Hey Backchannelers, it’s Jessi. As I watched Uber’s pugnacious CEO get called out for being rude to a driver earlier this week, I thought back to the first time I wrote about him, in 2013. A week before publication, he called my cell. “What I’m interested in is a story that is truth,” he said. His voice was rushed and breathy; somewhere on another coast, I could hear him pacing. “There’s what the media writes. There’s what the taxi lobby says. There are plenty of people who have bad things to say, and all that’s fine. You don’t have to be nice. But I want a story that’s truth.”
It was early fall, days before news leaked that Uber would receive $258 million in funding from private equity firm TPG Capital and Google, valuing it at close to $3.4 billion. (That seemed monumental at the time.) We were having a disagreement. I planned to write about him. He wasn’t into it. “How are you going to get the truth?” he asked. “I told everyone I know not to talk to you.”
That was quintessential Travis Kalanick circa 2013. Belligerent, headstrong. He thought he could bully me into postponing my efforts by calling me directly and telling me to knock off the reporting. Though it didn’t work in the case of my story, that confrontational style drove Uber’s successful march into market after market in the years that followed. Today the company is valued at $68 billion, making it the world’s most valuable private company.
Even then, you had to wonder: Would Kalanick’s bellicose style be his undoing? I did write the piece, which ran in Fortune, and I ended it with a question: Kalanick has built his reputation around the promise of being anti-establishment. What happens when Uber becomes the establishment? A more mature company may eventually need a less iconoclastic CEO.
This is the year Kalanick’s reputation has caught up with him. He has come under fire for agreeing to serve on a presidential advisory council (he stepped down), promoting a misogynistic internal culture in which a female employee says her complaints of harassment went unaddressed, and berating a driver. And that’s just in the last month. Though each of these events is problematic, taken in isolation in the context of another company, each would be surmountable. Not at Uber, however, because Kalanick has spent eight years honing this bro-brand. That’s why it’s time for him to step aside as CEO.
This is an extreme measure, but Uber is facing an extreme situation. If the company doesn’t act forcefully, it will not be able to recruit talent or work productively with regulators. And so far, every time the company has had a similar issue, it has not gone far enough to establish itself as a business of strong moral standing. In 2014, when Emil Michael made threatening comments about prying into journalists’ lives, Kalanick should have fired him; instead, he let it go. In 2016, when companies released their annual diversity reports, Kalanick should have followed suit; he did not. When former engineer Susan Fowler published her blog post on February 19th, Uber should have hired outside investigators; instead, it appointed a board member (Arianna Huffington) and an individual who had been lobbying on behalf of Uber in D.C. since June (Eric Holder). Against this backdrop, Travis has lost credibility with his employees, drivers, customers, and investors. His copious mea culpas sound plastic.
It’s not too late for Uber to reinvent itself as the mature, trustworthy transportation network its investors expect it to be. Massive culture shift is possible; just look at the way Microsoft transformed into a more collaborative company under Satya Nadella’s leadership. But it’s hard for a leader to shift a culture once it has been established, especially a culture that has served certain aspects of Uber’s aggressive conquer-the-world strategy well. To mature as a company and impress upon its stakeholders that it is trustworthy and inclusive, Uber needs a new face at the top — preferably someone who never joked to a journalist about a women-on-demand service called Boob-er.
