The myth that you can build a billion-dollar business without some shady dealings needs to die. Startups are usually faced with hard choices if they want to survive.
Pretending like Kalanick himself endorsed sexual harassment is ridiculous. We don't know whether he knew, how much he knew, or how involved he was. All evidence points to "the trail of information stopped at HR."
I think we like to pretend that startups should be completely moral and make no questionable decisions because of how awful companies have acted in the past. While it's true we shouldn't let history repeat itself, it's false to say that merely disrupting a market is worth criticizing. And this is what disruption looks like.
Balancing morality/ethics with winning is incredibly difficult. You can be an upstanding person, thrust into the CEO chair, and still screw up. Then all of your mistakes are magnified to ridiculous proportions and people claim it's a pattern of behavior that they spotted from the start, but everyone else was too blinded to recognize. Sound familiar? Not even in Uber's case -- it's a story that's repeated itself over and over.
The straightforward response is "Well, startups shouldn't act so disreputably then." I agree that you shouldn't do anything that brings harm to individuals, nor should you ignore a toxic culture at your company. But refusing to even try -- to say that if you're not perfectly honest or perfectly moral, that you shouldn't be allowed to build a company -- is a formula for letting the true snakes dominate the world. Honest people who make mistakes are better than assholes with a thirst for power.
But you have to let them be willing to admit that they've made mistakes. Kalanick has done this.