| 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? |