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by penguinfeet 3408 days ago
I think half of these were done out of incompetence, not maliciousness:

* Threatening to dig up dirt: You try working hard on a product and listening to reporters bash you every day of the week, sometimes blatantly making things up. I don't condone the exec's actions, but Sarah Lacy doesn't exactly have the greatest reputation.

* God mode - it's arguably what made Uber. There was initially a lack of restraint on its use, but I've heard of people getting fired for its misuse well before it was public.

* The blog post was very stupid.

* The sexism is quite rampant across all of SV.

* The subprime loans were pure incompetence: it got fixed. Nowadays it's easier to walk away from the loan than at any other dealership.

* The user tracking I heard was to prevent fraud - there's close to $1 million being taken by fraudsters per week. Fraudsters have also physically assaulted employees.

* They investigated a lawsuit being filed because it was targeted specifically at Kalanick, and their security team deemed it a possible threat. The guy happened to be ex-CIA in his previous career.

2 comments

I have never in 30 years in the Bay Area seen the kind of sexism reported recently about Uber. The fact that your only response to it is to claim everybody does it just reinforces the allegations against Uber.
For a company with a billion-dollar valuation, incompetence of that magnitude has a quality all its own. These sound like pretty flimsy excuses for a company that has enough cash on hand to buy competence in all these areas.
Exactly - which is what they did