Quote of the Day

One day we will look back at what will hopefully be the smouldering wreckage of Kalanick’s career and ask how a person so lacking in basic human and corporate ethics was allowed to run a company for so long.

—Kadhim Shubber at the Financial Times

It looks like the story that Travis Kalanick either tacitly or actively approved the theft of medical records of a rape victim by one of his executives in an apparent attempt to discredit her account.

It should be noted that the Uber driver who raped her had a record before he began driving, and was convicted of the rape and sentenced to life in prison.

Of course, we've know what Kalanick was ever since he embezzled tax withheld from employee paychecks to keep  an earlier startup of his afload.  (Why didn't he go to jail?)

It looks like this might finally catch up with him though, given that the Board of Directors has fired his chief lieutenant and put him on an indefinite leave of absence.

They are promising to fix the psychopathic culture of the company, but given that a member of the all hands meeting at which the changes were announced, a board member made a blatantly sexist joke, I'm not inclined to believe that there will actually be any change.

Uber is not a company which has a cancer in its culture, it is a company where cancer IS its culture.  (My opinion is shared by many current and former Uber employees)

The thing is that sh%$ flows downhill, and not only has this amoral culture thoroughly captured the executive suite, it has worked its way down to the drivers.

Case in point: Drivers has taken to colluding to trigger surge pricing by simultaneously logging out of their apps in order to stick it to "The Man", which conveniently ignores the fact that this actually increases Uber profits by screwing the customers.

As a final note, read Paul Carr's essay on this.  It is brilliant.