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His example reverberated across Silicon Valley. Calling your company “the Uber of X,” after all, doesn’t just describe an app that instantly delivers a real-world service; “Uberizing” a business implies adopting an aggressive approach to scaling and a ruthless approach to the competition. (As one Uber employee wrote online of Kalanick in petitioning for his return, “You’ve launched a thousand of us, your disciples, out into Silicon Valley. Let’s fucking do this. Game on.”) Outside tech, giants of industry from retail to food to health care are racing to Uber-ize themselves before upstarts beat them to it. How, then, could Uber be a mere anomaly?
The red flags had been rising for years. There were Uber’s tactics to undercut rivals and its methods of skirting regulatory scrutiny. There was Kalanick’s brash pursuit of autonomous technology, which led to an intellectual property lawsuit from Alphabet’s self-driving-car unit, Waymo. There was talk of digging up dirt on prying journalists. Despite these controversies, for the most part, Uber kept growing.
It wasn’t until former Uber engineer Susan Fowler’s February 2017 blog post that cries for Kalanick’s resignation gained momentum. Fowler described a toxic workplace, hostile to women and filled with selfaggrandizing employees and permissive managers. The modus operandi was “complete, unrelenting chaos.” In June, after an Uber-commissioned investigation into the matter by former U.S. attorney general Eric Holder found systemic organizational failings, Kalanick stepped down.
Today, it’s impossible not to see shades of Uber in everything from Ellen Pao’s 2015 gender discrimination lawsuit against storied VC firm Kleiner Perkins to the “brogrammer” culture that crippled Zenefits, a once-promising unicorn, last year. This past summer, a string of sexual harassment allegations exposed deep-rooted issues in the venturecapital world.
“I hope we’re at a point in time where everyone doesn’t just want to sweep everything under the rug,” says investor Theresia Gouw of female-led Aspect Ventures. Silicon Valley, though, is insular and guarded. In my reporting, I encountered few people willing to speak openly, let alone critically, about Uber’s troubles. Those who did (most of them, notably, women) argue that there’s an opportunity for course correction right now. It starts by acknowledging that the Valley isn’t yet the utopian meritocracy it strives to be—and that Uber’s errant system exposed some fundamental bugs in the startup economy.
Startup values don’t always scale
A few weeks after Fowler’s blog post, Kalanick held an hour-long discussion on Uber’s values at the company’s Palo Alto office. Talking to a room full of female developers, he called for a reassessment of his company’s core principles and vowed to fix Uber’s problems. “We have cultural values—i’m the author of them—and I think there’s a lot of good in them,” he told the audience. “[But] if they’re not well understood, folks can do things they shouldn’t do.”
Uber is often seen as a company devoid of principles, but Kalanick, in many ways, actually personified some of Silicon Valley’s central tenets, including a reverence for rulebreaking and growth at all costs. In the mid-’90s, Intel’s Andy Grove inspired a decade of entrepreneurs with his pugnacious manifesto, Only the Paranoid Survive, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s creed, “Move fast and break things,” influenced today’s generation of hackers turned CEOS. Y Combinator’s Paul Graham counseled founders in an essay that “the only essential thing is growth,” which should act as a “compass to make almost every decision you face.” Investor Ben Horowitz’s treatise on “wartime CEOS” outlined the battle-hardened characteristics required to overcome existential threats.
Promulgated by the very VCS responsible for making and breaking founders, this type of dogma has seeped into the Valley’s id. From the outset, Kalanick defined Uber’s mission by its pursuit of hypergrowth. Among his foundational tenets: “Always Be Hustlin’ ” and “Toe-stepping,” which promoted a confrontational culture where employees operate at each other’s throats and on the edge of legality. Uber’s values did not include any mention of “teamwork.”
This kind of cultural DNA might have been manageable when Uber was small; as the company grew, it was trouble. “Ask for forgiveness, scale fast, be audacious—generally, these kinds of principles are great,” says Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, CEO of Joyus and founder of the Boardlist, an online network that connects companies with female board candidates. “The issue is what’s missing: the absence of one critical value, which is that people matter.”
In his discussion with female employees back in March, Kalanick declared that Uber needed to transform into a culture where “everyone is accountable for their actions” and embraces “values encouraging good stuff and discouraging bad stuff.” After upending transportation networks across the globe, the leader of the world’s most valuable startup was only just starting to address Uber’s own failings.
The omniscient founder is a dangerous myth
Shortly after Kalanick’s resignation, Mood Rowghani, a partner at Uber investor Kleiner Perkins, came to the defense of not just Kalanick, but entrepreneurs in general: “Founder DNA is a precious asset and cannot be underestimated,” he wrote in
To acknowledge that Uber’s system of accountability failed is to acknowledge that fundamental change is necessary.