While her post did send shockwaves inside Uber and the Silicon Valley at large, I think, it was Mr. Kalanick's incriminating involvement in the Waymo - Uber lawsuit that ultimately sunk Mr. Kalanick. He simply had to go.
Susan's a great mind and I have had the pleasure of chatting with her in person, but there is definitely some historical revisionism going on here.
Travis created a bad Uber culture in general. He was done in not by Fowler specifically but the fruits of his failures as a leader blossoming into several parallel disasters of which Waymo was probably the major major fiasco of the bunch.
Pretty sure VCs smelling blood in the water is what took Kalachik down. Consequences of denying company of its do founder were obviously overlooked. Overall, if you read something by Susan Fowler, read her book instead
The metaphor that I’ve used for a lot of things (notably “viral content”) and that was first suggested by I believe MEJ Newman (complex graph theory) is, paraphrasing: It’s like measuring the size of the match to predict the size of the forest fire.
Susan’s blog was a match; internal issues (entitlement that made something like Levandowsky thinkable) and the tension they created (among the dwindling number of female employees for instance) was the increasingly dry underwood. I suspect that, a year later, the same blog post would have had no echo because all the female engineers would have had left at that point.
That is kind of how I remember it happening. After the revelations in the blog, there was a lot of talk and discussion here and other sites. Some people were fired then.
But only after Waymo became involved, there were rumors of the board moving to push him out.
It would have been nice if her allegations brought him down, but sadly it doesn't seem that way. In other words until investors saw their money potentially going down the drain in a lawsuit with Google, they kind of looked the other way.
Freada & Mitch Kapor (early Uber investors) published their blog post a few days after the Waymo lawsuit was filed. The lawsuit was filed within a week of Fowler's blog post being published. The Kapors' letter was exclusively focused on Kalanick's company culture, public conduct, and gross mismanagement of sexual harassment in Uber.
The Benchmark lawsuit, brought in April, mentions the failure of Kalanick to disclose to the board the risks of the Otto acquisition as the second item of six grievances.
My opinion is that it is unnecessarily cynical to assume that investors didn't care about the company's tolerance of sexual harassment and Kalanick's poor behavior, especially since it was central to their public repudiation of Kalanick.
Travis created a bad Uber culture in general. He was done in not by Fowler specifically but the fruits of his failures as a leader blossoming into several parallel disasters of which Waymo was probably the major major fiasco of the bunch.