume. The cliche that Tesla is Apple and Uber is Amazon is sort of true in that respect.

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

#668

Post by Tloewald » Wed, Jun 21, 2017, 3:02 PM UTC

Animats wrote: 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…

Isn't this a little like Madoff being vital to Madoff Securities? Uber's insane market cap is a direct consequence of a whole bunch of unethical, illegal, and barely legal activities.

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

#669

Post by zipppy » Wed, Jun 21, 2017, 3:03 PM UTC

camelite wrote: post #653

blackrose wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> or is this a one way deal? FFS, dude. Men hold the vast majority of power in our society. No cards are stacked against them. No old fashioned norms are still levied on them everytime a woman speaks to them. They aren't constantly reminded by our culture to be gentlemen or look handsome or bring home the bacon or do anything they don't want to. To say "think of the men!" here is either willfully ignorant or just bei…

> Men hold the vast majority of power in our society. No cards are stacked against them. If you "believe women who report sexual harassment", and more specifically, if you believe women who report sexual harassment in "less clear cut" scenarios than Susan Fowlers, then you are deliberately stacking the deck against the specific men who are accused of sexual harassment, some of whom will invariably be innocent. How mu…

I'm not going to nitpick about any individual discussion points you guys have going on, but I'll chime in to say that your approach to thinking about men/women in our society seems...disingenuous.

We can imagine utopia and then imagine how we would treat people in that setting. That seems to be what you're doing. But if we're not actually in utopia, then we really are tipping the scales in some way. And that does suck, and sometimes that means that one group is going to be treated unfairly, but often it's about the lesser of evils.

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

#670

Post by Bartweiss » Wed, Jun 21, 2017, 3:04 PM UTC

matt4077 wrote: post #362

hkmurakami wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For an embattled company like this in a fiercely competitive industry, you need committed leadership and not a rotating cast of hired guns looking to make a quick buck. Kalanick has serious issues but he's demonstrated unquestionably forceful (and polarizing) leadership that mere "managers" will never be able to replace. I've been bullish on Uber despite all their mistakes and internal issues because at the end of th…

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.

> even take-no-prisoner ask-forgiveness-later businesses run much better with a bit of attention to human decency

I'm sort of baffled by seeing someone say this in a comment that's supportive of Steve Jobs. Are there tons of "the human decency of Steve Jobs" stories I've missed? Because I would have said that I've never heard of Jobs showing even a scrap of that, and it worked out pretty well for him.

The things happening under Jobs were different than the things happening under Kalanick, sure. But I don't see where that's a function of anything like decency - it just looks like a cultural difference in what kind of inhumane hostility was happening. Jobs was a perfectionist, but he was also manipulative, cruel, and dishonest in ways totally distinct from that.