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

nytimes.com

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

#271

Post by Xxplosive »

keeptrying wrote: post #199
dfabulich wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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:…

The investors would have had to pay up given size of previous investments. The VCs just timed it "well" with Traviss personal tragedy. /smh They could smell the liquidity ...

Are you implying he's being strong armed into selling some of his shares?

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

#272

Post by anigbrowl »

sidcool wrote: post #15

Did Susan Fowler's article start this fire? If so, it's an incredible and inspiring story every victim of harrassment should follow. Thanks Susan.

No, but it did cause it to flare up after a lot of smoke and smoldering. I'd say the problems started ~2 years before that, partly from disregarding local regulators with impunity (rather than putting up a show of trying to cooperate) and partly from a strong of poorly-handled customer complaints where the firm seemed unwilling to take any responsibility for screening drivers. Those led to a persistent consumer narrative of indifference to social norms, which is never a good thing to have attached to your brand.

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

#274

Post by cthulha »

jlebrech wrote: post #261
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…

why can't they just stop the burn rate, most drivers won't jump ship and they can have a skeleton crew? or does this prevent them paying back investors?

You'd need to know what the burn rate is composed of: their engineering organisation might be less expensive than the marketing budget in a single major market.

If they cut ad spend and raise costs, then their growth story stops and other competitors have a window to move.

The go-to reading (at least a few years ago) for handling the difficulties of burn rate at a high-growth company is 'Mastering the Rockefeller Habits' by Verne Harnish, the chapter on cashflow. I think 'The hard thing about hard things' also talks about how this situation can kill your company if you're unlucky or unprepared

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

#275

Post by Animats »

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:…

If the existing investors refused to play ball, they could kill the next round, which really would kill Uber.

If there's a next round, it will probably involve a big haircut for the early-stage investors.

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

#276

Post by ckastner »

ckastner wrote: post #184
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…

> Kalanick is a jerk, but he created that insane valuation. I don't think Kalanick had much to do with it. He created the product, but it pretty much sold by itself -- similar to how Zuckerberg created Facebook, which sold by itself. I'm very optimistic about this change. To me, Kalanick, and the culture he bread, were toxic to Uber. I'm reminded of how Microsoft's share price jumped by 12% the day Steve Ballmer's re…

My comment that Kalanick didn't have much to do with it seems to be generating a lot of downvotes. This is surprising to me.

The reason I compared Uber's success to Facebook was because demand for the product was so great, it was viral. It's hard to mess up a product that is so incredibly popular.

Perhaps Instagram would have been a better example to communicate my point. Its initial success was clearly not anticipated even by its founders, and its success continued despite numerous hiccups and screwups in its early days. I posit that its founders ability, which was clearly limited (by their own accounts), had much to do with its success.

https://www.slideshare.net/iammutex/scaling-instagram

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

#277

Post by laluser »

ThrustVectoring wrote: post #267
laluser wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon already has Flex. Source: I'm a software engineer in that team. Uber is way too expensive at this point.

At this point, sure. In all likelihood, the actual operating business is more fairly priced in a fire sale. Free up overhead by trimming down the "eat the world" grandiose plans, cut growth-for-the-sake-of-fundraising subsidies, add some haircuts on bondholders, and you've got something that will reasonably work.

From a tech perspective, we have developed systems that actually work much better than what Uber has to offer for our use-cases. Their systems have been developed to solve for the "real-time" dispatching scenarios. That's not what we're optimizing for with Flex. Hint: it's the opposite.

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

#278

Post by [deleted] »

kornish wrote: post #153
dfabulich wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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:…

“He who can destroy a thing has the real control of it.” – Dune , Frank Herbert

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