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by amrrs 3232 days ago
Thanks AMA #1:

Did Kalanick really set up and encourage a bro Culture? Did he respect fellow employees as humans or was just running behind business success?

2 comments

Uber employee and can answer this:

Travis had a deep empathy for the challenges of building successful products, and would offer tremendous grace and thoughtful advice to his team solving problems in the trenches. When projects went sideways, and we presented numbers that were less than stellar, Travis was both empathetic and optimistic while offering actionable guidance and a path forward.

"Bro culture" is a loaded term and the wrong one to describe the environment Travis cultivated. He had tremendous focus on the problems at hand and pushed his team to operate with a sense of urgency to solve them. If anything I think he cared too much about each individual problem, which propelled his teams forward but sometimes left him too deep in the details of his business rather than focusing on the big picture.

Sounds like the most diplomatic way to describe a "do it yesterday" micromanager, or, at the very least, a nondelegating CEO (often seen in family businesses).
This... doesn't answer the question?
Former Uber employee here.

> Did Kalanick really set up and encourage a bro Culture?

No, not at all. He's a grown man and unbelievably serious about Uber.

> Did he respect fellow employees as humans

Yes. Always.

> or was just running behind business success?

I don't know what this means, but Travis Kalanick is absolutely the main reason that Uber has grown faster than almost any other company in history.