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posted by Fnord666 on Monday October 02 2017, @04:26AM   Printer-friendly
from the playing-board-games dept.

In a move that has not amused some of the company's investors and board members, Uber's former CEO Travis Kalanick has appointed two new members to Uber's board. The move has been described as a "power play":

Kalanick said in an announcement late Friday that he had appointed Ursula Burns, Xerox Corp.'s former CEO, and John Thain, the ex-Merrill Lynch chief, to the startup's board. Uber challenged the appointments, calling them "a complete surprise."

The former CEO is defending himself against a lawsuit brought by Uber's largest shareholder, Benchmark, over his authority to fill the two board seats. Kalanick says he controls three of the company's eleven board seats. Benchmark is suing Kalanick for fraud and has asked him to relinquish control of board positions. The suit is in private arbitration.

Kalanick resigned as CEO on June 20 after Benchmark and a group of early investors asked him to step down. Uber's board has been rife with infighting and underwent a contentious process to select former Expedia Inc. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi as its new chief.

"I am appointing these seats now in light of a recent board proposal to dramatically restructure the board and significantly alter the company's voting rights," Kalanick said in a statement emailed to Bloomberg. "It is therefore essential that the full board be in place for proper deliberation to occur, especially with such experienced board members as Ursula and John."

Also at NYT, TechCrunch, Recode, and WSJ.


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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 02 2017, @08:09AM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 02 2017, @08:09AM (#575810)

    If you have no money then starting a product that relies on critical mass is obviously a terrible idea.

    I think people have no clue what entrepreneurs go through to start companies. Kalanick was not some rich boy, nor was he a smooth talker that just convinced a ton of people to give him lots of money. His first successful company was started while living literally with his parents and then later moving to Thailand to take advantage of a lower cost of living there as well. After most of everybody else had given up on the idea, he kept with it. That company would eventually be bought for $19 million. This in turn was money he invested into Uber to actually get it off the ground. Only once he'd already proven the idea incredibly successful did people suddenly want to buddy up with him and the rest is history.

    And that's a pretty typical state of affairs. Elon Musk developed a tiny company along with his brothers and a shoestring budget (he at one prior made an effort to see if he could live on a dollar a day food budget) that again was not a critical mass related product. After signing on a handful of big names to their product, they eventually sold the company and Musk made about $22 million. That went entirely into company after company until we rich the point of SpaceX/Tesla where once again he put absolutely everything he had into these companies and came within a hair's breadth of losing absolutely everything he had spent the past decade building. But once his 4th rocket succeeded (the first 3 failed) the rest is history.

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  • (Score: 1, Troll) by crafoo on Monday October 02 2017, @01:53PM

    by crafoo (6639) on Monday October 02 2017, @01:53PM (#575890)

    No no no! You don't understand, man. These people were just incredibly lucky and if I had the same luck I'd be where they are now, but just like, SO MUCH MORE socially conscious and racially diverse and gender-neutral and vegan-positive and stuff. Work ethic, discipline, and drive have really nothing to do with it. It's all just white privileged. Just ask my sociology professor.