I think the moral flexibility of the diaspora and the people who encouraged it for $ would be a way more interesting article.
From the linked article linked about 'Fast':
Earlier this year, NPR reported on how CEO Holland had his share of controversy in Australia prior to starting Fast. Holland’s former startup, Tow.com.au, which aimed to be “the Uber of towing,” failed in what at least one person described as a “disaster.” NPR’s article noted that Holland’s previous venture was embroiled “in a multimillion-dollar billing dispute with the Australian state government over towing and impounding fees that led to the startup’s liquidation in 2018.”
I had lunch with an early Uber employee (male) who told me 'wokeness killed uber'. He said the famous cultural issues "weren't real", an if TK hadn't been ousted they'd have destroyed Lyft completely in a few months.
A couple of months before the self driving car killed a pedestrian in Arizona, a drunk engineer from that team told me 'everybody is lying on their human intervention reports to the state, that's just how the sausage is made'
Late Uber produces seriously impressive technology and mature, reliable services. Early Uber was so errr.. problematic... that I'd be hesitant to wear that as a badge.
Everything Susan Fowler said was verifiable true. Thuan Pham himself confirmed the details in an all-hands. She didn't kill Uber at all. The reaction to it killed Uber. The culture got gutted by incentive changes and turned it into a promo-chasing culture which killed the engineering excellence it once had.
Look at her Wikipedia page. She tried stirring the pot at Penn, Plaid, and PubNub. And then Uber was the jackpot for her. She is clearly one of those people who makes a career out of suing their employers. This type of person is common in California. You can make a lot of money by working for a company, suing them, moving onto the next company, suing them, etc.
The cultural issues were overblown out of proportion with a clear agenda to bring Uber down. The delete Uber campaign was also pre-meditated to malign the company by associating it with trump election.
Yes the beginning was in late January 2017, involving a taxi strike at a NYC area airport and Uber's messaging around continuing to operate to serve the airport and surge pricing. That's how the delete Uber hashtag arose and it just continued with wave after wave of negative stories for the next few months.
The whole way things unfolded subsequently (due to several other pile-ons in following weeks, and eventually TK's ouster in mid 2017) still seems surreal to this day.
(I worked at Uber for ~5 yrs and remember this time period well.)
Nope that was nearly a month after -- toward the end of February as I recall. #DeleteUber started when Uber turned off surge to an airport from a taxi strike. It was headline news already by the end of January: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/31/business/delete-uber.html
And people somehow thought that getting rid of surge temporarily was a bad thing, or using that message to take advantage of the situation. (I don't know exactly what the rationale was, because it still doesn't make sense to me after all these years...)
everybody was lying on their takeover reports. EXCEPT Uber.
Uber was banned from California because they refused to lie, and refused to be made to look stupid compared to the companies who WERE lying, and who have literally decapitated multiple people while their vehicle was in control.
my time with Uber was rocky, and I had many qualms. I left partially because I didn't want to be part of the culture that produced Herzberg's death. but this specific thing is not one they should be criticized for.
the cultural issues were real. that's fair to say.
Now Tesla has decapitated people. Particularly after Elon demanded that they stop using the radar to detect potential collisions. (He said it was too conservative, so they should only apply the brakes when both the camera and the radar detected an object.) The Model S drove under a tractor trailer, sheering off the everything from the bottom of the windshield up, and then continued to drive for quite a distance, until it drove into a ditch.
I think you may have been given an official line. Uber loved claiming Lyft was using its dirty tricks in the early days too, even though Lyft was entirely incapable of that kind of thing
To be fair the laws those regulators were in charge of enforcing were unjust. A victory for modern day civil disobedience, even if it was to make a buck.
A lot was also in a gray area. In fact France ending up (I think very unfairly, but ofc I worked at Uber) passing laws specifically against Uber to make it retroactively illegal. Which basically was a tacit admission that is was OK by the rules initially. Obviously the idea of being able to "hail" a ride -- specific to you -- in near real-time was not really considered around the world when a lot of taxi rules and regulations were done.
So you ended up having insanity, like the necessity for even a black car service to "return to their base" after a ride, for time periods up to 1.5 hrs. Basically trying to nix the notion of efficiency in ridesharing.
We all know that nowadays most of those rules were battled back.
But the taxi industry and regulators had some very crooked ways which were really to the detriment of broader society trying to get places without having their own car.
On the other end you have Uber who passed all the costs onto the driver, subsidized drives through unlimited investor money to crush any potential competition etc.
Not to undermine the good effort to put those data together. But for reasons the author didn't mention she's ex-Uber who founded Fast which was a disaster to put it lightly
Normally I wouldn’t fault someone for trying at a startup and failing, but Fast was an extraordinarily bad situation. They relentlessly hyped the company across social media while it was a disaster behind the scenes.
The employees of Fast got screwed the most. Remember that. They were misled into believing the company was successful when it was famously almost completely devoid of revenue. The founders lied to them.
The data may stand on its own, but I’d be very suspicious of any narratives being pushed by these people. Fast was a disaster, and the money they raised on those lies is included in those graphs.
It's hard - the fast product really required them getting a network-effect and that required a lot of hype.
I don't think it's necessarily a bad pitch, but clearly it was a business that was only ever going to either be wildly-successful or a complete disaster, and nothing in the middle.
Also they were probably way-too-late and stripe were much better positioned.
(And I'm not suggesting that those two scenarios are equally likely - it had probably a 5% payoff chance!).
Another commenter mentions the 'moral flexibility' of Uber. From the featured photo this appears to be another attribute of the diaspora. The business model of Arrived is frankly disgusting.
I highly recommend "Poverty, By America" if you'd like the background for my comment.
When all the single family residential homes are owned by investors, more people are forced into long term rental life who might traditionally be prepared to buy. But the investor speculation drives prices well beyond what working and some middle class earners can afford.
Rents increase bc a return has to be made, and there is no escape. The poor stay poor. The rich get richer.
Disgusting is a matter of opinion but it does seem a zero sun game with a lot of losers.
It pushes up housing prices and decreases supply for low income people and transfers that wealth to already well off people.
As long as the wealthy can keep housing out of reach they can influence the distort the entire market and charge as much as they like. This is why housing is such a ‘good investment’. It’s reverse Robin Hood.
Raising money in a low interest market seems to be the metric of being influential here. It'll be nice to see how these companies are still alive in the next 3-4 years. We can then measure the impact of these companies vs the paypal mafia.
As someone who worked at Uber at this time and a fair amount after it is really funny reading the comment sections on threads like these. I wish we were as comically “morally flexible” (also seems to mean evil for a lot of you) as you think. It would make for a good book.
I’m not arguing as it’s pointless online and with people who get so emotional at Uber. But you can find lots of news pieces that makes every company look bad posting one or several isn’t really saying anything about the employees who worked at the company.
You seem to get defensive. The management deciding to go the illegal route (and yes, "morally flexible" is appropriate) doesn't say anything about you. I just don't understand how you can defend the older management, which seems to be the point of your original comment.
Seriously, dude, the “taxi monopoly” everyone gets on about was in very few markets.
In places like, IDK, Phoenix all you needed to be a taxi was a certified meter, rates posted on the side of your car, a sticker which they gave you when you fulfilled all these requirements and, here’s the big one which allowed Uber/Lyft to undercut everyone, commercial insurance.
If your drivers don’t have to pay for expensive insurance and you can sell your product for under the actual cost it’s no big surprise you can gain a large foothold against the “taxi monopoly”.
Whenever I get back to Phoenix and take a Lyft I always talk to the drivers to see how things are working out for them after the “monopoly” was broken and, from what I can gather, they’re getting paid fewer peanuts than I did driving a cab and have to maintain their vehicles at their own expense. Sure, tell me how “the warranty covers all that”, they aren’t killing their resale value by putting in a million miles and the $0.50 fuel surcharge for a 23 mile trip helps out when gas prices are over $4/gal.
You’re the one who claims to know what they’re talking about yet make zero effort to support your claims.
Honestly, I’ve never heard anyone claim taxi drivers were getting rich but can tell you they weren’t universally getting exploited like the pro-rideshare propaganda was telling you. Back before Uber/Lyft I could work less than half the time, have a roof over my head and food in my belly plus got to spend time doing things I enjoyed like shaving yaks. After, not so much, all the “excess income” got siphoned off and went nowhere because VC money was subsidizing the push to bankrupt the competition.
Only job in my life where I had my income cut (to keep the insurance contracts which were the only thing making us money) and I’m not exactly a young pup.
Walmart (supposedly, no real evidence) does the same thing and everyone complains but some Silicon Valley companies do it and we’re supposed to cheer them on?
You're right. The taxi cab industries was a wealth generator for the drivers. Drivers were spoiled with the industry's magnanimity until Uber destroyed one of the best paying employers in history. It was so sad, and all the taxi customers revolted against Uber when it happened.
> The taxi cab industries was a wealth generator for the drivers.
It literally was…
Maybe not on the scale of “I’m gonna make a wrapper on top of this chatGPT API and be a billionaire” but you could survive with very little effort if that’s your jam.
Because they limit the number of medallions to create artificial scarcity. Meanwhile Uber created hundreds of thousands of jobs throughout the US, millions around the world, because there was demand for cheap ridesharing that was more reliable than the taxi cabs.
AirBnB and Uber were the same company breaking similar local rules.
AirBnB is illegally operating in tons of areas. Knowingly. Systemically.
And yet where is all the negative press?
Don't believe press narratives and try to put everything into context.
You really could make any company look bad or good if you wanted. There are a lot of actors, and a lot of different ways to slice it.
I think Uber and AirBnB were both aggressive, I suggest there should have been more regulatory pushback everywhere, but only for public good as a lot of mayors were just interested in backing this group or that, not really thinking about the true benefits of constituents.
Finally we have to consider the net benefit, and even while I think both companies have overplayed their hands, I do think there's a general benefit. It seems that regulations around Taxis and Hotels were far too onerous, and the surpluses lost to those de facto oligarchic situations were quite a lot. I'm grateful that both those companies shook things up, even at the cost of a bit of shenanigans.
Shenaniganically, I'm just pleased that the rat that scurried across my pillow at midnight in an Airbnb (that the host and company have both decided to continue right on doing nothing new in response to my reporting) decided not to bite me.
People are very positive about AirBnB even where it is a cancer because given the opportunity, most people would jump at the chance to own some rentals and get a part of that action.
There is press about 'illegal AirBnBs' but not attacking Chesky like they attack Travis. I'm not saying it's the 'same situation' at all, but rather, they have a different public brand/image despite a lot of similar business practices.
Lots of early people left since the Travis days. Since then, fixing the reputation damage has been a big focus in the company. Safety center, electric fleet commitments, DEI, Ukraine initiatives, etc, are all newer initiatives in that vein.
"Do the right thing" is now a company core value plastered all over the offices.
Even the "off the shelf stuff doesn't meet our needs" culture alluded in the article has given way to adopting 3rd party solutions more (e.g. Slack replacing uChat, Oracle partnership, etc). Lots of things have changed over the years.
uChat actually saved Uber a lot of money by the way. Slack is way more expensive and it would not meet the requirements of Uber at the time, i.e. anyone being able to chat with anyone (including the famous global Pool Party room with every single employee in it). Also Slack had an issue with Uber's scale, having messaging alerts for services that would not reliably show up that engineering would use to detect outages.
uChat was based on Mattermost as I recall which was open source, and saved Uber several million dollars plus over its lifetime course.
I was not directly involved in its development but I (started and) ran the engineering blog, and also Uber's open source program for a time where this partnership occurred.
It is funny how some of these examples are floating around about build vs buy, but uChat actually was a good deal while it lasted.
Ultimately Uber decided they didn't need everyone talking to each other all at once and so bit the bullet and paid more for Slack.
Mind you, he was a journalist working off of leaks, presumably from disgruntled employees (of which there were many in the high attrition era), and he obviously had a journalitically oriented profit motive of his own.
I love how people always try to run unpaid damage control for a documented shitstorm of ethical and professional misconduct.
Have we forgotten how Uber's casual abuse of "god view" was revealed when the then head of Uber New York met the reported he was scheduled to talk to by causally admitting, "I was tracking you." And then it came out that Uber employees were using it track exgirlfriends, journalists and celebrities?
How Uber instituted a vast program to specifically track government law enforcement agents to aid in their wholesale blatantly illegal operations.
How Uber's HR actively protected textbook sexual harassment. Specifically, a manager explicitly and in writing soliciting sex from a direct report?
How Uber's ATG was founded on the theft of Google's (now Waymo's) LIDAR technology.
How Uber execs famously complained that they weren't "killing enough people" with their self-driving tests.
How Uber routinely ignored and denied documented safety concerns in many markets, particularly in India?
But yeah. Anyone that exposes these actions trash, and not the demigods that oversaw and encouraged them.
What unpaid damage control? The shitstorms are well documented at this point. You forgot the security breach cover up, the espionage, and probably a bunch of other stuff.
What I "love" is people talking as if they are subject matter experts on shit they only read about in the news and have no first hand experience with. Gell-mann amnesia and all that.
What unpaid damage control? Implying that all the stories are made up or at least highly exaggerated by claiming that they’re all from people motivated to lie.
That’s the unpaid damage control.
And now the very guy that said “take [the documented and admitted gross misconduct] with a grain of salt” is shocked — “shocked”, I say — to be called out on his very actions, ignoring the very words written here visible to everyone?
That's a pretty uncharitable interpretation and goes to show you're just here to inject your own biases into stuff you read online and make strawman/ad hominem arguments to make you feel good about yourself.
Nobody is implying any of the scandals were fake, but there was one other comment in the thread wondering about whether superpumped is sensationalized, and these are my two cents wrt where the source material for that book / TV series comes from.
Nobody is implying anyone was lying either. Plenty of people were disgruntled because yeah hearing there's multiple cases of sexual harassment going on in your company sucks. Doesn't mean people are gonna go around lying about stuff, in fact a number of people built up the guts to come forward w/ their own horror stories after Fowler. But you are only going to hear those stories, not the ones about the board member that got kicked out for sexist remarks or the people that got fired after HR investigations, because those aren't outrage-bait. That's what I mean by taking it w/ grain of salt when consuming media.
Also, whatever damage there may be was already done years ago, so there's nothing to "damage control" at this point anymore. As GP implied, people tend to hold on to weak opinions strongly for stuff that frankly they don't even have any reason to be emotionally invested in, and I sure as hell am not interested in trying to "convince" you of anything.
Uncharitable? Please. We both know what the idiom means. Now you may think there you’re being even handed or something, but you’re not. It’s a tactic that’s used to dismiss criticism. Whether you intended to do it or not, that’s exactly what you did. It’s a baseless accusation that only serves to protect the abuser and discredit the victims.
It’s no different than saying that regular health screenings for preventable diseases are encouraged by doctors, but doctors have a profit motive, so maybe you shouldn’t, but definitely don’t talk to any doctors, because they might be lying to you for money. Or that the idea that smoke detectors should be placed outside of every bedroom is a plot by Big Smoke Detector to sell more smoke detectors.
Oh, so you just object to the specific idiom I happened to use? Ok then. Just assume I meant to use one that doesn't trigger you but still conveys the intention I explained above. I believe I was crystal clear that I don't approve of the decision/actions that led to the various scandals and that I sympathize with the victims, and I'll reiterate that I'm cautioning specifically against falling prey to gell-mann amnesia and then ending up getting all worked up in dumb flaming arguments w/ randos online on stuff that is inconsequential to your life and off-topic here to boot.
If you want to insist on thinking that I'm trying to gaslight you or whatever, you're ignoring the forum guidelines ("assume good faith") to the detriment of your HN experience and that's your problem, not mine. I'm going to go touch some grass now, I hope you do too. Cheers.
Inaccurate overall IMO; a caricature of what actually went on. But accurate in terms of capturing the sentiment that a lot of Uber skeptics had during the height of Uber mania, say 2015-2019. So the series is more a reflection of that than a faithful accounting of Uber's rise.
When I was at Uber, the vast majority were extremely moral people who felt strongly that we were empowering people to work for themselves in a well paying job. Everyone I worked with had the drivers and riders at the top of their minds and it's the only company where I strongly believed in the mission.
Yes, there were problems with incentives where some bad actors would do whatever it took to get into Zone 1 and get a 10X multiplier for a bonus, but the sad fact is that happens in every company. And yes, things that happened to Susan Fowler were horrible and the idea that it actually happened when everyone was trying to create a very progressive environment was extremely demoralizing. But her experience at Uber was definitely uncommon, all the women I worked with felt strongly that Uber was a principled and progressive company.
I hate to say it but intentions mean fuck all when the results are bad. People working at Facebook in the early 10s thought they were bringing people together and fostering openness in communication and helping the world, and instead we got a toxic hotbed of misinformation, conflict, and enabling genocide and the greatest increase in adolescent mental health problems and depression in recorded history.
The people working for the company might have the best intentions, but when the ultimate goal is to extract as much value from the users of the platform as possible and monetize it, by way of technology which upends long establish social and economic mechanisms, you are playing with fire and anyone with a little but of judgement can see that the end result is going to be disaster for everyone but the investors.
Seriously, I don't care if you think you are a good person -- you helped destroy an established industry by subsidizing with loss-leading fares and payouts and created a culture of contract work which has workers grinding all the time with absolutely no network of support to rely on. On top of this the business model of 'not our fault, you are dealing with a 3rd party' platformization which washes its hands of any fault or support is currently wreaking havoc right now.
Nah the taxi industry was a lot worse than Uber. Most of the arguments over whether Uber drivers are employers to me are baffling; most taxi drivers took set, long hourly shifts from the medallion owners -- a much greater hallmark of an employee/employer relationship -- and were mafia backed and run quite crookedly. Many taxi drivers to this day have much worse working conditions and pay rates.
On the rider side, many people of color, especially Black, were not able to get taxi rides because they drove right by them. Look this up if you don't believe me -- there are innumerable examples of documentations of this, and this basically was altogether eliminated with Uber rides.
Uber was a game changer and a great equalizer for a great many people in society who didn't own their own cars (i.e. visitors, but also people who lived in major cities.)
In fact many taxi drivers became Uber drivers and have made a much better living this way.
Of course, there are also many more Uber drivers than at the start... and so it is kind of a race to the bottom with respect to an equilibrium achieved where it's now just an OK job instead of the $30+/hr like in the early days for uberX drivers...
The latest news on this is literally the opposite (Uber integrating w/ various taxi companies as their lead generation and dispatch provider)
FWIW, I've talked with a number of drivers over the years, and there's people using Uber as a flex source of income while some other pursuit hasn't gotten off the ground yet, people using it to supplement FTE income from elsewhere, people that made bank post pandemic, people doing it to be active in retirement, people who complain about platform issues, people that give it praise, and everything in between. I think if one is going to be outraged on behalf of drivers, it behooves them to try to understand how diverse the driver population is in the first place.
On a similar note, I think people often get hung up on some pet notion but fail to realize there's a lot of stuff going on that makes it hard to keep tally in an ethical bean counter. For example, there's efforts to support Ukraine[0], there's one about increasing women's workforce participation via government-subsided commutes in the middle east, there's the electric vehicle incentives, etc.
Do these offset some ideological notion of how the transportation industry ought to work? I don't know, but I think only looking at the ideology side isn't going to tell the whole story of what's happening on the ground.
To be clear, I am not fond of the taxi industry. My point was that destroying things and replacing them with a subsidized temporary solution with no plan for what to do when the money runs out is irresponsible and the people who run these companies clearly don't care.
I mean, the latest earnings guidance was saying Uber was expecting to be GAAP profitable on an operating basis by the end of year (it already was profitable on an EBITDA basis for a while, and it was technically GAAP profitable on an overall basis in Q1 due to some equity appreciation). It's currently rolling out ads, which is known in the tech industry to be a high margin source of revenue, and if you google Uber in the news these days you'll see a plethora of other things coming to fruition that would simply never have happened under the taxi oligarchy.
I think latching on to the talking points from 8 years ago is not doing enough justice to how much Uber changed since then.
> I think latching on to the talking points from 8 years ago is not doing enough justice to how much Uber changed since then.
I am specifically talking a person about their experience working there at that time. This conversation is not about if Uber has changed or how bad the taxi industry was, this conversation is about 'can you be a good person while working for a corporation which is recklessly disregarding important social structures in order to maximize profit without concern for consequences'.
EDIT: I realize now I should have more clear with my tenses.
Shouldn't it be though? Even without getting into the weeds of Machiavellian ethics, I think if one can argue "you helped a high momentum company do X bad thing", then it's fair game to argue "you helped a high momentum company reach Y good outcome" as well. I don't mean to shit on the taxi industry when I bring them up, I mean that there are positive things Uber does today that are only feasible due to the sheer scale it achieved through the means it took to get there, and because even through its darkest periods, there were many insiders that sincerely wanted to do the right thing (and who eventually prevailed).
Is it "bad" if bad things happen from shaking things up and then good things materialize after that? As I said, I don't know to what extent the goods outweigh the bads or don't, but I'm trying to form strong opinions held weakly.
I get a bit drunk at a friend's house and my friend realizes I shouldn't drive home so he offers to let me sleep on in the guest room until I sober up. I refuse and get behind the wheel and make my way home. On the way I see a flipped car in a body of water near the road. I stop and jump in and save the trapped person.
Did the morally good act of saving a person negate the morally reprehensible act of driving drunk?
The end results don't make your actions in the original instance OK, even if the bad case (wrecking and killing someone) didn't happen but instead a good one did. I shouldn't have been driving since it objectively at the time was immoral and I had no way of knowing what would happen.
I think your thought experiment differs from the original topic in few different ways.
For one, the person you were replying to isn't the CEO. A more accurate analogy might be drawing ethical conclusions about the accountant in the company that built the road that led to the accident (or one at the beer company or a weapons company if we want to be spicier)
And the other thing is your drunk driver analogy has a big serendipity aspect to it. The change of tune at Uber was very deliberate in response to the reputational damage its earlier iteration inflicted on itself. A more useful thought experiment might be one about an ex-con gangster turned community service volunteer.
I agree reprehensible occasions remain reprehensible no matter what, what I don't agree with is the notion of immutable morality (X person is always as moral as they were previously), ascribing morality of amorphous groups to individuals, and various other cognitive biases I see people committing in threads like this.
I was trying to convey to the person I responded to that he or she should carefully evaluate the cause and effect of things before shrugging off culpability, even though they felt that they were doing good because they wanted to do good. My point was ultimately supposed to be that good intentions are not helpful if you don't bother evaluating the effect of your actions.
Being able to walk around guilt free is nice, but I won't respect you for saying 'but I was intending to do good' if you willfully ignored the reality around you.
Then after getting knocked around regarding the peripheries of my message and whether or not taxis are good or Uber actually was bad, I ended up operating defensively and lost the tether on the thread with which I had started.
I accept that I approached this poorly but I maintain that my message shouldn't be discard solely due to my incompetence at delivering it.
Thanks for following through with this and I do hope we converse again.
> I hate to say it but intentions mean fuck all when the results are bad
First off, your opinions are completely meaningless to me.
> you helped destroy an established industry
LOL my other comment rings so true about how HN loves to bend over backwards to defend the taxi monopoly.
1) Taxi drivers were not employees they were independent contractors.
2) Taxi drivers had to pay for gas, rent the taxi, and clean the taxi at the end of their shift
3) Every shift they had to pay for the use of the car/medallion and they started the shift OWNING money. Once they earned enough to pay for the fees, they earned everything after that. If they had to end their shift early due to illness or family emergency, they LOST money for the day.
This is the "established industry" that you are protecting? I'm happy to be a part of dismantling this immoral monopoly that abused their workers. Uber drivers can turn on and off their apps whenever they want, they can work at Uber and Lyft at the same time, they can withdraw their earnings at the end of the shift, etc. They can stop working whenever they want and they can start working whenever they want. My time at Uber something I'm deeply proud of.
You obviously care about my opinions or you wouldn't be upset and defensive and accusatory.
I would ask you to point out in my response where I am protecting anything. I am decrying the destruction of things by underhanded means (subsidizing to make costs artificially low and payments to workers high) which is irresponsible and completely indicative of a business model that has no concern for externalities or contingencies for failure. 'Oh the business didn't work' is a terrible line when in the process of failing you destroyed an entire working system, even if that system did suck in a lot of ways.
It is great that you are proud of your work, but I hope that in your current and future endeavors you may be able to use your talents for something a bit better.
> You obviously care about my opinions or you wouldn't be upset and defensive and accusatory.
Nah, I really don't. I enjoy having discussions where I educate people.
It wasn't underhanded, not in the least bit. Defending the status quo monopoly that exploits its workers is really strange. Destroying entrenched rent-seeking monopolies is doing the world a great service. Uber has been a public company since 2019. The fact that it's a viable business is beyond question at this point.
In that case, it sounds like you were a bunch of naive idealistic tech kids that bought the lie.
SV is very justifiably seen as a group of naive overconfident kids taking on the world and making a mess of it all, just as much as it is very justifiably seen as a group of ancap money men using computers to concentrate wealth and power.
If you want to “believe in a mission”, there are plenty of ethical jobs out there. It’s just a shame that so many smart people on this website are hooked on the high-TC go-go startup lifestyle.
I hate to break it to you, but if you ask every software engineer which companies are morally flexible you'll quickly have a notch in every companies belt and then some. It also usually isn't engineers that are the morally flexible ones, though that's certainly not a rule. It's executive leadership and people who lead products. It doesn't take many of those types to develop a side brand as morally flexible, and frankly, sometimes it's just the outcome of hard decisions. There's plenty of specific indictments of Uber, but most of them don't involve the peons. Engineers passing on judgement to other engineers about where they've worked is pretty silly.
Engineers contributing to the ability of assholes to continue making others miserable is a pretty clear chain of causation. Everything I've read about people's moral convictions says they consider causal relationships to be morally relevant.
The truth to me is a lot more nuanced. A lot of times engineers don't know how a product is actually being used. They have some key metrics they're responsible for but those are often abstracted away from the intended goal. Other engineers will see that something is headed in the wrong direction and try to influence it from the inside. Other engineers use their knowledge of the inside and share it widely. All of those depend on continued employment.
These kind of "causal relationship" judgements sound particularly adjacent to fire and brimstone rhetoric I've heard.
We all morally fail all the time. It's ok because we are fallible beings with limited access to information about the happenings around us. Asserting that we are capable of perfection as a core tenet only leads to a cynical disappointment-cum-misanthropy.
This means that morality consists of recognizing your responsibility to comprehending where you are in the causal DAG and what the probable outcomes of your actions might be, without shaming yourself about what you did before you understood.
It's not a perfect description because "getting paid not to understand X" is a real thing, but it's a start.
I agree about the concept, however, these are folks making blanket assumptions about an engineers day to day knowledge that is relatively common not to have in large orgs.
Ah. Classic. “There’s no such thing as ethical consumption under capitalism”, and then you get to run off and do anything you want.
Most people working in a tech job in a company like Uber are extremely privileged and could work elsewhere.
“I’m morally absolved because I’m an employee” is a particular brand of modern American (esp. SV) thinking. It is not inherent and it’s just not as true as y’all make it out to be. If the collective realised that they actually had an iota of influence over the world around then, the US union movement wouldn’t be the dumpster fire that it is.
Don’t meant to diminish anyone’s hard work in any way, but am I the only one fascinated by that excel sheet and how all those companies are managing to get funding? At least based on that short description of what they do.
Travis Kalanick was the real secret sauce behind Uber. He is an absolute legend. I do not think there was and will be another operator as skilled as him, knowing exactly how much gas to put in the demand and supply side to get a two sided marketplace off the ground so fast and so furiously, while being absolutely at ease in the chaos.
Good job by the author assembling all this data, but starting out with statements like
>Uber succeeded by hiring Really Smart People all over the world who were not afraid to tackle big challenges and who wanted to win.
Does not instill confidence in the author’s take. Uber succeeded by willfully ignoring laws, massively subsidizing actual costs with VC money, and frequently doing morally questionable things. Yes, they scaled well and worked hard, too, but so do many startups that fail.
I’ve always perceived mid-tens Uber as a regulatory arbitrage and gov’t subsidy play (GPS, regulatory incompetence as subsidy) masquerading as a tech startup, with a sideline in loss-leader pricing (thx SoftBank).
I don’t want to diminish the work of the technologists, I’m sure operating at this scale is very complex.
Yeah I think that's in part because so much of the cultural zeitgeist around Uber was on the policy implications, and the effect on consumer behavior etcetera.
There were a ton of technical challenges in scaling.
Uber was also one of the earliest corporate deployers of Node back in 2010 and ended up having one of the largest in the world arguably (have no idea to what extent they've replaced in the last few years).
Uber's open source projects have led to spinout companies that have raised a lot of money successfully like Chronosphere and Tecton.ai .
Halloween and then New Year's were huge traffic challenges and the Uber app (both driver and rider) really pushed the bounds of what was possible in the 2010s with respect to a two-side real-time marketplace for ridesharing and food delivery.
A list of fund raisings is not impressive. All it says is they are good at raising funds.
The IPOs matter and exits matter. Revenue matters if it's sustainable.
The list has two IPOs, which is great. But one is down 90% from it's IPO (aurora) and the other is down 98% from its IPO (bird scooters). Bird is only worth 75M today.
Being down from your IPO in percentage terms seems irrelevant. If FB was down 90% from it's IPO it would still be a $13 billion company. That's not a huge behemoth that instead grew by 4x since its IPO, but that's still respectable as an exit.
It might be success for the scammers. But it is certainly failure for the retail investors and general public. And people involved maybe should be vilified.
In the end I think real successes are those that deliver reasonable dividends.
Fair enough. If you raise 100M, IPO for 10B, and then drop 90% to 1B, you still accomplished a great thing, I agree. You turned 100M investment into 1B.
But Bird scooter raised more than 900M, and today is worth 75M. Yes, it's an IPO and that's great, but it destroyed a lot of wealth. Not clear who ended up holding the bag (VCs or the public investors), but either way it's a bad outcome
In this example, fair enough, Bird failed. It seems obvious from the 75 million valuation (and the being banned in city after city). And that was assuming a far smaller total raise than 900MM. They raised that much money? Their capital costs were really high, and it's possible they actually needed it.
My point was mostly about the details, not claiming that Bird was a success.
One could argue what the thesis or purpose of this piece might be, but the call to action seems to be this part:
“If you’re interested in supporting, joining, or investing in a company founded by Uber alumni or you’d just like to learn more, full details are below”
If you want to support, join or invest in someone on the basis of them being an Uber alumnus, you may want to know how much value was created by other alumni. The more sustainable (and, ideally, appreciating) that value is, the more likely you are to actually get to enjoy it.
But my point was, it doesn't matter what "delta since IPO" was. If Bird had an IPO by selling a single share at $200, then dropped to $20, it lost 90% of it's value. But it would still be a billion dollar company.
Paying attention to what they are worth now seems more important than what they are worth relative to a random date.
"If they were raising money at 1% of their IPO value a month before, then IPO'd and then went down to 10% of their IPO value, it's a win."
"Bird raised at a 10MM valuation, IPOed at a 1 billion valuation and settled at a 100MM valuation" says the same thing in a clearer way and lets you know who got screwed (people who bought IPO shares).
And for employees, Bird stayed (close enough to) its IPO price for the 6 month lockups to expire and everyone to sell. In fact, it was at around 7 months in that the stock started tanking.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 189 ms ] threadFrom the linked article linked about 'Fast':
Earlier this year, NPR reported on how CEO Holland had his share of controversy in Australia prior to starting Fast. Holland’s former startup, Tow.com.au, which aimed to be “the Uber of towing,” failed in what at least one person described as a “disaster.” NPR’s article noted that Holland’s previous venture was embroiled “in a multimillion-dollar billing dispute with the Australian state government over towing and impounding fees that led to the startup’s liquidation in 2018.”
A couple of months before the self driving car killed a pedestrian in Arizona, a drunk engineer from that team told me 'everybody is lying on their human intervention reports to the state, that's just how the sausage is made'
Late Uber produces seriously impressive technology and mature, reliable services. Early Uber was so errr.. problematic... that I'd be hesitant to wear that as a badge.
In other words, Uber killed Uber.
The whole way things unfolded subsequently (due to several other pile-ons in following weeks, and eventually TK's ouster in mid 2017) still seems surreal to this day.
(I worked at Uber for ~5 yrs and remember this time period well.)
everybody was lying on their takeover reports. EXCEPT Uber.
Uber was banned from California because they refused to lie, and refused to be made to look stupid compared to the companies who WERE lying, and who have literally decapitated multiple people while their vehicle was in control.
my time with Uber was rocky, and I had many qualms. I left partially because I didn't want to be part of the culture that produced Herzberg's death. but this specific thing is not one they should be criticized for.
the cultural issues were real. that's fair to say.
Do you have more on this?
Now Tesla has decapitated people. Particularly after Elon demanded that they stop using the radar to detect potential collisions. (He said it was too conservative, so they should only apply the brakes when both the camera and the radar detected an object.) The Model S drove under a tractor trailer, sheering off the everything from the bottom of the windshield up, and then continued to drive for quite a distance, until it drove into a ditch.
https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-tesla-florida-acciden...
So you ended up having insanity, like the necessity for even a black car service to "return to their base" after a ride, for time periods up to 1.5 hrs. Basically trying to nix the notion of efficiency in ridesharing.
We all know that nowadays most of those rules were battled back.
But the taxi industry and regulators had some very crooked ways which were really to the detriment of broader society trying to get places without having their own car.
There has to be a middle ground.
Not undermining the success of entrepreneurs but curious about tech’s obsession with mafia.
Aside, retargeting works!
[1]https://techcrunch.com/2023/04/05/venture-capital-using-data...
https://techcrunch.com/2022/04/05/fast-shuts-doors-after-slo...
The employees of Fast got screwed the most. Remember that. They were misled into believing the company was successful when it was famously almost completely devoid of revenue. The founders lied to them.
The data may stand on its own, but I’d be very suspicious of any narratives being pushed by these people. Fast was a disaster, and the money they raised on those lies is included in those graphs.
I don't think it's necessarily a bad pitch, but clearly it was a business that was only ever going to either be wildly-successful or a complete disaster, and nothing in the middle.
Also they were probably way-too-late and stripe were much better positioned.
(And I'm not suggesting that those two scenarios are equally likely - it had probably a 5% payoff chance!).
I highly recommend "Poverty, By America" if you'd like the background for my comment.
https://www.amazon.com/Poverty-America-Matthew-Desmond/dp/05...
Interested in learning more about this. Tagged the book for a future read, but in the meantime, can you enlighten us on the business model of Arrived?
Rents increase bc a return has to be made, and there is no escape. The poor stay poor. The rich get richer.
Disgusting is a matter of opinion but it does seem a zero sun game with a lot of losers.
As long as the wealthy can keep housing out of reach they can influence the distort the entire market and charge as much as they like. This is why housing is such a ‘good investment’. It’s reverse Robin Hood.
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/07/10/uber-investigation-...
In places like, IDK, Phoenix all you needed to be a taxi was a certified meter, rates posted on the side of your car, a sticker which they gave you when you fulfilled all these requirements and, here’s the big one which allowed Uber/Lyft to undercut everyone, commercial insurance.
If your drivers don’t have to pay for expensive insurance and you can sell your product for under the actual cost it’s no big surprise you can gain a large foothold against the “taxi monopoly”.
Whenever I get back to Phoenix and take a Lyft I always talk to the drivers to see how things are working out for them after the “monopoly” was broken and, from what I can gather, they’re getting paid fewer peanuts than I did driving a cab and have to maintain their vehicles at their own expense. Sure, tell me how “the warranty covers all that”, they aren’t killing their resale value by putting in a million miles and the $0.50 fuel surcharge for a 23 mile trip helps out when gas prices are over $4/gal.
Only on HN…
I drove cabs for nine years but fully admit I’m no expert so lay down your wisdom.
Yeah I thought so.
You’re the one who claims to know what they’re talking about yet make zero effort to support your claims.
Honestly, I’ve never heard anyone claim taxi drivers were getting rich but can tell you they weren’t universally getting exploited like the pro-rideshare propaganda was telling you. Back before Uber/Lyft I could work less than half the time, have a roof over my head and food in my belly plus got to spend time doing things I enjoyed like shaving yaks. After, not so much, all the “excess income” got siphoned off and went nowhere because VC money was subsidizing the push to bankrupt the competition.
Only job in my life where I had my income cut (to keep the insurance contracts which were the only thing making us money) and I’m not exactly a young pup.
Walmart (supposedly, no real evidence) does the same thing and everyone complains but some Silicon Valley companies do it and we’re supposed to cheer them on?
Yada, yada, predatory pricing, horay!!!
We read the same articles dude. Don’t act smarter than you are because you have Twitter.
It literally was…
Maybe not on the scale of “I’m gonna make a wrapper on top of this chatGPT API and be a billionaire” but you could survive with very little effort if that’s your jam.
AirBnB is illegally operating in tons of areas. Knowingly. Systemically.
And yet where is all the negative press?
Don't believe press narratives and try to put everything into context.
You really could make any company look bad or good if you wanted. There are a lot of actors, and a lot of different ways to slice it.
I think Uber and AirBnB were both aggressive, I suggest there should have been more regulatory pushback everywhere, but only for public good as a lot of mayors were just interested in backing this group or that, not really thinking about the true benefits of constituents.
Finally we have to consider the net benefit, and even while I think both companies have overplayed their hands, I do think there's a general benefit. It seems that regulations around Taxis and Hotels were far too onerous, and the surpluses lost to those de facto oligarchic situations were quite a lot. I'm grateful that both those companies shook things up, even at the cost of a bit of shenanigans.
Mind you, rat bites can be pretti nästi...
I know it’s against the rules but… have you been living under a rock?
It would be harder to find good press methinks.
Lots of early people left since the Travis days. Since then, fixing the reputation damage has been a big focus in the company. Safety center, electric fleet commitments, DEI, Ukraine initiatives, etc, are all newer initiatives in that vein.
"Do the right thing" is now a company core value plastered all over the offices.
Even the "off the shelf stuff doesn't meet our needs" culture alluded in the article has given way to adopting 3rd party solutions more (e.g. Slack replacing uChat, Oracle partnership, etc). Lots of things have changed over the years.
Two of these things are not like the other two.
That is great, I love slogans on posters. But if they were serious Uber would invite Spike Lee to their HQ to ward off the evil spirits.
uChat was based on Mattermost as I recall which was open source, and saved Uber several million dollars plus over its lifetime course.
I was not directly involved in its development but I (started and) ran the engineering blog, and also Uber's open source program for a time where this partnership occurred.
It is funny how some of these examples are floating around about build vs buy, but uChat actually was a good deal while it lasted.
Ultimately Uber decided they didn't need everyone talking to each other all at once and so bit the bullet and paid more for Slack.
Mind you, he was a journalist working off of leaks, presumably from disgruntled employees (of which there were many in the high attrition era), and he obviously had a journalitically oriented profit motive of his own.
So take it with a grain of salt, I guess.
Have we forgotten how Uber's casual abuse of "god view" was revealed when the then head of Uber New York met the reported he was scheduled to talk to by causally admitting, "I was tracking you." And then it came out that Uber employees were using it track exgirlfriends, journalists and celebrities?
How Uber instituted a vast program to specifically track government law enforcement agents to aid in their wholesale blatantly illegal operations.
How Uber's HR actively protected textbook sexual harassment. Specifically, a manager explicitly and in writing soliciting sex from a direct report?
How Uber's ATG was founded on the theft of Google's (now Waymo's) LIDAR technology.
How Uber execs famously complained that they weren't "killing enough people" with their self-driving tests.
How Uber routinely ignored and denied documented safety concerns in many markets, particularly in India?
But yeah. Anyone that exposes these actions trash, and not the demigods that oversaw and encouraged them.
What I "love" is people talking as if they are subject matter experts on shit they only read about in the news and have no first hand experience with. Gell-mann amnesia and all that.
That’s the unpaid damage control.
And now the very guy that said “take [the documented and admitted gross misconduct] with a grain of salt” is shocked — “shocked”, I say — to be called out on his very actions, ignoring the very words written here visible to everyone?
Amazing!
Nobody is implying any of the scandals were fake, but there was one other comment in the thread wondering about whether superpumped is sensationalized, and these are my two cents wrt where the source material for that book / TV series comes from.
Nobody is implying anyone was lying either. Plenty of people were disgruntled because yeah hearing there's multiple cases of sexual harassment going on in your company sucks. Doesn't mean people are gonna go around lying about stuff, in fact a number of people built up the guts to come forward w/ their own horror stories after Fowler. But you are only going to hear those stories, not the ones about the board member that got kicked out for sexist remarks or the people that got fired after HR investigations, because those aren't outrage-bait. That's what I mean by taking it w/ grain of salt when consuming media.
Also, whatever damage there may be was already done years ago, so there's nothing to "damage control" at this point anymore. As GP implied, people tend to hold on to weak opinions strongly for stuff that frankly they don't even have any reason to be emotionally invested in, and I sure as hell am not interested in trying to "convince" you of anything.
It’s no different than saying that regular health screenings for preventable diseases are encouraged by doctors, but doctors have a profit motive, so maybe you shouldn’t, but definitely don’t talk to any doctors, because they might be lying to you for money. Or that the idea that smoke detectors should be placed outside of every bedroom is a plot by Big Smoke Detector to sell more smoke detectors.
If you want to insist on thinking that I'm trying to gaslight you or whatever, you're ignoring the forum guidelines ("assume good faith") to the detriment of your HN experience and that's your problem, not mine. I'm going to go touch some grass now, I hope you do too. Cheers.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Pumped_(TV_series)
Yes, there were problems with incentives where some bad actors would do whatever it took to get into Zone 1 and get a 10X multiplier for a bonus, but the sad fact is that happens in every company. And yes, things that happened to Susan Fowler were horrible and the idea that it actually happened when everyone was trying to create a very progressive environment was extremely demoralizing. But her experience at Uber was definitely uncommon, all the women I worked with felt strongly that Uber was a principled and progressive company.
The people working for the company might have the best intentions, but when the ultimate goal is to extract as much value from the users of the platform as possible and monetize it, by way of technology which upends long establish social and economic mechanisms, you are playing with fire and anyone with a little but of judgement can see that the end result is going to be disaster for everyone but the investors.
Seriously, I don't care if you think you are a good person -- you helped destroy an established industry by subsidizing with loss-leading fares and payouts and created a culture of contract work which has workers grinding all the time with absolutely no network of support to rely on. On top of this the business model of 'not our fault, you are dealing with a 3rd party' platformization which washes its hands of any fault or support is currently wreaking havoc right now.
On the rider side, many people of color, especially Black, were not able to get taxi rides because they drove right by them. Look this up if you don't believe me -- there are innumerable examples of documentations of this, and this basically was altogether eliminated with Uber rides.
Uber was a game changer and a great equalizer for a great many people in society who didn't own their own cars (i.e. visitors, but also people who lived in major cities.)
In fact many taxi drivers became Uber drivers and have made a much better living this way.
Of course, there are also many more Uber drivers than at the start... and so it is kind of a race to the bottom with respect to an equilibrium achieved where it's now just an OK job instead of the $30+/hr like in the early days for uberX drivers...
The latest news on this is literally the opposite (Uber integrating w/ various taxi companies as their lead generation and dispatch provider)
FWIW, I've talked with a number of drivers over the years, and there's people using Uber as a flex source of income while some other pursuit hasn't gotten off the ground yet, people using it to supplement FTE income from elsewhere, people that made bank post pandemic, people doing it to be active in retirement, people who complain about platform issues, people that give it praise, and everything in between. I think if one is going to be outraged on behalf of drivers, it behooves them to try to understand how diverse the driver population is in the first place.
On a similar note, I think people often get hung up on some pet notion but fail to realize there's a lot of stuff going on that makes it hard to keep tally in an ethical bean counter. For example, there's efforts to support Ukraine[0], there's one about increasing women's workforce participation via government-subsided commutes in the middle east, there's the electric vehicle incentives, etc.
Do these offset some ideological notion of how the transportation industry ought to work? I don't know, but I think only looking at the ideology side isn't going to tell the whole story of what's happening on the ground.
[0] https://www.uber.com/newsroom/support-for-ukraine-2022/
I think latching on to the talking points from 8 years ago is not doing enough justice to how much Uber changed since then.
I am specifically talking a person about their experience working there at that time. This conversation is not about if Uber has changed or how bad the taxi industry was, this conversation is about 'can you be a good person while working for a corporation which is recklessly disregarding important social structures in order to maximize profit without concern for consequences'.
EDIT: I realize now I should have more clear with my tenses.
Shouldn't it be though? Even without getting into the weeds of Machiavellian ethics, I think if one can argue "you helped a high momentum company do X bad thing", then it's fair game to argue "you helped a high momentum company reach Y good outcome" as well. I don't mean to shit on the taxi industry when I bring them up, I mean that there are positive things Uber does today that are only feasible due to the sheer scale it achieved through the means it took to get there, and because even through its darkest periods, there were many insiders that sincerely wanted to do the right thing (and who eventually prevailed).
Is it "bad" if bad things happen from shaking things up and then good things materialize after that? As I said, I don't know to what extent the goods outweigh the bads or don't, but I'm trying to form strong opinions held weakly.
I get a bit drunk at a friend's house and my friend realizes I shouldn't drive home so he offers to let me sleep on in the guest room until I sober up. I refuse and get behind the wheel and make my way home. On the way I see a flipped car in a body of water near the road. I stop and jump in and save the trapped person.
Did the morally good act of saving a person negate the morally reprehensible act of driving drunk?
The end results don't make your actions in the original instance OK, even if the bad case (wrecking and killing someone) didn't happen but instead a good one did. I shouldn't have been driving since it objectively at the time was immoral and I had no way of knowing what would happen.
For one, the person you were replying to isn't the CEO. A more accurate analogy might be drawing ethical conclusions about the accountant in the company that built the road that led to the accident (or one at the beer company or a weapons company if we want to be spicier)
And the other thing is your drunk driver analogy has a big serendipity aspect to it. The change of tune at Uber was very deliberate in response to the reputational damage its earlier iteration inflicted on itself. A more useful thought experiment might be one about an ex-con gangster turned community service volunteer.
I agree reprehensible occasions remain reprehensible no matter what, what I don't agree with is the notion of immutable morality (X person is always as moral as they were previously), ascribing morality of amorphous groups to individuals, and various other cognitive biases I see people committing in threads like this.
Being able to walk around guilt free is nice, but I won't respect you for saying 'but I was intending to do good' if you willfully ignored the reality around you.
Then after getting knocked around regarding the peripheries of my message and whether or not taxis are good or Uber actually was bad, I ended up operating defensively and lost the tether on the thread with which I had started.
I accept that I approached this poorly but I maintain that my message shouldn't be discard solely due to my incompetence at delivering it.
Thanks for following through with this and I do hope we converse again.
First off, your opinions are completely meaningless to me.
> you helped destroy an established industry
LOL my other comment rings so true about how HN loves to bend over backwards to defend the taxi monopoly.
1) Taxi drivers were not employees they were independent contractors. 2) Taxi drivers had to pay for gas, rent the taxi, and clean the taxi at the end of their shift 3) Every shift they had to pay for the use of the car/medallion and they started the shift OWNING money. Once they earned enough to pay for the fees, they earned everything after that. If they had to end their shift early due to illness or family emergency, they LOST money for the day.
This is the "established industry" that you are protecting? I'm happy to be a part of dismantling this immoral monopoly that abused their workers. Uber drivers can turn on and off their apps whenever they want, they can work at Uber and Lyft at the same time, they can withdraw their earnings at the end of the shift, etc. They can stop working whenever they want and they can start working whenever they want. My time at Uber something I'm deeply proud of.
I would ask you to point out in my response where I am protecting anything. I am decrying the destruction of things by underhanded means (subsidizing to make costs artificially low and payments to workers high) which is irresponsible and completely indicative of a business model that has no concern for externalities or contingencies for failure. 'Oh the business didn't work' is a terrible line when in the process of failing you destroyed an entire working system, even if that system did suck in a lot of ways.
It is great that you are proud of your work, but I hope that in your current and future endeavors you may be able to use your talents for something a bit better.
Nah, I really don't. I enjoy having discussions where I educate people.
It wasn't underhanded, not in the least bit. Defending the status quo monopoly that exploits its workers is really strange. Destroying entrenched rent-seeking monopolies is doing the world a great service. Uber has been a public company since 2019. The fact that it's a viable business is beyond question at this point.
In that case, it sounds like you were a bunch of naive idealistic tech kids that bought the lie.
SV is very justifiably seen as a group of naive overconfident kids taking on the world and making a mess of it all, just as much as it is very justifiably seen as a group of ancap money men using computers to concentrate wealth and power.
If you want to “believe in a mission”, there are plenty of ethical jobs out there. It’s just a shame that so many smart people on this website are hooked on the high-TC go-go startup lifestyle.
The truth to me is a lot more nuanced. A lot of times engineers don't know how a product is actually being used. They have some key metrics they're responsible for but those are often abstracted away from the intended goal. Other engineers will see that something is headed in the wrong direction and try to influence it from the inside. Other engineers use their knowledge of the inside and share it widely. All of those depend on continued employment.
These kind of "causal relationship" judgements sound particularly adjacent to fire and brimstone rhetoric I've heard.
This means that morality consists of recognizing your responsibility to comprehending where you are in the causal DAG and what the probable outcomes of your actions might be, without shaming yourself about what you did before you understood.
It's not a perfect description because "getting paid not to understand X" is a real thing, but it's a start.
Most people working in a tech job in a company like Uber are extremely privileged and could work elsewhere.
“I’m morally absolved because I’m an employee” is a particular brand of modern American (esp. SV) thinking. It is not inherent and it’s just not as true as y’all make it out to be. If the collective realised that they actually had an iota of influence over the world around then, the US union movement wouldn’t be the dumpster fire that it is.
>Uber succeeded by hiring Really Smart People all over the world who were not afraid to tackle big challenges and who wanted to win.
Does not instill confidence in the author’s take. Uber succeeded by willfully ignoring laws, massively subsidizing actual costs with VC money, and frequently doing morally questionable things. Yes, they scaled well and worked hard, too, but so do many startups that fail.
I don’t want to diminish the work of the technologists, I’m sure operating at this scale is very complex.
There were a ton of technical challenges in scaling.
Uber was also one of the earliest corporate deployers of Node back in 2010 and ended up having one of the largest in the world arguably (have no idea to what extent they've replaced in the last few years).
Uber's open source projects have led to spinout companies that have raised a lot of money successfully like Chronosphere and Tecton.ai .
Halloween and then New Year's were huge traffic challenges and the Uber app (both driver and rider) really pushed the bounds of what was possible in the 2010s with respect to a two-side real-time marketplace for ridesharing and food delivery.
(I worked at Uber 2014-2019 in engineering.)
Uber only had the opportunity to prove its engineering prowess because nobody else had pockets that deep, and that much disdain for the law.
The IPOs matter and exits matter. Revenue matters if it's sustainable.
The list has two IPOs, which is great. But one is down 90% from it's IPO (aurora) and the other is down 98% from its IPO (bird scooters). Bird is only worth 75M today.
In the end I think real successes are those that deliver reasonable dividends.
But Bird scooter raised more than 900M, and today is worth 75M. Yes, it's an IPO and that's great, but it destroyed a lot of wealth. Not clear who ended up holding the bag (VCs or the public investors), but either way it's a bad outcome
My point was mostly about the details, not claiming that Bird was a success.
One could argue what the thesis or purpose of this piece might be, but the call to action seems to be this part:
“If you’re interested in supporting, joining, or investing in a company founded by Uber alumni or you’d just like to learn more, full details are below”
If you want to support, join or invest in someone on the basis of them being an Uber alumnus, you may want to know how much value was created by other alumni. The more sustainable (and, ideally, appreciating) that value is, the more likely you are to actually get to enjoy it.
Paying attention to what they are worth now seems more important than what they are worth relative to a random date.
"If they were raising money at 1% of their IPO value a month before, then IPO'd and then went down to 10% of their IPO value, it's a win."
"Bird raised at a 10MM valuation, IPOed at a 1 billion valuation and settled at a 100MM valuation" says the same thing in a clearer way and lets you know who got screwed (people who bought IPO shares).
And for employees, Bird stayed (close enough to) its IPO price for the 6 month lockups to expire and everyone to sell. In fact, it was at around 7 months in that the stock started tanking.