&gt; does it actually change corporate behaviour?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.&gt; is it a good thing that press can effectively hire and fire by continued pressureThat is an argument that is as old as the oldest printed pamphlet. I&#x27;m not going to argue it here, but I&#x27;m glad that the press reported on wrongdoing by high-ups at Uber, and I&#x27;m glad that users and investors responded to that information.

&gt; - 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&#x27;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&#x27;re not immune from scrutiny of your action by the public. Your company is part of society, depends on the institutions, and can&#x27;t ride roughshod over established norms of behaviour without also accepting the consequences.

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&#x27;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&#x27;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.)

This proves that speaking out makes a difference.Edit: HN discussion of Susan J. Fowler&#x27;s original blog post: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13682022" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13682022</a>

Believe. Do not take action against individuals without investigation, but at organization levels, take measures as though the complaints are true.

Investigating starts with belief.You don&#x27;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&#x27;s a reason Listen &amp; Believe is a thing and it&#x27;s not because anyone is saying &quot;you should have unquestioned faith in what someone says&quot;.

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.

General observations from experience:A well-run company will have proper procedures, processes in place to deal with work place issues.Management and all staff will also be required to take training on a continuous basis.Professionally managed organizations don&#x27;t walk around &quot;believing&quot; this or that or spouting off &quot;innocent until proven guilty&quot; and such:)

Please investigate, not necessarily believe. Innocent til proven guilty still has some place in this world..That being said, kudos to anyone courageous enough to speak the truth even at the risk of vilification.

Here is the clip <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=eowPka21BNc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=eowPka21BNc</a>

Uber&#x27;s business model reminds me of Zapp Brannigan.Fry: &quot;I heard one time you single-handedly defeated a horde of rampaging somethings in the something something system&quot;Brannigan: &quot;Killbots? A trifle. It was simply a matter of outsmarting them.&quot;Fry: &quot;Wow, I never would&#x27;ve thought of that.&quot;Brannigan: &quot;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.&quot;

A business culture flows from the top. Reading Susan J Fowler&#x27;s account told me the whole company must be toxic, for such abhorrent behaviour to be condoned of.

It is to my knowledge that the problems have been around from the start, but you haven&#x27;t noticed it.I&#x27;m pushed to think that the &quot;media&quot; didn&#x27;t report on it too much because the problems were economic. But as an average media company, that story doesn&#x27;t sell, it doesn&#x27;t interest the average reader, so they don&#x27;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&#x27;s public image, but that is a superficial problem in proportion to their disasterous funding model and general financials.

He didn&#x27;t say that women don&#x27;t lie about harassment, just that they are taken more seriously. Similar to rape claims.

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).

I should think that common sense would answer this question. You square it like this:Let&#x27;s say a person in your company tells you their boss is sexually harrassing them. You&#x27;re on reasonably good terms with both the accuser and the accused.Some responses you might make in this case:- Deflect. Pretend you didn&#x27;t hear it. Or, if pressed: &quot;This isn&#x27;t something I know anything about. You&#x27;d better take that up with them. Or maybe you could talk to HR?&quot;- Express skepticism: &quot;Well, I don&#x27;t know if you&#x27;re lying or not. Sounds like a he-said she-said situation. Sorry.&quot;- Express emotional support: &quot;That sounds terrible! I&#x27;m sorry you&#x27;re going through this, and I appreciate that it must be very hard for you to talk about this. How can I help?&quot;- Provide logistical support: &quot;Let&#x27;s get to the bottom of this.&quot;- Express complete solidarity: &quot;That bastard! We&#x27;re going to nail them right to the wall for this. Right. To. The. Wall.&quot;- Express complete solidarity for the accused: &quot;How could you say this about them? They&#x27;re a good person! They would never intentionally harass you. It must be a misunderstanding!&quot;Now: which responses might fall under the sentiment of &quot;please believe women&quot;? Which wouldn&#x27;t? Which responses violate your ethical norms?Seems to me, if you&#x27;re purely caught up in the legalism of the situation, I&#x27;m guessing your response is going to be &quot;skepticism,&quot; whether you want it to be or not.

&gt;Please believe women when they report harassment in the workplaceThis 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 &quot;innocent until proven guilty&quot; when accusation are leveled against another individual or company.

Not sure who &quot;we&quot; 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.

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&#x27;ve done a &quot;fair&quot; investigation which will not look fair to outsiders or victims. No malice is necessary, but it is frequently endemic anyway.

Harrassment is often entirely one person&#x27;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&#x27;t press charges.Investigations don&#x27;t help much in these cases. The pressure isn&#x27;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.

If you go to a police station and report a murder do you think they&#x27;ll a) investigate your claim or b) ignore you?That is the sort of belief we&#x27;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&#x27;s really not that complicated.

&gt; Please believe women when they report harassment in the workplace. Many of their reports may not be as clear cut as Mrs. Fowler&#x27;s.no evidence? no problem. guilty until proven innocent based on the gender of the accuser.

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&#x27;s public image.

Please believe women when they report harassment in the workplaceOne 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&#x27;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.

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&#x27;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&#x27;s.

Regardless of what he does professionally, his soul totally needs this.

Yes I&#x27;ve done several. Great overall experience but not to be taken casually.

Uber was already likely to lose. It was way behind in autonomous vehicle tech.Also, it wasn&#x27;t even close to profitable.

Frankly I don&#x27;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&#x27;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.

I don&#x27;t know if it&#x27;s possible for a company to change a culture that&#x27;s this sick.But it&#x27;s almost certainly not possible to do it with the same CEO. A leave of absence is not sufficient.

I believe that (much) more relevant than that is what regulators do with these services around the world. For the people it doesn&#x27;t really matter if it&#x27;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...

&gt; No credit cards. Drivers get paid directly with cash.I can understand why some people might see this as a feature, but that&#x27;s severely misunderstanding why people use services like Uber.

Libretaxi sucks. I don&#x27;t want to negotiate with the driver and I don&#x27;t want to pay cash. In typical fashion, open source&#x2F;FS people fail to understand what makes a product popular when they try to clone it.Nobody gives a fuck about &quot;Libre&quot;, I just want to get a fucking ride.

I really want to see free&#x2F;open-source win, but it won&#x27;t happen as long as people keep thinking that shouting &quot;down with closed systems&quot; is a substitute for a competitive product. Ideological purity isn&#x27;t enough.

Centralized systems have value, sometimes far more than open systems. The other way around is true also.You can&#x27;t automatically assume that closed systems are a bad thing.

<pre><code> &gt; No Credit Cards
 &gt; Negotiating the price with a driver
</code></pre>
No thanks!

Lyft? That is just another corporate-controlled centralized system. I&#x27;d much prefer something along the lines of <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;libretaxi.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;libretaxi.org&#x2F;</a>

There are articles showing them losing share to Lyft.

Disclaimer: I&#x27;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&#x27; ride sharing feature find it especially easy to switch.

Does losing talent and having trouble finding executives count?No COO, CFO and CMO for such a long time means the CEO was not doing his most important job: creating a high-functioning executive team.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;graphics&#x2F;2017-uber-leadership-gap&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;graphics&#x2F;2017-uber-leadership-gap&#x2F;</a>You might think they&#x27;re still strong in operations, but company-destroying risks rise every day the the leadership suite is in turmoil like this. And that&#x27;s just internal risks: what about their competitors and antagonists?

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?

This is a really interesting point. Uber didn&#x27;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 &quot;fulfilled by Amazon&quot; is already starting to do that.

I think Amazon has a shot at taking over Uber or even entering this space. They already have a great logistics pipeline built out.

Excellent examples.  To push the point farther, the Dow Jones Industrial Index tracks a basket of &#x27;best in breed&#x27; 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.

&gt; IBM&#x27;s recent demiseSomebody should let them know!Certainly on a downward trend of late but ~80BN in revenues last year is far from dead

When I said &quot;change of fate&quot; 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.

Pardon me for being somewhat rude, but your perspective suggests that you&#x27;re perhaps relatively young?IBM&#x27;s recent demise, Lehman Brothers going down under, Enron, Arthur Anderson &#x2F; Worldcom, the dismantling of Japanese mega conglomerates by the GHQ, Apple&#x27;s 90&#x27;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.

I&#x27;m in Pittsburgh. Most of my friends have moved to Lyft due to Uber&#x27;s &quot;behavior.&quot; To be fair, due the trips we are taking are relatively infrequent and when we do, there is little cost difference between the two.

But has any of the press coverage translated into actual business impact?  Uber&#x27;s been all over the news in Silicon Valley&#x27;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&#x2F;or most convenient, which remains... Uber.

Gett, Hailo, maybe Didi if&#x2F;when they expand out of China.

If Uber dies and Lyft becomes the new market leader, who is the new underdog?

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&#x27;s executives are not doing that bad after all!

In places like Chicago if you don&#x27;t tip the driver they will give you a 1 star rating. Having in app tipping solves this problem.

It will also be a tragedy. With Kalanick gone, Uber is already behaving like a conformist, viz. the recent headlines (1) &quot;Uber co-founder: We’ve been too obsessed with growth&quot; (what?); (2) &quot;Uber is (finally) rolling out tipping&quot; (just awful). That sounds just like Lyft and Lyft is not a worthy rival in any sense of the word.

Lyft is US only isn&#x27;t it? How would that be a good thing?

If you&#x27;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&#x27;t. I find that in large parts outside of the USA &quot;Uber&quot; 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&#x2F;Valuation: Uber 3.5x Lyft 4.28xNot an insurmountable task, but Lyft have a long way to go and no track record or operations outside of the USA.[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;fortune.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;08&#x2F;21&#x2F;uber-bookings-double&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;fortune.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;08&#x2F;21&#x2F;uber-bookings-double&#x2F;</a>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2017-04-14&#x2F;embattled-uber-reports-strong-sales-growth-as-losses-continue" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2017-04-14&#x2F;embattled...</a>[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com.au&#x2F;uber-profitable-in-hundreds-of-cities-2016-6?r=US&amp;IR=T" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com.au&#x2F;uber-profitable-in-hundre...</a>

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&#x27;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.

When any story about your company needs a tagline like &#x27;embattled CEO blah blah blah&#x27; it might be time to step back

Honestly when it comes to these &quot;most powerful woman in tech&quot; awards, she wins by a landslide.

I&#x27;d say the media, who was already after Uber.

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&#x27;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.

She was the bullet in the gun that Uber held to its own head; they could&#x27;ve avoided it by not being a shitty place for women to work

Susan Fowler is the giant killer of this century.Salutation!

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...

Is there an issue if it&#x27;s a woman?Is Marissa Meyer the only woman y&#x27;all know?

I bet it will be a woman. Merrisa Mayer? lol

What it means is that those investors believe that Uber&#x27;s board is padded by Travis&#x27;s cronies, and they want adult supervision brought in.

Wow, I thought he was just going to step away and take a break. Do we know who might replace him?It&#x27;s also interesting that the five shareholders mentioned in the NYTimes article want 2 &quot;truly independent directors&quot;. What does that mean? Depending on how many board seats there are, maybe two votes aren&#x27;t enough?

Wow! Looks like the investors really want their money back now and are pushing hard for an IPO.

No, but quite a few posts mentioned Travis being part of the problem and promoting that sort of culture.

I wonder how things would have gone had Kalanick&#x27;s family hadn&#x27;t suffered that horrible tragedy a few weeks ago. That is, whether he would have had the energy&#x2F;stubbornness to stay as CEO if he wasn&#x27;t dealing with personal challenges at the same time as professional ones.

I called for it in the Susan Fowler thread:<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13747414#13749264" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13747414#13749264</a>I do wish it hadn&#x27;t happened, though, I would have preferred if the company could have healed with him still managing to stay in control.

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&#x27;t the only problem Uber faced but it sure seemed to cause other previously overlooked issues and complaints to gain real resonance.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13682022" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=13682022</a>

&gt; Travis is not without his flaws but he created an awful lot of value for them.It&#x27;s business. Travis ought to understand that.

Firing founders was tried in the nineties and it always resulted in failure. Guess the Uber VC&#x27;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&#x27;d be calling the shots, instead he&#x27;s out of a job.

I don&#x27;t (yet) have an opinion on this, but it&#x27;s important to note the other side of the coin...&gt; Hope everyone&#x27;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&#x27;s been very well compensated for the value he&#x27;s created. You don&#x27;t keep a job because of what you&#x27;ve done in the past, you keep a job based on what you can do in the future.

Don&#x27;t kid yourself for a second that investors are kicking Travis out because of a moral imperative.

&gt; epic destruction of valueBetter than abiding by an epic destruction of values.

Any founder? Or just founders who drag their company&#x27;s name and culture into a swamp of immoral behavior?

&gt;Hope everyone&#x27;s paying attention to the identity of these investorsExactly. I would be wary of these specific folks. I bet you they would do the same to any founder in a heartbeat.

It isn&#x27;t a bad business move. Removing Kalanick allows them to start fixing their brand. He sounds like a bad manager anyway.But who cares about that? He created and maintained a culture that systematically abused people and covered it up.Fuck the investor value. People were harmed. This was the only ethical move they could make regarding Kalanick.

Agreed. Whether or not your listed events are the exact same set of reasons for his ousting, it&#x27;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&#x27;s mistakes.

I don&#x27;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&#x27;t know what the full Holder report said.

The problem with getting rid of any leader, a CEO, President, Prime Minister, or even a Dictator even when they seem &#x27;bad&#x27; is that you can&#x27;t be sure the replacement won&#x27;t be even worse or even more ineffective in meeting objectives. Unless there&#x27;s a clear and obvious replacement waiting in the wings it&#x27;s not certain him leaving is a good or bad idea, especially if they end up scrambling to find someone, anyone, to bring in.

&gt; Uber is under investigation at several levels of government for their Greyball program to hide from law enforcement.^^ this is why I never stopped using Uber.

Wow -- I&#x27;m amazed to hear this sentiment. I&#x27;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&#x27; well-being, for basic decency threaten to tear all of that down. Just in the past six months:* Susan Fowler&#x27;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&#x27;s lawsuit could shut down Uber&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;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.

You assert that:&gt; Travis himself has exhibited poor public behavior that was recorded by an Uber driverDo you have any evidence of this, or is this hearsay?If you&#x27;re referring to the video I suspect you might be - have you actually watched it?<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ejZL5Flwmjc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ejZL5Flwmjc</a>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 &quot;stuff this&quot; and getting out.

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 &quot;culture&quot; speak much.I hope Uber can continue. As someone who travels internationally on business, it&#x27;s quite useful. Seeing him go, it&#x27;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 &quot;management style&quot; 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.Sometimes the turmoil is too great.My last international trip, I used Lyft.

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.

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.

<pre><code> &gt; he created an awful lot of value for them
</code></pre>
Has he though? No one who bought Uber for $70bn right now would ever get their money back, despite that being it&#x27;s &#x27;value&#x27; (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&#x27;s actually feasible as a business, he&#x27;s no more a great CEO than the Wizard of Oz or Bernie Madoff.

&gt; Hope everyone&#x27;s paying attention to the identity of these investorsI hope everyone pays attention to the identity of the people that invests in his next company.

&gt; The worst [Steve Jobs] has been accused of is driving people hard to achieve the perfection he sought.And colluding with other tech companies to fix his employees&#x27; wages.

Jobs did some bad stuff apart from that and Kalanick is reputed to be quite talented.

You&#x27;ve been praising Steve Jobs throughout this thread, saying his flaws &quot;served&quot; Apple. We don&#x27;t know that they did. All we know is that they didn&#x27;t run it into the ground.If we are angry about Kalanick sexually harassing people (as we should be), Steve Jobs mentally&#x2F;emotionally harassing people is as bad. There is no difference, don&#x27;t make it seem like it is okay or that it was &quot;good for Apple&quot;.

There aren&#x27;t reports of Kalanick himself harassing women.

Kalanick is no Steve Jobs,Kalanick is a bro on an ego trip who stumbled upon a business. But harassing women, and all his other flaws, are not what created uber.Steve Jobs&#x27; flaws actually served Apple. The worst he&#x27;s been accused of is driving people hard to achieve the perfection he sought.

Here&#x27;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&#x27;s fool enough to trigger the apocalypse is because THEY will be in charge and assume that&#x27;s the answer. If they were on the outside looking in, they would have a very different opinion.

It was actually pretty different from that. PayPal merged with Elon&#x27;s X.com and had technical differences with the PayPal founder and they decided to stick with PayPal&#x27;s tech strategy. There weren&#x27;t similar scandals. (See Founders at Work).

&gt; Travis is not without his flaws but he created an awful lot of value for them.Valuation != value

So all that matters to you is investor value?Maybe some things matter more, like, not fostering an environment where sexual harassment is tolerated.

I am paying attention, and I&#x27;m just upset this didn&#x27;t happen sooner. Travis needed to go a long, long time ago.

Hope everyone&#x27;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&#x27;s board (with John Sculley&#x27;s behind the scenes string pulling) fired Steve Jobs. How well did that work out for Apple&#x27;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&#x27;s time to try Lyft.

I don&#x27;t think that&#x27;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.

Did he do a lot, sure.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&#x27;m sure there are others), maybe stealing (waymo lawsuit), and building tools to avoid the law....The answer is I don&#x27;t know, but it is going to be hard to recover from.

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.

I don&#x27;t agree it&#x27;s quite that uplifiting.  The culture had to be absolutely horrible, all the way up to the top, for Fowler&#x27;s story to have an impact.  Uber was already gearing up their lawyers against her, and if their culture hadn&#x27;t been so pervasive, and if there weren&#x27;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&#x27;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.

Did Susan Fowler&#x27;s article start this fire?  If so, it&#x27;s an incredible and inspiring story every victim of harrassment should follow.  Thanks Susan.

I&#x27;m sure there is a lot of cost gutting that could be done and the money they pull in is no laughing matter.Some deep cuts wil likely occur to make the company &quot;more efficient&quot; and &quot;focused on core competency&quot; etc...

&gt; to one who&#x27;s cash cow is closely managed by the monied interestsNot sure I&#x27;d use &#x27;cash cow&#x27; to describe something that bleeds cash to the tune of billions of dollars a year.

It will be interesting to see Uber&#x27;s HQ corporate culture shift from the wild-westworld crazy co to one who&#x27;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...With that said, who should lead Uber?

Do people believe that this PC circus can actually make a long term business profit?

What? Why? I looked her up on Wikipedia - she&#x27;s an author and a political commentator?

Good chance of it being Arianna Huffington.

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.

Why would you think Marissa would be a good fit?

No, her name is associated with decline. I think a woman CEO is likely, but it doesn&#x27;t have to be from inside tech. I bet on Indra Nooyi.

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&#x27;re going to choose the next CEO from within the company.

I don&#x27;t think he was or could be fired, I think he lost support of the major investors, and decided to resign as requested.

But then he probably would have a hard time raising more money.

&gt;&gt; The board lacked the power to fire himThat sounded right, but I was curious where that gets quantified. You can find the information in Uber&#x27;s Articles of Incorporation. Not sure if this is the most recent copy, but here&#x27;s a version from 2013...<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;orfe.princeton.edu&#x2F;~alaink&#x2F;SmartDrivingCars&#x2F;PDFs&#x2F;UberTechnologiesCertInc.PDF" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;orfe.princeton.edu&#x2F;~alaink&#x2F;SmartDrivingCars&#x2F;PDFs&#x2F;Uber...</a>The stuff about voting rights and board members starts on page 16.

If Camp, Graves, Gurley, Wei, al-Rumayyan, and Huffington all wanted Travis gone, explain the mechanism he can stop that for me please.

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.

No, he definitely had and still has a controlling vote on the board. The group of investors representing 40% of the company&#x27;s ownership has more than enough financial leverage to force his hand, by threatening to close their purses for the next funding round.

Founder CEO&#x27;s do not resign, they are fired.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&#x27;s no way Travis walks away because of this investor letter. It&#x27;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&#x27;t remove investors&#x27; 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&#x27;t big players. Hundreds would take their place immediately given the chance.

Yeah. Also don&#x27;t ask new employees for sex on their first day. Repeatedly.

Amazing the internet can empower an individual blog post to force the previously most formidable startup&#x27;s CEO to resign.Fear this inter connected world. Fear the power of language.

lol what the fuck is going on with this company?  Unbelievable amount of drama, I don&#x27;t know how any employees can do any work at this point.

Haven&#x27;t heard this adage before bit it seems appropriate for the situation. Good one.

Kalanick&#x27;s brohaviour has nothing to do with economic success. You absolutely do not need to harass people sexually to be successful.

Or as they say, &quot;what got you here won&#x27;t get you there&quot;

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&#x27;t think we can really value Uber at $70B; that&#x27;s the headline number for investors getting preferred shares. My main point is that Uber&#x27;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&#x27;t believe Uber has that strong a moat today, and the leaked numbers imply losses left and right.

As the adage goes, sometimes the startup CEO for the first $70 billion, is not the same as for the next $70 billion.

More matured and seasoned executive? Kalanick is 40, has star experience like almost nobody in tech business... I&#x27;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&#x27;t be the next Google, Amazon or Facebook (all led by founder CEOs), that&#x27;s for sure.

Well this comes as a big surprise. I just thought that he&#x27;d be taking a break.  I also think that he wasn&#x27;t forced to resign as much as he thought it&#x27;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.

No they effectively euthanized a pet for making a mess on the rug- after they had already scolded it and put it outside.

It comes down to conviction and courage to follow through. I find it curious that just when he&#x27;s out, one of the things that he&#x27;d fought against for so long has been done i.e. tipping.The reason it&#x27;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&#x27;s possibly inexplicable to them. They just like it. Travis and his team have created this experience.If there&#x27;s no courage and conviction, then Uber becomes indistinguishable from Lyft. I honestly don&#x27;t think the next CEO will have as much courage to say something like, &#x27;we know automation is coming and we have to be on top of it regardless of any negative feedback. If we don&#x27;t, it won&#x27;t matter because someone will do it anyway...&#x27;Time will tell and I think it will tell the same story I&#x27;ve told here.

I don&#x27;t think Uber can go much lower, negativity around it was simply overwhelming. Desperate times require desperate measurements - kicking CEO is like saying: &quot;ok, we did some wrong things - sorry, but we will try to change for a better&quot;.

There&#x27;s no reason to believe that Marissa would be right for any sort of turn around if yahoo is the reference here.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;karaswisher&#x2F;status&#x2F;874696738119888896" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;karaswisher&#x2F;status&#x2F;874696738119888896</a>

If Marissa Mayer is the best female candidate that comes to mind, then that proves the best candidate for the job does not happen to be female.

That indicates how much the tech press love writing about scandals at unicorn startups, and how much some folk enjoy reading them.

Didn&#x27;t Marissa Mayer recently resign from her job, and be available?Even if you want to see Uber dead, there are more humanitarian ways.

Sheryl Sandberg.edit: nevermind, Kara says no. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;karaswisher?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;karaswisher?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwc...</a>

I pretty much can&#x27;t stumble upon an article about Uber that&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;s ethics. If you&#x27;d asked me, I&#x27;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&#x27;t Marissa Mayer recently resign from her job, and be available?

&gt; This might very well be the beginning of Uber&#x27;s demise.Yeah they may start losing money every quarter.

Pushing a founder out is often a bad idea. This might very well be the beginning of Uber&#x27;s demise. This won&#x27;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&#x27;t kicked out, they instead were allowed to come into their own.There&#x27;s a distinct fire that a founder has for the company they founded. You can&#x27;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.

&gt; Uber has less than a year of runway left at their current burn rate.Do you have a source for this?

Uber bought market share by subsidizing rides. That can&#x27;t go on forever. Or much longer, without more capital. They&#x27;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.[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu&#x2F;article&#x2F;growth-vs-profits-ubers-cash-burn-dilemma&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu&#x2F;article&#x2F;growth-vs-profits...</a>

But that&#x27;s nothing new, Uber has been on that shaky ground for months now. &quot;If Kalanick can turn this around&quot; (and his banking on automated to make them viable) were basically the only hail marys the diehard bulls clung to. (Name recognition&#x2F;network effect being useless for obvious reasons that&#x27;ve been covered here in the past) with this, all their eggs are in automated.

&gt; 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&#x27;s death than Kalanick resigning. That, and the valuation being as insane as it is, which is also Kalanick&#x27;s fault, which as you point out, makes it hard to find greater and greater suckers.Perhaps they&#x27;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.

Keep in mind a company can be said to be valued at 100B today and 100M tomorrow yet everyone involved can still turn a profit.What matter are: Cash In Bank, Cash Coming In, Burn Rate.

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&#x27;s on an established service. Sure, they would slow down new features and expansion, but they&#x27;ve have expenses they can cut. And prices they can raise.

So Travis created an insane valuation but the business isn&#x27;t viable? That sounds like bad management to me. They may do much better without him.

But does winning have to come at the cost of basic human dignity and law?

Yeah, but winning meant becoming big while loosing money and saddling company with long term problems. Investors likely care about the money thing more.

&gt; Now I am a bear on Uber.I&#x27;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.

Please don&#x27;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.

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&#x27;s demonstrated unquestionably forceful (and polarizing) leadership that mere &quot;managers&quot; will never be able to replace.I&#x27;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.

“He who can destroy a thing has the real control of it.”– Dune, Frank Herbert

That&#x27;s one probable story.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.

The investors would have had to pay up given size of previous investments. The VCs just timed it &quot;well&quot; with Traviss personal tragedy. &#x2F;smhThey could smell the liquidity ...

That&#x27;s insanity. Why would existing investors refuse to play ball? They&#x27;re basically locked into it. Uber&#x27;s massive valuation is built on its potential and to anything they do that hurts Uber&#x27;s access to capital hurts them.I think they made a huge mistake in pushing Kalanick out, but I&#x27;m an outsider. There is surely something dark at play here, that we don&#x27;t know about.

If the existing investors refused to play ball, they could kill the next round, which really would kill Uber.If there&#x27;s a next round, it will probably involve a big haircut for the early-stage investors.

You guys are talking about Uber dying, but I cannot fathom how this is possible from just the user&#x27;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?

He&#x27;s &quot;Amazon profitable&quot;, Uber has profits if you neglict investments for market dominance.

You don&#x27;t have a company yet if you&#x27;re dependent on future investment.

I dunno, my guess is that he was too set in his ways to make the leap from &quot;CEO of a growth startup&quot; to &quot;CEO of a mature company&quot;.If you look at founder&#x2F;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&#x27;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&#x27;t think Kalanick is that guy, and I think the board finally convinced him of that. But if I was an investor, I&#x27;d still be happy to listen to his next startup pitch...

Given K ruthless record I&#x27;d say he bailed before the crack more than stepped down to see it flourish.Would wait to see what&#x27;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.

Can you explain how these large companies operate, explained like I&#x27;m a golden retriever?How does a company so big not make a profit&#x2F;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&#x27;t they just switch to &quot;profit mode&quot;?If there is no &quot;profit mode&quot; ... then why are people investing in the first place?

How much interest does he actually control right now?

You&#x27;re right, but I think that&#x27;s exactly how&#x2F;why Uber&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;t really own your company if you&#x27;re dependent on future investment.No matter what the cap table says, if you&#x27;re not profitable, it&#x27;s not really yours yet.

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&#x27;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.

Uber hasn&#x27;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.[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nakedcapitalism.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;11&#x2F;can-uber-ever-deliver-part-one-understanding-ubers-bleak-operating-economics.html#_edn4" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nakedcapitalism.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;11&#x2F;can-uber-ever-deliver...</a>

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.

Yes, they can cut their burn rate.But if they cut it too much, they&#x27;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&#x27;t going to be generating billions in profit. So they won&#x27;t be worth $70 billion.

&gt; and 95% of their drivers left, then 5% of their drivers would remain and they would be profitable... where does the &quot;killing&quot; of Uber occur?People will stop using Uber if the wait times get really long, which they will if most of the drivers leave.

can&#x27;t they just cut their burn rate? I mean it&#x27;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&#x27;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 &quot;killing&quot; 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 &quot;dead&quot;?[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;yahoo-market-cap-over-time-2016-7" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;yahoo-market-cap-over-time-20...</a>

Almost exactly the same, came to mind when I read that also.I suppose there&#x27;s some tipping point of &quot;very valuable&quot; and &quot;not that badly behaved&quot; 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 &quot;dealing with this person&quot; bonus (see: Steve Jobs, again).

Though not yet proven, wasn&#x27;t a similar logic used by HR (or higher management) to justify not taking action against &quot;star performers&quot; for their transgressions?

unless uber&#x27;s logistics is better than amazon&#x27;s (spoiler: they&#x27;re not) uber is only valuable as a brand to amazon. brand probably doesn&#x27;t move the needle for delivering groceries

I&#x27;d prefer Apple to buy Uber as a $AAPL shareholder... Nevermind this is all nonsense.

Amazon already has Flex. Source: I&#x27;m a software engineer in that team. Uber is way too expensive at this point.

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.

This seems like the obvious rebuttal. Kalanick could have resisted any simple vote to remove, so this isn&#x27;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).

Alternate take (not originally mine): the bad state of Uber&#x27;s financials is the cause of Kalanick&#x27;s ousting. If the company had a longer runway, or wasn&#x27;t facing the prospect of a down-round, he could have gotten away with anything.

&gt; This may kill Uber.Counterpoint: businesses in good shape don&#x27;t just drop CEOs. This move might just help it die slower.

Uber needs the network effect. Lower usage means fewer uber drivers, which means it&#x27;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.

Transportation is a very substitutable good. Uber doubles prices, they lose more than half their business, total effect on revenue is negative.

I hear all this doom &amp; gloom, but could Uber not just... raise prices? Sure, they would lose a lot of customers, but they would stay alive.How could Uber, barring wholly incompetent leadership, completely implode?

Kalanick has stated publicly that he has not sold a single share - so he has actually taken no money off the table whatsoever.

I&#x27;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&#x27;t motivated enough to fight these investors and is willing to let them burn the company to the ground.  I wouldn&#x27;t go as far as to say he doesn&#x27;t care anymore, but being forced out of your job and the potential evaporation of billions in paper wealth isn&#x27;t such a catastrophe if you already have enough money for several lifetimes in the bank.

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&#x2F;10th of what they raised money at. Time will tell.It&#x27;s a bad time for Travis to be handing over the reigns because he clearly hasn&#x27;t built a command team to takeover and the fraternity atmosphere is toxic enough that as these new leaders step in I&#x27;m afraid the middle management will view them as &quot;illegitimate&quot; 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&#x27;s a gamble.

&gt; I don&#x27;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&#x27;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.

&gt;but it pretty much sold by itselfIt&#x27;s called execution...

&gt; it pretty much sold by itself -- similar to how Zuckerberg created Facebook, which sold by itself.Haha don&#x27;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.

My comment that Kalanick didn&#x27;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&#x27;s success to Facebook was because demand for the product was so great, it was viral. It&#x27;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.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.slideshare.net&#x2F;iammutex&#x2F;scaling-instagram" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.slideshare.net&#x2F;iammutex&#x2F;scaling-instagram</a>

Facebook had a major ace in the hole by starting at Harvard. That&#x27;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&#x27;ve made for years, I&#x27;m happy to see that I&#x27;m not the only one -- danah boyd has mentioned it several times as well.I&#x27;m not saying Zuck didn&#x27;t execute well -- the advantage still could have been blown (and I&#x27;ve only just learnt of a similar network started IIRC at Columbia University which didn&#x27;t go as well). But for all the things Zuck can claim, building Harvard&#x27;s social appeal is not one of them.

&gt; Kalanick is a jerk, but he created that insane valuation.I don&#x27;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&#x27;m very optimistic about this change. To me, Kalanick, and the culture he bread, were toxic to Uber.I&#x27;m reminded of how Microsoft&#x27;s share price jumped by 12% the day Steve Ballmer&#x27;s retirement plans were announced. Microsoft has been on a major run ever since. Let&#x27;s hope that we see something similar here.

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&#x27;re going broke in 2018. (That &quot;undisclosed amount&quot; in 2017 isn&#x27;t a significant investment on Uber&#x27;s scale.)IPO? No way. They&#x27;d have to publish audited numbers. What&#x27;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] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.crunchbase.com&#x2F;organization&#x2F;uber&#x2F;funding-rounds" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.crunchbase.com&#x2F;organization&#x2F;uber&#x2F;funding-rounds</a>
[2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;07&#x2F;07&#x2F;new-reports-confirm-1-15b-leveraged-loan-raised-by-uber-at-5&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2016&#x2F;07&#x2F;07&#x2F;new-reports-confirm-1-15b-...</a>

Uber Founder Travis Kalanick Resigns as C.E.O.