Really? Travis built Uber from the ground up. Maybe you should build a billion dollar company before saying he is "clearly incompetent"? Because it's easy to "clearly" dismiss something from an ivory tower.
There is a great Warren Buffett quote, "I try to buy stock in businesses that are so wonderful that an idiot can run them. Because sooner or later, one will."
Uber is a potentially wonderful business. The business model is so wonderful Travis was able to raise funds almost instantly. He deserves credit for recognizing that, pursuing the idea and building it quickly.
But while Uber has raised enormous amounts of investment, and used it to grow incredibly rapidly, it's never come close to making money. And worse, as it's grown management decisions have repeatedly damaged it. Given billions of dollars, anyone can hire tens of thousands of people and expand world-wide. Running a large organization so it protects the value that's already been created is a skill Travis clearly lacks.
The examples are so numerous it's hard to pick the worst. But clearly his leadership, especially his mantra of "always be hustling" led subordinates to constantly cross lines that gained Uber very little at the cost of great risk. That's terrible leadership.
His lack of focus has saddled Uber with many dozens of side businesses that suck resources and attention from their #1 and only important task, building Uber out world-wide. UberEats?
Even the autonomous car effort was dumb. Autonomous cars are coming at some point, and they will be fully available for purchase when Uber needs them. What's far more important is building the Uber brand so it's on everyones devices and is their first choice for summoning a ride. Autonomous competitors will have to surmount that huge obstacle to even have a chance to chip away at Uber's lead.
Uber is going to win, it's almost predestined at this point given it's enormous funding and market penetration advantage. The only way it can fail is if governments are convinced it should be reined in, and Kalanick's entire leadership has generated awful PR and made that possibility far more real than it ever should be. They continuously damage the one thing they are tasked with building, the Uber brand.
How can that be regarded as anything but incredibly incompetent?
If you are 100% sure he is an "incredibly incompetent" founder, that must mean you have extensive training in knowing what it takes to be a good founder. How many billion dollar companies have you built? Because you sound like you know exactly what "competence" is for founders of billion dollar companies. You must have built many yourself, and experienced all the untold pains and frustrations that no one hears about. That's why you are in a position to judge Travis as "incredibly incompetent", right?
Lord, you are really married to the "how many billion dollar companies have you built?" straw man.
I've only built one $100M company (founded three VC backed startups that were valued at over $10M), does that make me unqualified or qualified? Travis has built a billion dollar company, but not yet made it successful, not only is Uber is hemorrhaging money but he was forced to resign out of fear his presence would queer their next round they'll desperately need.
My companies made it to profitability. So does that make me even more qualified than him?
When you are CEO, your job is to keep everyone focused on their jobs while you are focused on the big picture. You are allocating resources to increase the companies value, while also minimizing the biggest risks to that value.
When you are already the market leader, and already have billions in funding, you have created lots of value, and have minimized the risk of running out of cash before you're done building out your market. So what other risks do you have? Governmental regulation, brand damage, etc, hurting your growth and costing you installed base.
Travis led by telling people to take risks, to cut corners. The results were lots of damage to the brand and emboldening opponents who could push for government regulation.
Go through some examples
1) Threatening to surveil some inconsequential twit at Pando Daily so it could blow up into a big story about creepy Uber. Like Trump Administration level idiocy.
2) An HR staff that hid complaints of harassment to protect key engineers. When you have $7B in funding and a massive lead in app installs worldwide, no engineer is key, your brand is key.
3) Numerous instances of showing they can surveil people they don't like by tracking their uber rides.
4) He also distracted his teams, they have close to 100 different side businesses they've launched over the last few years, many of which have nothing to do with making the main Uber service you've been funded to build any better.
5) The Waymo suit. Autonomous cars right now a distraction, when they are finally ready they'll be freely available. The company with the largest market share and best brand should be able to easily adopt them. Travis poured a ton of resources into this acquisition and hired a guy who took the 5th amendment when deposed. Either Travis is duplicitous or he's incompetent for spending that much time and money on someone he didn't know was dirty and would possibly cost them an IP theft lawsuit.
6) Yelling at an Uber driver.
7) etc, etc, so many more examples in the same vein.
All of these hurt the brand, hurt the growth, hurt the installed base. It's his #1 priority to build all of those, and make Uber a service people are happy to have on their phones. Yet Uber is constantly in the news because of brand damaging behavior. Is your contention that because someone arbitrarily gave him a valuation over $1B that all this was good for Uber and he has some secret plan to generate horrible PR to improve the business?
Uber is a potentially wonderful business. The business model is so wonderful Travis was able to raise funds almost instantly. He deserves credit for recognizing that, pursuing the idea and building it quickly.
But while Uber has raised enormous amounts of investment, and used it to grow incredibly rapidly, it's never come close to making money. And worse, as it's grown management decisions have repeatedly damaged it. Given billions of dollars, anyone can hire tens of thousands of people and expand world-wide. Running a large organization so it protects the value that's already been created is a skill Travis clearly lacks.
The examples are so numerous it's hard to pick the worst. But clearly his leadership, especially his mantra of "always be hustling" led subordinates to constantly cross lines that gained Uber very little at the cost of great risk. That's terrible leadership.
His lack of focus has saddled Uber with many dozens of side businesses that suck resources and attention from their #1 and only important task, building Uber out world-wide. UberEats?
Even the autonomous car effort was dumb. Autonomous cars are coming at some point, and they will be fully available for purchase when Uber needs them. What's far more important is building the Uber brand so it's on everyones devices and is their first choice for summoning a ride. Autonomous competitors will have to surmount that huge obstacle to even have a chance to chip away at Uber's lead.
Uber is going to win, it's almost predestined at this point given it's enormous funding and market penetration advantage. The only way it can fail is if governments are convinced it should be reined in, and Kalanick's entire leadership has generated awful PR and made that possibility far more real than it ever should be. They continuously damage the one thing they are tasked with building, the Uber brand.
How can that be regarded as anything but incredibly incompetent?