On Tuesday evening, Travis Kalanick, a co-founder of Uber, resigned from his post as chief executive, apparently under intense pressure from the company’s major shareholders. Kalanick, whose public persona has been variously characterized as aggressive, juvenile, and brash, is both reviled and beloved in Silicon Valley. Depending on whom you ask, he’s either the tech industry’s best representative––a successful, visionary entrepreneur––or its very worst. On Wednesday morning, Bill Gurley, one of the board members who pushed for Kalanick’s ouster, tweeted that there would be “many pages in the history books” dedicated to Kalanick, adding that “very few entrepreneurs have had such a lasting impact on the world.” (Uber, which is only eight years old, is privately held and not yet profitable.)
Kalanick’s resignation came on the heels of a series of public disgraces, including an internal sexual-harassment investigation, the departure of several top executives, and a federal inquiry into Greyball, a tool built by Uber engineers in part to evade the scrutiny of law enforcement—all of which was preceded by the publication of an essay by Susan Fowler, a former Uber software engineer, which meticulously documented her experience of gender discrimination at the company. (At Longreads, Danielle Tcholakian has maintained a helpful time line.) Earlier this month, Kalanick’s mother, Bonnie, was killed in a boating accident, prompting him to announce, on June 13th, that he would take an indefinite leave of absence. “If we are going to work on Uber 2.0,” Kalanick wrote in an e-mail to his staff, “I also need to work on Travis 2.0 to become the leader that this company needs and that you deserve.”
What, exactly, will Uber 2.0 look like now? The company has the opportunity to rebuild its image and culture, and has already made two strategic hires: Frances Frei, a Harvard Business School professor, as the senior vice-president of leadership and strategy, and Bozoma Saint John, a well-regarded marketing executive at Apple Music, as the chief brand officer. The report that came out of the sexual-harassment investigation offers some further suggestions, among them installing an independent chairperson of the board and creating an oversight committee; revamping the process by which employees are evaluated on their performance and moved around at the company; establishing a formal complaint channel; limiting alcohol and controlled substances at company events; and “reformatting” Uber’s fourteen cultural values, replacing tenets such as “Always Be Hustlin’ ” and “Meritocracy and Toe-Stepping” with a renewed emphasis on diversity and inclusion.
The report’s recommendations, if followed in detail, would essentially lead to an overhaul of Uber’s cultural infrastructure. Nonetheless, Kalanick, who retains his seat on the board of directors, will likely continue to exert influence on the company that was, arguably, built in his image. Thuan Pham, who, as Uber’s chief technology officer, leads the company’s engineering division—which is described in Fowler’s essay as ignoring discrimination issues––remains at the company, too. Some Uber employees seem resistant to the idea of any 2.0 at all: a petition demanding that Kalanick be reinstated is reportedly circulating.
In an editorial published on Wednesday, the Times described Uber as “a creature of a technology industry that is still struggling to graduate from adolescence to adulthood.” Uber, which was founded in 2009, is a fairly young company, but many of its investors and board members have worked in the tech industry for decades. To call them seasoned professionals would be an understatement. (Kalanick, who is forty, is a serial entrepreneur.) The industry isn’t kicking and screaming through adolescence; it’s already well into adulthood.
The trouble is how it got there. Startups are often shaped by the values of venture capital: speed, growth, rapid returns. These values inform business practices and company culture, and the same qualities that make a workplace exciting and engaging can also turn a company into a cautionary tale. In a Medium post published earlier this week, Garrett Camp, Uber’s other co-founder, acknowledged that the company’s aggressive growth had been to the detriment of its culture. “I believe that our business can have 10x the impact it has today — once we have additional leadership and training in place, and evolve our culture to be more inclusive and respectful,” Camp wrote. Uber isn’t alone. In the past few years, a handful of former industry darlings––Theranos, Zenefits, Hampton Creek––have floundered and self-sabotaged in an effort to scale up.
Among my acquaintances in the tech industry, there’s abundant Schadenfreude about Uber’s fall from grace, but also a sense of uneasiness. The company is like the over-served cousin at the family wedding, the one who does the Running Man and sets fire to the centerpieces—not the representative you’d choose, but your shared DNA is undeniable. Uber isn’t the only tech company with an aggressive culture, structuralized sexism, potentially unethical business practices, and overlooked H.R. processes, just as tech isn’t the only industry in which these problems are pervasive. While it’s undoubtedly gratifying to see Silicon Valley’s more toxic qualities exposed and condemned for all to see, daylight alone isn’t enough to dispel them. To build a sustainable business, Uber 2.0 will likely continue to iterate on its culture, workforce, and business model. It may even draw on some of the other values—experimentation, creativity, collaboration—that characterize Silicon Valley. It may be years before Uber 2.0 is realized. Meaningful change, at scale, takes time.
