When the directors of Uber ousted its CEO and cofounder, Travis Kalanick, in June 2017, the move was paradoxically both long overdue and somewhat unexpected. For months Kalanick and the company had suffered a string of scandals, any one of which might have undone a typical chief executive. A female engineer had posted a long public account of rampant sexual harassment and the company’s “bro culture,” to which Uber’s HR department had turned a blind eye. The company had been caught ordering and canceling rides from its competitor Lyft, poaching Lyft’s drivers, and using software to surreptitiously track its own customers even if they closed the Uber app. During years of jousting with local taxi authorities over the legality of its car service, Uber had been discovered using a tool called Greyball that disguised the location of its cars and showed a fake version of the app to city officials. Kalanick himself was captured on video condescendingly berating an Uber driver who complained about falling fares.
When Founders Go Too Far
Silicon Valley venture capitalists used to routinely oust start-up founders—who were viewed as green and unskilled—as part of the process leading to an IPO. The author, an adjunct professor at Stanford and a well-known entrepreneurship thinker, describes how VCs gradually came to see founders not as a problem that needed to be solved but as a valuable asset that needed to be retained. In July 2009, when Mark Andreessen cofounded the VC firm Andreessen Horowitz with Ben Horowitz, it was with a key philosophical difference from rival firms: a “founder friendly” focus. Blank argues that this trend has gone too far, and the situation at Uber is just the most obvious example of that. He offers prescriptions for how to begin correcting this power imbalance.
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