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.

Comments

Toxic goat rodeo

[110010001000]

Not sure what a toxic goat rodeo is. It doesn't sound good.

Re:Toxic goat rodeo

[thegreatbob]

Kind of like a dumpster fire clown shoes shit-show?

That's OK

[Big Hairy Ian]

I understand there's still a vacancy at Yahoo

Re:That's OK

[__aaclcg7560]

Marissa Mayer should go to Uber. From what I've read in "I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59" by Douglas Edwards, she had a reputation for getting things done at Google. Success at one company doesn't always translate into success at a different company. Maybe her experience at Yahoo was fluke and she could do a U-turn at Uber.

Re:That's OK

[110010001000]

Marissa Mayer was Brins girlfriend while at Google. "I'm Feeling Lucky" is an apt title for the book.

Re:That's OK

[computational super]

she had a reputation for getting things done at Google

She invented gmail.

Lost users?

[Sporkinum]

I am guessing they lost a ton of users, or haven't been gaining any. Since the whole operation is a money loser now and in the past, and they were pumping money in contingent on growth, the investors forced the situation.
I loved Uber the few times I used it, but deleted my account and quit using it several months ago due to reports of harassment, and the way they treated their drivers. Latest thing was apparently their no-tip thing was that they paid fairly and tipping was built into the cost. Now they offer tipping in the app because they were shorting the drivers and the no-tipping thing was bullshit.

Re:Lost users?

[TWX]

The whole point of current-Uber was to build the company to be ready to be a leader for self-driving technology, so that passengers are already used to summoning Uber when they need a ride. Since Uber didn't want to invest a lot of money in their own fleet of human-driven cars, they chose to contract-out so that they don't have to deal with depreciation of capital purchases and amortizing purchases over the duration of the life of the equipment, they just make the contractor do it.

Unfortunately they're starting to learn the hard way that first, developing self-driving technology is very difficult for the kind of market that Uber wants to serve, as urban areas are fraught with hazards and exceptional conditions that the car must be able to cope with, and second, that stealing someone else's technology to attempt to deal with one's own shortcomings is frowned-upon by the courts.

Uber as it exists right now is a chrysalis, it's not what the final form is supposed to be. Unfortunately it looks like that chrysalis is destined to whither and crumble rather than to produce a new, mature form, as the timing was off and the choices were bad. Uber wanted to be the leader in a world where people stopped owning their own cars and simply summoned robotic cars to move them around, but it looks like Uber misjudged the timing and in their desire to be first they forgot that sometimes those who blaze the trail end up heading off in the wrong direction.

Re:Lost users?

[JohnFen]

I'm not so sure it was timing as much as Uber has incredibly bad business practices that would sink any company.

Re:Lost users?

[avandesande]

As self driving cars become mainstream Uber will become irrelevant. Without the cost of driver involved cars will become simple utilities... and utilities have razor thin margins.

Re:Lost users?

[TWX]

Oh I wholeheartedly agree. Their choice to pursue industrial espionage is the death-sentence for the company. If they're smart as a company they'll immediately scrap their entire self-driving program and probably fire/lay-off everyone that's ever worked on it or managed it and either start from scratch or else look for someone that's already making headway to partner-with, but then again, if they were smart they wouldn't have stolen someone else's development work in the first place.

When people first started talking about Uber and the combination of incredibly low prices and good service compared to taxis I was skeptical, mainly because I've known people that drive cabs and it doesn't seem like anyone makes all that much money. Cabbies can make living wages but they're driving a lot, cab company direct workers that maintain the vehicles and work in the offices make wages basically on-par wih similar jobs in other industries, and even though owners usually make the most money, they're not exactly earning the money to live a jet-set lifestyle. That tells me that with Uber, unless somehow they've magically figured out how to squeeze blood from a stone, they're operating in-the-red or with some other defiance of rules that cost money to follow. It appears that Uber is doing both, in that they have come up against regulations they're ignoring, and they're still running on venture capital money, not profitable. When you look at that, you need to ask yourself why they're doing what they're doing, and the only explanation that I can come up with is the one I posted above, that they're trying to become a big player in the future, and that now is just a stop-gap.

I don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

Travis hasn't done ANYTHING that we haven't seen in Robocop. What's the big fuss about? That he got caught? I'm tired of this fucking hypocrisy, it is still the same company with the same business plan - pretending they aren't running a taxi business to avoid taxes, and screwing drivers - why isn't THIS a problem?

Fuck off already.

Re:Building something new is hard.

[Cederic]

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?

Re:Our national ride sharing nightmare...

[freeze128]

...and about $1,000,000 for a medallion, right?

Proof..

[LesserWeevil]

Proof that if you're enough of an asshole as CEO someone will eventually notice.