So Travis Kalanick is out at Uber. He resigned as CEO last Wednesday night, June 21st, after five of the company's big investors flew out to Chicago (where he was actually in the middle of interviewing COO candidates, of all things) and handed him a letter called "Moving Uber Forward" that basically said: step down or we make this ugly. He's still on the board. Nobody's been named to replace him yet, it's apparently being run by a committee of 14 executives for now, which sounds about as functional as it sounds.
I want to talk about this because I keep going back and forth on how I actually feel about it, and I don't think "good riddance" quite covers it.
Here's the thing that's been sitting with me: this all happened about three weeks after his mother died. Bonnie Kalanick was killed in a boating accident on Pyramid Lake in Nevada in late May, his dad was hurt too. He took an indefinite leave from Uber less than two weeks after that, right when the Eric Holder report on Uber's workplace culture came out (that's the investigation that got triggered back in February after the Susan Fowler blog post about sexual harassment and HR basically shrugging). The report recommended stripping a bunch of his responsibilities. So you've got a guy burying his mother while his own board is reading him a 13-point list of everything he's doing wrong as a manager, in public, in the press. I'm not defending the guy or the culture he built. But I don't think you can talk about the timeline here without noticing how brutal it was on a personal level too.
And then, separately, there's just the plain fact that this company deserved the reckoning. I deleted the Uber app back in January during the whole #DeleteUber thing, when the JFK taxi strike happened during the travel ban protests and Uber turned off surge pricing at the airport in a way that looked a lot like strikebreaking whether that was the intent or not. I reinstalled it about six weeks later because Lyft coverage in my area is spotty and I needed a ride to the airport at 5am on a random Tuesday and didn't want to deal with calling a cab company that puts you on hold for twenty minutes. So that's where I'm at. Philosophically annoyed, practically still a customer. Not proud of it, just being honest.
What strikes me most is how much of this played out through leaked documents and reporter access rather than anything Uber chose to put out itself. The Holder report wasn't published in full, we mostly know what's in it from summaries and leaks to the New York Times and Recode. The investor letter leaked within hours. Kalanick's own resignation statement was carefully lawyered ("I love Uber more than anything in the world and at this difficult moment in my personal life I have accepted the investors request to step aside") which reads exactly like what it is, a statement written by people managing liability, not a guy speaking his mind.
I don't have a tidy take on whether Silicon Valley "learned its lesson" here, because I've watched enough of these cycles to know the lesson rarely sticks past the news cycle that taught it. Founders get forced out, the company promises a culture reset, six months later there's a new headline about the same underlying rot somewhere else in the org chart. Maybe Uber's different this time because the financial numbers were actually bad too (they lost something like $700 million in Q1 alone), and boards move faster when the money's the problem, not just the ethics. Cynical, but that's been my experience watching this stuff for going on six years on this blog now.
Anyway. No new CEO named as of me writing this, so we'll see who they land on. My money's on someone boring and operational, the anti-Kalanick, somebody whose job is to make Wall Street comfortable again before the IPO conversations get serious. We'll find out soon enough I guess.