The New York Times reports:
Travis Kalanick stepped down Tuesday as chief executive of Uber, the ride-hailing service that he helped found in 2009 and built into a transportation colossus, after a shareholder revolt made it untenable for him to stay on at the company.
Mr. Kalanick's exit came under pressure after hours of drama involving Uber's investors, according to two people with knowledge of the situation, who asked to remain anonymous because the details were confidential.
Earlier on Tuesday, five of Uber's major investors demanded that the chief executive resign immediately. The investors included one of Uber's biggest shareholders, the venture capital firm Benchmark, which has one of its partners, Bill Gurley, on Uber's board. The investors made their demand for Mr. Kalanick to step down in a letter delivered to the chief executive while he was in Chicago, said the people with knowledge of the situation.
[...] Mr. Kalanick's troubles began earlier this year after a former Uber engineer detailed what she said was sexual harassment at the company, opening the floodgates for more complaints and spurring internal investigations. In addition, Uber has been dealing with an intellectual property lawsuit from Waymo, the self-driving car business that operates under Google's parent company, and a federal inquiry into a software tool that Uber used to sidestep some law enforcement.
Uber has been trying to move past its difficult history, which has grown inextricably tied to Mr. Kalanick. In recent months, Uber has fired more than 20 employees after an investigation into the company's culture, embarked on major changes to professionalize its workplace, and is searching for new executives including a chief operating officer.
According to The Register:
Kalanick led Uber into fights on many fronts. The company had a strategy of entering markets without regard to regulation, earning it lawsuits all over the world. During one such lawsuit, Uber breached privacy laws. The company also stands accused of stealing self-driving car technology and deliberately targeting government officials who sought to investigate it.
The BBC notes:
Surely the most dramatic fall from grace the start-up world has ever seen, a scalp so big it will have chief executives across this city sitting bolt upright, and thinking: "If Travis can get booted out of Uber... no-one is safe."
What started out as a PR inconvenience has left the company without, to name just a few, a chief executive officer, chief operating officer, chief technology officer and chief financial officer. Uber is in tatters, engulfed by its own aggression.
Mr Kalanick embodied his company's prevailing attitude: success at all costs. It saw Uber dominate the ride-sharing world, his chutzpah enabling the company to attract investment so effectively that last year Uber alone raised more money than the entire UK start-up scene.
But in doing so he didn't play fair. He created a company that deceived local regulators, neglected the well-being of employees, wound-up drivers, troubled investors, obtained a rape victim's medical records and allegedly stole trade secrets from a rival.
See also: c|net
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday June 21 2017, @02:17PM (8 children)
These investors and large shareholders knew what they were getting into when they signed up for this deal with this guy at the helm. I'd rather see his ship sink and all the shareholders lose their shirts in the process, while better-run companies like Lyft succeed. Hopefully, with the company missing a CEO, COO, CTO, and CFO (holy crap, how is it still running?), it'll still go down in flames.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 21 2017, @02:38PM (3 children)
They knew what they where doing when they bought the ticket I say let'em crash
I'm not disagreeing I'm hoping this is dot com crash 2.0 and that it will take down google and spybook with it
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Wednesday June 21 2017, @04:20PM
and Microsoft.
Puhleeeeez!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday June 21 2017, @04:56PM (1 child)
I wouldn't mind seeing Google taken down a peg or two, but they actually have several genuinely useful products IMO.
But how could you leave Microsoft out of this list? The world would be better off without Facebook, Microsoft, and Uber.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 22 2017, @02:55AM
Indeed. Twitter should also be included in that list.
(Score: 3, Funny) by VLM on Wednesday June 21 2017, @03:01PM (2 children)
Dude. Its a taxi company. Ya ever seen the classic late 70s TV shitcom? You only need about ten warm-ish bodies to run an entire taxi company. And a lot of crappy bowdler-ized for broadcast TV jokes. This is a variety of the "... on the internet" business plans where you need a taxi company and like one smartass webmaster/IT dude and there you go.
You want to see something creepy thats tangentially on topic? Check out Marilu Henner. She hasn't aged much since 1980. Thats like 40 years ago. If there is such a thing as eternal vampires.... I can see why rich people believe in the technological singularity, due to the power of modern pills and plastic surgery I swear that Henner looks younger today than in the 90s.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Wednesday June 21 2017, @04:23PM
You also need the 'foreign' guy who says "Tank you berry much" a lot.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 21 2017, @04:34PM
Henner looked good in the 80s, now she looks creepy. Without knowing about plastic surgery and how it looks I would probably have guessed she is now only 15-30 years older than in the 80s.
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Wednesday June 21 2017, @07:54PM
Maybe #deleteuberinstalllyft or #lyftoveruber, to spread the meme?
Sure it's advertising, but it makes me consider where Lyft puts their stake in the ground, when they make an ad like this [youtube.com].
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday June 21 2017, @02:51PM (11 children)
On one hand, as the SJWs do entryism and their other stereotypical methods to destroy shitty SV tech-bubble entitled startup brogrammer culture I feel the need to reflexively oppose the progs, because, you know, progs are bad.
On the other hand, they're destroying a septic tank or porta-pottie overflowing with worthless shit, so the enemy SJWs are doing the whole world a favor.
Its an ethical puzzle... An enemy should always be opposed ... but if an enemy uses their limited energy to attack a hated 3rd party, ummmm, just eat some popcorn and watch? I donno who I should cheer for? Save the cheering for the God Emperor, I guess.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by jmorris on Wednesday June 21 2017, @03:24PM (4 children)
The guy had to go, he talks about The Fountainhead and stuff. The Powers that Be are making sure that one company in each niche is SJW Converged and that it dominates. If he had hung tough and stayed they would have destroyed Uber and moved on to one of the similar companies who lose venture money for a business model. He understood the rules, popped his Golden Parachute and will launch another startup. We should assume that he knew what would happen when he let Party Stalwarts like Huffington and Eric Holder assume important positions. The SJWs know they create nothing so are willing to let creators create, so long as they are willing to surrender control once the companies they make get big. And they don't even care if the Libertarians keep sacks of cash when they get booted, it isn't about money, they do not want anyone having positions of power who aren't "Of the Body."
Now that they can safely pick Uber as the one winner, as a blessed company it can return to being rewarded for losing money and punished for reporting profits even beyond the IPO phase, they are pretty much assured they will be the only one surviving in the Internet dispatched taxi space. This is of course only possible with the #FakeMoney the FED is throwing around, but there is less of it now so who knows how much longer this game goes on.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 21 2017, @07:43PM
Randian dipshits own the US there is only one solution to them, forcable Gualting
(Score: 1, Troll) by cubancigar11 on Wednesday June 21 2017, @07:47PM (2 children)
Oh my... you paint a scary picture but I just so happen to believe in it. For what its worth, I thought cutting off the CEO of SJW aka Hillary would start getting us some results. It is more scary if Mr. Kalanick founds another company and continues to play the game, instead of changing the rules.
(Score: 1, Troll) by aristarchus on Wednesday June 21 2017, @10:16PM (1 child)
And if cubancigar12 can believe something, that means? That it is right-wing conspiracy theory Infowars type tripe? That cubancig has also read Fountainhead? That jmorris is certifiably insane? It is just so difficult to draw any rational inference from this!! What if cubancigarette just so happened not to believe in it? Would the consequences for the universe at large be any different? Stay on topic, Soylentils, or you may be spam modded! It was the stockholders that forced this, you know, capitalists? The ownership class? The ones that own the CEOs?
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Thursday June 22 2017, @06:04AM
Warned you, cubancigar13! Your post was inane, incoherent rambling that under the just previous standards for spam mods, would be spam. Fortunately for you, it no longer is. I, and many other Soylentils, have sacrificed ourselves so that you may have the right to post your totally unsubstantiated and inane opinions. Show some respect.
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday June 21 2017, @03:38PM (5 children)
I don't know the details of the sexual harassment. I have no idea how true the charges are. But, if he was busy humping his subordinates, he needed to go. SJW's notwithstanding. If it was a matter of a few "inappropriate" comments that were never intended to lead anywhere, then damn the SJW's. There is a lot of room between those two extremes of "sexual harassment".
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Wednesday June 21 2017, @04:14PM
Oh gosh no, AFAIK he merely happened to be a CEO where someone ten levels down the management chain may or may not have done something.
Things are accelerating culturally very quickly, it was just a few years ago a HP guy got booted for having sex with someone.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Grishnakh on Wednesday June 21 2017, @05:06PM (3 children)
Travis is a dick, but to be fair I haven't heard anything about him personally sexually harassing anyone. The problem was that the company's internal culture was full of this, with middle managers being quite guilty of it, and top management did nothing about it, and the HR department actively defending abusers because "they're too valuable". It's a toxic corporate culture, and the CEO takes the blame for that because the buck stops with him.
Remember, the CEO is the public "face" of a company, and has the ultimate responsibility for managing the organization. If the organization is obviously mismanaged, it's the CEO's fault for either doing the wrong thing, or not doing the right thing (action vs. inaction). Travis seems to be a failure by inaction with regard to the sexual harassment problems.
As for "inappropriate" comments, that's not what happened: managers were actively soliciting sex from their subordinates. Not only is that horribly creepy and unethical, it's downright illegal. Yet Uber HR refused to act on these allegations because the accused managers were deemed "too valuable". HR reports to the CEO, hence the CEO is to blame.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 21 2017, @06:42PM
travis kalanick touched my junk liberally. he strapped me in to his uber mobile and he couldnt keep his offensive hands off of me. he was performing many red flag touches. i couldnt believe what the fuck was going on. i told travis the city would not approve of a billionaire touching an underage kid for free.
can you believe it? travis kalanick did all this. he picked me off the street, strapped my arms and legs down in the uber mobile's passenger seat, and just wouldn't stop fondling my cock'n'balls.
they definately were red flag touches. the goddamn referee he had in the back seat kept on raising up this red flag every time he touched my junk but did travis care? NO WAY! he just kept on doing it. I couldn't believe what the fuck was going on, indeed. I pleaded with travis but to no avail. I told him the city would not approve of such a wealthy man touching an underage kid like me (at the time I was 13) without at least compensating me for the trauma and the use of my body as his own personal plaything.
this got to him, worrying about his image. he continued to fondle me, all the while ignoring the referee's red flags. then he drove the ubermobile to my house and ejected the seat i was in! it was amazing. but surprisingly, after I woke up the next morning, my uber account had $150k in it!!! Can you believe it?????????????????????????
(Score: 3, Insightful) by krishnoid on Wednesday June 21 2017, @07:21PM
One of my professors once said to us, "Corruption comes from the top." I've since extended that to "Corporate culture comes from the top." So while the buck stops with him, I proffer (?) that it also starts there.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday June 22 2017, @12:41AM
Ah-ha. Sometimes, it pays to come back and re-read a post. Guess I had other things on my mind the first time, and I missed your real point.
"actively defending abusers because "they're too valuable"."
I can see that. If one or more bad actors have the boss' blessing to act bad, that makes the boss guilty. The message is, "I'll sacrifice all of you to keep my buddy happy!" Time to re-read 'The Jungle'?
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by YeaWhatevs on Wednesday June 21 2017, @03:27PM (3 children)
Sure he was a bad person, but everybody already understood that, so it's not like their reputation could get worse. I understand that Travis had super-voting rights. As a founder with super-votes, I would have just told the board to take a hike and replaced them. Once their hopes of seizing power are crushed it would quiet down.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 21 2017, @03:43PM (1 child)
It's more likely that his plans included a necessary capital infusion that was understood by all parties with all plans taking that infusion as an assumption. That in turn enables the investors/board to take control of the company by simply threatening to hold back the capital.
(Score: 2) by YeaWhatevs on Wednesday June 21 2017, @04:28PM
Reasonable argument. In that case I think Travis was headed for the trash bin no matter what, so he could be replaced by one of "their kind". Good news for T is, once the need for cash has passed and the bad press dies down he can go right back to being CEO :)
(Score: 2) by MrGuy on Wednesday June 21 2017, @04:07PM
That might work if Uber was in a position where they would never, ever need to raise money in capital markets again. Otherwise, it's corporate suicide.
Nobody's going to hand you money when you've very publicly declared on the very idea that you have any remote accountability to your investors.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 21 2017, @03:37PM (2 children)
Kalanick brought Uber from a little 'oh, cute idea' to a billion dollar international corporation and arguably the single most important company in domestic transport - all in about 5 years.
And this is all going to be destroyed (the first thing to happen once he steps down is tipping gets enabled which just about 0 customers actually like) because a handful of bad hires got their feelings hurt or didn't like the work environment. If you don't like your job, you're always free to quit you know. Silicon Valley is still one of the few areas where I think America can really be proud of still being an undeniable first in the world - even as we continue to slide downward by most all metrics. Things like this are how you have e.g. Hong Kong start taking over Silicon Valley's role.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Wednesday June 21 2017, @04:35PM (1 child)
Uber nationwide handles approximately 1/5 of the number of riders as the New York subways, so it's pretty easy to argue that no, public transit is still far more important than Uber ever was.
If there's one thing I've learned from my time in large-scale businesses, no single manager is very important to the whole operation. The "heroic CEO" is more myth than fact, and there are lots of people that are likely to be as good as or better than Kalanick available for hire.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 21 2017, @07:17PM
Given you're comparing it to New York subways, I don't think you understand the scope or scale of what Uber has done. In many places in the world transportation is an extremely corrupt industry. Criminal and government corruption/collusion are extremely common. I mean this is a very big deal - people have been killed over this industry. Uber, somehow, has managed to compete in spite of this - and has gone out of their way to keep their driver's safe. And I have no idea how they've done it. Certainly the various tools such as the much maligned 'Greyball' have played a meaningful role.
We also have some of this corruption in the US, though it's almost entirely peaceful. But here too, companies don't just come in and start offering dirt cheap prices without major corrupting influences coming into play. Getting around this corruption and backroom dealing against your company is not something they teach you in MBA programs. CEOs, as a management/executive role, I'd agree are relatively irrelevant. However, what Kalanick provided was vision, capability, and the willingness to see what was necessary to achieve results even when it was rather outside the box - to say the least. Nearly all of the greatest companies were built on these sort of personalities. And they all also tend to start their decline the moment they leave. Microsoft's Bill Gates, Apple's Steve Jobs for instance. Those companies are large enough that they can run on inertia for many years before reaching, but Uber is not. And the board has taken no time in starting to destroy the company. Enabling tipping is something that is universally disliked and will only harm the company by destroying one of its competitive advantages for very minimal gain.
These leaders of companies are not valuable because they're good businessmen but because of their ability to do something unique. Jobs for instance didn't do anything revolutionary, but he had this unique ability to somehow stay one step ahead even if he was just marketing and reshaping the work of others. Apple today, however isn't even doing that and is instead just coasting on his successes. Their one attempt at post-Jobs innovation, the Apple Watch, was a flop that everybody knew would be a flop. You have to give it to Cook for being to go with what he genuinely felt was right, but the problem is he's just not made out of the same stuff as these other people capable of bringing a company from zero to the top.
(Score: 2) by goodie on Wednesday June 21 2017, @04:12PM (1 child)
While I absolutely hate the idea of Uber as some sort of corporation that encourages the skirting of tax laws and uses a compensation model that will only hurt people in the long run (and have never used them), as others have pointed out, it has grown a lot in a very short period of time. My personal opinion, in those cases, if that you have to be a douche to be successful. Not that you necessarily want to, but to achieve these objectives you cannot stop at details. And yes, when you have millions of rides taking place every day across the world, allegations of assault and so on are a detail. They can hurt your image, but from an operational standpoint, they are outliers. Sure you will try to address them, but only because people make you. If you start to rethink your model because of those outliers, you compromise the trajectory that you have set for your company. This is even worse considering that up until it hurt them, shareholders were probably more than happy to have those brushed under the rug in hope that they would be quickly forgotten.
So Kalanick is probably a dick (no limerick intended). But it's not surprising, we have countless examples in the corporate world. Perhaps the big difference is that Uber has human employees and customers, unlike corporations like Oracle who have employees but whose customers are corporate (not a very high probability of sexual assault here...). My point is that it was bound to happen. And it will happen with the next big tech thing. People don't bother with the details and the sense of entitlement that comes with the big job sure does not help.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Gaaark on Wednesday June 21 2017, @04:28PM
I still picture the corporate guy from Mr. Robot (the one that used KDE) going out and beating the sh!t out of the homeless guy because 'he can'.
Wonder if that is based on anyone they know, or just the sociopath executives in general.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 21 2017, @04:47PM
The entire c-suite is vacant - all either left or got fired.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 21 2017, @07:52PM
Dicks than women in tech , makes me think that maybe everyone in silicon valley should be eliminated from the gene pool, having worked for some of these horrible people in the late 90's I can say just take off and nuke it from orbit it's the only way to be sure.