UBER’S NEW CEO SEARCH THE LEAST OF ITS WORRIES
Eroding brand image, business model are just tip of the iceberg
Want to run Uber? You’d better have a steel constitution for cleaning up cultural rot and the insight to make the leaky business profitable.
As the ride-hailing start-up gets set to replace co-founder and chief executive Travis Kalanick, who resigned late Tuesday after a group of investor firms pushed him to quit, it’s on the hunt for a change agent who can revamp a company riddled with uncertainty and still hasn’t passed one of the biggest tests of a start-up — its IPO. Among the issues:
Whether Kalanick, who remains on the board with powerful voting shares, is truly out of the picture.
How entrenched its cultural problems are. They range from a sexist work environment to strategic practices that sometimes skirt the law. Uber has many top positions to fill, including president, COO and CFO, meaning big leadership holes at a company with 12,000 employees.
And perhaps most significantly is the tenuous ride-hailing business model. It relies heavily on raised capital to keep fares artificially low. Uber and Lyft both are ploughing money into selfdriving cars, but it remains to be seen when that cost-saving tech will fully come on line.
Raising the urgency: Its market share has slipped to rival Lyft and its image is tarnished with riders.
“It’s surprising how incomplete the messaging is from (Uber’s) board, ranging from Kalanick’s exact role to who they’ve retained to conduct the CEO search,” says Jason Schloetzer, a corporate governance expert and professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. “The fact that so much wasn’t said reveals the continued instability at the highest levels of Uber.”
Candidates for this challenging but potentially lucrative CEO post — Uber has been valued at upward of $70 billion — are at this point just rumored.
A Fox Business report citing unnamed sources mentioned two potential COO candidates, Thomas Staggs, the former Walt Disney COO, and Karenann Terrell, former chief information officer of Walmart.
Another buzzy Silicon Valley name is Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, whose operations acumen and cultural imprimatur could serve Uber well. But she is unlikely to leave the social networking company if offered the role, according to sources close to Sandberg.