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Uber CEO Travis Kalanick Has Resigned Due To Investor Pressure (recode.net)
Travis Kalanick has resigned as chief executive of Uber after pressure from investors, ending eight years of leading the ride-hailing company that has expanded round the globe but became mired in controversies. From a report: Kalanick had become a giant liability to the car-hailing company for a growing number of reasons, from sketchy business practices to troubling lawsuits to a basic management situation that was akin to really toxic goat rodeo. Thus, he had to go, even though some sources said he had the voting power to stay. But big investors also have leverage and a big enough group of them joined to use it. Those investors include Benchmark, Fidelity and Menlo Ventures, all of whom sent Kalanick a joint letter called "Moving Uber Forward" on Tuesday afternoon. Interestingly, Google Ventures was not among the group, even though its parent company Alphabet is now in a major lawsuit with Uber over the alleged theft of self-driving car technology from its Waymo unit.
Not sure what a toxic goat rodeo is. It doesn't sound good.
Travis hasn't done ANYTHING that we haven't seen in Robocop. What's the big fuss about? That he got caught? I'm tired of this fucking hypocrisy, it is still the same company with the same business plan - pretending they aren't running a taxi business to avoid taxes, and screwing drivers - why isn't THIS a problem?
Fuck off already.
Building something new is hard. You can't have a touchy-feely CEO who walks on eggshells when you're building something like Uber.
You can however have a constructive respectful CEO that doesn't break the law at every opportunity, doesn't hire utter cunts and defend their working practices, has proper control of their organisation and actually makes a profit.
Sure, it's hard. Doesn't excuse being a cunt.
The difficulty is with the suits (i.e. lawyers). Suits don't like change. They don't like having their industry disrupted. So sometimes you have to apply a force to make that disruption happen.
So why aren't we hearing the same story about Lyft? Oh, you mean it's possible to do this without being a Kalanick?
I'm not so sure it was timing as much as Uber has incredibly bad business practices that would sink any company.