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 is bad enough. The real numbers have to be worse. Notice that leveraged loan in 2016.[2] All the details of that have to be disclosed in the prospectus for an IPO.
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: Kalanick has a controlling interest in Uber, so on paper, nobody could have removed him as CEO by shareholder vote. But despite complete control over the vote, you don't really own your company if you're dependent on future investment.
No matter what the cap table says, if you're not profitable, it's not really yours yet.
I dunno, my guess is that he was too set in his ways to make the leap from "CEO of a growth startup" to "CEO of a mature company".
If you look at founder/CEOs who have made that leap, they all tend to be very young (Jobs, Gates, Zuck, etc) and had very strong teams behind them.
Someone like Kalanick - who has run multiple startups to various exits - has been running startups all his professional life. His management style likely works very well at a startup, where failure is assumed so risk tolerance is high. At a startup, you need a field general leading the troops into battle.
But at a large, maturing company, you need a different skill set. Risk tolerance becomes a negative attribute once the company grows so large you can't control the risk anymore. Rather than a field general, you need a therapist capable of massaging the egos of the executive team and the board of directors. The job becomes more strategic and political -- execution is assumed, and failure is no longer an option.
I don't think Kalanick is that guy, and I think the board finally convinced him of that. But if I was an investor, I'd still be happy to listen to his next startup pitch...
> I dunno, my guess is that he was too set in his ways to make the leap from "CEO of a growth startup" to "CEO of a mature company".
If you look at founder/CEOs who have made that leap, they all tend to be very young (Jobs, Gates, Zuck, etc) and had very strong teams behind them.
And in Jobs' case, it took an absence from the company of more than 10 years…
Precisely. And then he was brought back, and in retrospect, many of his skills the second time around (charisma, design instinct, product focus) were the same that he had brought to Apple originally, but in the meantime, he had learned to temper his worst personal flaws (largely by learning to trust and listen to a small group of people who could counteract them).
I saw Ed Catmull (Pixar) give a post-Jobs death talk on youtube about how Jobs had completely changed during his 10 year hiatus and was far more empathic.
I'd say down votes because it wasn't clear whether Apple would have fallen if Jobs remained. He pushed the same vision when he came back as when he was fired.
He was an asshole of monumental proportions before and after. I am so far removed that I am a poor judge, what would be a good place to look into this.
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 the market for autonomous vehicles isn't going to look like the market for human-driven ones -- and vehicle manufacturers are going to be looking to build their own self-driving auto services rather than sell self-driving vehicles directly to consumers.
Uber's biggest innovation was their app. Even complex apps like Uber are not hard to clone if you have any sort of budget. There's an assumption a lot of investors make about their brand value: it assumes that another, already strong brand does not enter the same market. Seeing as Tesla has made no secret of their intentions to compete directly with Uber in the ride-hailing space, I don't think that's a fair assumption. Would you rather call an Uber or a Tesla at this point?
And what does buying a Tesla in that scenario even look like? Do you buy a car and rent it out a la Airbnb when you're not using it? How much money do you get for that, and how much of a cut does Tesla get since it's their algorithms actually driving the car?
Don't get me wrong; the brand value is actually really high because hundreds of millions of wealthy customers worldwide know Uber. Even if the company fails spectacularly, someone will buy them for a few billion in a fire sale just for the brand.
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.
I think Tesla also understands that once autonomous cars are ubiquitous, you won't own one: you'll just rent one for whatever needs you have in that moment. I think the best analog for the market dynamics that this will create is the airline industry -- a fleet of vehicles will be a massive investment, and ongoing maintenance, government oversight, etc. will be similarly cumbersome. But the job of the airline (actually operating the plane) is being done by the company creating the algorithms. That's a market control point that can be leveraged.
That's why ultimately, I feel Uber will end up being the Expedia/Priceline of the self-driving car industry. If you don't control the means of value production, you become a middleman. There's a reason they were working on their own self-driving tech rather than licensing from someone else -- everyone who is actually building this tech likely told them "go shove it, we can recreate what you do far easier than you can recreate what we do".
I keep hearing this, but why wouldn't you own one? Part of the reason to own a car is the immediacy of use. I don't want to have to do the equivalent of waiting for a lyft/uber every time I want to run to the grocery store.
Sure in large walkable cities with constantly circulating fleets car ownership might go away. For those of us in the suburbs who HAVE to drive everywhere, not so much. Even waiting 5 extra minutes for every errand (optimistic, given that my most recent lyft took 10-15 minutes to arrive) adds up fast. Let alone going out into the rural areas where Uber/Lyft scarcely exist and the nearest human structure can be miles away.
I could, however easily see a model where people rent their self-driving car out to Uber/Lyft when they're not using it. Driver fees would be gone, and they could take a greater cut that might even put them towards profitability.
Anyone who is price sensitive won't want to pay the hourly rate to have a car sit in their garage all day/night doing nothing. Nor will they want to pay the up front cost and/or interest to hold a controlling share in the vehicle.
And configurability means you can take a 2-seater when you are going to work, take a 4-seater to lunch with you coworkers, take a hatchback to the farmers market to pick up your groceries, and then an SUV to the mountains, preconfigured with a roof rack with your ski rentals already on it, sharpened and waxed, and then take a mobile office for the drive home so you can get some work done, and a mobile bedroom for your trip down to LA so you can catch up to sleep.
But yes, the wealthy will still own private cars because they can have it waiting, just like private planes. Also, cooties.
Plane travel isn't a day-to-day event, even for those wealthy enough to afford private jets. You still have to pack, travel to an airport, get on the plane, crew has to be made ready, flight plan has to be filed, etc. It's a high-impact event that occurs at most every few days, even for frequent flyers.
Driving is a day-to-day task. My time's already short, if I have to add an extra 5 minutes waiting for pickup every time I want to go anywhere (once again an optimistic estimate, it would likely be closer to 10), on a busy day that's a minimum extra hour a day of time I've lost just standing on the sidewalk. Margin matters, even an extra 15 minutes a day adds up to over 90 hours a year.
Also these rental services/configurations will hardly be free. So the cost of the car/maintenance isn't eliminated entirely. For my situation, given that I've been driving the same car for the last 11 years, and it was ~16k when I bought it, plus maybe an average $1200 a year in insurance, and maybe an average of $300 a year in maintenance that means I've spent an average of $2,954.54/year over the last 11 years on car ownership. And that number is only going to get smaller unless I buy another car.
But in this scenario I'm losing a minimum 90 hours per year on the margin. If those were work hours, then at my current take-home rate I can decrease that number down to around $1065/year going forward. Given that I'm likely going to make more money as the years go by, these continuous rental services are going to have to be awfully cheap to be worth it for my situation, and I don't think I'm too far from the average.
Now sure, if you're buying a new car every 4 years like some people do then it might be worth it. Or if the cost of insurance is prohibitively high in your given location. Or if your job sucks and you just can't afford a car. Or if you actually need a broad variety of vehicles on a regular basis. There are lots of factors that go into it, but for anyone who's middle class or better I don't think it'll supplant ownership entirely. Or maybe it will and I'll just be with the sour-grapes number-crunchers in the corner ranting about margin to anyone who'll listen. :)
> Also these rental services/configurations will hardly be free. So the cost of the car/maintenance isn't eliminated entirely. For my situation, given that I've been driving the same car for the last 11 years, and it was ~16k when I bought it, plus maybe an average $1200 a year in insurance, and maybe an average of $300 a year in maintenance that means I've spent an average of $2,954.54/year over the last 11 years on car ownership. And that number is only going to get smaller unless I buy another car.
Nope, but they will be commoditized. If you have a car that all you have to do is pass it an API key and a location, there's not much value a ride sharing service can add to that -- which means there will probably be a bunch of them. Which means that the price to the consumer should be something close to [ (marginal cost of ride) + (depreciation cost of ride) ] * 1.03. And the cost side of that will benefit from scale for the business, but not the consumer.
Basically, once it's commoditized, it will cost you more to do it yourself than to pay someone to do it for you. Just like with currently commoditized services like AWS, there can still be good reasons to do it yourself -- but those tend to be special cases rather than the norm.
> But in this scenario I'm losing a minimum 90 hours per year on the margin.
Err, I'll play along. If you were in an autonomous car (or even a current ride-share), you could just work while en route rather than drive. I'm willing to bet you spend more hours sitting in traffic today than you ever would waiting on a car to arrive.
Well hey if it somehow costs less than then I spend on car ownership in a year, then sure! All just depends on how much my time's worth/how much these services charge if/when they come around. But right now the sum total of rides per year, whatever the cost model, would basically have to be sub $1000 per year to make sense for me. Cheaper if I end up making more money as time goes on. If scale and commoditization can accomplish that then I'll happily embrace a new golden age of transportation.
As for the rest, keep in mind we're comparing renting an autonomous car vs owning an autonomous car, not renting an autonomous car vs driving. So the actual rides are equivalent. The time difference is me getting in my car and telling it where to go vs me hailing a car, waiting 5-10 minutes for it to arrive (where my capacity to do any meaningful work is basically nil) and then tell it where to go, a minimum of 3 times a day. Maybe up to 12 times a day on a busy day. That's not an insignificant time loss over the medium/long term.
Granted it's all hypothetical and the actual value of the time lost would be highly situational, but it would be one of those small daily time-sucking inefficiencies, like walking into the other room to get paper towels as opposed to just putting a roll in the kitchen. When you do them every day, those add up.
Tesla is a different story entirely. Uber is burning cash by subsidizing operations (aka buying customers); Tesla is spending it on capital assets and R&D. Money spent on operations generally won't benefit you beyond the current quarter; but capital assets (including intellectual property as the result of R&D) retain value over time and often pay for themselves in a relatively short period of time.
You'll notice a common thread throughout Elon Musk's "big bets" (Tesla, SpaceX, etc.) He is extremely conservative with operational spending, and all of these companies are very capital-intensive. Just look at the difference between a "Tesla Store" (small, maybe 3 or 4 employees, cars can be stored offsite wherever is cheap) and a normal auto dealership (huge, dozens of employees, majority of expensive real estate is used for parking cars). The Tesla store is very efficient compared to the auto dealer.
When you have high capex, it makes it easier to fund your company through debt rather than equity since those loans/bonds are backed by capital assets with a non-zero liquidation value.
Sure it will, when cars are available on demand anytime you want one for however long you want it at the press of a button. Convenience changes values, and ownership sucks when that kind of convenience exists.
That's short sighted and incorrect. Rental is only going to cost more than ownership if multiple people aren't sharing the cost, but the whole point of autonomous cars defeats that idea, renting will be vastly cheaper than buying.
> but personal vehicles are not going to go away.
For the vast majority of the population, yes, they will go away.
That's not good analogy (living in hotels), better would be to compare how many people own their flat/house and how many rent it. Which would imply that a lot of people will still own their car ...
Why should rental be more expensive by definition? A fleet of autonomous vehicles can operate 24/7. Your own personal car gets a trip to work and a trip back home every day and maybe another round trip to an activity or chore.
> 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.
Mileage is a critical component of cost of operation, and of range without stopping, which are pretty much (along with capacity and comfort) the things that matter most if you aren't driving and the car is just taking you from A to B.
That's even true if you don't own it (even the cost factor, since that—assuming an efficient market—still controls what you'll pay to use it.)
I don't think Uber's valuation is based on autonomous cars. That would be a really stupid bet for investors.
Autonomous cars are a side bet. A few hundred millions in R&D that would also attract good talent and nice PR for Uber.
But I don't think investors were stupid enough to invest billions into Uber based on that bet. Specially considering the fact that anyone who gets that technology first can make it big and Google had a few years of head start.
Uber's valuation has to be based on an anticipation of autonomous vehicles. Otherwise, whether self-driving cars arrive in 5 years or 10, investors are putting money into a horse-and-buggy company.
Not necessarily. If your projection is that widespread autonomous vehicles don't arrive for 30 years, there is a lot of money in the meantime to be made being a horse-and-buggy company.
Some business models are fundamentally broken, then the growth is eventually no longer effective in selling the story that one day the company will be profitable.
Another is that the board could have threatened to sue Kalanick for violating the loyalty and duty obligations that corporate officers have to shareholders - e.g. for suppressing systemic sexual harassment, withholding details about the Otto acquisition, etc.
He may not, but I have seen a board threaten a CEO in a situation like that. It never came to a lawsuit, the CEO stepped down but this sort of thing definitely can happen depending on how bad the situation is.
Investors sue all the officers all the time. United Airlines, Ebay/Craigslist, Skype, non-profits, etc.
Suppressing systemic sexual harassment violates his duty to report management problems to the board. Same with any meetings with Otto's founder a week prior to them leaving Google and founding Otto.
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?
Companies in burgeoning industries at this scale are concerned with longevity, specifically outlasting their competitors. Not short term profits.
They are thinking more along the lines of "how can we make 10 billion dollars per year, for the next 150 years." Think General Electric.
That's why they require huge amounts of money from investors, so they can aggressively grow to a size where other companies can't touch them.
The huge amount of capital is sort of like a moat.
When you're larger, you have something called economy of scale. Which means you have enough resources to do stuff the smaller guys can't do.
When you're larger, you also have something called a data advantage. Which means you know so much more about your customers, you can predict things and make decisions the smaller guys can't.
As best I understand it, Uber's play was for dominance.
Consider Facebook and Google. Together they're worth over a trillion dollars. Now ask yourself: what's the combined net worth of the second-biggest search engine and the second-biggest social network? Nothing close.
In a business where being second or third place is pretty good, you can switch to profit mode as you please. But Uber's valuation only makes sense to me if it lets them dominate a market like Google or Facebook does, setting prices and terms for the industry. I think that if they switch to profit mode, people will start to value them like a normal business, which would mean a giant drop in valuation.
I presume that's why board members supported an aggressive jerk for so long: Kalanick has been undeniably good at seizing territory, and if one sets aside little things like morals and externalities and long-term consequences, one could argue that aggressive jerkiness is exactly what Uber has needed.
Honestly, this market never struck me as one where dominance was even possible, so the investors' theories never made sense to me. But that's my best guess as to why they've been allowed to keep burning money like this.
>But lets say they go bankrupt in 1 year, couldn't they just switch to "profit mode"?
Well that they might have to try and do now. But usually it is hard to move to 'profit mode' - you upset your customers when you start to charge double. The idea is that before you do that you have either killed of the competition or your competition 'moat' is so big that everyone wants to keep using you because of $reason and so you can charge what you like.
>If there is no "profit mode" ... then why are people investing in the first place?
Nobody is ever sure if any startup will get to 'profit mode' you simply look at their market / numbers etc and if you decide to invest then you hope the startup can figure it out. This is the investing gamble.
You guys are talking about Uber dying, but I cannot fathom how this is possible from just the user's perspective. Uber seems to be everywhere, people take Ubers or driver for Ubers every day. How could a company this big fail?
Stop growing maybe, but going bankrupt and shutting down?
It's easy to grow when you sell dollars for 70c each. But, when you suddenly need to sell them for 1.01+$ nobody wants to buy.
Uber's problem is taxi companies have lower overhead because among other thing their drivers sometimes get hailed by people at street level. Which means their either taxi prices are lower and people stop using Uber or they pay drivers more and drivers mostly stop working for Uber.
"Uber is profitable in certain cities, e.g. New York City [1]. They could turn cash-flow positive if they just gave up useless market share."
I would assume that would also depend on how much of their fixed costs they can shed in conjunction with that. Uber may not die quickly but it could still die slowly if they lose the ability to move forward because they had to cut too much of their R&D and sales infrastructure to get to that positive number.
Plus such a massive layoff would be a big red flag to customers too. By Uber's nature, a particular ride isn't a long-term commitment, but I think people would start looking for a stronger-looking horse even so. One of those differences between homo economus, who every time they need a ride rationally examines all their options regardless of the future and realizes that as long as Uber can complete this ride the internal state of Uber doesn't matter, and homo sapiens, who will take into account the fact that Uber doesn't seem to be doing well even if doesn't rationally matter at this particular point.
Their valuation is based upon the assumption that they can maintain market share and raise profitability in those other markets. We all know this isn't going to happen though, so eventually someone is going to eat the valuation hit but the game of musical chairs to decide that question is still being played.
I don't think their valuation makes sense. I'm more replying to the gist of this thread, which seems to be saying they're dead because they aren't profitable. They could be if they needed to prioritise that.
> someone is going to eat the valuation hit
Liquidation preferences mean earlier investors (and employees holding Common Stock) take the hit of a down round.
Disclaimer: this is not investment advice. Do not make investment decisions based off my Internet comments.
Let's say Company X has 9,000 shares of common stock outstanding. It raises $1 million at a $10 million post-money valuation with a 1x non-participating liquidation preference. Its cap table is thus 1,000 shares of Series A preferred stock on top of 9,000 shares of common.
It then raises $10 million at a $50 million valuation with similar preference terms. Its cap table is now 2,500 shares of Series B preferred stock on top of 1,000 shares of Series A preferred stock on top of 9,000 shares of common.
Let's contemplate a $100 million exit. Everyone converts to common at $100 million / 12,500 shares, or $8,000 per share. Series A bought at $1,000 and thus sees an 8x return; Series B bought at $4,000 and thus sees 2x.
Let's contemplate a $50 million exit. Everyone converts at $50 million / 12,500 shares, or $4,000 per share. Series A gets 4x; B comes out flat.
Let's contemplate a $25 million exit. Series B does not convert. Instead, it demands its 1x liquidation preference and gets $10 million. This leaves $15 million on the table, or $1,500 per share. Series A converts and sees its 1.5x return; B comes out flat.
Let's contemplate a $15 million exit. Series B does not convert and gets its $10 million. This leaves $5 million on the table, or $500 per share. Series A does not convert and demands its $1 million. Series A and B come out flat; common gets $4 million / 9,000 shares, or about $444.
Let's contemplate a $10 million exit. Series B gets its $10 million and comes out flat; everyone else gets screwed.
Let's contemplate a Theranos exit. Everyone gets screwed. Turtleneck doesn't go to jail.
TL; DR Later stages are least volatile. They get screwed last, but also see upside last. Lower rungs' returns pay for this safety.
> Can you walk me through the math. How does one arrive at 1K of Series A preferred from 9K of common stock? How is that being derived? I'm not following.
At time t=0 (probably at founding and when hiring its first few employees) Company X issued 9,000 shares of common stock. At time t=1 it decides to issue 1,000 shares in a series A offering (most likely to VCs and outside investors). They are separate events.
1000 shares x $1000/share = $1m raised for the company in the series A.
> Also what is meant by "post-money" valuation? I'm assuming there is a corresponding "pre-money"?
Thanks for your detailed explanation. I had a couple questions if you don't mind. You stated:
>"Let's say Company X has 9,000 shares of common stock outstanding. It raises $1 million at a $10 million post-money valuation with a 1x non-participating liquidation preference. Its cap table is thus 1,000 shares of Series A preferred stock on top of 9,000 shares of common."
Can you walk me through the math. How does one arrive at 1K of Series A preferred from 9K of common stock? How is that being derived? I'm not following.
Also what is meant by "post-money" valuation? I'm assuming there is a corresponding "pre-money"?
Lastly by "coming out flat" you mean made whole again i.e recouped their initial investment?
In NYC, the Yellow cabs have a huge, huge overhead because of Taxi Medallions that used to cost $1.2 million each which effectively added $125 or so for a 12 hour shift. The value of the medallions are now < $700K, but I don't know if the $125 overhead is still in force.
Uber is far more expensive in NYC than other cities such as Chicago.
Now that Uber has allowed tipping and since there is a rating system, everyone must now tip otherwise risk getting low ratings which effectively makes NYC rides even more expensive than they had been.
Most people don't own cars in Manhattan so that they either have to take mass transit or use Uber/Lyft/Taxi. There are many elderly on fixed incomes that have trouble ambulating (moving around) where lower cost taxi service is important.
In NYC at least, Uber doesn't need all of that corporate overhead and perhaps they should spin it off into some low-overhead operation.
Tipping with rating basically equates to a shakedown. You have to now guess at the subjective price that the driver "feels" is deserved instead of what was agreed upon.
It has been assumed that the rating system will be blind, meaning the drivers will not be able to see tips before leaving their rating. There is still the social pressure to leave a tip, but it likely will not be quite as rude as not tipping a traditional cab driver.
Can you elaborate on what you mean when you say, "It has been assumed that the rating system will be blind"...
- There is already a rating system for drivers, and riders, so this isn't a "will be" thing, right?
- The rating system is not currently blind, as far as I know. Certainly riders can see drivers rating, and I believe drivers can see riders rating as well.
Blind was not the best term to use. I meant the rating will have to be made by the driver before he can see the tip given by the passenger, so they cannot leave a lower rating because of what they deem to be not enough of a tip.
I received an email from Uber yesterday. They're slowly rolling out the tipping service, starting in a few cities at first to test it out. It will eventually be everywhere.
Isn't part of the reason end users use Uber is for its ubiquity? If it was only available in a handful of cities that I won't be visiting, I wouldn't bother with it.
I mean, running a livery service in NYC is a fine business and there's no reason you couldn't make money at it. But it is certainly not the scale of ambition Uber was pitching.
To be profitable the prices would need to go up for more than 30% on average, because 30% only get's them to break even if you assume zero changes in ridership.
There are a few costs like background checks that may go down when they stop expanding, but fewer than you might think.
And I used uber or lyft to ride back and forth to work every single day because it's so cheap. ~9 bucks compared to a 3 dollar metro ride (and I typically save 20 minutes). If it's 15 dollars I'd ride less often and I'd probably try to hail a cab first.
Oh it's definitely elastic. I used to take Uber everywhere, until they (apparently) removed the restriction on driver's to use nice/current cars. Once drivers starting showing up in 10 year old beat down cars, my riding plummeted.
> taxi companies have lower overhead because among other thing their drivers sometimes get hailed by people at street level
I don't understand why that would decrease overhead?
I also don't understand why the other aspects of overhead (dispatcher, offices, taxi lots) don't add up to more than Uber (whose only cost is servers and support)
Of course they can be profitable. Uber doesn't have overhead. There are no Uber factories or millions of rotting vehicles in a warehouse. At the core it is a iOS/Android app (4 guys could maintain this), a call center (India), and a law firm (outsource it). They would have to cut their staff, remove the ping pong tables and get real but profitability is there. They are on a land grab.
You really don't know what you're talking about. There's more to Uber than just an app. There is a large set of backend services responsible for everything from authorization to billing, promotions, logging, road directions, ETA forecasts, driver portals and so much more. I've never worked there but ventures like this tend to be very complicated with lots of moving pieces.
Just dealing with the different laws about taxi services in different countries/cities itself would require a staff that size or more. And there's a lot more than that behind the scenes, like security checks on drivers, managers for each city to decide incentive plans for drivers etc. It's a very massive endeavour, and the size of the company is justified.
It takes a constant number of engineers to push a single feature, no matter the number of users.
It does not, however, take a constant number of engineers to maintain the infrastructure that lets a single engineer push a feature to millions of users. (P/I)AAS can help, but you still need people to monitor performance, find regressions and bugs, and track them down.
Call center in India ? But but but ... you guys said Indians are taking jobs away from the US. Why cant business be profitable with call center in the US itself. Greedy corps wants profits, outsource it and then innocent Indian employees gets the flak for it. Just wow !
That's the point. Their technology costs are pennies per ride, revenues dollars per ride. They are only spewing cash trying to grow faster by buying more drivers in more countries. They could hire organically for much less.
Uber only works if there are enough drivers so that I can always get a ride. If I get told that I have to wait 30 minutes for a ride more than a tiny handful of times I'm uninstalling the app. Growing organically in region would be very tough since it would take too long to get enough drivers in place that users could rely on the service and conversely drivers would be unwilling to sign up because not enough users where bothering to use the service.
Especially when there are competitors. Its what seemed to happen with Lyft in my area. A lot of people I know preferred using Lyft,
because of the morally shady nature of Uber, but Lyft would take 15-20 minutes for a ride, and Uber would have one in 5. Pretty quickly everyone (myself included) just started checking Uber first.
Sure, which is why Uber has invested so much in driver acquisition in expanding it's territories. But once those territories are established they should be able to spend far less. If driver times start to become longer, it means existing drivers have a higher utilization and will make more money, drawing more drivers to drive for uber, and solving the problem in a virtuous circle.
> There is always demand for Uber/Lyft just because there isn't a taxi cab nearby 24/7.
There's certainly a market for app/phone jailable cabs because there isn't one within street hail range at all times, but regular cabs have been phone hailable forever (it's the only way to get one outside of a few major urban cores) and are increasingly app hailable. Aside from regulatory supply restrictions (flouting which may not be sustainable) there's no real basis for a market for alt-taxis as anything but interchangeable competitors supplying the same substitutable commodity as regular taxis.
> but regular cabs have been phone hailable forever
With Uber you also get know the fare upfront, the time of arrival, no need to tell them your address, there is a driver reputation filter, passenger insurance and it's safer than normal cabs in many countries.
Uber doesn't make enough from fares to be profitable, they use investors' money to heavily subsidize them. Once the investor money runs out, Uber won't be able to pay drivers unless they jack up prices considerably. Once they are no longer price competitive, customers will move to other services.
Turns out the car service business isn't very sticky at all (even the drivers work for multiple companies...).
Drivers start to leave and the downward spiral begins. They just couldn't get to self driving vehicles fast enough - which may be why they were trying to borrow technology from Google.
Come on, self driving cars was never a solution for Uber in the medium term. Cabs are in the midst of normal traffic, not even highway or anything. No way this will work good enough within the next 15 years
"Uber is a play on self-driving cars" is a misleading but often repeated story.
When Uber started and raised its first investment rounds, self-driving cars were too far away to be part of a business plan. I doubt the latest investors take that view either - spending billions per year until self-driving cars happen is a way too expensive way to build up a fickle user base who will switch the moment a competitor offers 10% lower rates.
And when self-driving cars do arrive, there is no reason to believe that Uber will have exclusive access to them. Google and other software companies will be licensing the technology to anyone who pays for it, car manufacturers will be selling cars to anyone who pays for it.
It may kill taxi driver as a career, but there is no defensible advantage to Uber compared to Lyft, Hailo, Taxify, and so on.
Yeah. The whole driverless car thing with Uber is such a load of crap. It wasn't even in the plan until they started hemoraging money and had to come up with some excuse to keep investors on board. And by that point they were late to the game.
Uber as a play on driverless cars is a smokescreen to distract people from the fact they have little advantage over other companies and can't for the life of them turn a profit.
> they have little advantage over other companies and can't for the life of them turn a profit.
At this point why doesn't Uber just lay off a HUGE portion of their staff and kill the R&D. It's hard to imagine if they downsized significantly and quit investing in self driving cars, that they couldn't tip the needle into profitability.
Isn't that a fairly common move for a startup? Burn money to get off the runway, then downsize to stabilize?
not in the medium term, but maybe some investment thought they were going to have it in the long term and now - given legal issues - nobody is going to think that.
And when will that be exactly? This entire thread is overflowing with nothing but fantasies of Uber dying - basically raw emotional hatred - and little else.
Eight years on, they've never had a serious problem with raising capital and there's no evidence to suggest they'll struggle to do so now. The absolute last problem that Uber has right now, is money.
>"This entire thread is overflowing with nothing but fantasies of Uber dying - basically raw emotional hatred - and little else."
Except that there are no shortage of people who have maintained this view long before Uber's CEO was asked to resign and before Susan Fowler's blog post. Also there are also plenty of people who have commented here that believe Uber's prospect without Travis Kalanick as CEO are not good and also believe he should not have been removed.
>"Eight years on, they've never had a serious problem with raising capital and there's no evidence to suggest they'll struggle to do so now."
You might want to look up the term "irrational exuberance":
Uber has been a fantastic means to lose billions, so far. It's not clear that they have a way to profitability. Are you going to invest in them? Do you trust their numbers? If so you might want to explain why.
Anecdotally, I've personally taken Lyft almost exclusively lately. Among my peers, I've noticed similar trends. I've even heard shifting in language -- rather than say "call an Uber", I've heard "call a Lyft"., Plural of anecdote is obviously not data, but those are my data points.
This conversation was had in a thread a week or two ago. The consensus was that the Lyft or other alternative anecdotes are far and few between. Like saying call a Lyft has to be rare and probably just in certain small circle. Most people are on Uber.
The reason it's so big is they're burning VC cash to subsidize rides.
So yea when billionaires are paying your taxi fair to try and drive the local taxi firms out of business naturally they're everywhere.
But when that cash runs out the necessary price hike could just as easily drive them out of business. It's not like the drivers have any great loyalty.
We really need pro-competition legislation to stop this sort of predatory capitalism.
People keep saying Uber is burning cash, but their core business model is sound:
$5 per hour per driver goes to Uber
Assume 80,000 drivers (half of # U.S. Uber drivers) drive 8 hours a day, 7 days a week
52 weeks in a year
5x8x80000x7x52=$1,164,800,000
So about $1.1 billion just in the US. The only expenses are at headquarters (engineering, operations, design, legal, marketing, support) and the tiny field support offices they have in each city (local, entry-level employees).
As far as I know, Uber loses money on driver incentives and stuff like pool/share options, where they pay the driver the amount over the discount granted to the customer. I'm assuming a lot of such tricks are how they keep their drivers, and this is what they spend money on.
It sounds like the parent poster is saying that "pro-competition legislation" would prevent a new company (funded by VCs) from competing with an entrenched industry (taxis).
I think the confusion stems from saying pro-competition legislation will prevent competition.
If the unit economics don't stack up, then the bigger it is, the faster it'll go out of business without external investment. Pervasiveness doesn't mean it's profitable, it means it's popular. If I had a network of people giving away $1 for $0.90 it'd be super popular.
As it is, Uber doesn't need to do too much to hit break even. Some central costs cut, and a slight rise on price.
I agree, but investors don't want to break even. The fundamental tension here is high operating margins -- 60% not being uncommon operating margins for a software company -- are incompatible with a highly competitive industry. But it's those fat margins that justify massive R&D investment. Although software companies have enormous operating margins, they generally are not more profitable, because of huge fixed investment.
That creates a bit of a puzzle for industries with very thin operating margins that want to make significant investments in R&D. Generally they don't do it. That is why innovation at the Grocery store or in Long Haul trucking is so slow. From an engineering point of view, they are ripe for disruption, until you bring in an accountant to tell you that the disruption doesn't pencil out. Uber, like everything else, said to hell with it we're going ahead anyway. So how can they make things pencil out?
One option is to raise unit revenue in the future, which in an industry that's currently competitive means driving out the competition. IMO Uber was originally targeting this. But it turns out -- and really anyone could have told you -- that what Uber is doing isn't technically difficult. The heavy lifting is smartphones, GPS and Maps, whose availability made Uber/Lyft possible. Uber doesn't own any of the key technologies that make Uber possible, nor do they have a track record of being able to tackle really hard technology problems. They've had huge problems scaling and when Uber started using its own maps, it was a disaster. Bad maps is the #1 problem with Uber. Lots of new competitors have sprung up already that give basically an equivalent user experience, so Uber is not going to get real pricing power.
The next option would be "Lower unit costs in the future", But so far, that means spinning tales about self-driving cars, which is way beyond their technical ability as well as decades out even for those that have the chops to pull it off. IMO this only works because the latter round investors are naive about technology and the current investment climate is conducive to reaching for yield.
So while it's perfectly possible for Uber to continue existing as a concern, I don't think it's possible to satisfy their investors, and this means, unfortunately, that Uber may not make it. Many companies engage in a lot of self-destructive acts to meet unrealistic profit or growth goals set by investors, but in this case, Uber has only themselves to blame for setting these expectations. This is a shame, because I prefer Uber to Lyft and think they've created enormous value for both riders and drivers.
There is nothing that differentiates Uber from lyft, or another ride hail company. Drivers could easily switch between the companies. Driverless tech will be the differentiation. Whoever gets there first, even in limited urban centers will win the taxi industry
> Whoever gets there first, even in limited urban centers will win the taxi industry
Why "win"? There's no moat. I suppose there will be patents, but those expire or can be worked around.
More likely is that whoever gets there first will make all the mistakes that others can learn from. Every major car company has a self-drive effort now. Apparently Tesla, GM, Ford, and BMW are pretty far along. Lyft has a few partnerships here. It's only a matter of time before most cars drive themselves to some degree.
yeah expiring patents, and effective partnerships, give enough cushion for one company to get far ahead enough to dominate the business.
self driving hardware+software is much more complex than just writing some software... a non player can't trivially get into the game just because someone else have higher advancement
Competitors won't have to develop this stuff on their own. They just need to buy a self driving car that has an API. Trying to vertical integrate the self driving software is a moonshot.
guarantee you that for the initial years, self driving car will take the form of proprietary units, used for specific purpose, in isolated locations. Akin to self driving rail transportation.
No mass produced self driving appliances that any dumb human can use improperly. The industry won't take that chance of a poor impression and destroy public's confidence all together.
In urban/high density locations, a ride hail company leveraging driverless vehicles can make a killing.
It's a relished fantasy that Uber is dying or is going to die, because so many people in tech circles hate Uber and Kalanick.
It's not actually dying and it's not going to die.
Routinely skeptics here will point out that Uber is selling a $1 service for $0.75 (or a similar invented sum). Said skeptics then intentionally, comically ignore that Lyft is and has been doing the exact same thing and has radically less capital & valuation to play that game with. The name of the game is: last company standing; that's going to be Uber because they can afford to be and Lyft can't. It's that simple.
Lyft seems to be a fundamentally different company in two ways that gives them an advantage over Uber. First of all they are much happier to partner with local players and don't feel a need to 'own' the entire world in the way Uber does. Secondly Lyft seems happy being a ride dispatching service and don't see it as a temporary stepping stone towards much grander transportation ambitions.
The downside of this approach is that Lyft doesn't have anywhere near the upside potential that Uber has. If Uber pulls off all of its ambitions it will be larger than Lyft could ever dream of being. The upside for Lyft's more humble goals is that it's chance of reaching them are much larger.
Unless Uber is willing to change its DNA and scale back its ambition, give up on its long term goals, and stay just a basic ride dispatching service then your analysis is incomplete. However perhaps this scaling back is what the CEO change is fundamentally about.
Regardless of what you're saying, Lyft lost $600M on $700M in revenue in 2016. Those numbers are awful. And worse than Uber. Lyft isn't in any better shape than Uber in terms of needing more funding almost every year to sustain the company.
True. However I personally don't think either company can do too much about revenues at this point and it's all about controlling costs. From an outsider point of view it seems that Lyft is in a better position, culturally if nothing else, to do this. At least when compared to a Kalanick run Uber. It will be very interesting to see what priorities the next CEO will have.
Internal culture or external? The vast majority of people have little idea of Uber's issues and if they do have some idea, they don't care. I'm not saying that's how everyone is. Just most people. Especially outside of circles like HN.
If internal, I gusss that's true. But we don't hear much about Lyft's internal workings. We don't know the morale of workers or how productive the company is.
About controlling costs - that's why I mentioned losses. Lyft is only in the US yet its losses are worse than Uber. It makes Lyft looks worse to me. Has Lyft said it is profitable anywhere or even break even?
But then Uber's insane valuation is not helping itself. I guess both companies are in bad positions, hard to say which is worse. And I agree it will be interesting to see how Uber does over the next year with new top executives.
By culture I meant how they think internally about growth vs profitability. Uber under Kalanick feels like they wanted to dominate every market or die trying and Kalanick didn't strike me as the sort of person who would be happy running fairly successful company making modest profits. Lyft however seems like they'd be content with being number 2 as long as they're profitable. This is of course pure conjecture on my part.
Has Lyft said it is profitable anywhere or even break even?
The CEO said in a recent Forbes interview that their losses are currently coming in "under budget" and that they have a definite path to profitability. Make of that what you will.
I've seen Lyft saying those sorts of things for some time now when I skimmed around while replying to you. It seems like Lyft has been saying this sort of thing since around 2015/2016. For now I don't believe them. But I'll take that back if they do show what the CEO said when financial info is revealed for this year.
And yeah agree with Kalanick and Uber by extension seem to be only content with winning everything. They only gave up on China after spending a ton of money and clearly not being able to win. Luckily they were able to get a decent stake in Didi from the merger and leaving China.
> The vast majority of people have little idea of Uber's issues and if they do have some idea, they don't care. I'm not saying that's how everyone is. Just most people. Especially outside of circles like HN.
Agreed, but they'll get more funding. the big thing is, keep the support of your constituents and you'll keep getting funding.
Travis offended and insulted the drivers, while Lyft is chugging along quietly. As long as people have brand loyalty to them (which they sure do), they'll win the ridesharing battle as it's looking like Uber is teetering
> Secondly Lyft seems happy being a ride dispatching service and don't see it as a temporary stepping stone towards much grander transportation ambitions.
Yeah... that's why they have so much investment from car companies... ;-)
> Said skeptics then intentionally, comically ignore that Lyft is and has been doing the exact same thing and has radically less capital & valuation to play that game with.
I'm blown away that you have to read more than half way down all the comments to get to this observation. It should be an automatic reply every time someone echoes the fantasy that Uber runs out of money and Lyft is magically left to take over. I don't understand the mental gymnastics and contortions one needs to make to arrive at this absurd idea.
Correct, if Lyft and Uber IPO tomorrow. Most of these people are going to put money on Uber. Lyft is a lifestyle business its. Uber is a public utility.
Not sure what "its" is, but characterizing Lyft as a lifestyle business seems absurd. It's not as highly leveraged s Uber is, but that's one of the few companies I can think of that one might consider more aggressive.
This is an unpopular sentiment around here, but needs to be said more. You're still a child playing with other people's money until you're actually self sufficient.
In some cases this lack of maturity is particularly striking.
Yes yes, clearly there are points in time where there is a real entity that exists as a company. But in the context of "can I lose all this?" where you are a founder building something, you don't just not have control, you don't have anything when you are dependent on future investment.
Given K ruthless record I'd say he bailed before the crack more than stepped down to see it flourish.
Would wait to see what'll happen to his equity before take a bet, but gonna guess will be sold high and eventually rebought after the crack when K will try to step back in at a better condition, with less stakes and more hard cash.
I think you mean a big haircut for the later stage investors. Even if Uber has a down round, the earliest investors will probably still have positive returns (at least on paper).
You are confusing a down round with a small exit event (here and in other places in this thread). Liquidation preferences don't come into effect until a sale of the company - so no one is "crammed out" by them in a down round.
Though these two types of events are obviously correlated (a down round makes a smaller exit more likely) they are not the same and should not be confused. A financing at a valuation that is a billion dollars less than the last round would be a down round, but a sale of the company at that same valuation would still far exceed the liquidation overhang.
> Our main way of relating ourselves to others is like things relate themselves to things on the market. We want to exchange our own personality, or as one says sometimes, our "personality package", for something.
> The danger of computers becoming like humans is not as great as the danger of humans becoming like computers.
-- Konrad Zuse
And when Picasso said that computers are useless because they only provide answers, was he just being witty, or pointing at an abyss, knowingly or not?
Insofar none of us would want to suffer the consequences of such acts we cannot truly say we are capable of carrying them out.
It is what we mean when we claim someone is "incapable of <x>" such as murder. It does not mean they do not physically possess the means, but rather that they lack the psychological impetus to do so.
So a person who is psychologically capable of murdering has more control over me than one who isn't, and both are less in control than, say, a tsunami? Maybe, but neither can get at things I give freely to a friend? Control is the incapability of either friendship or self-defense, in my opinion, so yes, in a way always it requires numbing or killing something or someone. Leashes transform those on both ends.
"So a person who is psychologically capable of murdering has more control over me than one who isn't,"
More relevantly, a person who is both capable and willing to restrict your freedoms, potentially even unto death, has more control over you than a person who doesn't.
This isn't abstract theory. This is a description of "government". Would you pay any attention to the people claiming to be "the government" if they didn't have credible mechanisms for backing up their demands?
It is preferable that government not be solely founded on this power relation. It shouldn't be considered "sufficient" for good government. But it is certainly "necessary".
Note: downvotes are not a rebuttal. Not that I think that it's possible to dispute that statement by means other than "I'd like the world to work differently", but if someone were prepared to offer an argument, that would redound far more to their credit. And if you think I'm wrong, don't let me dangle in ignorance, otherwise I'm liable to keep saying such things.
The original quote does fall apart, as most quotes do, upon closer inspection.
Say you can kill a man, but irregardless of the threat to their life said man would refuse any and all of your orders, who can then be said to have 'control'?
In the end control means the ability to influence outcomes. There are many metrics, and for some choice of metric the capability of destruction is control.
The original Dune quote makes perfect sense in context. Paul was talking about destroying the spice supply by making Arrakis barren of sandworms. "Control" in this context is control of the spice, specifically being able to control there being none at all.
That's insanity. Why would existing investors refuse to play ball? They're basically locked into it. Uber's massive valuation is built on its potential and to anything they do that hurts Uber's access to capital hurts them.
I think they made a huge mistake in pushing Kalanick out, but I'm an outsider. There is surely something dark at play here, that we don't know about.
Liquidation preferences, senior equity, and debt-like terms, perhaps? If Uber is valuable enough in liquidation, it'd be a great opportunity to zero out the common stockholders and go home with a pile of cash.
you are absolutely right depending on liquidation preferences terms cascade it could be a great deal to force an IPO or another type of exit for later investors.
> Uber has less than a year of runway left at their current burn rate.
If true, this seems far more likely to be a cause of Uber's death than Kalanick resigning. That, and the valuation being as insane as it is, which is also Kalanick's fault, which as you point out, makes it hard to find greater and greater suckers.
Perhaps they'll be better off all around without Kalanick, assuming they can get the business side on track and get the burn rate under control, and perhaps make their business sustainable rather than a gigantic handout of VC money.
Uber bought market share by subsidizing rides. That can't go on forever. Or much longer, without more capital. They're already borrowing heavily, having run out of equity sources. The business model hype is supposed to be that they push taxis out of business, then raise rates. Or self-driving cars will somehow save them. Both are unlikely.
Completely ridiculous. The model was not to raise rates in the future. The whole reason they could raise so much money was that they showed as they reduced rates, they induced more demand. They also had data showing increasing lifetime customer value. I recommend reading Brad Stone's The Upstarts. If they can have higher profits/customer while having lower rates than other companies, then they actually have a moat. I don't think they got to the moat, though.
If you have costs that scale sublinearly with volume, such as software development or idle driver time, then margins really do improve with volume. Many successful businesses use economies of scale as an sustainable competitive advantage against competitors.
In fact, the central concept of venture capital is premised on the idea that businesses start out unprofitable but become profitable as volumes scale.
To what extent any of this is the case for Uber is worth debating. So feel free to have that debate, and bring forth new information or new arguments that support your thesis.
> If you have costs that scale sublinearly with volume, such as software development or idle driver time, then margins really do improve with volume
And if you're subsidising rides below cost because you're trying to grow your market and you have piles of VC cash so you don't care that you're burning through money, then eventually you're going to run out of that money and will be in trouble if you can't raise any more.
Time will tell whether Uber was building a sustainable business or just burning through VC cash.
Uber was just burning through VC cash based on the idea that 'if you're the biggest jerk on the block in every possible sense, capital will decide you're going to be the winner because you're meaner than everybody else'.
Winners don't quit, so Uber is dead to capital now: it was always based on maximum evilness and all the stuff about disrupting and ridesharing was mere window dressing.
Note to capital, wherever it is: this is what you get when you go by personality rather than studying the fundamentals of a business. You can't simply pick the most toxic individual or company, claim they're going to kill everybody else, and then prop them up with valuation. The valuation didn't fail but your pet Dr. Evil did, and that was your proxy for maintaining the 'killer' behavior. Unless or until capital can be personified as evil AIs that cannot die, this was never really an optimal strategy for capital.
Only if you are in #1 in a pie that isn't getting bigger. Ridesharing is most definitely not a developed market globally. There is a lot of room to increase the size of the pie.
Ridesharing is definitely not a developed market globally because in most of the rest of the world the margins on organising transport around cities are already measured in cents rather than dollars. These markets are not going to be more profitable for Uber than the ones they started in.
Particularly not if you can't set up an operation in an Western city with expensive taxi services without losing money on every ride you operate even before centralised overheads are taken into account.
This suggests to me that marginal rides are profitable, even if they aren't profitable enough to cover fixed costs of software development or investments into new geographic markets.
Thanks for the source and the reply. It's good to know that in 2014 they had promos in developed city markets that dropped their gross margins into negative territory.
Nonetheless, my impression is that this is more the exception than the rule, based on the financials I linked to earlier.
If you're losing money on every ride, then your aggregate profit on all rides will be in the negatives. More volume just makes the total loss bigger, because that's more money you've been giving away.
But are they losing money on every ride? I thought the whole point of subsidizing rides was(as OP comments pointed out) to raise demand, both for drivers and riders, they first entice both ways with the promise of lower rates and higher payoffs, then slowly increase their cut of the pie against the driver's payoff and increase the rates on riders.
I'm not saying this will ever offset their increasing losses, but that is what always seemed the long term goal of monopoly.
> I thought the whole point of subsidizing rides was(as OP comments pointed out) to raise demand, both for drivers and riders, they first entice both ways with the promise of lower rates and higher payoffs, then slowly increase their cut of the pie against the driver's payoff and increase the rates on riders.
Right, and by the logic that decreasing prices raises demand, increasing prices will decrease demand.
That's my point, and the point of critics that are often ignored. Their customers will bail the moment they start getting charged the $25 their $10 ride actually costs. And that increase will be to break even. Not make any money. Just break even.
Uber will never achieve a monopoly. There are buses, bicycles, and used cars for $1500. People aren't going to pay $600 per month on a ride hailing service. I've already ditched Uber, and so have many of my peers, in favor of alternatives that save money. And that's without significant price hikes yet.
The fundamental economics of having a private driver have not changed. An app doesn't change what it costs to pay someone to drive you everywhere. I hate being critical because it's often a waste of time, but Uber is sincerely one of the worst investments that Silicon Valley has ever produced.
> Completely ridiculous. The model was not to raise rates in the future.
I'm not sure if you're disputing OP's idea that Uber subsidizing rides is (at least in part) of an effort to kill the taxi industry, but my logic is, if you don't have any competition, why wouldn't you raise rates?
One possibility, because increased rates could result in your user base using your service less often?
While transportation is something everyone needs, I'm (as priviledged as I am in my salary) not going to pay $20 for an uber if it's $2 on the bus.
I'll take uber when it's $10, compared to $2.
They could possibly raise their rates some, but to answer your question specifically: because there are other factors involved in their price/demand/profit/market share equation, besides just competition.
You're exactly right though, and that's the problem.
People won't pay to use the service if Uber charges what it actually costs to deliver it. They're heavily subsidizing each ride. When you pay for an Uber, they're basically giving investor money to the driver to cover your fare for you. Investors have been paying for your transportation over the past few years.
At some point, they have to actually make money, and the only way to do that is to raise prices. The issue is no one will stick with the app at higher prices. I've already abandoned Uber/Lyft/others for a $300 bike and a bus pass, because it's much cheaper and much healthier. If they double or triple their prices, which is about what they'd have to do just to break even, lots of people will be following suit.
The self-driving car game was supposed to save them, but I don't think they're guaranteed to win that fight. Tesla seems further along than anyone, and I have far more faith in Musk's ability and track record of executing than I do in Travis (or whatever committee is replacing him). Not to mention every automaker is working on self-driving cars right now to boot.
Uber has no guarantee they'll dominate that market, and considering they can't even break even in their current market, I see them as a ticking time bomb.
>The self-driving car game was supposed to save them, but I don't think they're guaranteed to win that fight
Agreed. I'd argue that existing car-sharing companies like Car2Go are better positioned to dominate the "self-driving taxi" market. They've already solved the challenges of owning and maintaining a shared car fleet profitably. The day self-driving technology is ready, they'll already be miles ahead of Uber.
You got green name, so I'm gonna reply here too. You already pay for the bus, does not matter if you use it or not (okay there's a surcharge, cause we ain't no commies). Uber has to compete with that! If you thought VC's are good at throwing away capital...
edit: I forgot what green name means... green btw...
> The whole reason they could raise so much money was that they showed as they reduced rates, they induced more demand.
I've yet to see an Uber driver who started rolling in cash after the rates were dropped. 100% of my anecdotal conversations (and that's not 99.9% rounded up, but a straight up 100%) reminisce about the good ole days.
They don't have any kind of advantage apart from being first mover in the states so no guarantee they will take all the market share in the short term and in the long term if and when AI driven cars come they will be out muscled by car manufacturers who can put millions of cars on the road in a year when they go all in.
If I'm not mistaken, they were losing money on every ride. If they did not intend to raise the rates in the future, they're basically planning to go bankrupt.
And I have a really hard time believing companies plan to fail.
It's a very clear case of dumping, or whatever it's called in English. Unsustainable low prices, suffocate your competitors, raise prices.
At some point, though, every company that wants a sustainable business model needs to make money "on average" on the sum of all items (units of service, e.g. rides) sold. Uber being a local business should be able to do this progressively as its business matures in each city. However, if it is true that they are not profitable in their mature US market where by some accounts they enjoy >80% market share, that implies some substantial flaws in their model. Subsidizing rides in Asia or some smaller city in Europe is ok to gain growth, subsidizing rides in New York or San Francisco is worrying. And autonomous driving implies a completely different business model and economics (driven by the "who owns the car fleet" discussion).
That was never going to work. With self-driving cars on the horizon they will soon be forgotten about as car manufacturers start rolling out their own apps. The switching cost is too low. If Uber thought they could rely on brand recognition to dominate the market it's because they misjudged what market they were in and who the players were. Regardless of what Uber could do in the next 10 years Mercedes and BMW will still be more recognisable names and as soon as they roll out their self driving fleets and ride hailing apps Uber are history. No one will buy Uber if they can build the same thing for what is, in the grand scheme, essentially free.
That is exactly my point for a while now [1]. The investors could have easily picked on taxi company handed them several billions, but they chose Uber. Mainly because of the hype created by the senior leadership team. They seem to have overplayed there hand.
"Uber is an example of what happens when central banks attempt to ‘stimulate’ the economy through misguided central planning. By forcing down market prices and essentially moving spending from the future into the present, they’re hoping to stimulate investment in general. But what they forget (or more likely, choose to ignore) is that these ‘investments’ are likely just bad investments."
I agree with the general dynamic there, but the connection to Uber specifically is tenuous. Risk free interest rates of 0.1 vs 0.5% don't lead VCs to be more or less aggressive with creating and capturing new markets.
Sounds like a '90s startup. Companies acting like this en masse was what caused the 2000 crash. Uber isn't going to make it out of this alive, and they're going to take the rest of the industry with them. I think the whole culture of VCs looking for "unicorn startups" is going to go away when the unicorns all die.
But that's nothing new, Uber has been on that shaky ground for months now. "If Kalanick can turn this around" (and his banking on automated to make them viable) were basically the only hail marys the diehard bulls clung to. (Name recognition/network effect being useless for obvious reasons that've been covered here in the past) with this, all their eggs are in automated.
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 the day, the guy at the top was irrationally emotionally committed to _winning_. Now I am a bear on Uber.
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.
People like Steve Jobs weren't successful because they were assholes, they were successful in spite of it. Being manipulative, cruel, and dishonest do not help your business in the long run.
Yes, I agree. But the comment I was replying to seemed to suggest that somehow Kalanick is an asshole in a business-damaging way, while Jobs was an asshole in a necessary, visionary way. It's an idea that's some combination of cultural animus and the Jobs cult of personality - neither of them benefitted from being unpleasant.
You're right. However, the many other worse things Uber did than that sexual harassment case actualy do seem to be good for business - that's why for many years now I was hoping the governments will kill Uber. Unfortunately that did not happen, and it is this fact - not some narrative - that is dangerous, because there will be others willing to try out the "move fast and break laws" business model.
has Kalanick himself ever harassed women? I'm genuinely asking, I haven't followed the Uber story closely but I thought the harassment accusations weren't aimed at the CEO.
I don't think anyone's suggesting that sexually harassing women is good for business.
When another executive (probably illegally) obtained medical records of a woman who was raped by a driver in India, Travis viewed the records and repeatedly aired his belief internally that the whole thing was a setup by a rival company and no rape had occurred.
There are some stories documenting what seems to be a somewhat strange relationship to women, but that's not quite the point. He has, and this seems to be almost undisputed at this point, certainly let far too many serious incidents including sexual harassment and assault go by without taking action.
I've commented all over this thread (as a sister comment points out) because it appears there is a narrative that his attitude towards his employees misbehaviour is at least closely linked to the personality traits that allowed him to be successful. That can be seen, I believe, by the many comparisons to Steve Jobs, for whom it's accepted more widely that it was often hard to work for him because of his perfectionism, but that this was a necessary trait for his success.
The danger here is that people (mis)understand the situation and start excusing inexcusable behaviour, or even imitate it, because they think it's linked to success. It is not. You have to separate the strip-club-going bravado from the other law-breaking, which could at least in theory explain Uber's success.
> it was often hard to work for him because of his perfectionism
Honestly, this feels like a white-wash. Jobs was exceedingly demanding, but that's hardly unique. Jobs was also dishonest, secretive, and simply cruel to the people around him. This comes up over and over, even in his non-business interactions.
I agree that it's an error to lionize Kalanick's behavior. But it's also wrong to say that Jobs' behavior was radically different, or that Kalanick's party-boy bravado is clearly separable from his disregard for the law. Realistically, I think we'd be better off admitting that an urge to ignore boundaries usually applies across many topics.
If Jobs was more capable Kalanick, I don't think that was a function of his nastiness somehow being more noble. He seems to have simply brought a lot more skill to his task.
I don't think he has been accused of doing it personally.
It also is weird that matt4077 repeatedly contrasts Kalanick with Steve Jobs in this thread, despite Apple having been accused many times of mean culture, sexism, harassment and cover-ups too.
so he was standing over watching with approval as his employees were accosted? I doubt it. I think what's more likely is he didn't know about the extent of harassment (or didn't care, if you want to be cynical) and the initial HR non-response was likely just a really poor quality HR department designed to manage PR rather than solve employee problems. Organisations are more than just their CEO and while you can lay plenty of blame on him for allowing such a poor quality workplace culture to evolve, that doesn't necessarily mean that he's a big fan of sexual harassment in the workplace.
I bet you do, because nobody in their right mind believes that, and you are obviously attempting to cast the notion that a CEO might know what happens in their company as absurd.
Or do you also think that others believe oversight committees on BoDs literally stand over the managers and nod or grimace?
If he didn't know what HR was up to, he was incompetent.
> that doesn't necessarily mean that he's a big fan of sexual harassment
And... exactly nobody I've read here or anywhere else has asserted that. If you want to argue, do so in good faith.
I don't think a CEO knows what happens in such a large company at the level of individual employees.
If he didn't know what HR was up to, perhaps he wasn't the director in charge of HR? You can't expect a CEO to know 100% of what's happening in a larger company.
> And... exactly nobody I've read here or anywhere else has asserted that. If you want to argue, do so in good faith.
> ... managed HR's nonresponse to it.
your quote seems to imply that he went out of his way to make sure HR did nothing about the harassment. I'd be inclined to argue incompetence (or just a lack of ground-level micromanagement) over malice.
This seems like a pretty fruitless discussion. I have no idea why you're so focused on finding claims of malice to argue about. I certainly have said nothing about it. I don't know what's in dude's heart, and frankly don't care. This is about observed behavior.
Unless the facts on the ground are very different than what we've heard, Uber HR had a policy of protecting some people accused of harassment because they were highly valued. In other words, a decision somewhere was made that policy was to prefer key-player retention over the risk of lawsuits, because, obviously, that sort of policy is pretty much guaranteed to lead to lawsuits[1].
I have a great deal of difficulty imagining the HR exec who doesn't realize that - that would be beyond incompetent, well in to senility[2]. I also have difficulty imagining the HR exec who will personally take on the risk of mandating policy about balancing disparate business risks (slowing down by losing productive harassers vs. lawsuits and bad press). That can end careers, and anyone capable of landing a management job at an Uber is exceedingly unlikely to take that risk without taking it up the food chain.
Finally, I find it remarkable that so many people are willing to credit the man with extraordinary genius in business execution while simultaneously arguing his incompetence when it happens to absolve him of shitty behavior.
And with this, I'm done with discussing things I didn't say.
[1] Moving on to speculation, making that choice makes perfect sense in an environment with a value system emphasizing winning at any cost and burning down anything in the way. If they thought first-mover advantage was literally everything and they thought they had enough money to weather any resulting legal problems, that's the rational choice. And especially if you think you're the smartest guy in the room and can get away with it. Not unlike hypothetically deciding to gaslight regulators or steal IP from competitors or invade medical privacy to discredit opponents. For example.
[2] I don't know about other states, but in California, HR for firms over some number of employees are legally required to ensure employees have been trained on sexual harassment law. I'm sure it takes other forms, but generally we get to watch these awful law-firm Flash videos of cartoons being either awkward with or awful to each other, and then have to answer questions about which actions are harassment in order to make sure we paid attention.
> sexually harassing women and his general brohaviour are good for business
Nowhere has he said this. You're conflating two very different issues. No one is disputing that he is an asshole, etc. OP was making a different point.
It probably doesn't have to come at that cost, it's just not unusual for it to.
If you peal back the layers, probably most rapid growth, hard driving large companies have left a wake of upset and screwed over people behind it. Nobody "gives" you a hundred billion dollar company.. Uber's leadership was just particularly inept at pivoting from "scorched earth" to a slightly less savage strategy.
This will be an interesting pivot to watch, I've been kind of betting with myself when will the first week come with no news or good news for uber. I thought they'd have spun up the pr machine months ago, talking about co2 saved by carpooling or something. Giant company, currently fixed runway, all eyes on it and damaged culture. If uber doesn't die, the next CEO is a superstar.
Being an asshole (in some senses of the word) is necessary, it's just incredibly difficult to compartmentalize the good aspects of being an asshole (holding people to tough promises and standards, being unflinching in stating the truth to people's faces no matter how impolitic or uncomfortable) from the bad aspects of being an asshole (bullying, abuse of power).
Correct. This is why you see almost no billion dollar "tech" companies coming out of Scandinavia or Europe in the past 10 years. The places with so called, work life balance.
That is a spurious relationship at best. Actually you couldn't possibly have chosen a worse example. Scandinavia actually has the highest share of billion-dollar exits compared to the rest of the world (7% of such exits compared to 2% of global GDP and 3% of total European population) http://nordic.businessinsider.com/the-nordics-are-the-best-f...
Anecdotally, famous Nordic startups include Spotify, Skype, Mojang (behind Minecraft), King (behind Candy Crush, Farm Heroes), Rovio and Supercell.
This guy makes claims with 0 evidence. Points he makes:
1. Nordic countries have more über wealthy per capita.
2. Nordic countries are social democracies.
Then he draws the conclusion, with no corroborating evidence, that these two things are inextricably linked. No data to link these two points at all. Nordic countries in general have a high GDP PPP, and that is probably not solely (or at all) due to being social democracies. Scandinavian systems need to be efficient due the nature of their environment, e.g. they have a lot of land and not a lot of population, and fairly harsh climate (e.g. poor farming conditions). I would almost argue that "being cold" is probably a better indicator of national wealth per capita than "being a social democracy" (though admittedly, I haven't done thorough research either). I mean, look at Canada. Look at the non-farming bits of the US vs. the farming bits. Look at North versus South Italy. etc. Industrialization is more efficient and effective in regions where alternative methods of production weren't great in the first place.
For reference, here is the population density of the nations he was comparing (in people per km^2):
The US has 11x the population density of Iceland. Easier to have shared wealth when each person in your country can have 11x the land they could have in another country (with the caveat, of course, that this only applies if you are an industrialized nation).
I mean, just look at one of his "indicators" - billionaires per million people. By that metric, iceland is at that top. But there is only a single billionaire in iceland. Statistically, then, it's easier to be a billionaire in iceland. In practice, however, that is not the case. Things like population subsets need to be considered. In the US, you have a very large population, which is obviously going to impact per capita stats. However, you need to ask what proportion of those people are actually pursuing wealth in a way that could ever result in becoming a billionaire. e.g. a grocery bagger, probably never to be a billionaire. A plumber? Same. A hippy in a commune? Same. No data has been shown to adjust for lack of competition. At the end of the day, you have to look not at the total population, but at how many people are actually competing to become uber wealthy. Because, while attaining wealth isn't a zero-sum game, it certainly isn't an "everyone wins" game either.
Scandinavian countries have a very high proportion of jobs that don't really have a cap on upper income, such as software/game development, banking, music production, etc. because they have exceedingly efficient economies (as he actually touches on).
However, there is not clear reason to believe that they are efficient because they have social democracies. In fact, the converse (they became social democracies because they already had efficient economies) is just as likely, if not more so.
> The US has 11x the population density of Iceland. Easier to have shared wealth when each person in your country can have 11x the land they could have in another country (with the caveat, of course, that this only applies if you are an industrialized nation).
Can you elaborate on this supposed link between population density and shared wealth in developed nations? I don't understand the logical underpinnings of your argument. Developed countries almost by definition are less reliant on local geography.
Moreover, I don't see how space metrics are even relevant here. Iceland may technically have a lot of available "land" - but more than half the country lives in Reykjavik. A similarly lopsided urban / rural population distribution holds true in other Nordic countries.
You are exactly right. I did a poor job of explaining my thinking.
My point about geography and population density needs to be related to my point about industrialization to make any sense.
It is this: Nordic countries have modern economies weighed very heavily towards industrialization/mechanization, but most importantly, they are efficient. As you say, they also have a "lopsided urban / rural population distribution", which is a much better way of saying (thank you) what I was trying to say: Nordic countries have land, but it's not good for the classic wealth generator - farming. This is why the population is focused in urban areas and is not spread out. However, luckily for places like Iceland, modern cities don't really care how good the land is for farming. An oil refinery doesn't care about the health of the soil. A modern factory doesn't care if the terrain is a bit rocky. Solar panels don't care. Mines don't care. etc., etc. Basically all modern industry is fine in a place like Iceland.
This an unexpected and immense boon to making a modern industrialized nation efficient, because on the one hand, you have major population centres with not much in-between (due to the lack of farming), which is in itself efficient, because areas you need to service with public services are greatly reduced. But on the other hand, you have plenty of space to put modern things like factories or new cities or what have you.
Compare this to the US, the country with more arable farmland than any other country on earth. Sure, the US has big population centres, but they are spread out, and many of them are still driven by rural economies. This greatly reduces efficiency, and is generally why the spread out states seem to be further behind the small / densely populated ones.
I've included the percentage of population that is urban below for comparison, according to The World Bank, from 2015. Also, I think it is slightly different when the rural population is doing something like fishing (Nordic) vs farming, but I won't go into that here.
US - 81%
Sweden - 86%
Iceland - 94%
Comparing anything to the US is a little bit silly though, because the US is comprised of 50 states, all of which are quite a bit different from each other. For instance, I bet the uber wealthy per capita in say California or New York is much, much higher than the Nordic countries. So the obvious answer to this video is probably "move to New York or California if you want to make a lot of money". I will say that would probably require more initial capital than a nordic country, but if you have the initial capital, then your chances are probably better. SO THE ACTUAL ANSWER IS: Get a great education and livelihood in Norseland while you're young, get some seed capital, and move to Cali/NYC/etc to really start making bank.
Obviously if you want to become a billionaire, you're not going to move to Plano, TX. Yet Plano is affecting the per capita stats.
That is a bad example - Scandinavia is punching way above it's weight and reputation in terms of number of unicorn startups[1] produced on a per capita basis.
Sweden has a population of 9.8 million yet it has produced Skype, Mojang, Spotify, King, Klarna [0]
Australia has 2.5x the population but only two unicorns. The UK and London market themselves as the capital of unicorns in Europe yet with 6.5x the population they have either the same number of unicorns or just four more (depending how you count them).
That is remarkable for a country like Sweden, especially when considering the strength and size of the Swedish expatriate community in tech around the world (many tend to leave).
In terms of similar results, I think only Singapore is in similar or better unicorn per capita territory.
[1] "unicorn" isn't the best measure since it is a private valuation and you can get different answers depending on who you ask, but most people would recognize those Swedish startups as being successful.
Skype was a started in Sweden, by a Swede and a Dane. They then however set up a dev office in Estonia where the initial client was developed and set up their headquarters in Luxembourg, I'm assuming for tax reasons. They have however always had offices in Stockholm. That being said Microsoft has announced that they're closing the Stockholm Skype office to consolidate the development to Estonia.
Thanks for your comment! My apologies, no disrespect intended - I should have clarified I meant "left" for the purpose of your IPO. It was and is fantastic to see Australian talent prosper to such heights.
I see many clever companies where I live in Melbourne - however I am saddened by what I perceive as the neglect the government is showing for the tech sector, especially startups; I'm looking e.g. at how share options are taxed. I believe there's a lot of lost opportunity here.
I'd rather have a real work life balance (it's not so called, it's very real) than any amount of abuse working for a US style startup would throw at me.
Most of my colleague would as well.
To have the disdain for life you seem to display you must live in a very distant place from a sane version of reality.
There was a great scene in a Clive Owen movie - Shoot Em Up - where he goes on a bit of a rant about the correlation between fancy cars, driving like an asshole, and success. I think there's a small level of vague relevance here.
"Mr. Smith: I move my finger one inch to use my turn signal. Why are these assholes so lazy they can't move their finger one fucking measly inch to drive more safely? You wanna know why?
DQ: Not particularly.
Mr. Smith: Because these rich bastards have to be callous and inconsiderate in the first place to make all that money, so when they get on the road, they can't help themselves. They've gotta be callous and inconsiderate drivers too. It's in their nature."
Europe has plenty of passionate "asshole" founders and other workaholic types. The lower avg valuation of the tech scene has more to do with investors and general aversion to risk, dependency on public sector financing (really awesome but limiting in maneuverability), stronger status quo legislation, reduced VC scene and a more limited early-adopter audience for your products.
It was founded by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis (Danish) in equal measure. The software was based on Janus Friis' earlier work (the Kazaa p2p network). It was developed by an outsourced team in Estonia.
I don't know, during the last decade we've had billion dollar tech companies such as Spotify, King and Klarna come out of Stockholm which isn't the largest hub in Europe.
So what? Even at Uber, 90% of their employees, the ones who actually made the company as valuable as it is, won't see much in terms of reward for it, and they'll have sacrificed that work-life balance to do so.
I can't think of a way to take this statement that makes it true.
I don't know how old you are, but public morality towards sexual harassment just in the U.S. has changed in my lifetime. (For the better, although it is currently ugly and messy, as these changes always are.)
Even attitudes about what constitute harassment vary by culture between similar cultures. Compare Italy and Germany.
I think you mean policing "law" better. Policing "morals" is not possible since as I mentioned morals are relative. It is a dangerous thing if Police or state actors act on moral rather than law.
Of course not, but there isn't another option for Uber. Second place isn't good enough, not with their burn rate. You need Ghengis Khan if you want to slaughter and conquer.
It's this slaughter and conquer mentality that has caused them so many problems. I mean Lyft's main selling point to consumers has been 'Uber without all the attitude.' If Uber had been a little more customer-focused and emollient a few years back, they'd have held onto a much larger slice of the ride-sharing market.
Look at Google; they're firmly business-minded and have often butted heads with regulators and so forth, but most people like google, not least because of that 'don't be evil' branding and and their habit of giving people Nice Things.
That mentality itself hasn't caused Uber's problems. It's just their inability to successfully conceal it, as other big companies do. Kalanick was likely too idealistic and didn't place adequate weight on appearing soft, which allowed the press to rake him over the coals.
Neither did I mention that. Why did you associate those two things?
Does 'highly demanding environment' == 'Harassment' to you? If yes then you have far bigger problems. Any demanding mission ever might be out of reach to you per your value system.
Work conditions, overall demands of productivity et al will be brutal. And that ultimately gets to cause all sorts of other problems. People who just can't catch up with all the rush ultimately feel discriminated.
> People who just can't catch up with all the rush ultimately feel discriminated.
Non sequitur. You're also generally espousing some pretty reprehensible ideas. We as a society do not take the view that business success overrides all soft concerns, especially with regard to their employees. If ruthlessness and discrimination is the grist that your mill requires, find another mill.
>>We as a society do not take the view that business success overrides all soft concerns, especially with regard to their employees.
This is obviously wrong. Have you ever bought a iPhone? Or any other Apple product. Have you ever ordered anything from Amazon.
How do you think Walmarts and Targets of the world can sell you things for so cheap? Behind all this there is some guy being sent through some real hard ships.
If I can reach back to your earlier comment, it seems that your premise is that when margins are razor-thin, 'Work conditions, overall demands of productivity et al will be brutal.'
My answer to that is then there is something fundamentally wrong with your business model. Basically, what is the point in running a business under which such conditions are the norm?
Any demanding mission ever might be out of reach to you per your value system.
This is fallacious. Of course there are times when struggle is necessary. A rewarding life (however you define reward) certainly requires an investment of effort, and at time that effort will be very difficult. Sometimes we are faced with very trying circumstances such as natural disaster or war or serious economic insecurity, and we have to work very ahrd to survive.
But a key word here is sometimes. If you deliberately construct such an environment where survival and advancement are only possible through 'brutal' work conditions and demands of productivity, then you are actively making the world a worse place, because you are establishing such brutal conditions as a norm and implicitly telling people that their life choices boil down to slavery or death. Why would any sane person want to create the conditions of slavery? Slavery is a condition of life that people rationally wish to escape.
There seems to be this attitude that if people are not constantly driven by necessity then they'll get too comfortable and lazy and never do anything. This is not borne out by the evidence. Some people would, not least because they're constantly bombarded with messages to consume, consume, consume whenever they can as a relief from their economic anxiety. But few people are fundamentally motivated by gluttony. Given the opportunity most people opt to develop their capabilities and contribute or create rather than merely consume.
Choosing to promulgate brutal working conditions is essentially promoting brutality as your preferred model of social organization. That's basically a displacement of sadistic and/or masochistic impulses into the economic sphere. You may very well feel that nothing of value happens except under harsh compulsion, but that seems to both ignore all the evidence to the contrary (an irrational bias) and abdicate responsibility for the consequences (since brutality is well-understood to result in wholly avoidable injuries).
It seems to me that your value system rests on some rather extreme assumptions that are not justified by the available evidence, and insofar as it imposes compulsion on others rather than being used to motivate yourself, it's intolerable. Put another way, if you only feel alive and productive under conditions of harsh necessity, that's your business. But as soon as you insist that this is the way of the world and that others must get with it or be cast aside, you're infringing upon the freedom of others. And at a social level, through regulatory process, experience of litigation and so on, we've agreed that the creation of such conditions is not an acceptable means to pursue arbitrary ends.
>>Basically, what is the point in running a business under which such conditions are the norm?
As usual : 'Value'. All these affordable iPhones and seamless Amazon deliveries happen because they have a work culture that optimizes for every single $. I agree with your premise that these are not for everyone. But this is precisely why we have freedom. Nobody should sign up for a job they think is too hard for them.
As we talk there are doctors who are training by the clock, sleeplessly working towards becoming surgeons. This is necessary for various reasons. If it were any easy, people would become bad doctors with less training. This is bad for society. The fact that work conditions are harsh- that isn't wrong or discrimination or even harassment. The very demands of the job are such.
The top percentage of any profession are this way. That comes with the job. You just don't go and say why don't they make it easy to me to be the next Zakir Hussain. Mr Hussain has set pretty high practice benchmarks practicing his instrument pretty much his whole life. Was it worth for his to have undergone all that pain and punishment to get there? May be that fits into his value system.
If you want to beat Jeff Bezos you have to at least perform at his level or higher. You just have to chose your mission based on the mileage you think you have.
Making decisions at the cost of their employees' well-being didn't keep them in first place. Having a toxic work environment for women didn't put them in first place.
> Having a toxic work environment for women didn't put them in first place.
No, but that's not the point. How quickly we forget that we don't need dude bros to create a hostile environment for women. That GitHub situation was created by a woman, one who wasn't even an employee. We really don't give women enough credit.
Toxic work environment is everywhere. Remember the spreadsheet that Googlers started to compare salaries? I'd argue the Apple-Google-X pact to not poach one another is worse than anything Travis could imagine.
If there was crass behavior at Uber, I'm inclined to be more lenient because I think it is at a more primitive level than a well thought out plan to increase shareholder value by illegal collaboration to push down worker cost. If these people who criticize Uber really care about their employees, they will start publishing all details about how much salary and benefits and whatever money each employee makes.
Yeah, but winning meant becoming big while loosing money and saddling company with long term problems. Investors likely care about the money thing more.
There is no easy way for these people to make money. Not unless they start charging their customers some multiples of price higher than they are doing currently.
Here in India, I go by the office cab to home everyday. I generally chat with the drivers as to why they don't drive for Uber/Ola etc. The answer is they need to make a good 1300 rupees on a round trip to be profitable, at a minimum of 6 trips per day. A trip with Uber/Ola etc costs 300 rupees(With pool). But even then!
So that's like these people need to start charging a minimum of 5x extra to make profits. At that price these people are no longer a viable means of transport.
To be profitable you need to back to the yellow taxi medallion thingy all over again.
Another definition of 1 oom is anything between sqrt(10) and sqrt(10)*10. Basically 3 to 30. 2 oom, 30 to 300, and so on.
So if the (now edited) original intent was exponential, "more like 10x than 1x (or 100x)", then calling 5x an oom is fine. If the intent was linear, then yes, rounding 5x to 10x is 100 percent error (difference/actual). :)
I'm headed in the opposite direction and reinstalling the Uber app tonight. This is a very convincing capstone to a 180 degree course correction away from everything I disliked about Uber. I also hope Travis can learn and come back and lead the company again in the future.
They currently have no CEO, CFO or COO among other unfilled positions. Even once they bring on new people, it will take them time to become acquainted with Uber's massive worldwide operation... All taking place within a rapidly changing industry.
Traditional firms will generally prefer debt to equity as you will generally get a better shareholder return on debt. VC backed firms do not usually raise debt -- even if it is preferred -- because they are viewed as too risky by banks. When VC-backed firms raise debt it is because they are transitioning out of high risk to the stability of a established and predictable firm.
Alternate take (not originally mine): the bad state of Uber's financials is the cause of Kalanick's ousting. If the company had a longer runway, or wasn't facing the prospect of a down-round, he could have gotten away with anything.
This seems like the obvious rebuttal. Kalanick could have resisted any simple vote to remove, so this isn't a case of liking the results but not the methods. If Uber had strong financial footing, Kalanick would have been able to stay (and there would have been less interest in removing him).
I'm curious how much Kalanick has already taken off the table. That may be a motivating factor in his decision. If he has already pocketed hundreds of millions, he may understand that this could well be the death of the company, but just isn't motivated enough to fight these investors and is willing to let them burn the company to the ground. I wouldn't go as far as to say he doesn't care anymore, but being forced out of your job and the potential evaporation of billions in paper wealth isn't such a catastrophe if you already have enough money for several lifetimes in the bank.
Perhaps he pledged a small fraction of his shares to collateralize a non-recourse loan. This is one way to monetize equity without selling it.
The lender takes the risks as to share value and liquidity. If presented early in Uber's climbing valuation curve, it probably would have looked like a good opportunity to lenders.
I hadn't heard that. When did he state this, and is it still accurate as of today? It's possible he sold shares in the last few weeks during the run-up to this decision. Or maybe he hasn't sold shares, but there are other ways that he could have profited handsomely from Uber already. Cash bonuses, private sale of options (has he said he hasn't sold an option?) etc. I'm just saying if he has enough in the bank, he may have decided it wasn't worth it to fight his investors, the media, and basically everyone else that has jumped on the anti-Kalanik bandwagon.
It's actually would be a major news point I think. Whether or not Travis sells his shares is what's gonna be decisive of his position in the company and possible future ambitions.
Though not yet proven, wasn't a similar logic used by HR (or higher management) to justify not taking action against "star performers" for their transgressions?
Almost exactly the same, came to mind when I read that also.
I suppose there's some tipping point of "very valuable" and "not that badly behaved" where the argument is actually valid (see: all the Steve Jobs references in this thread). But at that point I guess the ethical solution is to make it very clear what new hires are in for, and pay a healthy "dealing with this person" bonus (see: Steve Jobs, again).
They were run in a way that assumed funding and burning money to get there. If they suddenly need to turn profitable, they can still downsize a lot. Consider their 2000 engineers... That's on an established service. Sure, they would slow down new features and expansion, but they've have expenses they can cut. And prices they can raise.
Not every round has to be an up round. They could decrease their valuation significantly and still survive. Surely there's plenty of value left in Uber.
Highly unlikely. Why? Investors who stomach multi-billion dollar annual losses will probably just shrug off the recent bit of trouble. If the choice is to either write off $15 billion or to give another couple to help the company go through a rough patch (what a buying opportunity!) I think I know what investors are going to do.
Kalanick's head has now rolled (not that it really hurts him much personally though, it's probably even a relief for him) but seriously a whole nother level of crap would have to happen with Uber before investors start getting comfortable with the thought of letting go those $15 billion.
Your comment is predicated on the fallacy that Uber's success is merely a function of runway / the ability to find new investors.
Bear in mind that the company's growth has been driven by its ability to run a very, very highly-performant backend -- and that's in turn a matter of getting the very best engineering talent on board.
Some, perhaps most of that talent is already pissed off about the fratty work environment and questionable leadership decisions. Recently, their options exercise window changed from 30 days to 7 years[0].
Angry employees + management turnover/uncertainty + limited runway + new rule that basically you don't lose your options when you quit = I'm officially an U-Bear.
On a related topic, I think people's schadenfreude for Travis is getting out of control and he's becoming a bit of a totem for everything that's wrong with SV....while his issues are largely self-inflicted ("boob-er" / treating drivers like crap on camera / etc), all the hatred directed toward him seems excessive in context. The guy just lost his mother, maybe cut him some slack?
It practically eliminates the opportunity-cost of leaving. Having seven years to be able to come up with the liquidity to pay the strike/taxes -- plus, critically, being able to wait several years to get a better understanding of whether the options have value before striking -- completely changes the calculus of whether to depart a company, whether because you're unhappy or because you've found something better elsewhere.
Agree this is good for Uber employees and I'm happy they have significantly less of an impediment to leaving than most other workers at pre-exit startups.
Uber is evil. They always have been. I've been trying to talk my friends into boycotting them for years because of their corrupt practices, and the various scams they've run on their drivers. Their highly-performant backend was used to place "ghost cars" and avoid government officials. The timing on this is, yes, frustratingly arbitrary, but this really is the whirlwind they have sown.
There is a lot of vested interest in this company - it will for sure never go down. Plenty of investors around the world who will buy in. Valuation is a different topic - but this company is here for the long haul.
Does anyone think that Amazon could be eying Uber but waiting for them to lose value? Seems like it would be a natural fit for their delivery network especially considering their recent purchase of Whole Foods.
There's no doubt that Amazon has much more established delivery logistics than Uber at this point, but I wonder if the real value would come from another angle:
Uber has been pushing hard on self-driving cars (I mean, in the long term, it strikes me as their only viable business model, so it makes sense). By my best estimates, salary for delivery drivers for Amazon packages run somewhere between $6B and $10B per year (for comparison, if I remember correctly, Amazon's revenue is somewhere around $35B/yr). Automating delivery could be a HUGE deal for them, and an opportunity to scoop up a major player in the autonomous driving space might look very appealing.
Then again, with Washington State throwing the doors open for autonomous testing, Amazon could likely develop their own system on their own turf for less, even if Uber's valuation goes WAY down.
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.
unless uber's logistics is better than amazon's (spoiler: they're not) uber is only valuable as a brand to amazon. brand probably doesn't move the needle for delivering groceries
> 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 retirement plans were announced. Microsoft has been on a major run ever since. Let's hope that we see something similar here.
> 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.
Nope, This is wrong. Kalanick stood in front in the fight against the City officials and Taxi unions across the globe. Uber could've been done and dusted had it been left as a product to be sold by itself. Kalanick pushed Uber up high against the current of water, which is not exactly similar to running a Social Media Company.
> Nope, This is wrong. Kalanick stood in front in the fight against the City officials and Taxi unions across the globe.
Don't kid yourself, this fight was fought by lawyers and lobbyists.
Uber financed one side of this fight, but seeing as the outcome of this fight was critical to Uber's business model, that wasn't some genius insight, that was self-preservation.
That might be a big deal in America, but it has not been part of Uber's appeal in Australia. Uber here is absolutely focused on the product experience.
If anything, there's a proportion of people who supported local government rules and existing taxi services over the American interloper, a counter-balance to the anti-union and anti-municipal crowd.
Please be mindful that the American experience does not translate globally, even to other english-speaking western countries!
I think you're really just reinforcing the point. He's been willing to do whatever it takes. In the US that meant testing how far he could push and how many regulations he could bend and break before people called him on it. In Australia, apparently, that means first pushing the product experience as far as possible to convince people Uber is much more desirable than taxis.
And regardless of that, it doesn't matter: by the time Uber started operating in Australia (or any non-US country, for that matter), they already had a history of pushing hard against existing norms. Uber would have never even gotten to the point where expanding outside the US would have been possible if it hadn't been for Kalanick.
Sure, he's a jerk, but to claim that he had nothing to do with Uber's expansion after launch is just absurd.
As an Australian - I thought Uber's main appeal here was price. The taxi product experience, from everything I've heard, is far worse in the US than here.
Uber's appeal in most markets is exactly that, product and pricing.
Speaking from a place where taxi service was terrible, inefficient, expensive, often corrupt and dangerous, Uber came in like a savior, when the government went after Uber people came to Uber's defense because now we can't go back to the way it was.
To be fair I think that is the same as most places Uber has been to.
'Software company, Not a taxi company' argument was used extensively to circumvent license and medallion regulations. On top of it they used VC money to drive down the prices by 4x-5x.
Several tens of thousands of drivers in every state in every country they went to got shafted because of these moves.
So yes he was very brutal and ruthless upfront. You can't replace that kind of human quality easily.
> it pretty much sold by itself -- similar to how Zuckerberg created Facebook, which sold by itself.
Haha don't know where to start. Facebook could have gone to shit in so many ways just like all the predecessors like Myspace and Friendster, but they made all the right decisions and won. Same goes for Uber.
Uber and Lyft operate in a space where there's a huge barrier to entry capital-wise.
This is not the case for 100% Internet based businesses like Facebook.
So they're really completely different models and therefore the competitive landscape can't resemble each other. It's more fair to compare the Uber-Lyft dynamic to rental car businesses like Enterprise-Hertz.
There doesn't have to be a single global monopolist. There probably won't be.
People do move, and the convenience of one app to hail taxis everywhere is appealing. But then again, people don't move that often that installing the local taxi app is too much of an assle.
No no, you've got it a little bit backwards. Right now, the biggest profits for capital are in being bearish about Uber and shorting Uber. This is in the nature of amoral capitalist investment: all the right decisions are 'supporting and enabling Uber' right up to the point where the bubble of valuation pops and then the only right decisions are 'bailing and running away from Uber'.
Kalanick's right decisions are now based on how much he was lying when he said he hadn't divested the slightest bit from Uber. I'm guessing that everyone read his character well, and that he was in fact lying on a massive scale and has many lifetimes worth of stashed-away wealth. Right now, winning for him means avoiding prosecution and jail (probably easy to do) and Uber is over, already.
So Uber lost, and anyone still clinging to Uber has lost (but there will be amazingly few of those). It's the frog and scorpion fable, really. Travis isn't the scorpion, and Uber isn't the frog. Uber is the scorpion and Wall Street is the frog.
What do i have a little bit backwards? You are free to talk about your opinion but it's kinda confusing when you just reply randomly to an unrelated thread.
I am talking about how execution matters, because parent said Uber just worked on its own to get where they have, just like Facebook worked on its own to get where they have. None of these are true.
My comment has nothing to do with wall street or shorting or whatever concepts you bring up.
You've said 'Uber and Facebook made all the right decisions and won'. I think you've got that backwards (and was indeed replying to you): I think it only looked like they made right decisions because Wall Street looked at those decisions and went 'hot damn, one of us!'.
Facebook may have won. I think you'll find Uber didn't win, because Wall Street needed Uber to remain the Travis Uber, in spite of any laws or limitations, and that's clearly no longer true.
Wouldn't investors be able to look at ownership information to see if Travis's shares decreased? I doubt all of the investors would take him at face value, especially the ones who publicly criticized him.
It's essentially the same mechanism: the terminology is immediately understood. The market is public opinion, in a rather special public. If these people all 'short' Uber, it might not even go public. I guess the equivalent would be trying to take all the VC money back? And obviously the equivalent to a long position would be investing more VC money in Uber.
Nobody would seriously argue that there's no difference between the two because Uber doesn't exist yet in 'stock' terms. They need to translate the initial investor enthusiasm into an IPO, so short/long spells out the likely climate for said IPO.
Microsoft had a storied past with decades of profitability behind it. They were shedding an operational CEO who failed to succeed in Mobile and made expensive mistakes in tablets (Windows RT) along with the Windows Vista debacle happening under his watch.
Uber has lived in Unicorn land thus far. The potential to turn a profit has buoyed them but that cash bubble seems to be running out of fumes. They could sell for 1/10th of what they raised money at. Time will tell.
It's a bad time for Travis to be handing over the reigns because he clearly hasn't built a command team to takeover and the fraternity atmosphere is toxic enough that as these new leaders step in I'm afraid the middle management will view them as "illegitimate" leaders.
Time will tell. I hope for the sake of all the people who hold Uber stock as part of their compensation that they get a pay day but it's a gamble.
Facebook did many things right. How many people really thought Facebook would be a $450B company in 2017, good for top 5 most valuable company, and pulling in over a billion in profit a month. Yes most of the money is being made on mobile which likely wasn't the master plan of Zuckerberg or others. But things had to go right up to 2013/2014 to allow Facebook to become huge in revenue and profits with its mobile business.
We don't know exactly how much influence Zuckerberg had in all the decisions. For example the common theme for years was for there to be uproar after any major feature or change.
Like the news feed that is now ubiquitous. A worse company might have feared the backlash and slowed down on features and growing the news feed.
I assume Zuckerberg was also fundamental in acquiring Instagram and Whatsapp. Instagram is worth tens of billions now. Whatsapp has 1.2B or so monthly users. There were many comments on how overpriced and silly the Whatsapp purchase was. But most of it was in stocks and the cash at the time may have been a lot ($4B), but Facebook gets that much per month now. Whatsapp tripled its users since its acquisition.
A lot of tech people disliked the Messenger split off. But that seems to be working out for the business too. It is becoming its own platform now and can also boast 1B+ users per month.
Maybe anyone would've done all this. I don't know. But I do know it was Zuckerberg in charge when all this occurred.
Facebook had a major ace in the hole by starting at Harvard. That's the network pretty much everyone wants to be a part of.
The irony is that in growing, FB traded down that cachet -- but managed to transition from cohort value to network value fairly successfully.
This is an argument I've made for years, I'm happy to see that I'm not the only one -- danah boyd has mentioned it several times as well.
I'm not saying Zuck didn't execute well -- the advantage still could have been blown (and I've only just learnt of a similar network started IIRC at Columbia University which didn't go as well). But for all the things Zuck can claim, building Harvard's social appeal is not one of them.
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.
Kalanick had everything to do with the valuation. This, however, is a problem: what you might think of as premature optimization. Yes, Kalanick is why Uber got an impossibly high valuation from the collective fantasy known as Wall Street: they were operating based on personalities and primitive ideas of conflict, rather than a real understanding of how systems work.
But it was a premature optimization because those responsible for turning 'viciously competitive evil guy' into raw capital failed to acknowledge that he'd screw them in turn as soon as he needed an exit strategy. You simply cannot turn to childish human dominance battles as a model for what will work in large systems and interdependent markets.Even propping up your 'pet winner' with near-infinite capital won't save you forever.
I agree ... but I wonder if the only reason Uber has grown is the way that it's bullied its drivers and the communities it "serves". I'd say that his personality and drive has caused both the companies successes and its problems. I wish there was a convenient way to short Uber via my discount broker.
Especially interesting is that Uber may already have been essentially doomed, and now it is will be very easy to make the case what killed Uber was "do the right thing" forced-resignation of the founder by 5 of his investors. That seems like lose/lose for them.
can't they just cut their burn rate? I mean it's not like they own a fleet of cars they need to make car payments on and fill with gas to keep operating.... in theory there's no minimum spend to keep operating, is there? if (hypotehtically) they cut spend to approx. nil, and 95% of their drivers left, then 5% of their drivers would remain and they would be profitable... where does the "killing" of Uber occur?
Yahoo for example is coasting along at a market cap of 53.40B down from its high of over $125 billion[1]. In 1999 dollars. Is it "dead"?
But if they cut it too much, they'll stop growing.
The problem is they need to sustain their 70 billion dollar valuation for investors to be happy.
To be worth 70 billion they have to be either:
Growing at a very fast rate (which requires a very large burn rate to sustain)
Or be generating billions in profit each year. Even with a cut burn rate, they aren't going to be generating billions in profit. So they won't be worth $70 billion.
Keep in mind that if their leaked financials are to be believed, they made $6.5 billion in net revenue for 2016. Unfortunately total costs exceed revenue, so they are far from profitable, but that's not exactly chump change.
What are they counting in net revenue? As they bill themselves as a brokerage service (to avoid those pesky employment laws...), I would imagine they only count their commission in net revenue? 6.5 billion is pretty impressive then!
It's probably eminently practical for a company of this type to cherry pick the most profitable core areas of the most profitable urban areas. Which is effectively what services like Instacart do. But it's not scalable and won't command a high valuation.
Just making a profit isn't enough; they need to make a big profit. Kalanick could probably turn a profit if he fired the whole company and drove a cab himself, but that's not gonna placate the investors who sunk hundreds of millions into it.
obviously the least price-sensitive 5% would remain. it's not like they're running currency exchange or something - people don't have a super set demand curve. maybe 95% of their customers do, but not 100% of their customers... (unlike a currency exchange, for example, which would drop to precisely 0 users worldwide if it increased prices by just 10%, since 100% of any such users are super price-sensitive. likewise if a currency exchange subsidized exchanges by 10% it would have more users the next day - by far - than people on Earth. easily a trillion "users", or whatever the rate limit is for signing up and performing exchanges. try to visualize these two different demand curves and you will see that Uber should still have some users if they raise their prices, because not all of them are completely price sensitive and only use it because it subsidizes rides, and not for any brand or convenience reasons. unlike a commodity currency exchange which exists under ironclad demand curves that drop to 0 if you move along it even slightly. picture these curves.)
Can you provide a source for this? I'm honestly very curious. I've seen this claim bandied about for years, but I've never seen a source that verifies it. Is Uber really losing money on a marginal basis in developed markets?
Here's an article with citations from November of last year. Note that it does use data from 2015, since at the time that was the most recent publicly-available published data.
Ever rising valuations can't save the company, so I don't see how Kalanick's departure threatens its prospects for survival. "More of the same" isn't a winning strategy for a company that's not on the right track.
I may be simplistic or naïve, but if your business isn't profitable, that's what kills it. Travis or no Travis, it doesn't seem like Uber has found a way to cut a profit yet and at some point, profit becomes a requirement.
Uber needs the network effect. Lower usage means fewer uber drivers, which means it's harder for me to get a lift, which makes me use something else. So a relatively small dip can cause a collapse un usage.
Raising prices could include raising (by not as much) payouts to drivers, which could make them more attractive to drive than Lyft. Then again, if too many customers leave, then you have a surplus of drivers who get frustrated because they can't get fares. But perhaps there's a balancing point somewhere in the middle.
And many/most Uber drivers also drive for Lyft. There's no harm in leaving both apps on and grabbing a more-elusive (but higher) Uber fare when one comes along.
They're spending a lot. If they throttle back to the core business they might be able to squeak by. I do wonder how feasible that is given how bizzare their cap table is.
Seriously, it's mind-boggling what they're burning cash on. Driverless cars. Drone helicopters. Ubereats. Who knows what other pie in the sky tech that is decades away. Why would you burn cash on such things when the core business is not profitable?
What software? Their self-driving tech is tainted by Waymo's claim they stole it, so it would have to be very, very good for some company taking the risk of using it. I doubt it is _that_ good, so I don't expect to many buyers for it.
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
Being a glorified taxi dispatcher probably isn't Uber's idea of a successful endgame. They desperately want to be a big player in the future of autonomous transportation and are clearly willing to bet the success of their taxi dispatching company to do so. Cutting their burn rate to a skeleton crew means giving up on that ambition and spending the rest of their 'life' as a reasonably successful company, with perhaps some modest profits, dispatching taxis via a phone app, and neither they nor their investors seem to want that.
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.
"If you want a higher building, you should build strong columns"
They will change the company's current culture. Slow down the pace of growth to try to adjust what is wrong. Probably focus on where they have margin to operate. This is clear in Gary ( Uber Co founder) text on Medium.
"In a highly competitive market it is easy to become obsessed with growth, instead of taking the time to ensure you’re on the right path. Now is that time… to pause"[0]
Their valuation is entirely and utterly founded on the idea of growth, and that there is no other path. They have absolutely no chance of turning around and telling Wall Street, of all people, that it's time to pause. Wall Street only loved them when they moved fast and broke everything there was to break.
This is death. I mean, it's sensible talk, in another context it would be seen as enlightened, in a larger sense it's the right answer.
Uber aren't IN another context. They depend completely on Wall Street continuing to think they are the biggest shark that ever sharked, and now that's ruined and the only big investment opportunities are in betting AGAINST Uber. Most likely the smartest money is already out.
This is death. Shouldn't be, in a more sensible context, but it absolutely is. You can't tell Wall Street 'it is time to think sustainability' when they bet on you eating the goddamn world for them.
I concur. This is a very poor decision all of which stems from the snowballing and mob mentality of the outraged.
Companies at this stage in an ultra competitive market (not talking about ride sharing, but self-driving) need their founders to lead and grow. It is just too early and critical to bring in a professional CEO. See Apple.
Uber hasn't been able to show a single GAAP-profitable market anywhere, including cities in the US. Rates would have to be more than 100% higher just to archive break even. Scale economics of that magnitude are unheard of with physical products. Self-driving is essentially just a media stunt for them, just like amazons drone delivery news that pop up every year just before christmas.
Just look at the numbers in this article[1] - they need scale economics of two times the cost of the driver of the cab to archive GAAP profitability, which, obviously, is impossible even with self-driving.
he could have cleaned ship years ago with all the previous scandals but he was either too stubborn or too arrogant to think any bad news would pull his company down. he was representative of uber's toxic culture and it seems like he should have stepped down right after he was caught bad mouthing a driver FROM HIS OWN COMPANY.
Correct. It's the video where the Uber driver blames Travis personally for him buying cars and his small transportation business failing. I mean, how could an incredibly high interest and high upfront capital car loan into a very speculative and low margin business be risky? It must be Uber and Travis screwing him.
Much of the resistance to Uber (such as laws that were broken, protests) were from entrenched interests. At least where I live in NYC, Uber was dramatically improving customer value while providing innovations that reduced greenhouse gas. It provided completion for the entrenched Yellow Cab monopoly with its very high rates. Sometimes Uber would have higher rates but then you could take a Yellow Cab instead.
The Yellow Cab special interests paid off politicians so that there was a limit of 13,000 Yellow Cab medallions for 8.5 million people. The price of the taxi medallion was $1.2 million. While people in Manhattan could get a taxi, there were no taxis in Brooklyn, Queens, Bronx, ... Because of the artificial limit on medallions which only benefited medallion owner but not New Yorkers, a driver leasing a cab for a 12 hour shift could pay $125 just to lease the car.
When Uber and Lyft came, the rates were lower, one could use Uber Pool to have even lower rates and save on greenhouse gas. Now taxi services have some availability outside of Manhattan. Now many Yellow Cabs are idle and the value of the medallions went for $1.2 million to about $700,000 or less.
In NYC, the Yellow Cab medallion owners tried to get the mayor to put restrictions on the growth of Uber/Lyft, but New Yorkers protested.
Uber/Lyft have increased customer value, lowered greenhouse gasses while not forcing drivers to pay excessing leasing fees for vehicles.
So why Lyft get none of the protests? I think you are mixing unrelated subjects.
Uber final product is good for society. And other companies can provide the same product (in my city, São Paulo, there are other 3 good companies in the same space).
Uber practices as a company are toxic for its employees and some of the toxicity leak to society.
If such calculation was possible, I believe it would show a net positive impact in society. But a company with good practices and the same product would have an even larger net positive impact.
As a society, I believe we should not settle for bad companies making good products, that's why I believe all the protests are legit.
Once upon a time I heard a concept in motorcycling of the sacrificial jerk. This was when you deliberately rode behind someone who rode like an asshole. In turn they provided the upper boundary of your willingness to break the speed limit and for you to ride like an asshole, in hopes that they'd attract the ire of the police instead of you.
Leaving any motorcycle safety conversations aside, I think Uber has been the sacrificial jerk of the rideshare industry. Lyft probably would have attracted some of the same issues if there hadn't been someone more brash and more willing to flout their law breaking ahead of them.
Now Uber's explosive expansion and the resultant "they're gonna do it anyway, may as well accommodate 'em" reaction of the regulators has more or less normalized the good parts of the rideshare industry. Lyft and perhaps other competitors-to-be can benefit without taking nearly as much flak. Hopefully you're right in terms of the ability to provide a much bigger net positive in that situation.
One thing to remember is many cops will grab the car nearest to them instead. It happened to me when I was matching pace of traffic while speedometer went out. I was in the back. Cop pulled me over instead of the speeding leader.
I think you're right. The whole thing is complex, with labour law/norm implications, entrenched and concentrate interests in dozens of jurisdictions. Also uncynically ideological objectors. It was inevitably going to draw a lot of fire. I'm personally shocked at how far and wide uber have managed to spread.
Leaving aside broader questions, I think we can take a guess at what happens after Uber gets pulled over. Someone will take their place. What soneca said above makes reasonable sense.
OTOH, I'm not sure how useful this culture of rebuke and scolding really is. I think it's a bit extreme to wish for regular corporate collapse because of scandal. Reform needs to be an option here. Then again, maybe an occasional sacrificial lamb is good for making the other lambs ride slower. If it doesn't really matter who it is, may as well be the jerk.
I will say that their management of internal culture isn't something I have any sympathy for, and I hope that doesn't end up being where boundaries are pushed. There is certainly a tendency for armchair kneejerking in today's culture wars, but Uber's personnel issues go beyond the gray area in my opinion.
> So we found that in 2015, if you extrapolate to the whole U.S., we found that the overall consumer surplus added up to almost $7 billion. So people spent about $4 billion on Ubers, but they actually would have been willing to spend about $11 billion. So for every dollar people spent on Uber, they got about $1.50 worth of extra joy that they would have been willing to pay on average above and beyond what they did pay. And to put it in a context just how big this consumer surplus is, the total amount of money that went to what Uber calls the driver partners, the people who are driving the cars, was something like $2.5 billion. So the consumers got more than twice the benefit of all the money that went to the drivers. And Uber itself only got to keep about $1 billion.
Of course, none of this makes Uber immune to criticism for the way they operate as a company. And there are sufficiently many alternatives that, even without Uber, society is likely to continue reaping benefits from ride-sharing as a technology.
I believe most consumer industries have consumer surplus, since different customers are willing to pay different prices but the companies can only charge one price. This includes the taxi companies that Uber displaced. From reading the abstract, this paper does not calculate the additional consumer surplus generated by Uber beyond taxis.
Note that it doesn't follow that Uber would make more money simply by raising prices -- consumer surplus measures the amount Uber could make by charging each user their "true" value, but if Uber simply raised prices, then they would lose demand.
However, Uber is actually starting to use price discrimination (i.e., charge different users different prices based on their characteristics), which would eliminate consumer surplus [1].
They probably felt comfortable taking a loss while they expanded more on these subsidized prices. As long as they don't get involved in harassment claims and theft of a competitors IP they should be in a strong position to start raising prices....
I would conclude that Uber is spending extra money to expand the market just as Amazon took losses to expand their market. They don't need to raise prices, but eventually reduce overhead per ride.
They really don't. Uber represents itself as profitable for Uber drivers, but this is only true in the short-term. When you factor in car maintenance and depreciation etc, the "profits" that Uber shows you essentially go out the window. It's equivalent to selling a tiny bit of your car's value.
If Uber raised their prices, the average real value would drop from its current real value of $2/hr, to...
Uber is the largest player by far, so they are an easy target for frustrations and for incumbents. "Uber" is almost a generic term for a iPhone hailable vehicle.
Generally, there is market competition for drivers. For example, Lyft for those drivers who are unhappy with Uber. You have stated that in your city, São Paulo, there are 3 good companies. If one company mistreats drivers, they would go to a competing firm and the firm would lose revenue.
It's reasonable to assume that Didi has noticeably grown since October 2016, but none of these numbers are easily verifiable externally to these companies.
(Lyft's market share is unclear to me, but perhaps 2 million rides per day, more or less?)
Kind of unfair to compare Didi (or any Chinese company) with the free market alternatives. If you're given state sponsorship from one of the largest countries, then you should easily be able to do more rides than Uber.
I don't think that UberChina's failure to win against Didi was due to state sponsorship. Didi had a better product tailored to the Chinese market, better operations people who conducted local campaigns in more cities, and only one market to compete in, as opposed to Uber's worldwide competition.
It was apparent that Didi had achieved the network effects necessary to overcome Uber in volume. Both companies wanted to focus on revenue so it was savvy of Didi to purchase UberChina so they could reduce ride subsidies.
I think that the success of UberChina, along with Yum! and Wal-Mart, demonstrate that it is possible to prevail in the difficult Chinese market.
According to HN commenters in China, Didi understood that government employees needed a standard voucher so Didi made its generation automatic in the app. UberChina apparently never did.
It was used as an example to illustrate that Didi did the little things that remove friction for its customers. Didi also recruited drivers in smaller cities; its coverage was superior to UberChina's.
I think there's a case to be made that the tax policies that apply to investor organizations and participants qualifies as a form of state sponsorship.
Do they nearly guarantee people will buy the app despite foreign competition? This sort of thing happens in China more than over here. U.S. consumers use or buy products from many places with significant percentage coming from China at some point. Something just being American sponsored doesn't usually cut it.
Aside: is there anything to be said for doing well in lots of countries vs a monopoly in one?
It seems to me that to be successful in certain countries requires skills that don't translate internationally - for example, understanding the quirks of one big country, or negotiating the political situation.
telecom monopolies are government enshrined, so not capitalism. Negative externalities of burning fossil fuels (plastics are a fossil fuel product) are allowed because government allows people to pollute "some"... not capitalism.
Perhaps the defenders of capitalism should have to account for the effect their economic system has on the government and its ability to properly regulate the economy given the immense private wealth that the owners can use to influence policy and politicians. It is an economic and political system, not purely an economic system.
You're conflating free markets with capitalism. And once laws are influenced by capitalists, the market is no longer free.
And this is again a failure of government, not capitalism. As an analogue, you cannot say that socialism is a flawed system purely because of what happened in russia-you must not mix up economic and political philosophies.
The free market determined that that was the fair price for government policies to be bent towards industries' or actor's will. You'll forgive people critiquing the economic system if it freely and naturally leads to the ills we find objectionable.
And on the contrary, I absolutely do hold the failure of the Soviet system against central planning and command economies, even socialist ones. Given that, I find democratically-executed socialism using markets for prices (some consider this market socialism) much preferable.
You can if your complaint (as above) is that the economic system has adverse effects on the political system or vice versa. Would you claim you shouldn't attribute the resulting explosion to water when you pour it on sodium because one is a liquid and the other is a metal?
Telecom monopolies are not by government intent by rather by regulatory capture.
As a capitalist, I hella want to exclude others from the market. If I can get the government to do this for me, then I'm willing to pay the lobbyist fees to make that happen. In the IP space the only reason I'm willing to slave away at invention is the possibility of a patent, a right to exclude, a limited monopoly.
As a capitalist, the absolute last thing I want is a free market. Thiel puts it this way: competition is for losers.
OP is saying that government allow a certain amount of pollution.
A government could decide to forbid pollution altogether (whatever that means) and still maintain a capitalistic economic system.
We have generally forbidden dumping barrels of spent oil in rivers, for example.
Likewise, a non-capitalistic system can forbid or not pollution.
They were government regulated until that didn't work, then broken up. After the subsequent deregulation, the monopoly is in the process of re-creating itself now.
I think that may be a picture of phone lines when they were point to point i.e. each connection had a dedicated line rather than going through a switch. I don't think it had anything to do with thousands of telecom companies.
"Under Theodore N. Vail from 1907, AT&T had [...] acquired many of the independents, and bought control of Western Union, giving it a monopolistic position in both telephone and telegraph communication. A key strategy was to refuse to connect its long distance network — technologically, by far the finest and most extensive in the land — with local independent carriers. Without the prospect of long distance services, the market position of many independents became untenable. Vail stated that there should be "one policy, one system [AT&T's] and universal service, no collection of separate companies could give the public the service that [the] Bell... system could give.""
Societal norms forced him to resign. In other parts of this world with more patriarchal and authoritarian governments the leadership style might have been accepted.
You're catching a lot of flak for this, but as long as there is diverse competition, you're right.
I used to bounce back and forth between Uber and Lyft based purely on price, but now I almost exclusively use Lyft because I'm not a fan of some of Uber's practices.
capitalism -- an economic and political system in which a country's trade and industry are controlled by private owners for profit, rather than by the state.
So you are saying that the investors, i.e. the capital, pressured Kalanick out for reasons of profit rather than due to pressure by the state in the form of multiple lawsuits. You are mistaken.
In particular, there is no evidence that Uber's naughty bro culture is any less profitable than a mature egalitarian culture. Lack of profit wasn't why Kalanick was shown the door.
I would imagine they've seen a revenue decline from all the bad press. Furthermore, there's no way he wasn't directly involved in the Otto lawsuit, which isn't the governments doing.
According to recent reporting in Bloomberg, there was a temporary dip in market share due to the #deleteuber campaign, which has since recovered. Both companies have grown considerably over that time period. Lyft's ridesharing growth in the U.S. has been much higher than Uber's.
The Waymo lawsuit is still very much up in the air. Kalanick's involvement is already public: he collaborated with Levandowski to acquire a team of self-driving-car engineers and their work over 8 months. The key demands of the Waymo legal team were rejected in their injunction. Judge Alsop did not see a clear nexus between the Waymo designs and the Uber lidar, referring the matter to trial.
>According to recent reporting in Bloomberg, there was a temporary dip in market share due to the #deleteuber campaign, which has since recovered.
Based on what? Uber isn't public, they aren't forced to release any information on their ride sharing, and what info they do release isn't subjected to any real verification.
The only article I see is based on "number of app downloads" - that has literally no relevance in the number of rides they're servicing. I've got Uber on my phone and I haven't used it in 3 months and I don't see that changing anytime soon. They didn't lose me outright as a user, but they, for all intents and purposes, lost my business.
The article had some numbers leaked from Uber. It should surprise you when some information isn't public these days, considering the volume of leaks from that company.
I have not been keeping up with the news surrounding Kalanick or Uber, so this is an honest questions.
Did the courts say that Kalanick is barred from being the CEO of Uber? Or, is it the case that Kalanick's actions have put Uber at risk fines and further litagation?
My (admittedly uninformed) take on the situation is that Uber's investors weighed the costs and benefits and determined that Kalanick needed to go. While the regulatory environment probably influenced the decision, it wasn't the government calling the shots.
I'm actually separating the issues rather than conflating them.
Capitalism by itself looks at profit. In the United States capitalism is held in check by a legal+political+free speech system. A company (Uber) is not held in check by more capitalism; it is not held in check by competition. As an aside, this breaks down with regulatory capture.
When VW cheated on its emissions testing it was not checked by a more efficient and competitive Tesla. It was held to account by a legal system external of capitalism.
We are not saying the same thing. His investors asked him to step down for a reason and that reason was not profit or rather lack thereof; they've had ample profit reason to fire him for years. The reason the Uber board asked him to leave was not a capitalist reason.
I'm not sure why you seem to deny the possibility that capitalists are concerned with future profits as well as past ones. You say their reason was not lack of profit, based I guess on the fact that they haven't suffered any major setback beyond their normal lack of profitability in the past couple of quarters. That's an oddly restrictive definition.
Capitalism is about future profits, by definition. I can't invest money in Apple in 1997. I have to invest it today, and my only concern is what happens after that investment. The Uber boarding kicking him out is entirely a capitalist reason. They've invested money, and his presence will (they believe at least) negatively affect the return on that investment going forward.
It's just a blatant fact that Kalanick wasn't axed because of his inability to turn a profit. That card has been left on the table for quite some time by board inertia in the vain hope that this unicorn would grow wings. Instead, Uber lost $2.8B last year. That isn't rational.
Your only concern may be what happens after an investment but you'd be foolhardy not to take past performance into account. Undervalued (Apple in 1997, return of Steve) is one thing. Throwing good money after bad is another.
$2.8B is just a ton of money to lose and for a startup it's insane (thinking of Amazon but Uber's losses dwarf Amazon's early losses). Frankly, I think the board is using this as an excuse to do now what they should have done a couple of years back. Boards are human. They aren't homo economicus incarnate. Ascribing rationality to the outcome of a board meeting because capitalism makes no sense. Really, they lost $2.8B last year.
> It's just a blatant fact that Kalanick wasn't axed because of his inability to turn a profit.
No one is suggesting that. When people say "this is capitalist of the board to do" they're talking about the individual board member profiting from a successful exit. Put more simply - investor puts $1 in Uber on day 0 and expects to make $100 on day 1,000 and makes a $99 profit. They're axing TK because they want to make their $99 return on investment.
By allowing it to willfully break laws in dozens of countries, contributing to lowering standards of living and high stress at work, tracking users at all times, having a hostile workplace, then becoming the most important provider of such services in the world?
Yeah, that's totally capitalism doing its work, and not the painfully obvious "throw VC money at it until it works" scheme, right
The same pushy, aggressive culture that made their some of their employees' lives awful also made it possible to get excellent service that reduces tons of drunk driving and generally improves people's lives.
I really don't think they could've broke into the market by asking politely; it took some fire in the belly. However, the side effects are pretty devastating as well.
> The same pushy, aggressive culture that made their some of their employees' lives awful also made it possible to get excellent service that reduces tons of drunk driving and generally improves people's lives.
So you're basically saying that stuff like treating women like shit was NECESSARY to provide a good "taxi" service?
It's not excusing it. Just putting things into perspective. As bad as Uber might be, they might be less bad than the alternative. In those terms, one may not want to champion the legacy system as better.
Users got a better experience from Uber, but it's not clear it was at the expense of the service side of the population being treated worse than they were treated by the incumbents, therefore all other things being equal Uber would still be a net positive.
> As bad as Uber might be, they might be less bad than the alternative. In those terms, one may not want to champion the legacy system as better.
The alternative isn't the legacy system, which nobody's saying is better. The alternative is an Uber with decency (even if still bold to break into regulated markets). Or an Uber competitor.
Necessary is the wrong way to look at it, it was a consequence of the growth above all strategy.
They broke into markets with disregard for the law, often it backfired, often it didn't.
Allegedly(as it is being investigated) they also "stole" IP from Alphabet in an attempt to get ahead in the self-driving gold rush.
They repeatedly ignored several sexual harassment reports in order to protect someone who they referred to as a "high performer", in the name of growth, they could not afford to lose a high performer.
In the startup/VC/unicorn hype world growth is king, it comes before profit, revenue, employee wellbeing, customer satisfaction, business and work ethics.
Uber is not the first guilty of this, it's just the extreme case.
Cornelius Vanderbilt got his start by breaking a monopoly given to ??? to offer ferry service between New York and New Jersey underbidding holder of the monopoly. He broke the law to do it and was sued. It actually was judged by the Supreme Court and the monopoly was thrown out because of Interstate Commerce (I think it decided this entire area of law, IIRC).
There are many entrenched, incumbent interests that try to make money not through healthy wealth creation but by trying to appropriate wealth through politics (e.g., granted monopolies) which to some degree the taxi industry was.
Uber and its competitors did a great service to many people and ultimately really angered monopolistic incumbents.
The sexism isn't the only problem within the company. It's the easiest to criticize, because it's obvious how stupid and absurd it is--and how there is no excusing it, but I Uber has done a bunch of other things that reflect this same mindset.
> stuff like treating women like shit was NECESSARY to provide a good "taxi" service?
No, but its possible they were two facets of the same quality.
While the aggressive, see-what-we-can-get-away-with attitude is useful (and probably necessary) in fighting the entrenched local monopolists who have local government protecting their vested interests, it turns out to be a serious liability with respect to workplace norms and stealing of trade secrets.
im not here to scold you, but this comment is kind of revealing. it shows a need to explain a bad thing by saying that a good thing caused it. while i wont deal with the substance of the argument (which i personally reject), its my experience that this argument's format shows up an awful lot when there is a bias that someone has to bend reality to preserve.
its also revealing that you would even bother entertaining this idea. why not just say "yea. they shouldn't do that."? im pretty sure there are companies that have "disrupted" industries that were not filled with toxic culture.
> it shows a need to explain a bad thing by saying that a good thing caused it.
It does no such thing. It explains the nuance of someone else's argument which I thought was being misconstrued. That is, a thing can have positive and negative aspects.
> while i wont deal with the substance of the argument (which i personally reject), its my experience that this argument's format shows up an awful lot when there is a bias that someone has to bend reality to preserve.
Huh? That is to say "I will ignore your argument (but dismiss it) and jump ahead and make value judgements about your motivation and biases."
> its also revealing that you would even bother entertaining this idea. why not just say "yea. they shouldn't do that."? im pretty sure there are companies that have "disrupted" industries that were not filled with toxic culture.
What I find revealing (and amusing) is that you admit you are ignoring the plain meaning of my post, but prefer to look for thoughtcrimes in the subtext.
i mean, your not wrong to get annoyed at someone for kind of guessing whats going on in your head. it just struck me as odd that someone would even bother to make the point at all.
That's completely wrong headed. What people think is entirely the reason that something is "pioneering" or not. How businesses comport themselves and treat their various constituencies is part and parcel of their ongoing success.
> if that's the case, you'd have to protest lots of start ups and companies in silicon valley. There's no shortage of toxic workplaces.
What's even the point here? You're aware that no one has to protest a company they don't know or use. And that "you can't protest one if you don't protest all of them" is a fallacy.
This is factually incorrect. You're drawing a direct parallel between medallion taxis and Uber/Lyft rides, when they are not in fact the same at all.
The outer boroughs, and every neighborhood in the city, has had car service options for decades, where you call a phone number (or often walk to a local storefront stand) to get a ride.
This is the exact market segment that Uber has entered. Literally. There wasn't and still isn't a restriction on the number of TLC car service cars on the streets.
This idea that there "were no taxis" in the boroughs and now there are is ridiculous. There weren't many yellow cabs before and there still aren't. There used to be thousands of TLC cars before and there still are. Except now people use an app instead of calling Arecibo or Carmel.
Street hailing was and still is prohibited, both for Uber and for phone style car services.
The massive innovation, of course, is the use of a smartphone app for hailing, which made it technically possible to create the market that we see today. Uber, Lyft, and the other companies that built internet enabled hailing solutions certainly do deserve credit for building out that innovation, but that change was just an obvious outgrowth of the technological change to everyone having a handheld always connected small computer. It was inevitable.
The dynamic you're describing for NYC just doesn't really fit the facts. Nor does the idea that a lot more people taking a lot more rides in cars is reducing greenhouse emissions, but that's another matter.
I'll attest to the original comment by davidf18. Uber/Lyft have radically changed NYC for the better. Ride sharing services are significantly cheaper on the order of multiples, easier to use (eg. no more hailing, paying), and a hell of a lot more pleasant to ride in than taxis.
Taxis were notoriously bad. They'd intentionally take slower routes to run up the meter, refuse passengers trying to go to locations the drivers don't want to go (despite this being illegal), etc. Not to mention this is all made more attractive due to our failing decrepit subway system.
The smartphone app innovation you speak of was not inevitable. Taxis indeed had a monopoly, and thus had absolutely zero incentive to developing an app. The competition induced by the ride sharing services destroying them is what incentivized them to finally launch an app, but I don't have it on my phone nor do I know anyone who has, and it's probably inferior to that of its competition.
Counterexample: Taxi companies in Stockholm developed hailing apps before Uber. Most of them already had location services for mobile phones so you could call their voice system, and there was an option to get a cab to your current location if you were calling from mobile. I presume there was a cooperation between the mobile carriers and the taxi systems so they could pull that info.
Their first hailing apps was simply an extension of this, but it used the phone's gps, and you would press a button in the app for "a taxi, now, here", but the underlying systems were at least already there.
After Uber entered the market, they made their apps better, and you can now attach a payment method to pay through the app, and there's gps tracking of the car you're waiting on, same as Uber and similar.
But Stockholm never had a medallion system or other caps, and there's no monopoly, but there is some sort of oligopoly where some companies get better access to major taxi destinations such as airports and train stations. As usual, healthy competition is the key. :)
My point, which both of you appear to have missed, is that we're not actually talking about taxis at all. Taxis are things you hail by flagging them down on the street. They're still there, driving around in circles looking for you, just like before. You're just not using them any more.
We're talking about something called livery cars which have existed forever and were also very widely used before Uber as well. You used to arrange for pickup using your phone. You still arrange for pickup using your phone.
The car, the driver, and the laws surrounding both are essentially the same as they were before. What's actually changed is your phone.
This distinction is quite different in cities that aren't New York, where there were taxis and nothing else, and Uber has in fact created a new category of private car transportation service. But here in NYC the non-taxi car service market segment existed already and was vibrant, the parent comment claiming they broke some kind of monopoly is just incorrect.
> Taxis are things you hail by flagging them down on the street. They're still there, driving around in circles looking for you, just like before. You're just not using them any more.
> the parent comment claiming they broke some kind of monopoly is just incorrect.
Are you saying taxis are not a monopoly? Or are you saying ride sharing apps did not break the taxi monopoly? If taxis were a monopoly, and if we are not using taxis now because of ride sharing apps, then it would seem ride sharing apps broke a monopoly.
It's not just that, ride sharing apps allow anyone to turn their own personal vehicle into a taxi, and work their own hours. This massively increased supply, rendering the fixed medallion taxi monopoly irrelevant. Uber Pool and Lyft Line further increased supply and drove down prices.
Add to that the incentives induced by the rating system and fares determined before you hail the ride, and you also get a far superior riding experience.
So no, the innovation here wasn't just that the hailing is done via an app. This alone would not have spurred the dramatic improvements we've seen.
carmel didn't quite have the saturation of drivers as uber and so you don't have to "think ahead" to hitch a ride. Certainly the smart phone allowed animated maps to pacify the client but, also, for foreign travelers, didn't really need to speak a different language to convey source and destination (as well as credit card info). Plus all the tracking of the driver for peace of mind from a safety pov.
Your reply doesn't address anything CPLX said. There were already non-yellow cab options in NYC for car service, and there still are. That's the point they were making.
Decrepit I'll give you, and even a low grade, but failing?
From Wikipedia:
2016 subway ridership: 1.76 billion = 147 million per month
2016 global Uber ridership in October: 40 million
Not the same league.
The subways could improve, but I prefer them (and walking) by far to taxis and cars. I guess I just don't have experience since I take maybe one or two taxi rides a year and have never used car services. You seem to take them much more.
I've lived here for the past 5 years (including a summer before), and the subway has gotten significantly worse every year. Commuting to/from work in the outer boroughs in particular is a nightmare. The month I lived in Astoria for example, it seemed that on over 50% of my rides, the train would stop at some point for an extended period of time due to signal failures, and I'd often have to wait for numerous packed trains to pass before new ones would arrive.
I actively avoid the subways as much as possible, especially in the summer when the stations are uncomfortably hot/humid. I mostly walk, ride Citibike, or take Uber/Lyft. Luckily I'm able to do this because I live reasonably close to my office in Manhattan.
Uber Pool has been a godsend because it's so cheap. I can often Uber to/from the office for about $.50 more than the price of a subway side. Granted traffic in the city is horrible so it's not all sunshine and rainbows - my Uber Pool today from midtown east to west of Penn Station took absurdly long due to standstill traffic, but at $2.03 I'm not complaining, and I'll take any excuse to avoid the subways.
> I actually live there and there are no Yellow Cabs in the outer boroughs.
I am writing this from Brooklyn, where I have lived for about 20 years.
> Before Uber there was no hailable service.
There still isn't. Street hails are only from medallion cabs, plus the green outer borough cabs which came just a little bit before Uber showed up and are still around.
There wasn't street hailing before and there isn't now. This isn't complicated. You used to use a phone to get car services before and you still do now. The laws and the dynamics of that aspect really didn't change much.
The innovation is that now your phone has a computer in it and GPS so you press a button and use an app instead of talking into the thing to a dispatcher guy in an office. It's a technological change that happened.
> I don't take these services much in the outer boroughs
As mentioned, I live in the outer boroughs, Brooklyn specifically. You should come check it out sometime, there are about three million of us here. We got along pretty well before Uber, we just called Arecibo. They were fine, and still are, I use them to get to the airport now since the drivers are way better.
Pricing is honestly pretty similar now to what it was five years ago, with very short trips being a little cheaper on Uber/Lyft than they were in the old system. Plus all the promos and so on.
It's way better now to just press a button on the phone, and have your payment info stored, and all that. No question about that. But those are technical innovations.
Your argument is that their innovation had to do with changing the dynamics of supply and demand in a restricted market. But that didn't really happen, and to the extent it did it was because smartphones made it possible. Steve Jobs probably has more to do with the declining price of medallions than Travis Kalanick.
> Uber pool reduces greenhouse gases because multiple unrelated parties can ride in the same taxi instead of using two different vehicles. Elementary.
Unless they were previously taking the subway, of course. The world isn't quite so facile.
I used to use Arecibo all the time, it was pretty much as easy to get a car as with Uber: they answered immediately and a car was typically at your door in 5 minutes.
Things I miss about those pre-Uber days:
- The drivers knew exactly where to go just off of an intersection. If you told them you were going to Tompkins and Hancock, they'd get you there often without needing to ask any clarifying questions. Now drivers have no idea where anything is.
- Music in cars from the driver's collection. Hearing random cumbia or ghazals or hip hop. It made you feel like you were in New York. Now drivers are catering to a generic millennial audience and all I hear is bad top 40.
- Overall just how human the interactions with drivers felt. I once had a driver come up into a house party with us, and ended up having a very weird/memorable night. Now everything is sanitized and rarely do I get a driver from Uber or Lyft that is willing to even have much of a real conversation for fear of getting a bad rating.
I don't miss the need to negotiate price or the need to pay in cash. The apps are also cheaper for the most part. I do miss the gritty New York.
Arecibo! I remember them from my time around Park Slope. My personal go-to was Evelyn Car Service from Prospect Heights.
That said, even Manhattan has had phones for black cars. I've routinely called Dial 7, Carmel, and Skyline on different occasions on demand (primarily when it's raining, when it's really hard to get a yellow cab), and had no issues. I still do so when Uber surge pricing is ridiculous for my tastes.
In the LES where yellow cabs can be scarce, you had Allen Car Service and Delancey Car Service (who I'd call for airport runs).
The reliability of these car services was pretty good. They'd call you if they were delayed or were otherwise late. (Drastically different from San Francisco, where the taxis were pretty much a terrible crapshoot experience)
When Uber started to take off in NYC, some of the feedback I heard was "I get to look like a bigwig", when in reality, anyone can get a black car, and if you think it makes you look more important... it doesn't.
My point is, there's a lot of talk of "Uber was revolutionary" and "before Uber there was nothing!", when the sad truth is these folks never bothered to look?
I mean, anyone who's lived in NYC for some time can tell you the numbers for Carmel or Dial 7 in a heartbeat, and some may even be able to recite the jingles from their ads.
Uber was just yet another dispatch car service, but with an app.
My point is, there's a lot of talk of "Uber was revolutionary" and "before Uber there was nothing!", when the sad truth is these folks never bothered to look?
I mean, anyone who's lived in NYC for some time can tell you the numbers for Carmel or Dial 7 in a heartbeat, and some may even be able to recite the jingles from their ads.
I do think you're understating the importance of discoverability.
I lived in Morningside for three years. (This is in Manhattan, by Columbia University, for you non-New Yorkers.) I'd never heard of the car services you mentioned. Even though I could easily access yellow cabs, after a few awful cab rides to / from the airport, I would have been pretty eager to try out something different.
My point is, maybe I was ignorant, lazy, should have asked around, whatever. Clearly you are a savvier New Yorker than I was. But Uber/Lyft makes the process of getting a reliable, enjoyable experience way easier as a newb, or tourist, or lazy person who doesn't bother to find a Real New Yorker, or whatever. That would have provided real value to me.
Arecibo is awful. They would always tell me "five minutes!" regardless of how long it would take for the car to arrive. Their attitude and customer service were not good.
I am so happy to never have to call Arecibo again. And now that Lyft service is good out here, happy not to use Uber either.
You just didn't know the code. Five minutes meant there was someone pretty close to you and it would be fine. Seven minutes meant there was someone that would head your way but he was a little further away so don't trip out about it. Ten minutes meant we're fucking busy but a guy will pick you up sooner or later. Fifteen minutes meant hopefully we'll be hiring some new drivers soon and when we do we'll definitely send one your way. And a busy signal meant it's time to consider public transit.
Cute but false, in each of those scenarios they would tell me "five minutes" and then when I'd call back 15 minutes later to ask & complain, they'd say "oh there was traffic, now he's five minutes away" and then one time I called back again 20 minutes later and the guy yelled at me and hung up on me.
I think this really depends on which city you are in.
When Uber started in SF, the experience of getting a taxi was very frustrating. There weren't enough cabs, the cab drivers were over the top rude, they refused to take credit cards and were aggressive about tips, if you called a cab they would never show up, and they were (and still are) expensive. It was not necessarily about the app, it was just that it was reliable -- you could get a car when and where you needed it and not having to pay in the car made the experience far superior.
At the very same time, there were all these black cars rolling around the city and picking up passengers somewhat illegally. That experience was not great because you often had to negotiate a high rate, but this was mostly because there were no taxis available. In other words, there was a bunch of supply that could be utilized.
I think those conditions made Uber particularly ripe to work in SF and once it did, that proved that it could work elsewhere as well.
The app was also a huge benefit, but in context, I actually think it could have been just as useful in the beginning if you could have texted your address.
It goes to show that for something to be great, you have to get a lot of things right at once. :-)
I live in Harlem and even in Harlem it is hard to get a Taxi in Harlem. Cab drivers regularly would discriminate against minorities who needed cabs. Uber changed all of that. Now cabs are happy to see me when I flag one down. Car Service is usually pretty horrible. The cars are dirty on the inside and they will typically overcharge you for a trip. I made the mistake of paying 20 bucks for a trip that would've been a $7 cab fare and maybe an even cheaper with an Uber/Lyft.
Are you really comparing car service in the outer boroughs to Uber? I mean I guess I agree with the TLC comparison but experience to the consumer is absolutely different.
Uber entered both markets. I live in Manhattan(UWS) and treat taxis or Ubers as interchangable. When you can pull up an app on your phone and have a car in 2 minutes, that is effectively similar to a street hail. Heck, because I work near Chelsea market(big tourist destination), using Uber gets me a car 5-10 mins quicker than trying to hail a cab and constantly getting sniped by people who appear upstream.
The quasi-firing of TK isn't an indictment of Uber as a product, or an overall social good (although both have been intensely debated). It is an indictment of Uber as a business.
Even if we grant that Uber is a huge overall social good, it is clearly not sustainable at its current pace. Uber's burn rate is the highest in history, and the C-suite is barren. The board clearly felt that TK couldn't get Uber out of this mess. And the board, at the end of the day, only cares about long-term share price.
I downvoted you because this has nothing to do with the article. Whether or not Uber is a good thing is not relevant to Kalanick stepping down or the rotten culture he cultivated.
Uber under TK was criticized for breaking laws, but those laws were in place to protect incumbents from market entry. In NYC, were AirBnB does break NYC and NY State laws, Uber does not. It follows the rules of the NYC Taxi & Limousine Commission. Except for the Mayor that tried to restrict Uber/Lyft for political reasons to help the incumbents, we New Yorkers welcome Uber/Lyft.
That's simply not true. Very few people have criticized Uber for breaking absurd incumbent-protecting laws.
The vast majority of people have been criticizing Uber for breaking laws related to fraud, stalking and harassment, and a generally toxic workplace culture.
The product that Uber offers is good (and no one other than taxi medallion owners is really arguing that). But they've gone about delivering it in an unnecessarily bad way.
They made a big deal about an illegal app that was only necessary because unlike NYC, the other city(s) were trying to restrict the market competition. Uber never used that app in NYC because we welcome technology and competition and the special interests did not dominate the politicians.
> Err, the cheaper rates were due to uber subsidising rides with VC money, which was unsustainable. Uber also did start a leasing program for drivers.
The cheaper rates in NYC which are extremely high compared with the rest of the USA were because there was no $125 / 12 hour lease fee because there were no medallions.
Medallion owners would get mortgages (like houses) for the $1.2 million medallions and the high lease fee paid for the medallion mortgage. In fact the other special interests besides Yellow Cab medallion owners were credit unions who financed these mortgages.
A $125 / 12 hour lease fee comes to over $90,000 per year.
By not having to pay these excessive expensive leases, drivers could be paid less money and still make a profit. Drivers who leased the Yellow Cabs still have to pay for gas. Lower costs for taxi service means more time with customers in cabs. Everyone wins except medallion owners and credit unions with the mortgages and politicians bought off by these special interests.
> The cheaper rates in NYC which are extremely high compared with the rest of the USA were because there was no $125 / 12 hour lease fee because there were no medallions.
As explained elsewhere in the thread, Uber does not and has not ever competed with medallion taxis for their main product (Uber X/Uber Black) in New York City. Uber's direct counterpart would be the for-hire cabs which are also regulated by the TLC, and are not required to have medallions.
Uber is already subject to the exact same requirements of the TLC that their predecessors were - Uber drivers in NYC have to have a valid TLC license. So there is literally no difference in supply-side regulatory cost there.
You clearly don't live in NYC. Uber absolutely changed how people in NYC get around.
Whether or not they fill the same requirements, they made it so easy to get a car that it was easier than standing on a street corner and hailing a yellow cab.
And aside from that, they added accountability. Yellow cab drivers were rude, the cars were moderately clean at best, and generally took opportunities to rip people off. I remember leaving my phone in a cab around 2008, I immediately called it and the dude picked up, said he was around the corner and to meet him outside. He was more than willing to give me my phone back- for $60 and had a shit eating grin on his face. I had the same thing happen in an Uber about 5 years later- the guy dropped the phone off at my house free of charge with a smile.
There is a reason that NYC taxi medallions have pretty much halved in cost since Uber started here- because they are directly competing with yellow cabs!
Rather than respond to the anecdotes, I'll point out that I was rebutting the original claim: that Uber was cheaper because it (unlike medallion cabs) does not have to pay for licensing fees. Uber does pay for licensing fees, just under a different classification. More importantly, that's exactly who Uber's competition is on the drivers' side, which is exactly what OP was talking about. Uber drivers are generally people who have driven livery cabs for years and either split their time between Uber and other livery cab services, or have switched over to Uber for livery cab driving.
When talking about the price, it's more accurate to compare Uber to other livery cabs, and to say that Uber has caused the share of livery cabs in the overall cab market in NYC to increase, rather than to look narrowly at the medallion market, and ignore the regulatory field that they are in, ignore the costs of that regulation, and ignore all of the direct competition on the supplier side.
> Rather than respond to the anecdotes, I'll point out that I was rebutting the original claim: that Uber was cheaper because it (unlike medallion cabs) does not have to pay for licensing fees.
It is not about licensing fees, it is about that because of the medallions, taxi drivers had to pay $125 / 12 hours for the lease. Before Uber/Lyft those medallions which were restricted to 13,000 for a city of 8.5 million (as well as many visiting tourists, business people, and in a city where many don't own cars), the price of a medallion was $1.2 million. After Uber/Lyft the price decreased to $700,000 and many Yellow Cabs are idle. Prices are lower, service is far better.
If your point is 'Taxis can't compete with Uber because of the medallion system', then you're probably right.
But if your point is 'Uber was primarily successful because they found a way to get around the medallion system', then I don't think so.
The reason being, livery cars were around long before Uber, are much more comparable, and they also did not have to deal with medallions. So, why didn't livery cars put the taxis out of business a long time ago?
I think the real reasons for Uber's success are:
1. Livery cars were a hassle to arrange. Uber solved this by using smartphones with GPS.
2. Livery cars were slower to pick you up. Probably because there weren't enough drivers on the road. Which is probably because there weren't enough riders. Uber solved that catch-22 by subsidizing the rides to jumpstart a positive network effect.
Also-
Clear transparent pricing. No getting to the destination and the dude suddenly asking for $30 more than you previously agreed to or arguing over a tip (I live outside Manhattan- nearly every time I took a trip home in a cab, there would be some kind of hassle- the guy wanted cash-often claiming his credit card machine was broken, more $ because traffic was heavier than expected, was just pissed about a $20 tip not being enough... there was something nearly every time.
Accountability and a feedback loop- if the guy did try to rip you off somehow, prior to Uber, you really had very little recourse. There is a process to lodge a complaint in NYC, but it involved paperwork, showing up to a hearing (which you will have to take time off of work for), and then maybe something might be done.
You kind of touched on it, but also just some kind of visibility into when exactly your car will arrive. When Uber was new in NYC, wait times were much longer, generally 10-15 minutes, which I didn't mind much because that's probably about how long it would have taken me to find a cab, and I could finish my drink inside the bar/restaurant and finish as the driver pulled up. This has actually gone downhill a bit over time- So many times I pull up the app to see a half dozen cars within 4 blocks of me, and then when I actually try to reserve, its a 7-8 minute wait. Or they accept the trip but then I guess got a better offer on Lyft or something and is just heading in the wrong direction- meaning you have to cancel and then fight with Uber over being charged a cancellation fee, which usually isn't too hard to do, but its just a hassle and a way drivers can currently beat the system.
The share of taxi rides in Manhattan has decreased by almost the same amount Lyft and Uber rides have increased [1]. The overall number of rides has increased in the other boroughs due to Lyft and Uber ridership.
Maybe, it is very likely that NYC rides need to be propped up with incentives by ridesharing companies. We won't know the economics until somebody tries to IPO or shutters their company.
Actually, the normal Yellow Cab rates are so high in NYC that Uber can still charge rates twice that of Chicago Uber and come out ahead (NYC $1.75 per mile, Chicago $0.90 -- twice the amount).
i don't follow your math. can you expand on the increase. $125 / 12 hour means it is around 12 bucks an hour. if you have 3 rides an hour (don't know if doable), it would increase a single ride by 4 bucks. that doesn't seem the end of the world
~10 minutes avg ride time in SF. You also need to take into account the extra 4-5 avg minutes it takes for a driver to pick up the person. So I would assume a driver in SF can make 4 rides an hour.
People keep saying that, and yet prices still haven't risen.
I feel like a decade from now people are going to still be repeating this same old line.
It also seems awesome. Why wouldn't I want VCs to give away a bunch of money to its customers?
No, it is not going to run taxis permanently out of business. All you need is a car to do that. If this is really true, as soon as prices rise, another taxi company can start back up again and take market share.
> People keep saying that, and yet prices still haven't risen.
Uber is still losing money hand over fist. It has to come to an end at some point, either when they finally raise prices or they just go bankrupt.
> It also seems awesome. Why wouldn't I want VCs to give away a bunch of money to its customers?
A couple reasons:
1. VCs don't "give away money". They invest, with the expectation that their investment will be returned many times over. Given that it is explicitly Uber's goal to have a monopoly on transportation, you can extrapolate what that means for their intended pricing strategy if they ever manage to take over.
2. While taxis may or may not be an example of this, it's important to realize that VC-backed dumpi^H^H^H^H^Hpromotional pricing can destroy existing businesses even if those businesses were competitive and sustainable. For example: wash.io, which I commented about here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13608376#13608798. They shuttered a whole bunch of laundromats in SF, which was all for nothing since they went out of business anyway. That's not a healthy dynamic.
A lot of that money is going toward Uber/Lyft growing market share. But a lot of the overhead could disappear because so much of it is run by computers.
The previous market making mechanism for this industry was for a buyer to stand on a street corner, hold their hand up, and hope that a vendor who sold that service drove by.
I'm going to wager that wearing a suit and/or other indicators of being of a higher social class are far more important than race. I've never seen a rich minority person discriminated against...
Do you believe that the fact that you, personally, have never "seen a rich minority person discriminated against" effectively support your argument? Do you think there are any studies that have been done to try and see if there is racial discrimination in the taxi business? If you haven't tried to look for such studies, why not? Or if you did, why don't you cite them instead of your own personal experience in not seeing rich minorities being discriminated against?
If I wear shorts, flip-flops and a t-shirt I get passed by all the time by cabs. If I wear a suit, almost never. Also, both those articles suggest something more to the story than outright racism. Most cabbies aren't comfortable with me riding in the front seat, and I wouldn't really blame them either.
I disagree. When I was in college (09-12 in Baltimore) it was impossible to get a cab unless it was a weekend night (in which case they’d all line up outside the dorms). I remember calling cab companies, being told “we put out a call on the radio, someone will probably be there in the next half hour.” And then nobody showing up. The ability to rate drivers and the ability of the system to punish drivers who won’t pick up mildly inconvenient fares has vastly improved this industry (at least from my POV).
You must not live in SF. In SF you would call a cab, and then hope that the cab would come. After 30 mins you would call again asking where the cab was, and they would send another cab. After another 30 mins you gave up and drove.
Same goes for trying to hail a cab from the streets. Empty cabs would drive past you because they wanted to only drive passengers to the airport. I'm glad they are all going out of business.
They do now in San Francisco. But only because they lost so much business to Uber. This was an industry that was effectively a monopoly -- not one company, but one type of provider. And none of the players was improving the experience for the customer.
Calling for a cab was extremely unreliable here. You could easily wait for an hour (because any driver coming to pick you up could, without ill effect for him/herself, stop to pick somebody up on the street). Some cabs took credit cards, some didn't. Some claimed to take credit cards but then "the machine was broken" so you had to pay cash.
Uber improved on every single aspect of the customer experience. And they did it while offering lower prices for the consumer.
However: to me, they haven't proven it's a viable, long term model. I highly doubt that they are paying their drivers enough to cover the cost of wear and tear on the cars (many/most of the drivers I see with Uber and Lyft are doing it full time, so they are crazy if they aren't factoring in the cost of the car and maintenance as part of their cost). And AFAIK neither company has proven they can make money.
So: this industry was due for a shakeup.
But it needs to be done by a company without rampant management problems, and it still needs to prove that there is a viable, long term business model that works for the company, the drivers and the consumers.
[edit: and, yes -- long term, there won't be drivers in these cars. But Uber has to find a way to survive until then, and I don't believe they can burn cash that long]
> Some cabs took credit cards, some didn't. Some claimed to take credit cards but then "the machine was broken" so you had to pay cash.
This type of thing sounds like the usual American "let the market sort it out" that other western countries don't have. Taxis are already government controlled (via taxi licensing) so why aren't they required to accept credit cards, as they are in Australia?
America has that regulation; that doesn't and didn't stop cabbies from taking advantage of those who lack the gumption or encyclopedic knowledge of regs to challenge the driver on the spot.
Paris also probably has laws against longhauling, doesn't mean Parisian cabbies don't do it to naive tourists.
Edit: And yes, some people (including me) do take the position that the market should be left to decide which payment mechanisms to accept (just like most people do in every other context -- who wants a law saying bakers have to accept credit cards?), so long as they're declared before the transaction, and there's (legally) free entry/exit into the profession. It's a strawman to characterize someone as being okay with changing the accepted payment methods after the fact.
Bakers and taxis are inherently different - no one gets stuck in a location they don't want to be because of a lack of wholewheat.
I'm not saying peopl are ok with changing it after the fact: I'm saying the government should do what government is supposed to do and serve its citizens, in this case forcing taxi companies to accept credit cards.
Market/self regulation generally trends to work in two ways: the well off get to crow about how government regulation isn't needed, and the less fortunate don't get to use that service because they're never the prime market for business, but they don't have a soap box so the other side keeps barking on about how good it all is.
>Bakers and taxis are inherently different - no one gets stuck in a location they don't want to be because of a lack of wholewheat.
And no one gets stuck in an unfamiliar area while low on blood sugar?
>I'm not saying peopl are ok with changing it after the fact
Yes, you were! You brought it up specifically in the context of cabbies who refused CC after taking on a fare with signs and machine saying they could pay that way. If your point was just that "being able to pay with CC is nice so it should be mandated", then you shouldn't have pointed to the after-the-fact case as a danger.
>I'm saying the government should do what government is supposed to do and serve its citizens, in this case forcing taxi companies to accept credit cards.
And you're failing to ground it in any way that doesn't generalize to forcing arbitrary merchants to accept arbitrary payments, while focusing the majority of your rhetoric on grandstanding about "hey, I just think governments should help the people" instead of a concrete justification for how this helps the people, or any recognition of any downside of such a mandate (which you were able to see in the case of bakers and CCs).
>Market/self regulation generally trends to work in two ways: the well off get to crow about how government regulation isn't needed, and the less fortunate don't get to use that service because they're never the prime market for business, but they don't have a soap box so the other side keeps barking on about how good it all is.
Again, you're assuming your policy helps the poor and anyone who opposes it just doesn't understand it, instead of actually elaborating on the substantive mechanisms. Tomorrow you'll be right back lecturing us that credit card acceptance hurts the poor because merchants have to distribute the fees over all customers, including the poor unbanked who can't get one, and I'm just too privileged to see that.
How about confining your remarks to the pros and cons of various policies without dragging motives and demagoguery into it?
Was in England last week. Many cabs still don't take CC. I used one cab, for the experience and then went back to Uber. Cabs just aren't that great, and the experience is not reliable, predictable, or easy.
> This type of thing sounds like the usual American "let the market sort it out" that other western countries don't have.
Well, to be fair, it's "let the market sort it out while severely restricting the market through regulation" which while I wouldn't say is the usual, isn't as uncommon as it should be. Either one has it's place, but together they generally don't work well...
> I highly doubt that they are paying their drivers enough to cover the cost of wear and tear on the cars
Since Uber/Lyft has no problem attracting drivers at the rates they pay, this argument rests on drivers being financially ignorant enough that they don't notice they're losing money doing it.
Maybe they are not losing money, but perhaps many might be surprised how much less they are really making after factoring in cost and upkeep of a vehicle.
In the Chicago suburbs, calling the dispatch center was and still is how it's done. There are a few "posts" scattered here and there where cabs will queue up, but in general, you have to contact dispatch.
In NYC, there is one app called Arro that responded to the competition of Uber/Lyft, but was not available beforehand. I believe there is a 2nd app now as well.
It didn't work when I wanted to take a cab from Logan Square to work. Called the dispatcher. The cab showed up somewhere between 15 and 60 minutes later.
"Pretty well". We just tried to get an Uber in the French Quarter and had to cancel 2 different drivers because they couldn't figure out how to route around the barricades.
In a couple urban cores where both customers and providers were extremely dense so that that simple method could work, surez that a mechanism in play; everywhere else (and often also available on those same areas) it was “customer calls dispatch agency on the phone, dispatch agency routes to service provider via radio (or mobile phone)”; Uber replaces the dispatch agency and changes the communication mechanism on both sides from a phone to an app on the phone.
"Most of the upsurge is occurring outside the city’s Central Business District (Manhattan below 60th Street), Schaller reports."
Also, the overall increase was 3 to 4% according to the report. In NYC we keep hearing how subway ridership has been increasing every year. At any rate, a decrease of 10 million trips per year out of 1.7 billion is hardly significant.
Also, this simply states that perhaps we should be regulating private vehicular traffic in these areas, not restrict traffic that helps the public (and provides employment for low-skilled people).
Uber might improve "customer value", but as someone that takes a cab once every three months or so, cars with TLC license plates constantly failing to yield to my attempts to use a crosswalk have not improved my experience.
I've decided to solve this by 1-starring and no-tipping any driver that fails to yield to a pedestrian, drives in a bike lane, or exceeds the 25mph speed limit at any point in the ride (so, like, all of them), but of course, I take a cab once every three months, so that won't do much.
If we really want to reduce greenhouse gases, a better approach might be:
1. Properly funding the MTA (congestion charging)
2. Widening sidewalks, especially in Midtown
3. Grade-separated and camera-enforced BRT lanes and/or surface rail with signal priority.
"driver that fails to yield to a pedestrian, drives in a bike lane"
At least in Uber/Lyft you can rate a driver, there are many taxi drivers in NYC who drive rashly and don't do those things you listed and yet if you don't tip they will explicitly ask you to.
To me, the following are the most important things to use a ridesharing app:
Not paying any tip (In Yellow cab, many drivers demand for tip if you don't tip them)
Rating the drivers (It's a positive thing depending on how you view it)
Booking when you are drunk (While there are some apps that let you book yellow cabs we all know how bad those apps are)
Uber as a company or Lyft as a company may be disliked for some of the things they do, but ride sharing is a positive outcome. If the above three points are there for yellow cab, I will happily use them anytime. The way a driver drives is not something specific to uber or lyft.
Uber provides certain value to customers. It would not exist in the first place if it does not. Riders get cheaper and faster rides than old taxi cabs. Drivers get jobs which would be harder otherwise. However, does that justify Uber's unethical behaviors? Does that justify sexually harassing female employees? Does that justify evading regulations with a Greyball tool? Does that justify stealing your competitor's technologies (think of Waymo here)?
The regulations by and large were simply there to protect incumbents that wanted to keep out competition which offered higher customer value (by offering lower cost, more responsive, less greenhouse gas) service.
Unlike AirBnB which does break NY City and NY State laws, Uber has been following regulations that are imposed by the NYC Taxi & Limousine commission (e.g., screening drivers, etc.).
I see this "incumbents" narrative touted a lot, but it just ain't so. Non-medallion livery companies (black cabs) have been in NYC for a looooong time.
But because of stupid laws protecting Yellow Cab monopoly, it is against the law to street hail them, having to call instead. Also, not a reliable single brand, also they don't take credit cards, unlike Yellow Cabs.
iPhone hailing to me and many others at least, is effectively street hailing. Not certain what your beef is with Uber. Service and costs have dramatically improved since they and Uber/Via/Gett/Juno came, even in Manhattan.
It's against the law to street hail an Uber as well. Uber works because hailing one with your phone is legally equivalent to calling a cab company, not sticking out your hand.
Uber Pool has 2 or more unrelated passengers using the same car for transit hence less greenhouse gas compared with using separate vehicles. Elementary!
> At least where I live in NYC, Uber was dramatically improving customer value while providing innovations that reduced greenhouse gas.
There is a lot of potential for such reductions to happen in urban areas. Shameless plug - the potential for pooling using Uber data is shown in Figure 8 (https://arxiv.org/abs/1701.06635)
I completely agree and as things are, Uber's prices are far higher in NYC than say, compared with Chicago because the Yellow Cabs here are so expensive compared with those from Chicago.
And this actually gave Uber cover to do a lot of stupid stuff.
For one thing, because cabs were so bad, Uber was able to do a lot of stupid and scummy things yet still be way better than cabs.
Also, it had an interesting effect PR-wise. For a long time, whenever I heard something negative about Uber, I just assumed it was taxi industry shills making up ridiculous lies. Because there definitely were taxi industry shills going around (online, newspapers, etc.) and making up ridiculous lies about Uber. Later I understood that some of the negative stuff I was hearing about Uber was a huge lie and some of it was totally true.
So? They disrupted a bad system and drove some innovation into it, what does that justify?
Let's look at the flip side here. They "disrupted" an industry by repeatedly violating the law and undercutting the competition by subsidizing nearly 2/3 of the cost of fares using investment funds. Is that innovative? I'd argue that nearly anyone could disrupt any industry with such a model, regardless of the actual merits of anything else they'd built.
Add on to that their horrible corporate culture, their seeming support of industrial espionage, and the underhand tactics they use to take advantage of their drivers.
It was smart of them to take on a corrupt, broken, and outdated system, because it allowed people, like you, to whitewash so many of their flaws and transgressions.
Citation doubly required because if the net miles driven actually increases due to increased use of cars over public transit (very likely), and increased availability of transportation services overall, the greenhouse gas emissions would go _up_ if anything.
There are situations where ride services would encourage public transit utilization (last mile services), but I'd guess those are far from the dominant use case.
There's plenty of people, myself included, who don't have a car but would otherwise probably get one if effortless car services on-demand like Uber didn't exist. You need to take that into account.
According to some estimates I've seen just constructing a car is equivalent to 3-4 years of carbon footprint of driving it[1][2].
You might say "buy used!". I would, but over the entire economy it would add up to the same amount, the net demand for new cars would increase.
That EPA link says nothing about the embodied carbon footprint of manufacturing vehicles.
The Guardian article is very deceptive:
"... the emissions from the manufacture of a top-of-the-range Land Rover Discovery ... may be as much as four times higher than the tailpipe emissions of a Citroen C1."
Did you see the trick they pulled there?
They took carbon emissions from manufacture of a large vehicle (Land Rover Discovery), and divided it by the tailpipeemissions of a very efficient small vehicle (Citroen C1) in order to concoct a large-sounding, but ultimately meaningless comparison "4 times higher". You may as well compare the manufacturing emissions of the Land Rover to the tailpipe emissions of a cow.
But even assuming your point about manufacturing emissions, while you don't buy a new vehicle yourself because of your use of ride services, the cars used for ride services will be replaced more often, because they are more heavily utilized, and hence will have to be replaced more often.
On second look, yes that Guardian source is pretty shitty. I couldn't find some authoritative source for the CO^2 emissions required to produce a new car. My point was that you had to consider it.
> cars used for ride services will be replaced
> more often.
It's not meaningful to consider how often they're replaced, but what mileage they tend to get if we're going to look at how the CO^2 cost of producing the car is amortized over its lifetime.
According to EPA statistics a typical car gets used for 100-200K miles[1], for taxis that number seems to be easily 2x or 3x larger[2]. So for the same amount of moving people from A to B taxis are mor CO^2 efficient.
Of course there are all sorts of secondary effects you're not taking into account. Once people don't own a car because they have something like Uber available to them, they're more likely to use a bike or public transport for a trip they'd otherwise take by car. Just compare somewhere like NYC to LA in terms of how much CO^2 a typical person emits while going about their day.
I don't know what the exact numbers are, but this is a lot more complex than what you're making it out to be.
This is too short-sighted. In my city a lot of people use Uber INSTEAD of readily available public transit (anecdotal observation). That's kind of a bad deal if it's a widespread truth. This would continue to hurt public transportation funding over time.
With Uber Pool you can have both. People can choose to use Uber pool and in exchange for a bit of additional time for transit, save both money and save the environment. Win Win (lose as far as time).
Still a net loss against public transportation, the current savings are also largely driven by artificially low fares that Uber subsidizes with driver bonuses (to undercut the market).
Buses and trains carry a lot more people per trip so the use of Uber pool does not negate the greenhouse gas argument. Uber pool will pollute more than other forms of mass transportation. Uber pool is only a subset of Uber users too.
Uber pool takes two or more unrelated passengers and puts them in the same vehicle. This is clearly less greenhouse gas generated than if all passengers take independent cars. Therefore, Uber pool reduces greenhouse gasses.
By your argument, because Uber/Lyft provides better customer service overall compared with Taxi service which is why they are commanding such a large market share, that is a bad thing because people are taking more cars over mass transit as a result.
You're missing the point. The comparison isn't everyone taking a single car vs using Uber pool, the comparison is people using Uber (pool or not) vs using public transit.
Uber pool might lower the amount of greenhouse gases compared to everyone using individual Ubers, but that is a drop in the bucket compared to the increase from people using Uber instead of public transit
I have to flag you because you are not discussing this in good faith. You are constantly dodging questions, and trying to put words in people's mouths.
What I have said is logical and true: Uber Pool saves greenhouse greenhouse gas because instead of having separate vehicles people are sharing the same vehicle. What people seem to be arguing is that because taxi (or taxi equivalent rates) are more affordable for low-income people and are no longer taking inconvenient mass transit, then that is some sort of negative, which is terribly elitist.
Why not argue for doubling taxi fares and banning Uber, equivalents altogether and force anyone without a private vehicle (which is the majority of people in Manhattan and perhaps even NYC) to take mass transit? It is a silly argument. Because Uber is provider better customer service at a lower cost, that is a bad thing? Really?
Not only is what you’ve said not logical or true, you keep putting your irrelevant Uber love in threads where we’re discussing Uber’s toxic office culture. Whatever you feel about the NYC taxi industry is irrelevant when discussing a culture that fosters sexual harassment.
And even more in bad faith is your constant assertion that people who are not fans of Uber are somehow against poor people. Your entire second paragraph is filled with this. Based on that, I could easily say that, because of your comments of Uber love, you’re a huge fan of the kind of office culture that Susan Fowler wrote about. Would it be accurate? Probably as accurate as your assertion that those who are against Uber is against poor people.
Where I've used Uber, buses, subways, and trains have simply not been an option most of the time. You can't throw a subway at every transportation problem.
I read that Uber/Lyft usage corresponds with lower drunk driving fatalities. This sounds like a more effective and humane method than the ever-more-draconian penalties imposed on drunk drivers.
Absolutely true, but does this justify Uber's workspace culture, Waymo secrets, or sidestepping law enforcement (main reasons for Kalanick's resignation according to article)?
The law enforcement cited was mostly to keep Uber out of the market to protect incumbents from competition.
Unlike AirBnB which breaks NY City and NY State regulations, Uber does follow NYC Taxi & Limousine Commission rules imposed on them and Lyft and other services. But in NYC, the Mayor's unsuccessful efforts withstanding, we aren't trying to restrict market entry and basically asking that Uber drivers undergo the same screening as Yellow Taxi drivers.
It doesn't. That is the point. Uber follows the law.
Read this part of the article:
"Uber made a particular effort to deploy the tool in cities where it faced opposition from local regulators or rival taxi and transportation companies. One of those cities was Portland."
NYC did not bow to pressure from rival taxi companies and they did follow the law cooperating with NYC Taxi & Limousine Commission (again, unlike AirBnB which directly broke NY City and NY State laws and was sued by the NY State Attorney General). Uber was never in trouble with the law in NYC nor NYS and the only time it has trouble are with entities that try to block competition from the regulated monopoly.
Uber/Lyft have NOT reduced greenhouse gas. Not a bit. Those rides are still being taken, and inbetween rides, those cars are driving around.
"while not forcing drivers to pay excessing leasing fees for vehicles."
In the same way someone who owed money to the company store didn't have to start doing that, but due to predatory terms, once they did, things get pretty out of hand. And since Uber/Lyft are the ones who dictate those terms, they are to blame.
I've taken several rides in Uber cars, and, as it happens, always as one of 2 or 3 passengers. Some of them have been Priuses. I wouldn't doubt that, for those specific rides, emissions have been less than other options I had. I'd be curious to see the actual data before jumping to conclusions one way or another.
Exactly the same scenario in Hong Kong. And Government still dont realize what is wrong with the current Taxi system.
It is not fair to the consumers, because they are not getting any decent services out of it. It is not fair to the taxi drivers, because their earning only barely manage to lease the car.
And it is only what called the Medallions owner that actually profits.
Everyone already knows what the upsides are, that's why people supported the growth of Uber in the first place when it was just a San Francisco startup. Nobody has ever argued in good faith that the firm wasn't solving a problem, of course they were.
But focusing only on the benefits and avoiding discussion of the costs or new problems that something creates is sales talk; internalizing sales talk leads to cognitive bias.
I am opposed to the taxi industry collusion entirely, but Uber/Lyft are creating customer value by subsidizing their transportation costs via investor dollars. While I would love to see the taxi companies forced to reform, Uber will never make a penny.
Uber has better quality service from my experience. I still remember, Sat AM in NYC, and Lyft wanted to charge surge pricing when the city is far quieter than during a weekday. Uber did not charge surge pricing on a Saturday morning!
Not certain why downvoted and no explanation provided for providing a fact. I think most would agree that Lyft charging surge pricing during a non-surge time is ridiculous. Uber to their credit did not try to rip me and other customers off.
A few weeks ago, I posted on HN about my experience in Hamburg (no Uber in Germany. The local taxi authority has its own app which works equally well, if not better).
Last weekend, I was in Budapest. There is no Uber in Hungary (anymore), but the main taxi company (Fötaxi) has its own app which works brilliantly.
I honestly see no "moat" around Uber in markets where (large) taxi dispatchers have the insight to build a ride-hailing app.
It's only a matter of time before we are back to square 1, or rather, square 2.0:
* licensed, regulated taxis, either independent or through dispatcher
* all connected to an (api-)interconnected ecosystem of ride hailing apps
* payment to driver directly (cash or card), tipping discretionary
* receipts emailed to rider afterwards, with annotated map and start- and end time
This will weed out dishonest drivers, and will benefit honest drivers.
Uber's only differentiator in well-organised urban markets is its app.
The turning point for Uber's decline will be when NY and London mirror Uber's functionality in their own apps, with the benefit (in London) of cabs being allowed to use the cab lanes (or, in Amsterdam, the bus lanes).
First, I hate having to have multiple apps to do the same thing. That would drive me crazy for every city. I would pay a premium not to do that.
Second, none of these apps I have seen thus far even attempts to make it easier for the user to add payment methods. Each time I need to put in my credit card information? Twice if I am on business? Nobody has taken advantage of Apple or Android pay integration.
I don't consider myself a heavy cab user, but I probably take at least ~200 rides a year, and unless the city is regulated (credit cards) I am using Lyft.
But is that true for most people who use Uber, or even taxis? I wouldn't be surprised if a large portion of Uber/taxi users were in fact people traveling to a different city.
I would be surprised. At least in New York, people use taxis very often, and thus use Uber very often. I'd wager the vast majority of Uber usage is in people's home towns/cities.
Personally, I use other apps when in NYC, but fall back to Uber when I'm somewhere else and can't find a local app.
This is exactly what got me to use Uber initially. I can show up in San Francisco, or London, or my tiny hometown where cabs take 45 minutes to arrive, and Uber will work the same way for about the same price. Having a robust, universal way of getting places really does matter to a lot of people.
Where I grew up, the vast majority of people I knew very rarely left the county they lived in - even though it was only a couple of hours to New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington DC. By the time I moved to Philadelphia, my social circle was much more likely to travel - but on the whole, the greater population of the city tends to stay within the city ("I have everything I need here, why would I bother with the hassle of going somewhere else?")
Hm, ok. We'll here in Europe things are a bit different. Most people travel, it is pretty easy to do so and even the 'poor' (students, people that only have bikes) move from city to city regularly.
I've got acquaintances from all over the planet though, and even there most people travel with some regularity to other cities. Holidays, family visits and so on, and then of course there is business travel which I would assume is one of the larger customer groups for Uber/taxis.
The first point is key, especially when you're not familiar with the city. I rarely use either Uber or Lyft in my home city, but now Lyft is the first thing I launch when landing in a new place, and that's all domestic US travel, forgetting international. It can't really be discounted how important the multi-city, single app feature is to these services for travelers.
My first ever use of Uber was in another country, after about 40 hours awake and traveling. Even with the hurdles of setting up an account, it was vastly easier than getting local transit for my route. (As checked later when I was functional.) That's a huge benefit that none of the proposed alternatives (bar Lyft) can offer.
>First, I hate having to have multiple apps to do the same thing
Don't worry, once there are enough apps someone will figure out how to scrape and aggregate the info. The same thing happened when airlines and hotels started putting booking info online except at the time it was websites instead of apps.
Google Maps is already starting down this road a bit (admittedly only with the big companies). That's the likeliest path in terms of companies that have the leverage as well as the existing technology to make this happen.
> You don't need a standard, the taxi companies just all need some API
But what does that API look like? What are the MVP operations required to make a successful ride hailing API? Will that API provide realtime location info of the driver, or allow payment, or <insert myriad of questions here>.
Without a standard, the Taxi API landscape will be a mess.
> Apps like "Transit App" will just integrate them all
This is a pretty major oversimplifications of this issue. Sure, this is technically possible, but it sounds like a horrible solution.
Bringing in the considerations about the actual API design, this also means that user experience may vary wildly depending on which service they're interacting with.
Can != should. If aggregating many systems is the future, we should push for a technical solution that doesn't suck.
You're overcomplicating the issue - a lot. The important thing is that the ride sharing systems provide APIs that show the time and the price, to allow users to compare. The next step is that the service providers and apps can work together on payment, which is really the complicated part. Following the booked cars in real time is simple in comparison.
Not having some API standard is usually how it's done with many services nowadays, and the market/comparison apps have to integrate multiple APIs. Big deal.
Guess we just have to agree to disagree. API design matters. A lot. "As long as they provide some API" doesn't really cut it if you want a system that functions well. Having spent close to 10 years of my career gluing systems together through APIs, I've encountered too many "Oh we have an API!" vendors only to find out how horrible that API is. The consumer facing product is often a direct reflection of the underlying APIs powering it. If you have many APIs powering it, the app will take on all of the negatives of the sum of those APIs. Good app design can help smooth over the rough edges, but that only goes so far.
Again, I should reiterate: I'm not arguing that it can't be done or that it's not possible. I'm arguing that the result will be subpar. Let's remember that the parent discussion is about the creation of a system that rivals the Uber/Lyft experience. If you want to do that, someone (probably someone big like Google as suggested in another comment) is going to have to influence the design of these APIs so the end user experience is a consistent/good one.
I agree with the multiple apps and not knowing which ones to use where.
However, as an example, when Uber and Lyft left Austin, one of the companies created locally (RideAustin) to replace the gap does allow payments via Apple Pay. Very convenient, and they also give you the option of rounding up to donate to a charity of your choice.
I guess it's just up to all the other options to realize what people want.
Except... The negative reviews on RideAustin are pretty much all about people having horrible payment-method issues.
Apple Pay is great if you're immersed enough in that ecosystem, but otherwise? Uber and Lyft store CC info, allow for easy deletion, and take PayPal. I'm glad Ride Austin exists, but they still seem to be several laps behind on letting you give them money.
Paying the driver directly still sucks. In the US you constantly deal with the "I don't take cards" bullshit and lack of simple feedback for when they take you on a scenic tour.
I would be fine with taxis if I didn't have to interact with the driver at all when it came to payment and could provide feedback right in the app.
>In the US you constantly deal with the "I don't take cards" bullshit
Sounds like a free ride, to me. In my city cabs have to accept credit cards by law. This means if the machine is broken, the cab is unfit for service. If a driver refuses to take a credit card, you don't have to pay them. If they're rude about it, you can call 911, there's a whole division of the PD dedicated to dealing with cabs. The threat of having an officer show up and a possible fine or suspension is probably enough to "fix" their machine.
Personally I prefer a simple feedback system that kicks out bad drivers to confrontation and a need to call 911. Not to mention that there's quite a gap between good service and service that complied with the law. If a driver is rude, swears at me, drives dangerously, what can I do about that? Spend part of my day calling a hackney division that probably doesn't care?
A rating system is actually superior to getting the government involved.
You might be right but I'm js you do have some recourse. You can file a complaint and your leisure. It only takes a couple complaints to trigger a fine.
Not exactly appealing... The last time I went through that, I ended up with a cabbie following me down the street in his car, making threats and watching where I was going, in a town with police response times of 20+ minutes.
A ride experience where I don't have someone threaten me while I call 911 is worth some money to me.
For me the main advantage of using Uber in Europe is payment.
It doesn't even matter whether it's card or cash - once I'm at the destination I just want to get out of the car. And having to think about tipping is even worse.
And I don't mind paying a fair price.
"I don't take cards" or "It's broken" results in me walking out of the cab. Irregardless of if it's the beginning or end of the trip. All but one time did they change their tune.
In Germany and Budapest, and certainly Sweden, drivers are required by their dispatchers to accept credit cards. "Cash only" drivers will be a thing of the past soon. Look at what happened with the London black cabs: they all accept credit cards these days.
Not everywhere in Germany and even in places where they are required to, for many drivers the card reader is somehow always "broken" when you try to use it. I now use taxi-calling apps with built-in payment as those are really convenient.
This is true in some US markets, not true in others. In NYC it's very easy to pay by CC and requires no interaction with the driver, because they installed CC readers in the back seat of every cab years ago. And if the reader is broken, they're required to tell you before the ride starts.
This is definitely already starting to happen. Uber was banned for a long time here in Madrid which allowed other apps to gain a lot of traction. I'd say the most popular is myTaxi, which allows you to hail the standard local public taxis. I believe it works the same in most major European cities. No need for private taxis.
myTaxi seems to be emerging as a big European one. It's in every major German city (where it started), and also just recently acquired Hailo, which was the dominant London taxi-hailing app.
Ubers other differentiator is the fact that I can go to just about any city in the world and use it. I guess I could research and install fotaxi but as a 21th century consumer, I'm extremely lazy.
I don't think it comes down to just being lazy. Regardless of whether you've had good or bad experiences with Uber, you've had experiences, may have chatted to their support team, etc, and you know what to expect from the service and the company. The local alternative might be better, but it's an unknown.
For me that's Uber (well, Lyft), but a local restaurant - I don't think it's a fair comparison. Getting somewhere in a cheap and timely way is often an instrumental issue, rather than "part of the travel experience". When it isn't, I'll happily walk, take the subway, etc.
This sort of reminds me of Usain Bolt in Beijing, actually. He lived on McDonald's chicken nuggets, not because he's averse to trying new things but because he couldn't risk anything upsetting his stomach during competition. For him, eating was instrumental, so he wanted predictability.
Even if you immersive travel, there are times when it's really useful to know what you'll get.
I read the GP as saying there'll be a unified UI to various local taxis ("interconnected ecosystem"). I could see this emerging from EU regulation, in a similar way they mandate banks to open up their APIs (which is much bigger than taxis).
I don't know how big that really is. While there are a few business people/tourists that travel a lot, a lot of execs are likely to either take a taxi straight from the airport taxi queue, as it's quite a lot of hassle to use uber at a lot of airports.
The small journeys around town aren't as likely to be as valuable, it's usually the longer airport fares which will make up the majority of taxi spending for people away.
That's why these local taxi companies usually have billboards at train stations and airports that inform travellers of their app.
EDIT: Alternatively, convince the taxi companies to open up their API. Then you can have one app that selects the correct API based on your current location.
> That's why these local taxi companies usually have billboards
What year is this? $YEAR_OF_BILLBOARD_INVENTION + 2?
> Alternatively, convince the taxi companies to open up their API.
I still feel like one company will take over. You cannot build a good product by federating APIs across different municipalities, governments, continents, (planets?).
I don't use a taxi app in Budapest -- the good old phone dispatchers still work just fine and I almost never wait more than 10 minutes for a cab -- but in Berlin I use the "MyTaxi" app all the time[0].
The thing I find interesting is that MyTaxi is loosely coupled with the drivers. There is no obligation to pick up MyTaxi fares, you can go about your business as a cabbie and take MyTaxi fares when business is slow. Seems to work quite well for the drivers.
This morning I had to wait probably 15 minutes before a driver took my MyTaxi order, but considering how bad the phone-dispatch service is in Berlin I call that a win.
Everything else is very Uber-like: electronic receipt, pay in app if you like, tracking of the car on its way to you (more or less).
Oh, and two very neat features: you see your cabbie's full name (this feels safer to me) and you can save them, after rating, to a "favorite drivers" list, which I assume the service will use to help improve customer satisfaction.
I had the same in Madrid. Tried to get a taxi for 15 minutes. After that time I had already walked to the next taxi rank and got in the first taxi there. Mytaxi always showed cabs close by but wasn't successful. Wasn't even a busy day, the taxi rank was more than full.
As much as I don't like uber, surge pricing can be a really helpful feature that I would like to have with cabs as well.
Or even just let cab companies compete on price, maybe with some limits. When they could compete on price in Budapest it's true that a lot of tourists got ripped off, but it was awesome if you could afford one of the more expensive companies. Once they introduced uniform pricing the better companies got flooded with calls and availability dropped... and tourists still get ripped off, but probably less often and usually when coming from the airport.
> cabs being allowed to use the cab lanes
> (or, in Amsterdam, the bus lanes).
I have not been in an Uber in Amsterdam in the last couple of years that didn't have a full Taxi license (posted in the dashboard) and where the driver was legally permitted to take the bus/tram lanes.
From talking to a few drivers (just asking them about Uber) my understanding is that at some point in Amsterdam Uber was just hiring pretty much anyone with a car as a driver, but then The Netherlands cracked down on it, and now they're all as legit taxi drivers as any other taxi.
So I believe you're posting on the basis of out-of-date information when it comes to Amsterdam.
Uber's decline in Amsterdam will be not only when the local market provides apps of equal caliber, but when they match Uber in prices, it's way cheaper than taking a taxi over here.
London Black cabs are more expensive than regular taxis because of the huge amount of knowledge those drivers have. The ability to know the city well, along with all road works, detours, construction, and places of interest, is amazing. Even now Google is only approaching this level of knowledge and it still has to improve its interface.
The same almost everywhere, here in Stockholm people used to use Uber when it was about 30% cheaper but nowadays it's been so common to have surge prices that I've not missed uninstalling Uber after the sexist reports came out, sometimes taxis have been cheaper than what friend's Uber app were estimating for a ride.
Common users aren't also aware that Uber is cheaper mostly because of their own subsidies. If this is gone soon feels like it'll only hasten Uber's demise.
According to the article 5 different VC firms representing 40% of the voting shares asked him to resign today. Kalanick still controls the majority of voting shares and a board seat.
Most of Kalanick's trouble started with Susan Fowler speaking out. Please believe women when they report harassment in the workplace. Many of their reports may not be as clear cut as Mrs. Fowler's.
Uber's business model reminds me of Zapp Brannigan.
Fry: "I heard one time you single-handedly defeated a horde of rampaging somethings in the something something system"
Brannigan: "Killbots? A trifle. It was simply a matter of outsmarting them."
Fry: "Wow, I never would've thought of that."
Brannigan: "You see, killbots have a preset kill limit. Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own men at them until they reached their limit and shut down. Kif, show them the medal I won."
If you go to a police station and report a murder do you think they'll a) investigate your claim or b) ignore you?
That is the sort of belief we're talking about, a serious investigation with the assumption the person reporting it is not lying. The investigation itself could of course result in not sufficient evidence being found. It's really not that complicated.
There have long been reports from various minority communities in the United States and elsewhere of crime reports being ignored entirely or not taken seriously.
Alternatively, look at the public scrutiny of police shootings. However you personally feel about them, there is a section of the population that sees them as a miscarriage of justice that is playing out in the public square. People look at the extremely low (non-existent?) conviction rate of officers and see either a police force operating without consequences or a remarkably well-mantained and well-monitored police force.
Obviously there should be an investigation, but history tells us that it is very easy to fool ourselves into believing we've done a "fair" investigation which will not look fair to outsiders or victims. No malice is necessary, but it is frequently endemic anyway.
Not sure who "we" is but far too frequently at tech companies, harassment allegations are ignored. For that matter prominent men sometimes admit to harassment and are acquitted anyway.
Harrassment is often entirely one person's word against another. Many of these cases are decided by who the jury believes, if the case even makes it to court—because, remember, most victims don't press charges.
Investigations don't help much in these cases. The pressure isn't to find (often non-existent) evidence, it is to commit to the shitty process of trying to get people to care about you a painful part of your life.
A business culture flows from the top. Reading Susan J Fowler's account told me the whole company must be toxic, for such abhorrent behaviour to be condoned of.
>Management and all staff will also be required to take training on a continuous basis.
This is miserable. Unless the definition of sexual harassment changes every 6 months, you should not be forcing employees to retake these training sessions.
Often they are a means of having something to which they can point and say "we were doing our very best to create a safe environment". It's more of "ammo in case of lawsuit" than actual useful training. It may also be to just follow regulations in some places where they ought to have at least X hours/minutes of training on compliance related matters per year/month etc.
People (hopefully) won't get practice on reporting and handling harassment claims. It's good to have a refresher training to both remind employees of the process as well as a gesture to show they are still taking the issue seriously.
Innocent until proven guilty is a great standard for criminal trials but probably not for the workplace, where people who report harassment are usually taking an incredible career risk by doing so.
People can also be very manipulative. Following down this path (i.e. "believing that the accuser is right even before the investigation starts") will only lead to less women being hired for relevant positions.
Here's a relevant scenario: I'm a man, I hold a managerial position and I have to choose between hiring another man or a woman as a one of my direct-reports. Let's say both contenders have the same qualifications, they're both equally fit for the job, but then, I, as a manager, start thinking that if I hire the woman she will then possibly think of filing a sexual harassment complaint down the line in order to take my job. Remember the "believe" part, which means that the sexual complaint doesn't even need to be backed by anything real, because most of the times after the complaint has been made public the damage is already done for me, as a male manager, no matter what the investigation finds (if it manages to find anything). So I choose the man over the woman as my direct-report.
I think it would be more fair to say he would discriminate based on perceived risk to himself. In this case, that risk is based on the sex of the person involved, but his argument can also include, for example, hiring someone with lesser qualifications, who is less likely to be promoted past him, over a more experienced candidate.
The more general point would be, be aware of the second order effects of changes you promote. For example, revocation of innocent-until-proven-guilty would almost certainly reduce the chances of people who have blown the whistle of being hired again, as they would present a much higher risk to prospective companies, regardless of whether their claims were true. The fact that they would blow the whistle at all would serve as a huge red flag.
Of course, I don't actually know the incidence of sexual harassment at workplaces, and have no idea whether false reports are even an issue. I strongly doubt they are, but I can somewhat understand male managers fear of them, given that they can ruin careers and marriages. As much as sexual harassment is a problem, I don't think assumption of guilt is an appropriate or long-term effective solution.
When you introduce irrational events into a mostly rational world (i.e. when you introduce "believe before investigation" into a world run by financial compensation) then you're bound to have irrational responses, such as discrimination, yes.
Assuming other people aren't psychopaths is irrational optimism, while desperate defensive strategies like not hiring high-risk people are perfectly rational.
In a world where no evidence is required before firing, then that would be the sane thing to do. Always hire the sex you are not attracted to and make your sexual preference very clear.
Im sorry, but if you extrapolate that kind of paranoia and self-servedness everything has difficult repercusions. Maybe companies shouldnt have an HR department at all because people might decide the risk of someone complaining about them is so big that they stop hiring anyone.
I've never understood this position. We take a risk too by following innocent until proven guilty in criminal trials, but hundreds of years of the opposite (e.g. "A witch!" -> kill the
'offender', "A child molester!" -> kill the 'offender') have shown us that the risks of a fair trial are better than the risks of ruining peoples life over accusations. Why should this be any different in the work place?
There's a middle ground between innocent until proven guilty and condemned by accusation and we've been using it in a courts of law for many, many years. Sexual harassment is primarily a civil issue, not a criminal one. And civil issues are resolved based on the preponderance of the evidence, not innocent until proven guilty.
Anyone accused of sexual harassment should have a chance to give their side of the story and an investigation should be performed, but the company should act based on what HR believes happened, not just what HR can prove happened. Neither the accuser nor the accused has the presumption of being right or the burden of proof.
Even when the burden of proof is a preponderance of the evidence, the accuser still has the burden the proof. The general rule seems to be more than 50% probability or "more probable than not." This is not a minor issue...if all you have as evidence are the testimonies of the accuser and and accused and no way to impeach either one of them, deference should still be given to the accused.
Also note that it is in general impossible to prove that something did not happen, as opposed to proving it did, as things that did not happen have no evidence of their occurrence by definition...
> "Civil issues are resolved based on the preponderance of the evidence, not innocent until proven guilty." ... "Neither the accuser nor the accused has the presumption of being right or the burden of proof."
This is incorrect. "Innocent until proven guilty" and "preponderance of evidence" are not two levels on one scale. They are distinct legal principles which can be applied at the same time or separately. Both, however, relate to the burden of proof and differ between criminal and civil trials, which is probably the source of the confusion.
Crudely: one standard is about what happens without sufficient evidence, the other is about how much evidence is sufficient.
---
The burden of proof is a general concept of which party in a trial must prove their claims, and to what standard. "Presumption of innocence" is one possible answer to "which party", while "preponderance of evidence" is a possible answer to "what standard".
The party bearing the burden of proof for an issue is the party which must provide evidence. Simply: if everyone at the trial rests without offering any evidence, whoever bears the burden of proof loses. In criminal trials, this is the presumption of innocence you mention. In civil trials, the matter is more complicated, but in effect the plaintiff bears the (initial) burden. In asset forfeiture cases, infamously, the government bears the burden in the initial trial (against the asset), but the owner bears the burden of proof as a third-party claimant if they want their property back.
(It's emphatically not true that neither side has the burden of proof in civil trials. There is always a burden of proof when a claim is being made, to determine what happens if no evidence is provided. However, civil cases frequently involve affirmative defenses, in which each party bears the burden of proof for the claims made by that party. Both, not neither.)
The standard of proof, meanwhile, is the hurdle which must be cleared by whoever bears the burden of proof. It's how convincing their claim must be to be accepted. In civil cases, yes, this is a "preponderance of evidence", interpreted as the claim being more likely than not. In criminal cases, this is "beyond a reasonable doubt" - that's on the same scale as preponderance. Other standards exist outside of trial settings: in various contexts US law employs standards like "some evidence" and "reasonable suspicion".
---
I'm not (just) being pedantic here. If we're talking about borrowing a legal standard for deciding against someone in a dispute, I think it's very important that we're clear on what we mean.
It's possible to vary both the size and placement of the burden. We could believe the accuser (burden on the accused), but hold the accused to a mere "some credible evidence" standard for their defense. We could believe the accused and demand evidence "beyond a reasonable doubt", or lower that to "preponderance of evidence", or even further. Or we could even use some standard not borrowed from the courts.
But right now, almost no one clarifies what they mean. The results of moving the burden will be very different from the results of lessening the burden, and it's important to understand what we're proposing.
Preponderance of the evidence is the standard that companies should be following because that is the standard that will be followed in any civil suit that follows the company's resolution of the issue, either from the accused or the accuser.
Innocent until proven guilty is the standard for depriving someone of their freedom, not their job. If the harassment rises to the level of sexual assault, it's the standard the prosecutor will use. Otherwise, it's irrelevant in the context of sexual harassment.
The problem is with these "difficult" issues the first thing anyone who is trained to work in this area (even on the employee side) as I am - will tell you is you have to verify what you are being told.
Take measures based as though the complaints are made in good faith.
If you assume them true then you would act as if the investigation has already taken place, and determined that they are true. If you're going to act like that why would you need an investigation?
If complaints or concerns are raised in good faith then you have no need to mistrust the representation and instead can look to the facts and context of the situation.
Believing someone is not important, understanding the sequence of events that led to them speaking up is.
That's more like "take them serious" on the "believe" (i.e. "It's true, do something!") - "take them serious" (i.e. that could very well have happened, let's check this out) - dismiss (i.e. yeah, yeah, let them talk, could never have happened) spectrum.
All three points lead to different actions and the one in the middle seems to be the most appropriate.
>Take measures based as though the complaints are made in good faith.
Which is to say, do more than just investigate. Take action as though the complaints are true, although not necessarily all the action you would take if you knew the complaint to be exactly factual.
You should always investigate, even if (to borrow your formatting)
you believe that
they believe that
their statements are false
and are making a bad faith accusation. It would still be correct to investigate if that was your belief. If you believed that the accusations were entirely factual, then perhaps the immediate step would be to fire someone. But if instead you simply believe that the person is accusing someone of something in good faith, something has already gone wrong and there is a problem. Even if no one did anything wrong.
To put it in terms that might be more familiar, every complaint is an incident and should involve a (blameless) postmortem that asks how the system failed such that someone felt the need to complain. And action should be taken in response. Sometimes, the system failed in such a way that it allowed a malicious actor to do a bad thing, and that malicious actor should be reprimanded, independent of the postmortem.
Believe the accuser when writing the postmortem, and begin incident response as soon as possible. Investigate fully before reprimanding a potential malicious actor.
It was badly worded, restated might be "as though the complaints are made in earnest though cannot be relied on as 100% factual". Which is to say, they should be taken seriously, and immediate action should be taken when possible, but insofar as all memories are fungible and witnesses unreliable, things should be verified when possible before certain measures are taken.
I think more appropriate would be to limit the scope of belief to the complainant. Treat them as a person; acknowledge they have experienced something traumatic.
Do not believe every word anyone says as the absolute truth of an event. Evidence, corroboration, attempts to be objective -- these are all the rights of the accused.
Believe the complainant but do not assume they are correct. Our memories are the movies based on real events.
Accusers are unlikely to abuse this power in the workplace because it harms them, too. It's embarassing, stigmatizing, and often leads to conflicts with the friends of the aggressor.
You don't have to assume truth, just believe they mean their account, you assume good faith. Believe them and allow that belief to start the process of uncovering what the truth is.
There's a reason Listen & Believe is a thing and it's not because anyone is saying "you should have unquestioned faith in what someone says".
I'm not sure what you mean here by belief, but it seems like a redefinition that causes the word to lose value.
"Believe" has always implied to me "understands to be true". How can I believe anything based only on the words of a single person? (Except trivial things like believing that they said something to you)
I have primarily heard the phrase "listen and believe" used by people who think it is impossible for certain kinds of people to understand the experiences of other kinds of people.
Following that argument, the claim is that if you assert an experience I am not capable of understanding then I must accept it, for I have no grounds to refute it.
This has always seemed like unquestioned faith to me, for I think any argument should be able to stand on it's own merit. Maybe I am missing some nuance to the argument, or perhaps there is more going on, but in any case 'believe' seems to be the wrong word.
I'm using the usage that social and case workers use when they talk about believing victims.
So... frankly, I don't really care what HN thinks of the usage.
Note, again, that nothing you said is counter to the "good faith" usage. You're assuming they are speaking the truth as they see it. That's all.
That's how any investigation that involves eye witness testimony works.
It's also the recommended practice for improving reporting and investigation so, again, don't really care what HN thinks about the term: the experts in the field recommended it.
The Susan Fowler article greatly accelerated this process and drew a huge amount of (deserved) media attention. However, Uber has a long history of bad behavior in many different ways. The internal culture being rotten was known-about-but-not-talked-about for a long time, and their history of legally gray and unethical business practices was already a major specter on the company's public image.
Please believe women when they report harassment in the workplace
One of the problems with this unilateral statement is that if this becomes the new norm, then women can just level accusations and be believed. Men get fired or have other consequences.
It is never a good idea to have a policy of sweepingly and uncritically believing some category of people over another. That is actually the problem we currently have, only it is generally white men who get believed, no matter what they say, while women and poc get ignored, dismissed, etc. Consider how poorly that is currently serving women and poc and maybe stop to wonder if you would want to be on the receiving end of that.
Your remarks make it clear that you have enormous privilege and you imagine you cannot lose that advantage. Consider the possibility of losing it. Just as a thought experiment. Your smugness is deeply rooted in your assumption that you will always be privileged. And I don't even know where to begin here in telling you how sick and twisted that is.
In a weird way, it deeply reinforces the current sick system. And if you did get your way, you could well lose the thing you currently cannot imagine losing.
I am not for having a Lord of the Flies social order and simply shuffling around who the default victims are. I would like to treat everyone better, not simply make the current victims the next generation of abusive tyrants.
It is to my knowledge that the problems have been around from the start, but you haven't noticed it.
I'm pushed to think that the "media" didn't report on it too much because the problems were economic. But as an average media company, that story doesn't sell, it doesn't interest the average reader, so they don't report it that much. Then the sexual harrasment scandal surfaced and _that_ is when the media jumped on board, because everybody loves getting political and hearing about scandals and feminism and all those kind of controversial topics.
If anything, the scandal damaged Uber's public image, but that is a superficial problem in proportion to their disasterous funding model and general financials.
>Please believe women when they report harassment in the workplace
This meme is often repeated in context of sexual harrassment (workplace or otherwise). How do you square that with the fact that women are as capable of laying and misleading as men are? How do you square that with "innocent until proven guilty" when accusation are leveled against another individual or company.
I should think that common sense would answer this question. You square it like this:
Let's say a person in your company tells you their boss is sexually harrassing them. You're on reasonably good terms with both the accuser and the accused.
Some responses you might make in this case:
- Deflect. Pretend you didn't hear it. Or, if pressed: "This isn't something I know anything about. You'd better take that up with them. Or maybe you could talk to HR?"
- Express skepticism: "Well, I don't know if you're lying or not. Sounds like a he-said she-said situation. Sorry."
- Express emotional support: "That sounds terrible! I'm sorry you're going through this, and I appreciate that it must be very hard for you to talk about this. How can I help?"
- Provide logistical support: "Let's get to the bottom of this."
- Express complete solidarity: "That bastard! We're going to nail them right to the wall for this. Right. To. The. Wall."
- Express complete solidarity for the accused: "How could you say this about them? They're a good person! They would never intentionally harass you. It must be a misunderstanding!"
Now: which responses might fall under the sentiment of "please believe women"? Which wouldn't? Which responses violate your ethical norms?
Seems to me, if you're purely caught up in the legalism of the situation, I'm guessing your response is going to be "skepticism," whether you want it to be or not.
I'm not sure what your argument is. Unless you are part of HR in your made-up hypothetical situation, it's not your job to intervene or seek retribution because you'll just screw it up and you'll make things worse. Personally, if you know both parties well you may very well find yourself skeptical of those claims ... or not - context matters.
All companies will have a process for handling harrassment claims and process for resolving them. Accusations should be directed to HR (or suitable designated party at the company). If the harrassment continues you may have to involve the legal system - that's what it's there for.
So, your answer in this case is: you do not get involved, period. Deflect, maybe some logistical support to direct them to HR, but nothing more?
They go to HR and a week later they're let go – no real explanation given. (Hey, it's at will employment here in CA.) Or, as happens at Uber, nothing happens, and your coworker continues to complain about harrassing behavior (if they're even talking to you at this point). What do you do now?
My point is: the real world is messy, and doesn't come with cut-and-dried definitions and solutions. Processes can help some, but true neutrality comes at a cost. Corrupt and sexist agencies in your company can continue to operate with aplomb. Your relationship will be damaged with coworkers who have had this happen to them – to say nothing of how it damages them when they have this happen and all of their coworkers look nervously away. It can poison your relationship to the company and all the good people that work there.
I read "please believe women" as an invitation to get involved in a constructive way, and I fervently disagree with you that you as a coworker can only make things worse. You can offer emotional support, so your coworker knows you're there for them. If you have pertinent information, you can offer it. You can hold your company's feet to the fire to make sure they're handling it appropriately. And of course – since I didn't specify the gender in the scenario – you can do the same whether the people involved are male, female, or anything in between.
No. Nobody argues sexual harrassment claims shouldn't be taken seriously. Nobody argues rape claims shouldn't be taken seriously. Nobody. That's not what OP argued. It's a common meme to argue that claims of sexual harrassment and sexual assult should be assumed to be true. That's insane. It upends our entire notion of Justice.
The required burden of proof can and should be much lower in the workplace.
Sure everyone is capable of lying but P(harassment occurred | report of harassment) is much greater than P(harassment did not occur | report of harassment).
>Sure everyone is capable of lying but P(harassment occurred | report of harassment) is much greater than P(harassment did not occur | report of harassment).
This sort of comment will get you banned here regardless of what you're commenting about. We've warned you about this before. If you don't want to be banned, it's time to post civilly and substantively or not at all.
It should go without saying, but this is independent of how wrong other commenters are. Someone else being wrong does not confer the right to drag the discussion down further.
Sure. Sexual harassment is worse than a false accusation, so yes, I'm going to err on the side of taking a harassment claim seriously. If the cost is a few people getting fired that might not have, fine.
Standards for the burden of proof in a court of law and in the workplace are and should be different.
> I bet if you are ever on the receiving end of a false accusation you will be singing a different tune.
I don't know, I could say the same about women and men who show up to work and just want to do their jobs without coworkers trying to grope them, make lewd comments, withhold promotions or offer interesting work only in exchange for sexual favors. That seems pretty unfair too and we hear about that happening far more often than we hear about people being unjustly accused.
I'm a rich white guy, if someone makes a false accusation against me and I have to leave a company, tough luck; I'll be OK.
Obviously I would prefer if people do not make false accusations, and a company should try in the event of any allegation to determine whether it has a factual basis. But if it's a he said she said situation I am going to side with the accuser.
The wild thing is that the situation you are describing happens literally weekly in tech - prominent women do shout about the unfairness of it all, about reporting harassment and having nothing happen, or being forced out of companies after reporting. Many women choose to leave.
>I'm a rich white guy, if someone makes a false accusation against me and I have to leave a company, tough luck; I'll be OK.
Ah. Isn't that perfect. It's great you're rich and your life could never be ruined by false accusations. Screw everyone else eh?
>But if it's a he said she said situation I am going to side with the accuser
That's insane.
>The wild thing is that the situation you are describing happens literally weekly in tech - prominent women do shout about the unfairness of it all, about reporting harassment and having nothing happen, or being forced out of companies after reporting. Many women choose to leave
You keep saying things like this but at some point you may want to back it up with some real numbers otherwise I'll just assume you're making things up.
Tech industry employs hundreds of thousands of people, and that's California alone. That number gets up into millions if you include the United States ... And your proof are anecdotes??? Random? No. Self-selected to confirm your bias? Yes! Jesus. You have no idea do you? You just feeeel you must be right.
Edit:
I want to add that I'm genuinely interested in knowing if a) there is a problem and b) the scope of the problem. Tech industry is one of the most progressive out there and tech hubs are based in very progressive regions - so what are we talking about here? All I see is people like you who not only have nothing to back up their claims with but also want to push for insane policies based on non-existent evidence ( policies which you admitted will never hurt you due to your wealth ).
According to a 2016 survey 60% of women in tech in SV reported an unwanted advance. Of those, 65% were from a superior (always inappropriate). One third of women reported feeling unsafe at the workplace. This is why I default to believing reports of harassment
Not exactly hard to find. We can quibble about the exact percentages and the methodology but the odds of the real percentage being close to 0 when ~50% of women reported an inappropriate advance from a superior are nil.
You're asking for a completely unreasonable standard to be upheld. If an employee said they got mugged and their laptop was missing, you wouldn't start asking if they were out late at night, were they drinking, "why did you put yourself in that situation," we'll replace your laptop the next time you lose it, etc, you'd say "that's awful" and replace their laptop.
Hope everyone's paying attention to the identity of these investors behind this horrid behavior. Travis is not without his flaws but he created an awful lot of value for them.
They pressure him into taking a sabbatical, then two days in they pull this cowardly act of firing him remotely. Not only was it a cowardly act, but it was the wrong thing to do for the business. It will lead to an epic destruction of value.
Worst business move since Apple's board (with John Sculley's behind the scenes string pulling) fired Steve Jobs. How well did that work out for Apple's shareholders at the time?
Travis Kalanick needed to change but do you really think that running Uber by committee is going to work? Guess it's time to try Lyft.
Wow -- I'm amazed to hear this sentiment. I'm personally proud that one of our VCs was involved.
Travis helped build an incredible company, but his disregard for the law, for his employees' well-being, for basic decency threaten to tear all of that down. Just in the past six months:
* Susan Fowler's blog post exposed a terribly broken HR system and a culture of sexual harassment that reached the very top. This has huge legal implications in addition to the obvious moral and ethical ones.
* Waymo's lawsuit could shut down Uber's self-driving car program, into which they have put hundreds of millions of dollars. There may be evidence that Travis colluded with Levandowski to steal Google's self-driving techonology.
* Uber is under investigation at several levels of government for their Greyball program to hide from law enforcement.
* On top of all this, Travis was videotaped cursing at a driver who complained about pay rates.
At this point, Travis had to go. It's going to be hard for Uber to recover from all this, but this is the first step. I hope that this becomes a lesson in SV that there are consequences to this kind of behavior, and that at some point the adults will step in.
I don't think these examples are all that damning, aside from the Susan Fowler and HR failure:
- Waymo: the judge has not ruled yet, and there is no evidence revealed to the public which implicates Uber. There is lots of evidence implicating Levadowski.
- Greyball: I can see investors forgiving this as a necessary play to fuel growth.
- Cursing the driver: a private conversation, neither here nor there.
That said, there may be issues that are not public, and the sexual harassment problem alone may be enough. Senior leadership was rapidly leaving. We don't know what the full Holder report said.
Waymo: the judge has not ruled yet, and there is no evidence revealed to the public which implicates Uber. There is lots of evidence implicating Levadowski.
But uber is still lagging behind Waymo/Lyft in the self driving technology. They were desperate to catch up, hence the acquisition of lewandowski's new company in the first place. Now that path is no longer viable regardless of the verdict.
Whoever becomes the new CEO will have to be laser focused to make their auto pilot program work somehow. Without that, Uber has no path to profitability.
They really should have done what lyft did, building partnership with companies like Google/Waymo and GM instead of trying to build their own auto pilot program from scratch.
Agreed. Whether or not your listed events are the exact same set of reasons for his ousting, it's a good thing for our industry that his brand of unethical leadership is being shown the exit. As if TK is the only leader than can deliver the same type of value. Good riddance! Lyft just got their opportunity, hopefully they learn from Uber's mistakes.
Are you saying someone else can deliver the same value as TK (so Uber is fine), or are you saying Lyft just got their opportunity (so Uber is not fine)?
The problem with getting rid of any leader, a CEO, President, Prime Minister, or even a Dictator even when they seem 'bad' is that you can't be sure the replacement won't be even worse or even more ineffective in meeting objectives. Unless there's a clear and obvious replacement waiting in the wings it's not certain him leaving is a good or bad idea, especially if they end up scrambling to find someone, anyone, to bring in.
Perhaps the most damning piece of evidence against Kalanic as a terrible leader is the complete absence of any kind of serious leadership team or program around him.
Sadly, Uber's board sounds more likely to be the kind of disaster that controlled Yahoo, HP and so many other faded stars from the valley.
Looks like Apple's decision not to invest was well played.
I don't (yet) have an opinion on this, but it's important to note the other side of the coin...
> Hope everyone's paying attention to the identity of these investors behind this horrid behavior. Travis is not without his flaws but he created an awful lot of value for them.
He's been very well compensated for the value he's created. You don't keep a job because of what you've done in the past, you keep a job based on what you can do in the future.
Firing founders was tried in the nineties and it always resulted in failure. Guess the Uber VC's need to painfully relearn that lesson?
If Travis had been smart enough to create two classes of stock like Mark Zuckerberg and the Google founders he'd be calling the shots, instead he's out of a job.
Travis was calling the shots. That's why he's getting blamed for the alleged toxic culture (which includes not just sexism, but mistreatment/underpayment of drivers, among other things).
Travis himself has exhibited poor public behavior that was recorded by an Uber driver. That in itself reflects upon the company.
Yes his assertiveness and drive got them where they are, but sometimes companies do need to grow up.
Jobs was a consistent asshole expecting perfection. That is way different than emboldening a climate of harassment, degradation, etc. that took place under his watch. Having recent external c-level hires quit due to the revelations of "culture" speak much.
I hope Uber can continue. As someone who travels internationally on business, it's quite useful. Seeing him go, it's just one more example. Pincus felt screwed through how Tribe.net went through, set himself up in a sheltered position at Zynga and through a combination of "management style" and problems at the company had to step down.
The cultural issues made public between Zynga and Uber are way different, but in both cases you had CEOs that structured the holdings such that they could retain power despite turmoil.
All I see if a bitter, vindictive man try to ambush the CEO of Uber on a night out - who then actually sits down and tries to explain his reasoning to him for several minutes, before giving up, and being "stuff this" and getting out.
And I see the opposite. I see a CEO being confronted by one of the people who actually makes his company work, and the CEO telling him to go get fucked.
You've been praising Steve Jobs throughout this thread, saying his flaws "served" Apple. We don't know that they did. All we know is that they didn't run it into the ground.
If we are angry about Kalanick sexually harassing people (as we should be), Steve Jobs mentally/emotionally harassing people is as bad. There is no difference, don't make it seem like it is okay or that it was "good for Apple".
I've been doing saying it all over the thread to nip this idea in the butt that sexual assault is in any way a feature of a successful break-the-rules, disrupt-the establishment startup.
I'm not primarily interest in defending Steve Jobs, although I think his reputation may be a bit overblown, and largely based on a few anecdotes from rather early in his career.
But the repeated reference to him shows how people are equating the two, which is just terribly wrong, at least in as far as it concerns the sexism at Uber.
Because from the stories I know about Jobs, a credible case can indeed be made that he was slavedriver in search of perfection, and that his nastiness contributed to his success.
For Kalanick that may also be true in regards to Uber's repeated trouble with local law regarding employment and licensing. But the sexual harassment charges simply have nothing to do with it,
Has he though? No one who bought Uber for $70bn right now would ever get their money back, despite that being it's 'value' (I know, I must be new here). This is all just fantastical and silly, a constant game of persuading investors to play along. Unless there is some great master plan for pivoting into a business that's actually feasible as a business, he's no more a great CEO than the Wizard of Oz or Bernie Madoff.
Here's the trick: literally only those actually on the committee will be arrogant enough to think that will work, and that they can replace Travis.
Nobody else is going to buy it, and this is death for Uber.
But the reason anybody's fool enough to trigger the apocalypse is because THEY will be in charge and assume that's the answer. If they were on the outside looking in, they would have a very different opinion.
No, they're kicking him out because the public is coming to see it as a moral imperative that Uber needs to be held accountable in some way for their behavior. I don't really care if the investors have or follow their morals, as long as they are in some way strongly incentivized to behave in that manner. We can't make the people have morals, but we can strongly encourage them to act like they do.
The investors could have gotten away with much less, certainly without firing him, from a PR angle. I say this as someone who hates Uber with a passion because of the senior management's sliminess, and who no longer uses Uber because of it.
My guess is that there are also much deeper issues here. And things like the Waymo deal indicate that there may be a whole slew of other slimy behavior that will end up hurting Uber more in the end. My guess is that we don't know the depths of poor decisions at Uber.
Don't kid yourself into thinking that a majority of the public knows or even cares about the things that Uber has done. They use Uber because everyone else uses Uber and to take an "Uber" is to use a "Kleenex" or to "Google" something.
Firstly, I will continue to kid myself. Investors are humans, my friend. Everyone is capable, and should be expected, to put decency above money when the two come into conflict.
Secondly, it doesn't matter. Many people cared about the morality, and it was enough to make a difference.
With Apple again, if Jobs had not been fired then we may not have the Jobs that people remember today. When he returned Apple had nothing and the board basically kneeled at his feet. He had complete freedom. Way more than he did before his departure.
Jobs did say that looking back getting fired from Apple was a good thing. So who knows maybe Travis will come back later with a some new perspective in life.
Most founders. I don't think it had come to that yet. The good he has done immensely outweighs any wrongdoings. There was a degree of penance on his part and it should count for something.
Travis has had to make a lot of hard decisions to get Uber where it is. These decisions have at times cost him goodwill of the public but I think they are (were) worth it for the long term.
Weighing the good vs the bad is something you can only do after a while. It's possible that Uber, which has yet to turn a profit, will effectively go away in a couple of years -- in which case, Kalanick will have spent billions of investors money with nothing to show for it.
> Travis has had to make a lot of hard decisions to get Uber where it is. These decisions have at times cost him goodwill of the public but I think they are (were) worth it for the long term.
For sure. But it will take a few years to know if that's actually a good place; at present, it doesn't look that way (but it's too early to tell for sure either way).
Perception is the same as reality here, though. He could be a great leader, but still too controversial to keep at the company. If it wasn't an organizational decision, it was a marketing decision.
It was actually pretty different from that. PayPal merged with Elon's X.com and had technical differences with the PayPal founder and they decided to stick with PayPal's tech strategy. There weren't similar scandals. (See Founders at Work).
In Paypal's case, Elon Musk went on his honeymoon trip to Australia and when he landed there he got the news that he had been removed from the position of CEO (See Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future), just like how Kalanick got fired on his sabbatical.
The article skips over the board entirely, but Travis must have been blindsided by his co-founder Garret Camp and early CEO Ryan Graves for this to have transpired. The board likely threatened to fire him unless he resigned, because there's no way Travis walks away because of this investor letter. It's more than likely the letter just provided the air cover his old friends needed to send him packing.
edit: For those replying that Travis has control of the board, please cite your sources. Being the majority shareholder using dual-class stock is a much different thing. Shareholders elect board members, but you can't remove investors' board seats, that language is boilerplate in financing documents.
Uber does not need the backing of the investors from the letter to remain solvent. With the exception of Fidelity, these aren't big players. Hundreds would take their place immediately given the chance.
The board lacked the power to fire him. He controls most of the company. They had persuasive power, sure. But if he had wanted to dig in and refuse to leave, he could have.
That sounded right, but I was curious where that gets quantified. You can find the information in Uber's Articles of Incorporation. Not sure if this is the most recent copy, but here's a version from 2013...
This is the part that I think people are missing. Uber has a tight runway and burns a ton of cash every year. It needs focus, execution, and some more time (aka $$) to push this thing over the edge into profitability and IPO readiness. This means that Uber may need some money in about a year if it isn't IPO ready by then. Someone here mentioned that at their current burn, they have less than a year of runway left.
So while Travis holds the majority of the voting power, he doesn't hold a ton of real-world cachet because of circumstance around the company. Uber is in a relatively fragile period in it's journey and no one at the top can afford to disagree right now so he has to mostly do what the big chunk of investors collectively tell him to do. The hope is that they can stay calm, run on autopilot without Travis for a bit and guide this cruise missile right through an IPO if everything goes according to plan. Since the investors effectively control the supply of additional capital, they are in a unique position of power here relative to Travis.
I think Uber's downfall is a bit exaggerated in the rest of these comments here. They'll go through some troubling times, but they just need to stay calm, and guide the ship. A lot of the pieces are already in place thanks to Travis, but Uber doesn't necessarily need him to oversee the next milestone the same way they needed him the past couple of years of insane growth.
That, and the fact that there's likely a ton of capital senior to Travis's under a liquidation event. If Uber gets revalued below $10B in "we can't get funding and ran out of runway" restructuring, Kalanick's stock is likely getting zeroed out.
He owns more than 50% of the voting stock. Boards don't operate on one-man-one-vote, they operate on one-share-one-vote. If he had really wanted to stay no matter the consequences, he could simply have voted against his own firing.
That's not usually the case. Boards normally operate on one-person-one-vote. A majority of the current sitting board members can therefore fire the CEO.
Shareholder meetings operate on one-(voting)-share-one-vote, so a majority shareholder ultimately controls the composition of the board. But if one of "his" directors, who his shares elected, breaks ranks and votes to fire him, simply owning the shares doesn't allow him to immediately override that vote. Kalanick could have voted out the board members opposed to him at the next shareholder meeting, and voted in sympathetic ones, who then might rehire him as CEO. But that's a different question than whether he could win any board vote simply by virtue of owning a majority of voting shares. Shares don't directly have board votes, they just elect directors who have board votes, who usually vote with the interests of the shares that elected them, but might not always. Besides exercising their personal judgment, directors also have independent legal responsibilities that may in some cases make it prudent for them to vote to fire even the person who put them on the board.
No, he definitely had and still has a controlling vote on the board. The group of investors representing 40% of the company's ownership has more than enough financial leverage to force his hand, by threatening to close their purses for the next funding round.
If Uber ends up going down in flames, unable to recover from the scandals and lawsuits, and Lyft prevails, it will be the most incredible change of fate in the business world this century or perhaps longer.
The future of automobiles and transportation is still being swirled about, and it feels like Uber's downfall has blown the game WIDE open, ready for anyone (maybe Uber, maybe Lyft, maybe Tesla, Google, Apple, an automaker) to just step in and take all the riches.
Pardon me for being somewhat rude, but your perspective suggests that you're perhaps relatively young?
IBM's recent demise, Lehman Brothers going down under, Enron, Arthur Anderson / Worldcom, the dismantling of Japanese mega conglomerates by the GHQ, Apple's 90's turnaround, the death of workstation companies, deregulation of US airlines, are all orders of magnitude more impactful than if Uber dies and Lyft prevails.
Excellent examples. To push the point farther, the Dow Jones Industrial Index tracks a basket of 'best in breed' companies. With the exception of General Electric, every company listen in 1896 is no longer listed. That speaks nothing to the many that were listed and removed over the years. Big companies rise and fall, and we often forget the companies that fail all around us.
I'm assuming parent meant IBM's "relatively" recent demise. IBM lost many billions in the early 90s and was close to disaster, at the same time Microsoft (originally an IBM supplier!) was surging.
When I said "change of fate" I meant reversal of fortunes. Not very often the #1 dominant company in an industry sinks and the #2 takes over, which is the scenario I was discussing. Not just a top company declining, but their direct competitor ascending as well.
If you're in the USA and keeping tabs of the controversies I think it is easy to overestimate Lyft and underestimate Uber.
Uber is in 100 more US cities than Lyft and 81 countries where Lyft isn't. I find that in large parts outside of the USA "Uber" is synonymous with ride sharing.
Uber bookings revenue is doubling each year[0], net revenue growth is outpacing growth in losses[1] and they claim to be profitable on a per-city basis in early markets[2]
Direct comparisons: Countries 82 (Uber) vs 1, Bookings: $20,000M (Uber) vs $1,400M, Growth: 100% (Uber) vs 250% (Lyft), Net revenue: $6,500M (Uber) vs 700M, Losses: $2,800M (Uber) vs $800M (Uber has much better margins and margin growth), Valuation: $70,000M (Uber) vs $6,000M, Revenue/Valuation: Uber 3.5x Lyft 4.28x
Not an insurmountable task, but Lyft have a long way to go and no track record or operations outside of the USA.
Do we have any data to suggest that Uber is materially weakened? Do the negative headlines and social media posts necessarily translate into significant changes in consumer behavior?
You might think they're still strong in operations, but company-destroying risks rise every day the the leadership suite is in turmoil like this. And that's just internal risks: what about their competitors and antagonists?
Disclaimer: I'm in the Bay Area and roots in Chicago.
People are not turning in my experience and have never heard of any of these scandals; however, when I bring them up and really get into them I have noticed people without prompt switching to Lyft. I think people who use Apple Maps or Google Maps' ride sharing feature find it especially easy to switch.
But has any of the press coverage translated into actual business impact? Uber's been all over the news in Silicon Valley's incestuous little bubble for the last few months, but the general public has a solid track record of continuing to use whatever service is cheapest and/or most convenient, which remains... Uber.
I'm in Pittsburgh. Most of my friends have moved to Lyft due to Uber's "behavior." To be fair, due the trips we are taking are relatively infrequent and when we do, there is little cost difference between the two.
Frankly I don't believe its possible with Arianna Huffington neither.
If you ever worked with her, you will clearly see shes a female type of Kalanick; the only difference he seems to love party, sex and alcohol and couldn't care about sexual harassment at his company; meanwhile Huffington is known for backstabbing employees (co owners too) and always gossiping behind others back just for fun and treat people like crap in general. In both examples, a normal company would not be able to thrive; and also look what happened with Huffington Post under her tensure; even AOL ceo did not want to work with her at some point.
Bottom line -- removing Kalanick is like rearranging seats on Titanic.
This is a really interesting point. Uber didn't get its valuation by aiming to be the world biggest taxi company, they got it by aiming to be the infrastructure fabric that underpins everything.
Amazon have started from a very different place, but apart from the user accessible vehicles they are nearly at the same point, with their recent efforts in Prime, groceries, etc.
I wonder whether Amazon will open up that infrastructure further to other companies. Arguably "fulfilled by Amazon" is already starting to do that.
Uber got it by aiming to be the most dominant, demonstrably aggressive and ruthless competitor there could ever be. It almost didn't matter what Uber proposed to do, it was in how they meant to do it and Travis personified that, and all the 'bad behavior' was read as good… by Wall Street standards… because it indicated a sharklike savagery that surely no other company could prevail against. This is why they got their valuation.
With Travis gone, the only people who will believe that's still the case are whatever committee is at the steering wheel. They will think they're great and totally capable of being as ruthless and fierce as Travis, which is why they are creating that situation. No other investors will agree: you can't replace someone like Travis with a committee.
It will also be a tragedy. With Kalanick gone, Uber is already behaving like a conformist, viz. the recent headlines (1) "Uber co-founder: We’ve been too obsessed with growth" (what?); (2) "Uber is (finally) rolling out tipping" (just awful). That sounds just like Lyft and Lyft is not a worthy rival in any sense of the word.
Why Lyft is not worthy rival of uber? Pretty much wherever you can find uber in USA, you can find Lyft. And considering they have taken way less money from investors than uber and still doing as well tells me that Lyft's executives are not doing that bad after all!
I believe that (much) more relevant than that is what regulators do with these services around the world. For the people it doesn't really matter if it's Uber or Lyft. We are already seeing a protectionist wave of regulations getting rid of affordable transportation throughout the developing and the developed world, I can only imagine that when self-driving cars actually hit the market for good it will be on the whole forbidden in some countries...
Libretaxi sucks. I don't want to negotiate with the driver and I don't want to pay cash. In typical fashion, open source/FS people fail to understand what makes a product popular when they try to clone it.
Nobody gives a fuck about "Libre", I just want to get a fucking ride.
That's too reactive. The point is that there may be services we want (ride) on infrastructure we can inspect and control and we might want to have respect for the operators while we're at it. I see those as features which make execution more expensive and tend to attract less investment and thus not as well done, when done by volunteers in their spare time. That is a incentive problem, not an open source problem.
It's not too reactive at all, it's precisely how I feel as well. I travel a lot in South East Asia and the absolute last thing I want is to have to bargain with the driver (100% of the time they will try to rip me off) or carry bundles of small notes at all times (100% of the time the driver will claim to have no change).
I have no idea who LibreTaxi is for, if anyone, but their marketing page makes me want to run a mile. Uber and grab have been a revelation for me in SEA and I use them exclusively.
I said "something along the lines of libretaxi". Not libretaxi. You can still do libre with a reputation system and without having to bargain for every ride.
In Brazil, Uber required drivers to accept cash payment having seen that it was successful in other countries like India. Suddenly carjackers realised that Uber cars were basically cash machines on wheels and so armed robbery, murder and mayhem ensued.
As a counterpoint, Careem, Uber's biggest competitor in the GCC, accepts cash. I love the system as they've handled it well - if the driver has no change, they just add it to your account for use on the next trip, with no pressure to tip. You can even run a negative balance although I'm not sure what the limit is.
I really want to see free/open-source win, but it won't happen as long as people keep thinking that shouting "down with closed systems" is a substitute for a competitive product. Ideological purity isn't enough.
I, for one, will consider using Uber again. It is very important to me to see a change in leadership. I simply couldn't square my use of the app with the sense that Uber was deeply unethical, starting from the top.
Also, it's so disappointing to see so many people buy into the cult of personality of the Startup Founder. There's a lot of half-baked reasoning going on on why Uber's fate should be inexorable tied to Travis. So far, the two main arguments I've seen are "because Steve Jobs" and "he raised so much money for them". Neither one of these are compelling in explaining why Uber's survival prospects should be further damaged by a change at the top.
The only argument that's compelling to me is the concept that they've built their whole business on unethical assholery and it's going to take a lot of time and energy to reorient a big company around a different M.O. But even that's not very compelling, because it presumes that there aren't a whole lot of people already there who would flourish in a healthy, ethical work environment. I know a number of people there who feel that way.
> Also, it's so disappointing to see so many people buy into the cult of personality of the Startup Founder. There's a lot of half-baked reasoning going on on why Uber's fate should be inexorable tied to Travis. So far, the two main arguments I've seen are "because Steve Jobs" and "he raised so much money for them". Neither one of these are compelling in explaining why Uber's survival prospects should be further damaged by a change at the top.
It's such a strange idea--that out of the seven billion people on the planet, only one is capable of leading [Company X]. Who really believes this?
It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Successful leadership is only possible if people actually follow and trust the leader. In the absence of that, you'll get apathy and probably utter failure. So if this idea that only a single person can lead a company spreads throughout the company, it becomes true.
>Mr. Kalanick last week said he would take an indefinite leave of absence from Uber, partly to work on himself and to grieve for his mother, who died last month in a boating accident. He said Uber’s day-to-day management would fall to a committee of more than 10 executives.
>In the letter, titled “Moving Uber Forward” and obtained by The New York Times, the investors wrote to Mr. Kalanick that he must immediately leave and that the company needed a change in leadership.
>In the letter, in addition to Mr. Kalanick’s immediate resignation, the five shareholders asked for improved oversight of the company’s board by filling two of three empty board seats with “truly independent directors.” They also demanded that Mr. Kalanick support a board-led search committee for a new chief executive, and that Uber immediately hire an experienced chief financial officer.
>"“I love Uber more than anything in the world and at this difficult moment in my personal life I have accepted the investors request to step aside so that Uber can go back to building rather than be distracted with another fight,” Mr. Kalanick said in a statement.
Apparently a 10-executive committee of indeterminate duration wasn't going to suit the board's needs. Taken along with the immediate CFO search, it sounds like Uber simply does not have the time to let Travis sort out both Uber's culture issue and his own personal issues before things start to go sour. Unfortunate timing as I think that, had the accident not happened, Travis would have been able to turn things around. When it rains, it pours.
I think this is right on. It's a crucial moment for Uber and that is no time to hand leadership off to a big committee.
I'm seeing a bunch of references in these comments to when Steve Jobs was fired from Apple.[1] A more relevant reference might be when Jobs stepped down to treat his cancer. He named one interim CEO--Tim Cook--and fully empowered him to run Apple.
If it was Travis's idea to leave a 10-person committee in charge, that is the sort of insecure, bad decision that would set off investor alarm bells.
[1] This is actually not a great comparison to Travis. Jobs was not CEO when Sculley fired him, and in fact had never been CEO of Apple. He was one of 3 founders, each of whom was arguably crucial to the early success of Apple--Jobs, Woz, and Mike Markkula, who did serve as CEO and sided with Sculley in firing Jobs. Apple subsequently grew 10x under Sculley.
Kalanick is no Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs was an asshole at times, but that behaviour was always about driving people hard to create what he considered a perfect product.
Kalanick's brohaviour has nothing to do with economic success. You absolutely do not need to harass people sexually to be successful, and that idea must die, fast.
In fact: If you promote such a culture, you're giving up the opportunities that employees with different backgrounds, motivation, ad loyalty can bring to the table.
I'd correct you, slightly: Kalanick's brohaviour (as you put it) has quite a lot to do with stock market success because aggressive, amoral, bro-like investors collectively act like economic success is a matter of showing personality traits like their own.
So, if economic success ONLY depends on eliciting investment from these people, then you need to be dominant and brutal in every perceivable way, including sexual harassment, to signal that you're successful. This is far from new.
If success also involves building a functioning company, you've got to look beyond investor bros as a metric, and this is where Uber hasn't shown quality.
> If it was Travis's idea to leave a 10-person committee in charge, that is the sort of insecure, bad decision that would set off investor alarm bells.
To be honest, from what I've read, the two men don't seem to be similar at all except in the fact that they both founded spectacularly successful/revolutionary startups. Jobs might have been incredibly rude but he did not promote a culture of sexual harassment...that is just a different kind of aggressive culture. He was more about pushing people to unreasonable limits, not giving due acknowledgements etc.... all of which are reprehensible, but nowhere near as terrible as sexual harassment.
Like you mention, it seems EXACTLY the result of an insecure man trying to make himself irreplaceable rather than an adult understanding the reality of the situation and the actions required to save his baby (Uber).
It clearly makes a difference as to who is CEO -- on several occasions a succession of bad news stories has effectively removed a tech CEO (Mozilla, GitHub, Uber, ...)
Questions I'd be interested in your thoughts on:
- does it actually change corporate behaviour?
- is it a good thing that press (which it seems is sometimes influenceable) can effectively hire and fire by continued pressure?
(And please note that's not whether this case was wrong, but whether it opens the possibility of intentionally targeted public campaigns to remove someone from a company sponsored by unstated private reasons. And those are genuine, not rhetorical, questions.)
That remains to be seen, obviously. But a constant in the reports about Uber was that unscrupulous behaviour (e.g. obtaining the medical records of a rape victim) was enabled by the CEO. One might presume that a change in leadership will mean better behaviour. It will also probably mean that Uber can start hiring for all the C-level positions that are currently vacant, bringing in fresh blood and a different way of doing things.
> is it a good thing that press can effectively hire and fire by continued pressure
That is an argument that is as old as the oldest printed pamphlet. I'm not going to argue it here, but I'm glad that the press reported on wrongdoing by high-ups at Uber, and I'm glad that users and investors responded to that information.
> - is it a good thing that press (which it seems is sometimes influenceable) can effectively hire and fire by continued pressure?
If it holds people in power accountable for their actions, then yes, it's a good thing. I agree using the press may be a double edged sword, but if businesses and governments fail to keep their executives and personnel from harassing their employees, then what other recourse is there?
There was no conspiracy to undermine Kalanick. Nobody is actually questioning the accusations levelled against him. The press simply followed the story, and people were interested in hearing about it. In doing so, they affected positive change at Uber. Everything worked as designed.
And yes: even as a private company, you're not immune from scrutiny of your action by the public. Your company is part of society, depends on the institutions, and can't ride roughshod over established norms of behaviour without also accepting the consequences.
Pushing a founder out is often a bad idea. This might very well be the beginning of Uber's demise. This won't be good for the company.
All CEOs make mistakes even great ones like Gates with antitrust or Zuck calling users dumb-fucks. They weren't kicked out, they instead were allowed to come into their own.
There's a distinct fire that a founder has for the company they founded. You can't hire that. Without this fire at the early stages of a company, the company will likely lose out to competitors like Lyft.
A hiatus is one thing but kicking a founder out is simply bad.
Mark my word and take that to the bank. This was a bad move.
I pretty much can't stumble upon an article about Uber that's not about controversy. I know that kind of news sells better. But in my perception now Uber had the pendulum swung far off center. I've been shocked by their (reported) ethics, to the point of not purchasing their services. I know that consequence is not taken by a majority of people, but I do sense a more than average disgust for Uber's ethics. If you'd asked me, I'd have welcomed their demise. The only thing to turn that around for me is new leadership.
A woman for Uber CEO would be a good signal -- if the best candidate for the job happens to be one. Didn't Marissa Mayer recently resign from her job, and be available?
I don't think Uber can go much lower, negativity around it was simply overwhelming. Desperate times require desperate measurements - kicking CEO is like saying: "ok, we did some wrong things - sorry, but we will try to change for a better".
It comes down to conviction and courage to follow through. I find it curious that just when he's out, one of the things that he'd fought against for so long has been done i.e. tipping.
The reason it's courage involved in such a situation is because, against all external pressure, he maintained that he thought it would create friction. I can see that and some people may disagree - and those people can use Lyft, but at the end of the day, most people use Uber the way it is because of a certain experience that's possibly inexplicable to them. They just like it. Travis and his team have created this experience.
If there's no courage and conviction, then Uber becomes indistinguishable from Lyft. I honestly don't think the next CEO will have as much courage to say something like, 'we know automation is coming and we have to be on top of it regardless of any negative feedback. If we don't, it won't matter because someone will do it anyway...'
Time will tell and I think it will tell the same story I've told here.
Completely agree. Uber (as a product) will turn into Lyft, rather than what should be the other way around on the merits. Uber is clearly a superior product. That is orthogonal to its quality as a company. I'm not convinced that having a good company culture requires the product to be shittier.
Disagree. I think some of these VCs are just trigger-happy when it comes to dealing with founders. I don't know why this is the case; may be they think it's easy and they know better.
How often do you hear VCs talk about how much they're on the founder's side like Vinod Khosla. At almost every turn, you'll hear Vinod go on about his reverence for founders. He does however add that this is not always the case. Sometimes, he says, founders must be asked to leave. When Vinod tells you to step aside, I think he'd most likely be right because you know his intentions aren't malicious. Do I think it had gotten to that point with Travis? My answer would be no.
That kind of thing is often said by people who are merely lucky enough not to have fucked up so far, or to not have been fucked over. Individual success is not a proof.
Think about this the next time you're putting up with bad behavior at work. Susan Fowler ultimately lost her job and went through painful criticisms for speaking out, but she did kick off a lot of change at the company.
Think about this the next time you're tolerating bad behavior on the part of your employees. A number of people lost their jobs in the resulting firestorm but that fire reached right up to the top.
Think about this the next time you're considering investing in a company where the leadership team plays fast and loose with law. Disruption is important, but principles are just as important. If the leadership team gets their advantage by not following the rules that others do, watch for them to not follow the rules that they should as well.
This looks good for Uber. Right now Uber needs operational and financial stability. Something Kalanick apparently didn't know how to provide. So moving him aside is good.
Also, I think investors forced him out by saying they will finance next round only if Kalanick is gone. And they need more investment, because losing $2bn a year makes them run out of cash soon and inevitably.
Still - Kalanick and his co-founder friends have a control over a board, so theoretically Kalanick can get his ass back as CEO as soon as he wants. If he wants...
The Kalanick-VCs deal might have another background. To cut those $2bn annual losses, Uber needs to change financially. Those changes will hit customers (prices will increase) and drivers (their pay and benefits decrease). So Uber needs an interim manager to introduce them - a "bad guy", who can take the "blame" for it. A change, that will not hit Kalanick's reputation.
But it's all good. Uber will continue to grow. The service is just too good.
His misbehaviour is (in this case) tolerating such behaviour at Uber, something which many seem to consider a strategy to "let boys be boys" and create a great business freed from the oppressive shackles of "political correctness".
But go google and you'll find quite a few anecdotes that do make it seem as if he has a strange hangup with women himself.
I agree with everything you said but he literally did not sexually harass anybody. So saying that he did is just inaccurate. Regardless of how big of an asshole he is.
Do you have an example for such a startup in recent history where the founder left within the first few years and the startup succeeded with a new founder? I don't think we can really value Uber at $70B; that's the headline number for investors getting preferred shares. My main point is that Uber's position is not nearly as strong as the $70B implies; this number exists because Travis was super aggressive at growing revenue, so investors must have had expectations of the company continuing its insane growth trajectory. I don't believe Uber has that strong a moat today, and the leaked numbers imply losses left and right.
I don't agree it's quite that uplifiting. The culture had to be absolutely horrible, all the way up to the top, for Fowler's story to have an impact. Uber was already gearing up their lawyers against her, and if their culture hadn't been so pervasive, and if there weren't a series of other contraversies at the same time, things might have ended poorly for her.
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.
All this talk about Lyft becoming the new Uber is perhaps a bit unrealistic.
Apart from in SF, I've never found Lyft available anywhere I've been (although I understand it is operating on other parts of the US).
To momentarily sing-praises of Uber: the same app, the same login, the same card just works internationally pretty much where ever I have gone on work and vacations regardless of currencies etc - morals aside it is a slick service - but so far I've not been able to use a single Lyft ride because they dont seem to be available apart from the US.
Please come to London & the EU Lyft! I dont want to use Uber due to their well-publicised issues but there is no alternative apart from "old world" solutions.
Not in the past few years - SF only. But I do appreciate that Lyft is active elsewhere in the US, just that Uber appear to be active in a LOT of markets where Lyft is not (i.e. there are places in the world that are not major US cities).
Certainly Uber is more places but in the past 2 weeks I've spent time in "cities" of sizes around 50-60k people and almost all have had both services. Often Lyft will have less cars on the road but I did not struggle to find a Lyft.
One thing that strikes me as strange is how we have had a persistent release of negative information about Uber through many different kinds of media outlets for the past few months.
This is not meant to cast doubt on the problems at Uber highlighted in these reports.
However, It seems like the drip of negative information was intentional, perhaps with the goal of having him resign.
Uber was guilty in the public eye almost immediately.
Even today the media narrative is that this is good for Silicon Valley culture as a whole. Implicit in this line of thinking is that most SV companies have the same culture problems. I find that to be troubling and largely incorrect.
This is a pretty strange line of logic. Uber has consistently been in the media for YEARS about corrupt things they've done. I think the public decided they were bad because of those many things, not by some stroke of luck...
While it is true they have been in the media for years for various reasons... Over the past few months it seemed to be accelerating.
Perhaps the lesson here is that if you set out to disrupt powerful interests across the world, you better have your own house in order, otherwise they will disrupt you.
And also encourages more people to systematically stop sexually harassing other people.
Because certain people like Uber board member David Bonderman have a really hard time getting it through their thick Neanderthal skulls that they shouldn't make crude sexist remarks about how women talk to much, while on stage at a company all hands meeting whose topic is how the company is turning over a new leaf to address their systematic culture of sexual harassment. Even if it's hilariously ironic because it was actually a man who just couldn't keep his big fat mouth shut.
Exactly. And this had been coming for years. A transgendered friend of mine starting working there in 2014. She quit within a week. It was only a matter of time.
They could have remained shitty, but taken plausible deniability actions. As with a top exec personally going to India to get a rape victim's health records (?!?!), Uber seems to have no concept of covering their asses.
They just showed a complete lack of care in so many situations... Shows that ignoring the rules can certainly pay off.
How could the board kick out a CEO founder given the vertiginous increase in equity valuations said founder presided over? Because those valuations are only meaningful to end investors (i.e. the LPs) when shareholders experience positive cash flow. At Uber the opposite is happening. Why shouldn't we assume, then, that the board realizes Uber is headed for a fatal pinch[0] and has acted accordingly?
Bloomberg in April reported[1] Uber's cumulative cash burn at US$8 bn since its founding in 2009. You can argue that Travis Kalanick presided over rising valuations but so far there is no evidence of an increase in book value per share. Conversely that cash burn risks being crystallized as "value destruction" if revenue growth stalls.
The alleged personnel issues, the lawsuit, the bad press -- they are history and the firm has no choice but to cope with them. But failing to improve net margin can be quickly fatal and if that is happening then the other issues remain relevant. TK, who also presided over those, becomes part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
Do VCs care more about public perception than long-term health of the company? Uber has been in the news for all the wrong reasons but thinking from the VCs POV, I doubt there is a better person to run Uber than TK. The company's monopoly is still precarious and I have a feeling that without a CEO like TK, the fate looks like a combination of retreating from markets, heavy losses, and a huge drop in valuation.
It's not just public perception - it's internal perception too. Attrition at Uber is through the roof. Yeah, Travis is one of the best people for the job and his aggressiveness built Uber, but you can't build and maintain Uber if the rest of your talent is fleeing and you can't replace them because of your rep. Plus, he's obviously created a lot of liabilities for Uber at the same time that he's created value - besides the massive cultural problems, Uber's facing a number of dangerous lawsuits.
I have no idea why everyone is going on about Fowler/harassment scandals.
He should have been fired by the board for the results of the Otto acquisition and the handling of Waymo lawsuit, and that was probably a much larger factor.
Not unsurprising, as Uber really is trying to grow up, and Travis Kalanik has been the silicon valley poster boy for a bit too long. I still think he did a phenomenal job, not only launching a successful startup, but creating an international cultural movement.
I wonder who will take his place, and, more importantly, I wonder if Uber will continue winning.
Does he deserve to be complimented in any way shape or form?
No... Not in the slightest.
I think the question is can uber continue winning without being toxic to staff (drivers, women, I'm sure there are others), maybe stealing (waymo lawsuit), and building tools to avoid the law....
The answer is I don't know, but it is going to be hard to recover from.
I don't think that's quite fair. He absolutely deserves a lot of criticism for the things that happened under his watch as Uber CEO, but he did create a giant company that has the highest(?) valuation of any SV startup. He deserves some respect and compliments for that.
> but he did create a giant company that has the highest(?) valuation of any SV startup. He deserves some respect and compliments for that.
The only people that benefited from his achivement were the investors. Considering where Uber stands at the moment they might not ever see a return on that.
If creating value gives you some sort of moral pass then we shouldn't have any sort of issues with epipens being more expensive, or martin shkreli jacking up drug prices... after all they did it in the name of creating value.
If you prefer to read what I posted that way, then that's your prerogative. I am simply stating that this isn't some kind of zero sum game or that it's black and white. I even stated (which you conveniently left out) that he does deserve criticism for the issues that happened during his tenure, and I believe he deserves a lot.
The problem is were never going to know how much of the success your praising is tied to the awful behavior that you say we should be critical of.
Were talking about the lance armstrong of CEO's. The collective behavior is corporate doping, lying cheating and stealing to get to the top isn't the path to sustaining success.
Uber is just shooting itself in the foot at this point. The few things it did get right, no tipping and market-driven pricing, are being rolled away. Then it would truly have no advantage.
'The asset' in my statement obviously refers to shares in Uber. Those aren't 'in public markets'.
Moreover, even if I were talking about assets in general, including those traded in public markets, my statement is still true. If company A buys shares in company B, and company B's share price subsequently goes down in value, then company A may mark down their own holding (i.e. reduce the value they report in their accounts) to reflect that new reality. But that reality (the lower public market value) preceded the mark down. So the mark down cannot be the cause of the reduction in value.
In simpler terms, 'marking down' is an accounting activity, or one of financial reporting. It's writing down what is. It's creating the reality. That's why it's called 'bean counting'. The beans exist before they are counted.
Kara Swisher's podcast had an excellent episode on Uber that did a great job surveying this firestorm, and defending Travis' business direction, without exonerating his leadership's many flaws. Definitely worth a listen.
Wow, makes me want to skim over the original Susan Fowler thread to see if anyone predicted this happening [0]. Her allegations of course weren't the only problem Uber faced but it sure seemed to cause other previously overlooked issues and complaints to gain real resonance.
I wonder how things would have gone had Kalanick's family hadn't suffered that horrible tragedy a few weeks ago. That is, whether he would have had the energy/stubbornness to stay as CEO if he wasn't dealing with personal challenges at the same time as professional ones.
I'm sure that was a big factor. Turning a firm's culture around in this case would mean reinventing himself at the same time at the firm, and while that's doable it's a full-time thing. The loss of his mother and serious injuries sustained by his father in the same accident were a cruel twist of fate that would derail many people under the best of circumstances, never mind these more difficult ones.
Just a few years ago, Uber was the place to be, the startup to imitate. How many Uber for X pitches did we see? The entire story makes me sad (not the resignation, that was kind of expected) - Uber was an icon of "disruption" and of challenging the status quo. Now, it's just a sad story and people prefer to not be associated with it.
Wow...Travis Kalanick has his flaws, but come on, he will come back bigger just like Steve Jobs. That hurts! A company like Uber needs an aggressive CEO, not a pushover CEO...this is one reason why investors kill companies.
I see this happen so many times, a company takes too much investment, the CEO is replaced, then the company dies within a year...
Why is something like Uber called ride-sharing to begin with? I'm not sharing my ride with anyone that coincidentally wants to travel (more or less) the same route as me. I pay somebody to drive their car first to me, and then some other place.
This is called a taxi or cab [1], there Uber is a taxi company.
At least in Germany, there used to be actual ride-sharing systems, of which the best one used to be mitfahrzentrale.de, where people would advertise what route they were planing to drive (and when) and other people could "book" a seat on that route. I don't know if some others still exist, I haven't used them in years.
There are a number of ride-sharing services, the self-proclaimed biggest being blablacar.de, previously known as mitfahrgelegenheiten.de, I believe.
We also have a multitude of car-sharing services, where if you subscribe, you can look for a free car parked somewhere, and then drive it wherever you want within a certain area. Examples are car2go, DriveNow, and I believe Starcar and other rental-car companies also have services like that.
Uber actually had to pull out of several german cities because of taxi-related regulations. Taxi-drivers in those cities need to obtain a license, which drivers for Uber obviously don't do. So (some german) institutions also view Uber as a taxi company.
Along these lines, Lyft started out as an actual ride-sharing platform with Zimride, until eventually the current model took off and they decided to sell the ride-sharing part of the company away.
Lyft also used a donation model back in the day (this was the case when I first started using them in 2014). You didn't have to pay for anything, but there was a "suggested donation" along with a message saying that drivers you donate money to will be more likely to give you a ride again.
Well, the real reason is because none of regulations that apply to taxi and livery services make any mention of "ride-sharing," so you can claim you aren't subject to any of them.
I am really disappointed that another article discusses a power struggle without mentioning the power struggle.
Something like this is nearly always a power struggle. That the accusations may be valid is just showing that the people attaining power have a higher chance in this situation. It doesn't change the fact that it is a power struggle.
So who are the people taking over? For an news paper that shouldn't be hard to figure out. Who are the three new guys? They are 100% sure linked to the group taking over. They are certainly not "neutral". Who is likely to become the new CEO? This guy is certainly the leader of the coup or a puppet.
it doesn't mention the power struggle because this article is PART of the power struggle. The journalist who wrote the article is basing the story based on the people who they have interviewed (who are the ones who are struggling for power) as well as the continuing narrative surrounding Uber (which is the story the people struggling for power are trying to create)
you should read this very interesting (but simplified) exploration of power talk for a general idea of why this article was written the way that it is:
I'm about 50% through (the e-book; if someone presents interesting knowledge he should also get paid for it).
So what you're saying is that I shouldn't have such expectations towards the reporter. The reporter may or may not be smart enough to look behind the curtain, but his official job is not to look behind but to present the "objective" official grand narrative. Talking about the actual power struggle would expose him since it may be considered unprofessional and un-objective, as well as hurt his trust relations with people who give him inside info. So the most naive but objective report may actually be written by the smartest reporter. New point of view. Thanks!
glad you enjoyed it. I first found this article series maybe a decade ago and it really changed the way I view the world. There are some flaws with it, but the overall thesis is pretty solid
Yeah, every good model can offer two things: Increasing the amounts of options in case there are two few (this model for instance enables god-seeking sociopaths to accept god's awayness and embrace it as a new freedom), or decreasing complexity and thereby also increasing your options (e.g. this model described to me the difference between the different talk modes and thereby enabled me to gather more information from such a news article like the Uber article).
However no model is able to provide completedness. They either always lack some significant amount of reality, or create significant amount of fantasy on top. That was proven by different scientists in the 1930s and is explained quite well imo in Goedel Escher Bach. I don't remember the details but at least one of them was a Mathematician who basically delivered the proof that Math can't solve all the problems that Math tries to solve. It is impossible.
Would Marissa Mayer be a good fit for Uber CEO? Given that she just resigned from Yahoo, one would think the board would at least consider her. Unless they're going to choose the next CEO from within the company.
Absolutely, you can count on her to destroy Uber gracefully with a topping of PR. And she will end up with a few hundred million at the end of it all. Failing upwards personified.
> In recent months, Ms. Huffington has become the public voice of Uber’s board as the company has tried to overcome scandals over its workplace culture. She has forged a friendship with Mr. Kalanick. And behind the scenes, she has been a driving force in recruiting an Uber board member and executives.
People make a difference. Uber has a lot of execution left to master and without Kalanick and the other key players that have left the company, the odds are now definitely not in its favor. And yes, the self-driving car play was a brilliant fund raising play (leveraging the news of the amazing advances by Tesla) but a terrible waste of limited resources. It is acceptable to outsource such projects. Or to make strategic alliances. Business is most often a series of trade-offs. Startups more so.
I think he was right about the self-driving. He doesn't have a moat otherwise, as explained in another comment above; specifically ts not hard for a city to develop, deploy and advertise their own cab-hailing app and only a little harder to then design partnerships with other cities to network and share profits.
Uber's play was that they could subsidize that through private investors in order to scale. But now they have to find, hire, and compensate basically the whole tier of upper management, while still burning operating money. I'm not a business major, but that's probably REALLY not good.
I'm surprised I haven't read about it in another comment yet, but this is screaming for a company with good management and a stash of solid reputation/PR/marketing to come get a really good deal. Maybe Facebook because the culture wouldn't clash as much as my next two: apple and Google? Apple has the cash, and needs an entry into automotive while we wait for the apple car. Google/Waymo+Uber immediately settles the lawsuit, puts uber back into moat territory with self-driving, and gives google some people on the ground to compete with Amazon in last-mile?
I wonder if it would have been difficult to get his (or convince him for) resignation if he wouldn't have been in grieving phase, considering his history of retaliation ?
Like it or not, the liability of diversifying just went up.
It's clear that the lynch mob of armchair activists will no longer be satisfied when action is taken against the individuals who are directly at fault; they tend to drag everybody they can into this mess and attempt to hold them accountable.
Travis aside, you can't expect engineering managers to ignore what happened and risk their career because somebody in H.R might screw up.
1. You must get involved if you hear anything that could be remotely questionable. Otherwise, you will be the guy who ignored all of the signs and enabled the culture.
2. If you get involved, and it turns out to be nothing, you are now harassing a co-worker. It was just an office relationship, and things went sour? It's your fault now.
3. Don't get involved? You are an enabler and must be punished.
I was reading a thread on Reddit last week (Things you can no longer do at work, or something like that) and apparently some men are scared to close the meeting room door if they are left alone with a woman these days.
Happy to see this as Uber allowed and per their PR laughed at it's users' back accounts getting hacked/losing money.
I had 1k stolen from my bank account via Uber and after my research showed...
- THey knew about these hacks happening ...about ten or more people a day
- Their PR was it's the users fault for choosing a weak password vs. doing a press release letting users know they need to change their passwords and offering 2 way verification
- You could not and probably still can not outright and quickly cancel your UBer account. No you have to send a message and I waited days to severe all any ties with them.
This happened to me and 1000s of others in 2015 per my search on Twitter then. Then in 2017 you see just how horrible this organization is ... it does not give at ratz ass about anyone who is not a KalaNick bro including employees, customers, drivers.. basically all groups it needs to operate and succeed.
Still wanting it to go down in flames and my 1k back into my bank account!!!
Without support of his major investors, Uber would struggle to raise additional capital and would probably go bankrupt in 2018-2019 with their burn rate. They asked him to leave, but not nicely.
None of the accusations against Uber and Kalanick are about behaviour that is "good business" in any imaginable way. Uber gains nothing from sexually harassing its employees.
...and if that's a 21st Century thing, so be it.Maybe you should do 21st-century things like being a good guy, considering this is the 21st century.
Travis Kalanick might be upset... All the way to the bank, as a holder of huge equity and majority voting power (so he seems to have the capacity to reinstall himself as a CEO when/if he finds it fit) who surely has negotiated nice conditions for himself in any liquidity event.
I don't know Kalanick, though I've read about how his brashness and "win at all costs" attitude was forged through his past startup failures[1]
If this is true then he is his own worst enemy, and I find it very sad when anyone - no matter how big a jerk you think they are - is trapped in a repeating pattern of negative and destructive behavior.
To be clear: I am not absolving him of his behavior, I'm just observing that the culture comes from the founder and his wounds run deep.
[1] Scour filed for bankruptcy, Red Swoosh was acquired after enormous struggles to keep the company afloat.
I'm going to go against the crowd and say that Uber survives as a business for now. They may scale back expansion and they might raise prices. They may even get acquired at a lower valuation. But I bet they'll still be operating.
I think their burn rate is almost surely the result of subsidizing expanding markets. I can't imagine established markets being anything but ludicrously profitable.
Disclaimer: I don't necessarily like Uber, I've never even used them and I know almost nothing about their (former) CEO outside of headlines.
There are a lot of lessons to be learned here but I think one of the biggest to remember is - don't send any emails to anyone (even Mom) that you wouldn't want to be published on the front page of the NYT. Let alone to thousands of employees. For example, the yearly event emails that Travis sent from the frat-boy CEO frame of view. The employees probably received it well ahead of the event and likely even an uptick in morale, but in the long term, it is not an email he is proud of sending.
In the letter, in addition to Mr. Kalanick’s immediate resignation, the five shareholders asked for improved oversight of the company’s board by filling two of three empty board seats with “truly independent directors.”
This seems like a narrative to cover their attempt to get more power in the company... Clearly Kalanick has appointed directors on board that are on his side, which is exactly what he should do and the point of shareholder's appointing directors... Of course, investors want their people
Well this comes as a big surprise. I just thought that he'd be taking a break. I also think that he wasn't forced to resign as much as he thought it'd be the best choice for the company (he probably has majority voter control).
Kalanick - because of his super competitive nature - was probably the best person to be CEO during the time he was but maybe its now time for a more matured and seasoned executive to take over. Just my thoughts.
More matured and seasoned executive? Kalanick is 40, has star experience like almost nobody in tech business... I'm wondering who would be more matured for highly unregulated, exploding industry that depends on innovation (solar, self-driving cars)?
With a new seasoned exec, I predict Uber will stabilize, IPO at some point and becomes the Yahoo of the industry. It won't be the next Google, Amazon or Facebook (all led by founder CEOs), that's for sure.
A-holes take notice, the times are changing. The only name here that deserves to be in history books is Susan J. Fowler's for having the courage to speak up.
No fan of Kalanick, but letting leadership fall to a 10 executive committee at such a critical moment in Uber's history sounds like a complete disaster. Uber needs to make serious bold moves and I don't think anyone is lined up to make them. My guess is they'll try another funding round, fail at that, then attempt to IPO at an uncertain share price.
This guy may be a huge asshole.. but he is not anywhere close to why Uber has been having problems.. though I hope his resignation helps the company. Obviously his resignation followed immediately by their "180 days of change" campaign, in app tipping etc.. was a well planned move to get some heat off them
Is there an available API/service that does the trip tracking part of Uber? Of any technical challenge that would present a bunch of clones popping up, I can see that being one of them. The rest is just generating an invoice and accepting a credit card payment. Obviously, not to scale, but for small-medium-sized locales, it could suffice.
There already are lots of Uber clones. You can buy Uber-clone code to start your own.
The hard part of cloning Uber as a company is building both sides of the market. It's almost impossible to do without a clever strategy and tons of cash.
That's simply not true. Places where Uber and Lyft aren't allowed have a thriving alternative ride-sharing economy. In Austin, there are 3 different Uber-clone apps that do a fine job: Ride Austin, Fasten, and Fare.
Wow, I thought he was just going to step away and take a break. Do we know who might replace him?
It's also interesting that the five shareholders mentioned in the NYTimes article want 2 "truly independent directors". What does that mean? Depending on how many board seats there are, maybe two votes aren't enough?
Haha I thought the same thing, then kicked myself for manifesting that thought into the universe, only because that seems the most probable Silicon Valley knee jerk reaction in this case...
Travis was not anywhere close to being responsible for the amount of heat he has taken lately... but this + their 180 days of change, in app tipping and things is good for the company and hopefully will make the drivers a little happier..
I can't wait to see the next company Travis builds. A few months from now I'm sure he will be feeling the hunger again. And man, talk about carrying a chip on your shoulder. I hope he finds further success in life and learns from his mistakes.
Even if he's out as CEO he still will likely wield outsize influence due to his 1) board seat 2) equity stake 3) majority of leadership are presumably his people.
Will be interesting to see who replaces him and whether the company actually changes.
If they were smart they would hire a diplomat like Condoleezza Rice (Dropbox). They have a ton of experience dealing with crisis, external perceptions, government relations, and lobbying on an international level.
UBER: Crowdfunding the development of autonomous vehicles by temporarily giving people jobs and keeping all the data collected by the thousands of drivers using its app.
The fact that Uber brought in tipping the day it got rid of Kalanick makes me believe it is a money issue. Basically Uber raised prices by 10-20% to match Lyft.
For my own selfish interests, I was hoping they would keep him in there for as long as possible. I exercised my Lyft shares and the value is shooting up the moon.
It wasn't Kalanick's who did it but his employees. And guess what, Apple had a fair number of stories about toxic work culture and sexual harassment too.
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?
Would you please not take HN threads on ideological tangents and into flamewars? We're trying to avoid those things here. You also crossed repeatedly into incivility in your comments, which is not cool. We ban accounts that do these things repeatedly, so please don't.
Anecdotally, I'm in the process of being sexually harassed by a director at the company I work for and choosing not reporting it. I plan to leave in a couple of months, my startup is in the final stages of closing a seed round - getting in to a sexual harassment lawsuit right now is the last thing I need in terms of stress and career.
The power dynamics are significantly different though, I don't feel at all in danger, I'm a 6'2 man who lifts weights in his spare time, so it's more of an annoyance than anything truly worrying. I understand that this person may go on to harass the next person who fills my role, but I simply have too much personally riding on the outcome of the present to leverage it in that way.
> more of an annoyance than anything truly worrying
I'd certainly be pretty worried if someone in a position of power over me was doing anything of the sort. Even if you don't have to worry about the individual literally overpowering you (Which in itself would be a tough thing to prove you were not the aggressor if you are a muscular 6+ footer and had to push off an aggressive advance)
that isn't a historical problem the way it is for women
Any feminist will remind you that sexual harassment isn't about sex, it's about power. With more women in positions of power these days expect the number of harassment cases where men are the target to rise.
Most people that report harassment are taking a big career risk (and if they go public like Mrs. Fowler did, inviting abuse from Internet mobs) by doing so, so yes, I'm going to default to believing people that report harassment unless I can find credible evidence it didn't happen.
An example (from a case I was involved as a witness in only last week). A jury must be 100% confident that the evidence presented confirms their beliefs. The judge will say "do not decide based on if you believe it happened but instead on the evidence presented". There a world where the jury can believe it happened (and deliberate for 4.5 hours) but still come out with not guilty because the physical evidence is not there. In historical sexual abuse cases (of which this was one) - the CPS (Criminal Prosecution Service here in the UK) will not take on the case if they did not think there was a good chance of winning and yet the only real evidence here was witness testimony and no forensics. It didn't matter that the jury obviously believed it happened - they did their job and realised that was only an opinion and not backed by evidence.
"I believe you" can mean you believe what the person is saying WITHOUT it meaning you take it to be 100% factual.
In this circumstance, it can mean you believe them (as in, trust them) but you're not "convicting" anyone of anything. But you ARE giving them the comfort of "trust."
> it can mean you believe them (as in, trust them) but you're not "convicting" anyone of anything.
If they say "X touched me inappropriately" and you say "I believe you" meaning "I trust you", then that means "I trust that you are telling the truth".
(Actually, what I think you're really talking about is a kind of social nicety, what is in reality a white lie. Where people will say "I believe you" as like a kind of gesture of good faith towards a person. Like indicating that you're not going to be biased against them. But it's not actually a statement of belief. In other words, it does not have a meaning in terms of a type of belief).
well, as obstacle1 has explained below, then you're not actually talking about beliefs. (which was what the original discussion did concern).
E.g. in some of these situations you are actually lying to the person (in a mild way) and not actually expressing a belief at all.
An analogy. I might say "I went to the store", but actually I was at a friend's place, and I said this because I wanted to come across a certain way.
It is not that the statement "I went to the store" has these two interpretations. The notion of going to a friend's place isn't a different interpretation of that statement, it is just that I'm not telling the truth.
I don't think that's accurate. I can believe you without being absolutely convicted that you're accurate or correct. I can believe your testimony to me in good faith, but understand it may not be accurate.
> I can believe you without being absolutely convicted that you're accurate or correct.
Of course - and that means you still think (to some degree of conviction) it is true. The original context that spawned this discussion was implying some sort of interpretation that did not involve a belief of some sort in the truth of the statement.
> I can believe your testimony to me in good faith, but understand it may not be accurate.
If someone says "X touched me inappropriately", and you respond "I believe you" then this response means "I believe your statement" not "I believe your testimony was in good faith". (Or it is a kind of white lie, as discussed elsewhere in this thread).
> If someone says "X touched me inappropriately", and you respond "I believe you" then this response means "I believe your statement" not "I believe your testimony was in good faith".
That's true, but this is literally how 99% of human interaction works out.
My dad might say "Hey, can you help me with something on the house in two weeks?" and I don't even know what day yet, so I'll say "Of course, would love to!"
It's... not a 100% completely honest response, but it's the polite one. Rather than saying "I have no idea because I lack information, please tell me the date and I'll get back to you."
In reality, I say sure, I commit, and as more information is acquired we adjust the situation: just as would happen in the original scenario.
White lie or not, it would be inappropriate and needlessly damaging to reply to your colleague in such a way "I have no idea if what you're saying is true, sorry, but I'll look into it."
We're talking about the action of "believing" a colleague when they come to you with a complaint.
It would not be healthy for anyone involved to actively show skepticism towards them.
If you do not show some level of skepticism, you default to a state of belief. As in, you believe your colleague at face-value for the complaint brought to you.
We're _not_ talking about convicting someone of a crime. We're not talking about taking immediate action on that belief.
>If you do not show some level of skepticism, you default to a state of belief.
Well, no, you default to a neutral state of receiving information, sans judgment.
Also it is not true that if you do not show skepticism, you default to some specific state. You could hold any number of opinions without showing skepticism -- what you are showing the other party is irrelevant. "Showing" or expressing belief is not the same thing as believing.
>As in, you believe your colleague at face-value
If you are pretending that you believe your colleague while silently reserving judgment or judging disbelief, you do not believe them in any meaningful sense of the word. You are disguising your judgment of what they are saying so as to not cause further conflict -- i.e., acting. That is very different from believing what they say or even 'believing at face value'.
Of course you can. You can believe the victim while saying that the evidence doesn't meet whatever bar you set - in criminal matters that would be "beyond all reasonable doubt".
It's fine for people to say "I think he did it, but the prosecution didn't prove it, and so I found him not guilty."
If you believe someone, that means you think what they said is true.
In this mindset you've setup a guilty until proven innocent framework because in your mind you already believe to be true any accusations leveled at someone.
When someone levels an accusation, the only belief you should hold is that it's a serious accusation that needs further investigation because someone has risked a lot by leveling it.
Believing anything that comes out of someone's mouth to be true when there are massive consequences to their words is unethical.
>It's fine for people to say "I think he did it, but the prosecution didn't prove it, and so I found him not guilty."
You cannot believe someone to have done something and personally believe that the person is not guilty. They may not be guilty under the framework of the law, but you are still treating them as guilty in your mind. If you worked with the accused and you had a strong sense of ethics, you would never treat that person the same way again, even though the accusation may have been proven to be fabricated.
It is unethical to take accusations at face value that will ruin people's lives.
100% on-point, but I'd caution about bringing judgement into these matters.
Believing a colleague when they come to you with ANY complaint does not mean you're going to pass judgement, or you even have to. It means listening and doing that in a way that does not discourage future complaints.
> Believing a colleague when they come to you with ANY complaint does not mean you're going to pass judgement, or you even have to. It means listening and doing that in a way that does not discourage future complaints.
Your attitude towards them -- listening etc -- is a completely orthogonal matter to whether you believe in the truth of their claims.
There seems to be this wishy-washy notion of "belief" that's causing confusion in this thread, where "believing" is equated to "not being judgemental".
Saying "I believe you" means "I believe what you said is true". There are no interpretations that are contrary to that.
Yes, you can modulate the strength of your belief but they're all beliefs that the statement is true. The great-grandparent comment (the one whose meaning this discussion was about) was implying something other than belief in the truth of the statement.
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.
I am saying employment is at will (in most US tech contracts) and an employer can terminate your contract for any reason. "Anything goes" = there's no set standards of proof
IANAL but my understanding is that employer can terminate you for no reason (as in not giving a reason). But if an employer fires you for cause and that cause is unfounded they can be sued for wrongful termination.
This handy list suggests you have a claim if you report you were harassed and your company fires you (retaliation), but not if you are fired after someone falsely accuses you of harassment.
And trusting people to have free speech is definitely going to be abused by people who want to say controversial things. And trusting people to use encryption is definitely going to be abused by criminals who want to commit crimes. And trusting people to own kitchen knives is definitely going to be abused by people who want to stab others.
Yes, we can all make factually true, but totally irrelevant arguments that don't change anything.
You're talking about the rights of individuals. A person has the right to free speech and a person has the right not to be harassed.
A person does not have the right to be trusted, but can expect to be taken seriously on a claim of harassment if they have earned trust or if they provide evidence to back up the allegation.
This suggests that trust isn't or hasn't been abused by harassers at places like Uber. There, Uber HR trusted harassers when they said "I didn't do that," or they just didn't care.
I'm going to default to believing people that report harassment unless I can find credible evidence it didn't happen.
The UK police had to back off from a similar policy that the after high profile investigations that were dropped with no criminal charges being made. They now take complaints seriously and try to keep the confidence of the complainant but don't start off with unconditional belief from the outset whilst still proceeding, at first, on the basis that the allegation is truthful but testing the accuracy of the allegations and the evidence with an open mind.
in a criminal trial the most common form would be an alibi, which is proof that the accused was somewhere else and not in the place the crime occurred at the time the crime occurred.
I don’t know why you would think otherwise. Yes, if a man of any background complains of victimisation, then take those complaints in good faith and investigate them.
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 being a dick.
>Men hold the vast majority of power in our society.
Power isn't based on gender, it's based on wealth. Do you think abuse of power will suddenly end once the majority of wealthy individuals are women instead of men?
Power is enacted through multifarious means, with wealth being one of them. Wealth isn't a requisite for power. Generally in the US, positions of power are held by men, because of (or in spite of) an interconnected system of laws, norms, and a history of (generally) men telling people what to do. And those gender-based ideas enacted in laws and norms and our culture have percolated through our society to affect everyone in ways we often can't detect.
The point is that yes, for these reasons and many others, we should "believe women when they report harassment in the workplace."
It could be you or your family having connections to powerful people. Being famous. But what's important as it pertains to our conversation: being in an authoritative position, e.g. a teacher, law enforcement officer, manager, or company executive. All of these people can have an influence, or "power," over others -- including, but not limited to, women.
As your question doesn't really have anything to do with our debate, I respectfully decline to answer. It was nice talking.
I am extremely pro feminist, but I believe this particular tactic is one of feminists most self destructive anti-patterns.
It's one thing to say women have substantially more cards stacked against them on average. But it's another to say men have no cards stacked against them.
Your position is particularly harmful to feminist aims, because one of the core feminist teachings that we need to get through is this:
Don't assume a woman is a certain way because of stereotypes. Between group differences are smaller than within group differences.
Women can be less sporty than men on average, while still almost half of women are more athletic than the average man.
Similarly, women can have more cards stacked against them on average, while still nearly half of men have more cards stacked against them than the average woman.
The place we need to get to, which I believe intersectional feminism advocates, is to understand each person and situation individually, and consider that there are always many axes of oppression operation simultaneously.
To address your assertion directly: that a male victim of sexual harassment has no cards against him, consider this:
The flip side of "boys will be boys", a meme used to let rapists go unpunished, is "boys must be boys", a meme that men always want sex and therefore if he had a drunken hookup he must have wanted it. This goes far beyond the less accepted (though still frighteningly effective) meme of "she was drunk so she must have wanted it". Women are not presumed to want sex all the time.
I consider that a card stacked against men. We have precious little shared framework for thinking and talking about the times we don't want sex. It's not equivalent to the deck of cards that is patriarchy, but it's a card.
I think feminism will profit greatly from taking a stance on how people should be treated better, rather your stance, which is a stance on which people should be treated better (women).
I still believe WATM is usually a derailing technique used to distract from discussions of women's rights, I just don't believe that in the current climate it benefits the feminist movement to respond to them as such. It doesn't take much effort to say "sure, men too" and doing so reinforces other key feminist rhetoric.
I was mostly trying to point out how ridiculous camelite's argument sounded. I thought maybe we should instead have a serious conversation about the events leading up to Uber's current troubles, and how they reflect on our society and our own individual mindsets. But apparently this isn't the place for that.
Anyway, yeah, of course everyone has different circumstances. I didn't mean literally no men, just as the grandparent comment didn't mean literally believe all women. I was speaking generally in order to be comprehendible to a guy speaking generally and hypothetically.
Generally speaking, as a group, yes -- especially when compared to the social pressures put on women. Yes, that's changing, but we still have a way to go.
Happy to hear any difficult and unrealistic social pressures you think we regularly face today.
I don't want to get into a back and forth with you on this topic so I will politely decline your request.
I just wanted to say that it seems to me like you are speaking about broad generalizations and that is not the same thing as speaking about real people or individuals. Also, that your generalized idea of men is based on the premise that that general man is a wealthy and powerful person, but this is not the case for most men.
> 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 much comfort the fact that other people with the same genetalia tend to fill the boardrooms provides to the accused, I will leave to your imagination.
> 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.
Men aren't reminded constantly by their culture to do things they don't want to do? Where do you live, because it sounds like paradise to me.
> To say "think of the men!" here is either willfully ignorant or just being a dick.
It's neither. It was an attempt to puncture what I saw as misguided rhetoric. A good old WhatAboutTheMen is an efficient approach because the commenter's default reasoning for not "just believing" men would likely mirror mine for not "just believing" women. And so I don't have to spell it out for them.
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.
disingenous: lacking in frankness, candor, or sincerity; falsely or hypocritically
I'll do you the honor of not questioning your sincerity without even making an effort to address any specific thing you said. Seems like an almost...pusillanimous...thing to do.
> We can imagine utopia and then imagine how we would treat people in that setting.
I am not suggesting a solution to the existence of injustice, which is what a utopia would entail. I am merely pointing out that simplistic rhetoric about believing accusors will not solve the problem.
> 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.
And there we part ways. Adding up all the bad stuff that happens to one group, comparing it to all the bad stuff that happens to another group, and saying "if this makes the bad stuff in the big pile smaller, then having more bad stuff in the small pile is acceptable collateral damage" is not a good approach. Applied in the large it would quite likely lead to two much bigger piles. I know you probably don't recognise that as what you're doing, but your reasoning is far too simplistic given the complexities of the problem.
I was commenting on the mindset one would have to take the positions you have, which is why I didn't address individual points. I guess that was lost on you.
edit: fine, apparently people get downvoted if they're not pedantic.
"and saying "if this makes the bad stuff in the big pile smaller, then having more bad stuff in the small pile is acceptable collateral damage" is not a good approach. Applied in the large it would quite likely lead to two much bigger piles."
Show your work. Why is that "likely" to lead to two bigger piles?
> I was commenting on the mindset one would have to take the positions you have, which is why I didn't address individual points. I guess that was lost on you.
There's a word for that, you know.
> Show your work. Why is that "likely" to lead to two bigger piles?
If we both agree that we want fewer incidents of harass ment, a higher fraction of harassers punished, fewer false allegations, and fewer incidents of innocent people being punished... then that's a pretty complicated problem, right? Now multiply that by the number of potential harassers and harassees in the world. My "work" is simply the observation that a complicated problem isn't solvable by simplistic rhetoric. Of course, given the climate, that spiraled, as it does.
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.
I'm neither rich nor powerful, and I don't feel pressure to do anything outside of ensure my own survival. I mean, I could get a girl pregnant and still have a hell of a lot less to worry about than she does.
This is a lot of aggression, and it makes me think that you are just as closed to alternative viewpoints as those with whom you are discussing this topic. I think you should completely re-evaluate your approach to debating this in the future.
I see what you're saying, but I've laid out many other, less aggressive points and remained open to any good counter-argument.
I'll take the downvotes for this, but I think certain stances people are spouting on this thread are aggressively perpetuating the poor societal values I've been arguing against. They're aggressively playing down the consequences of their sexist mentality and normalizations. And because I'm a not-impoverished white dude who doesn't worry about being persecuted for my opinions, I expressed them.
(Also, the "selfish dick" part isn't meant to be taken personally. Many people are selfish, and own up to it, and wear the badge proudly. That's great. But to argue for sexism under some pretense of a noble cause is bullshit.)
I didn't have a chance to read this before you deleted it, but let's get one thing out of the way immediately: I'm not a white male, yet you seem to be attacking me (and others who think you are doing more harm than good) on this presumption.
You need to understand that the way you engage others on the internet is harmful to your viewpoints. You honestly come off as hostile and even childish. You're fabricating complete strawmen and attacking them. I honestly have to question whether or not you have some sort of personality disorder, given how upset you get over things that the people you are attacking have not said or even implied. You also seem to be extremely self-loathing, and you want to project that onto others.
> You honestly come off as hostile and even childish. You're fabricating complete strawmen and attacking them.
> You also seem to be extremely self-loathing, and you want to project that onto others.
These are funny sequences of statements.
Anyway I wasn't attacking you; I was arguing against the ideas presented, that we should "think about the men!" first when we're discussing women reporting sexual assault. The paragraph I deleted implied that anyone who holds this worldview either hasn't ever listened to a woman or is self-centered. I could've put it better, but frankly I was tired of arguing.
And I was fixing the record because you said "blackrose is exclusively thinking of rich and powerful men when framing his argument." Which is false, and I believe I offered good evidence for in my simple example.
Your second paragraph breaks the site guidelines. It's not ok to argue like that on HN, especially on divisive topics. If you have a substantive point to make, please make it thoughtfully; otherwise please don't comment until you do.
> then you are deliberately stacking the deck against the specific men who are accused of sexual harassment, some of whom will invariably be innocent.
This is really a stretch in logic, and the oxymoronic "some of whom will invariably be innocent" gives away your motives on this topic.
Parent comment was saying we should give a little more credibility to reports that women make about sexual harassment in the workplace. It's a pretty good idea that would make everyone's lives better (even ours, the men!). But if your reaction to that mild suggestion is hostility and misleading arguments, you're contributing to the problem and encouraging more "manly" behavior that necessitates women's blog posts and company culture course-correction.
It's not even a tiny weeny little stretch of logic. It is self-evident to anybody who is thinking clearly about the matter.
> Parent comment was saying we should give a little more credibility to reports that women make about sexual harassment in the workplace.
No. Wrong. Parent comment said "believe women who...", not "give a little more credibility to reports that women make about sexual harassment". Do you understand how those two statements are different? Your one doesn't even make sense. Crediblity is "the quality of being believable or worthy of trust". Credence is probably the word you were thinking of. I don't think I'm smarter than you, but these sorts of mistakes do go to show that you are not thinking clearly.
> It's a pretty good idea that would make everyone's lives better
Not the falsely accused. They are men too, right?
> But if your reaction to that mild suggestion is hostility and misleading arguments, you're contributing to the problem and encouraging more "manly" behavior that necessitates women's blog posts and company culture course-correction.
The suggestion is not mild. My reaction was not hostile. My arguments were not misleading. I'm not contributing to the problem of some men being sexual harassers, except perhaps at some absurdly theoretically removed degree, which would leave me damned for pretty much any I comment I could make. I'm not encouraging manly, or even "manly" behaviour. My comments don't necessitate women's blog posts, if by that you are referring to Fowlers call-out. The latter is in fact an absurd charge against me on a personal level, as I'm sure you would recognize after mature reflection. That I necessitate company culture course-correction is likewise absurd, though flattering.
Luckily we have the power of inference and ability to understand what statements mean even when people use different words -- unless, of course, we have an axe to grind, which is what I'm seeing here in your comments.
Your counter arguments haven't convinced me. But it was nice discussing this. Hopefully others will see this thread and make their own decisions.
I can see you're trying to rise above your instincts here, and that is a good effort. However, you should have left out the parting shot about the axe.
print "%s may or may not take over the world at some point, but it needs another round of investment in the next 18 months just to survive." % ('any Ponzi scheme')
I use %s with Python 3 when I don't specifically have access to 3.6 (like at work, where I have to use 3.4 because we're a RHEL 7 shop). I detest .format(), and I won't use it.
print "{something} may or may not take over the world at some point, but it needs another round of investment in the next 18 months just to survive.".format(something='any Ponzi scheme')
python 2, 3 are nice... got loads of libs... just that they don't have enough static typings to help me around :(
mypy is going in a nice direction! hope it would get scala or idris-level typechecks :)
But... most library definitions are quite lacking...
if only some big company would volunteer to fill that huge gap...
(hope MS gives some luv! just like they did with Typescript + DefinitelyTyped)
This shows how important virtue signalling is today's America. We have well loved CEO's of billion dollar companies using actual slave Labour. No one write a about them. But here we have journalists like Sarah Lacy going on a crusade against him. Though she always forgot to mention that she has taken funding from VC supporting Uber's rival.
"Virtue Signaling" is the most asinine, mean-spirited concept invented since about the middle ages. Its only ever used as a blanket dismissal of others' opinions, even going so far as to blatantly use the moral strength of an argument as a weapon against that argument.
mean-spirited concept invented since about the middle ages.
I'm unsure if this is hyperbole or not.
With regards to it's use, in my observation I don't think it's used so much as a weapon against an argument as much as perhaps a weapon against the self congratulatory and rather shallow nature of online protest. I didn't always feel this way but it seems that whenever the term is brought up you have a number of posters who feel it's incredibly important that it be known, to complete strangers on an internet message board, that they are the good guys and are sincere in their beliefs and actions.
In any case, I'm not very smart so I could be wrong in my observations.
'Virtue signaling' is a term that is most often used by people who have a hard time understanding the concept of actual virtuous behavior. For those with sociopathic tendencies everything is a signal or feigned behavior that is used to achieve a specific end, so it is not hard to see why they would assume such behavior and intentions in others.
There is a limited amount of attention that can be given to issues, it therefore makes sense that many unsavory individuals will slip through the cracks and never get in trouble.
In my defense, I felt at the time it was relevant, due to the fact that he berated that cab driver one time. (Which was filmed) and mentioned Ayn Rand to the 2 blonde's he was with in the cab. That was the reference.
However, its your house, and I respect the houses wishes, and will avoid making CEO Masturbating jokes ever again.
Because they won't get any more free advertising from Kalanick whoopsies? Must be someone in the public relations department, because that will now have to get a much more generous budget.
Why does anyone care about Tesla? It's just another car company? Except that in both the case of Tesla and Uber the two companies have the potential to revolutionize transportation. Consequently, people are very interested by what these companies are up to.
It sounds as if people were fired, investigated and so on. I don't understand the part about the medical records. Surely merely wanting to double check the story isn't the issue? Illegally holding the record would, but it seems the responsible person was also fired?
I mean, given their business practices, I am not surprised if their culture turns out to be toxic. I just don't see the reasoning behind blaming him for sexist men in the company, if he never supported such actions.
Maybe you just need to be clarified the meaning of scrapegoat: you kill the goat instead of your son, that's the biblical story. It means blaming someone inferior (or, of inferior importance) instead of someone higher up. Blaming the CEO cannot be scrapegoating by definition.
Yes, from all accounts it's pretty clear that he condoned and even promoted an arsehole culture.
> Were steps not taken to remove the harassers, once the incidents came to light?
Basically, no. Now, years afterwards, a few heads have finally rolled -- but only after it snowballed into a major (international, not just US-national) media scandal. But not back when the incidents first came to light, no.
> How can the CEO watch over every social interaction?
1) By delegating to a HR department with instructions to follow the law. Which instructions they might have had on paper, but obviously not in actual fact, given the real prevailing culture there.
2) So it comes back to, again: By making it clear, in words and example, what the working culture is supposed to be like. So that potential victims can be assured they won't get harrassed, potential harrassers can be assured they won't get away with shit like that, and the HR department can be assured they're supposed to go after the harassers and support the victims, not the other way around.
I don't know, this all feels so obvious I am compelled to question your grounds for asking. Are you really claiming you didn't know this, or couldn't figure it out for yourself? Because even asking the question smells a bit fake; like concern-trolling in support of the culture Kalanick's fostered.
Let's assume Uber dies. One bad outcome from this could be that Lyft gets a monopoly. I hope that doesn't happen.
Also, it will be awesome if instead of another Uber created there will be an open pool of ridess/seats available and people can use the platform of their choice. A la airline ticket booking model (of course the exact same approach will/may not work) or the bus ticket booking approach. Also, airline industry isn't hyperlocal.
It will be interesting to see Uber's HQ corporate culture shift from the wild-westworld crazy co to one who's cash cow is closely managed by the monied interests who will surely own the company from this point forward to ensure all future scandals are either quashed or kept under wraps...
While your comment puts the high level business model in rather simplistic terms, which I agree with, how is it that "running a mini cab system" costs them 700 million per [time period] and why does said system require 6700 employees as of April 2016 (according to quora)
Laura's post from feb stated that on the ops/sre/infra team alone they had ~126 engineers, though I don't know if that includes managers... but it made it sound like there were many layers of managers, thus all the infighting
IPO? No way. They'd have to publish audited numbers. What's leaked out is bad enough. The real numbers have to be worse. Notice that leveraged loan in 2016.[2] All the details of that have to be disclosed in the prospectus for an IPO.
[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/uber/funding-rounds [2] https://techcrunch.com/2016/07/07/new-reports-confirm-1-15b-...