Uber CEO Travis Kalanick Has Resigned Due To Investor Pressure (recode.net) 59
Travis Kalanick has resigned as chief executive of Uber after pressure from investors, ending eight years of leading the ride-hailing company that has expanded round the globe but became mired in controversies. From a report: Kalanick had become a giant liability to the car-hailing company for a growing number of reasons, from sketchy business practices to troubling lawsuits to a basic management situation that was akin to really toxic goat rodeo. Thus, he had to go, even though some sources said he had the voting power to stay. But big investors also have leverage and a big enough group of them joined to use it. Those investors include Benchmark, Fidelity and Menlo Ventures, all of whom sent Kalanick a joint letter called "Moving Uber Forward" on Tuesday afternoon. Interestingly, Google Ventures was not among the group, even though its parent company Alphabet is now in a major lawsuit with Uber over the alleged theft of self-driving car technology from its Waymo unit.
Toxic goat rodeo (Score:4, Insightful)
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Our national ride sharing nightmare... (Score:1)
...is now over. Feel free to call a real, licensed cab driven by an insured and industry certified professional next time you need a lift.
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Re:Our national ride sharing nightmare... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re: Our national ride sharing nightmare... (Score:2)
Why would I want to call someone?
I want to use an app with full transparency on where they are and how much it will cost me.
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That's OK (Score:5, Funny)
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she had a reputation for getting things done at Google
She invented [businessinsider.com] gmail.
Lost users? (Score:4, Interesting)
I am guessing they lost a ton of users, or haven't been gaining any. Since the whole operation is a money loser now and in the past, and they were pumping money in contingent on growth, the investors forced the situation.
I loved Uber the few times I used it, but deleted my account and quit using it several months ago due to reports of harassment, and the way they treated their drivers. Latest thing was apparently their no-tip thing was that they paid fairly and tipping was built into the cost. Now they offer tipping in the app because they were shorting the drivers and the no-tipping thing was bullshit.
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The whole point of current-Uber was to build the company to be ready to be a leader for self-driving technology, so that passengers are already used to summoning Uber when they need a ride. Since Uber didn't want to invest a lot of money in their own fleet of human-driven cars, they chose to contract-out so that they don't have to deal with depreciation of capital purchases and amortizing purchases over the duration of the life of the equipment, they just make the contractor do it.
Unfortunately they're sta
Re:Lost users? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm not so sure it was timing as much as Uber has incredibly bad business practices that would sink any company.
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Honestly it will depend on what quality the users expect.
Over the last few years people on this forum as well as others have discussed what the future would look like with self-driving cars, and the discussion of the random-vehicle subscription model has always gotten back around the the state of the vehicle. Typically the concern is that the car will arrive trashed, or soiled, or some other issue similar to what we see on mass-transit or with taxis. It may well be that different customers will willingly
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I don't think about them as a social-media company. I think of them as a company that masquerades as a ride-sharing company in order to avoid passenger livery laws in order to keep costs down while they work on their real service.
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Perhaps. I suppose it depends on if they've said nearly all things to all investors, or if there are some investors with a lot more involvement in what's really going on in the company and what its actual goals are.
I remember the dotcom boom, and stupid investors throwing money at anyone with a website URL registered. Hell, Zombo.com was set up as a joke and even they apparently were contacted by investors even though all that site had was a silly flash animation.
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Oh I wholeheartedly agree. Their choice to pursue industrial espionage is the death-sentence for the company. If they're smart as a company they'll immediately scrap their entire self-driving program and probably fire/lay-off everyone that's ever worked on it or managed it and either start from scratch or else look for someone that's already making headway to partner-with, but then again, if they were smart they wouldn't have stolen someone else's development work in the first place.
When people first star
We're on a break (Score:2)
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Yeah, I think Travis is just the reincarnation of Lig Lury, Jr. [google.com]
I don't get it (Score:3, Insightful)
Travis hasn't done ANYTHING that we haven't seen in Robocop. What's the big fuss about? That he got caught? I'm tired of this fucking hypocrisy, it is still the same company with the same business plan - pretending they aren't running a taxi business to avoid taxes, and screwing drivers - why isn't THIS a problem?
Fuck off already.
Re:Building something new is hard. (Score:5, Insightful)
Building something new is hard. You can't have a touchy-feely CEO who walks on eggshells when you're building something like Uber.
You can however have a constructive respectful CEO that doesn't break the law at every opportunity, doesn't hire utter cunts and defend their working practices, has proper control of their organisation and actually makes a profit.
Sure, it's hard. Doesn't excuse being a cunt.
The difficulty is with the suits (i.e. lawyers). Suits don't like change. They don't like having their industry disrupted. So sometimes you have to apply a force to make that disruption happen.
So why aren't we hearing the same story about Lyft? Oh, you mean it's possible to do this without being a Kalanick?
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I hope Lyft (and the others) stay around a long time, I agree. I hope Uber goes out of business as quickly as possible.
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A collectivist utopia would involve a modern efficient public transport system where ride sharing is a quaint 21st C anachronism.
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With Marissa Meyers leaving Yahoo, and being a female, she'd be the perfect candidate to be the CEO of Uber. Besides Uber uses Gmail.
Mayer was paid a total of $239 million when she was terminated at Yahoo. She has enough now and doesn't need to be fired from Uber yet.
Proof.. (Score:2)
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Or as they say, it's the 66 billion glass ceiling :-)
Leading? (Score:2)