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Bill Gurley Is Leaving Uber’s Board

nytimes.com

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Re: Bill Gurley Is Leaving Uber’s Board

#121

Post by V-eHGsd_ »

dang wrote: post #119
V-eHGsd_ wrote: post #68

that person has been elected president.

Would you please not take HN threads on generic political tangents? They lead to flamewars and trainwrecks, as seen below. We're hoping for better than that here. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14609910 and marked it off-topic.

pardon?

can you help me understand how my reply was off-topic given the question:

> As an analogy, take every major political scandal you can think of - Monica Lewinsky, Watergate, Iran Contra, Chappaquiddick, etc - and imagine a single elected official perpetrating them all within the course of a year. How do you think they would be treated?

Re: Bill Gurley Is Leaving Uber’s Board

#122

Post by dang »

V-eHGsd_ wrote: post #121
dang wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you please not take HN threads on generic political tangents? They lead to flamewars and trainwrecks, as seen below. We're hoping for better than that here. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14609910 and marked it off-topic.

pardon? can you help me understand how my reply was off-topic given the question: > As an analogy, take every major political scandal you can think of - Monica Lewinsky, Watergate, Iran Contra, Chappaquiddick, etc - and imagine a single elected official perpetrating them all within the course of a year. How do you think they would be treated?

It's a matter of degree. At least the parent comment was loosely tied to the original topic, where yours went off the moorings altogether.

It's often a judgment call where to clip these threads, sort of like the temperature at which to save a boiling frog.

Re: Bill Gurley Is Leaving Uber’s Board

#123

Post by mr_turtle »

res0nat0r wrote: post #16
lettergram wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They have three lawsuits that can sink the company, given their runway. They now have next to no leadership, and they still have no clear path to making money. Their board is up in arms, their CEO stepped down, but still has full control. If they want investment, it's going to be a down round. And their CEO will have to give up a significant chunk of the business. Even then, idk who else is left with the capital they…

All this shakeup at the top, but will it affect anything on the ground? I'm still going to take an Uber this weekend and no one not in tech that I know will even hear about any of this, let alone know who the CEO is. Sounds like they are trying to cleanup their image, then will get back to expanding their already massive reach they have in their cities they are already in around the world.

Second this,, why would any who uses Uber take into account the internal turmoil happening within the company when they decide to use the app or not?

The costs of Uber going up or decrease in availability of drivers should matter more.

Drivers only care about their bottom line which is rate per mile/time and frequency of riders.

Re: Bill Gurley Is Leaving Uber’s Board

#124

Post by dang »

exclusiv wrote: post #75
V-eHGsd_ wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cute comment edit aside, I'm not sure I follow the distinction you're trying to make. edit: to be absolutely clear, i'm not saying that trump has committed _every_one_ of the _specific_ acts referenced by the parent. but he is the amalgamation of every terrible, wrong-headed political move a person can make, and he's president. my point was the initial analogy was bad, "picture a candidate who's done every bad thing…

Yeah Trump didn't drive a women off a bridge and leave her dead like your previous leader Ted Kennedy. I personally support third party but damn the left loves to ignore how dirtball their own party is. Add Mel Reynolds, Robert KKK Byrd and others to the mix and it's laughable the party is any more a champion for anything. I honestly don't understand how either side can wage an ethics war on the other. Someone makes…

This is a toxic comment for HN. Please keep political flamewars way far away.

Re: Bill Gurley Is Leaving Uber’s Board

#125

Post by snarf »

goodriddance wrote: post #15

For all the future founders on HN, the lesson here is to never do business with Bill Gurley. He's one of the reasons AngelList exists. I hope his lesser known reputation finally catches up with him and forces him out of Benchmark and out of the VC industry entirely. The Ravikant v. Tolia (and Bill Gurley) Lawsuit: http://blog.ericgoldman.org/personal/archives/2005/02/ravika...

Exactly this. For those who weren't around in the first dot com bubble, he has a certain reputation which he has managed to bury. Benchmark used to be a much bigger firm back then, and due to poor fund performance, they had to scale back and "reboot" the firm. Along the way, he managed to bury his lesser know reputation. This was critical to getting deal flow in the current investing environment which is much more founder friendly given the increased availability of capital and competition for deals. Tolia also managed to rehab his reputation after lying about completing his Stanford degree and working for McKinsey (and teaming up with Gurley to screw over his other Epinions cofounders). He's now running NextDoor with significant investment from Gurley.

Re: Bill Gurley Is Leaving Uber’s Board

#128

Post by rtpg »

sebastos wrote: post #32
BinaryIdiot wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think they can't get more investments? They just completed this report and now Travis is out; unless you have proof you can't say they didn't fix their issues. So not only have they shown concern to solving a major PR and culture issue but they're absolutely HUGE. If they IPO it could be an incredible exit. Am I missing something? They seem far, far more investable now.

Yes, you're missing that this is all wish fulfillment doomsdayism. People are nursing some recreational outrage because of the revelations regarding Uber's culture. So now they all have a pet theory that Uber will fail. They're working backwards from what they _want_ to happen though, so their "theory" can explain anything: "Kalanick is a loose cannon who's going to run the company into the ground" Kalanick steps dow…

you're acting like this is the start of the idea that perhaps the entire taxi industry is not worth what Uber is claiming, or that having a bunch of autonomous vehicles is probably hard for an iOS app company to manage, or that they ultimately have never proven they can keep drivers happy without subsidizing prices, or that they might not get huge backlash from legal action around driver status, or .....

There's an argument for Uber's eventual success, but there's a lot of stuff against it too. It's not an absurd theory.

Re: Bill Gurley Is Leaving Uber’s Board

#129

Post by [deleted] »

stickfigure wrote: post #41
danaliv wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A jerk is someone who borrows your car and doesn't pay for the dent he puts in the bumper. What happened at Uber was the creation of one of the most insanely hostile work environments in living memory, where flouting not just the law, but also basic standards of human decency, was not only accepted but encouraged at all levels of the company.

Did you work there? This narrative is almost comically hyperbolic. I know exactly one person who works at Uber. She joined as an engineer about a year ago. I asked; she says it is less sexist than every other place she has worked (especially after all the press), and she likes her job. She also says it's a big company and she doesn't know if it's different in other parts.

[deleted]

Re: Bill Gurley Is Leaving Uber’s Board

#130

Post by csmattryder »

andybg wrote: post #87
neil1 wrote: post #11

I wonder if Travis resigning was contingent on Bill Gurley leaving the board. As Bill seems to be the main anti-Travis actor on the board.

It's unclear if Gurley actually wants to leave the board. Part of me thinks that he knows something really bad is coming down the pipes (e.g. potential criminal liability re: Otto, etc) and he wants to distance himself now. It's half a conspiracy theory, but makes you think ...

It's got to be the Otto lawsuit, that's obviously coming, after Levandowski dropped the ball with that "plead the Fifth" stuff.

Even the Google network forensics team have him bang to rights[1] taking data while on-site at the campus, Google would be mental to not launch a volley and destroy a potential competitor in the process.

And you don't drop $680m on an acquisition without going through board approval first, surely? Somebody's definitely complicit.

[1] https://www.wired.com/2017/02/googles-waymo-just-dropped-exp...

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