"Susan Fowler" uber

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Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley by Emily Chang

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Burning Man, California gold rush, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, company town, data science, David Brooks, deal flow, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, game design, gender pay gap, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Hacker News, high net worth, Hyperloop, imposter syndrome, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microservices, Parker Conrad, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, post-work, pull request, reality distortion field, Richard Hendricks, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, women in the workforce, Zenefits

If you are contacted by anyone asking for personal and intimate info about me, please report asap,” Twitter post, Feb. 24, 2017, https://twitter.com/susanthesquark/status/835193441814392833. Uber denied being behind: Sarah Buhr, “Uber Says It’s ‘Absolutely Not’ Behind a Smear Campaign Against Ex-employee Susan Fowler Rigetti,” TechCrunch, Feb. 24, 2017, https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/24/uber-says-its-absolutely-not-behind-a-smear-campaign-against-ex-employee-susan-fowler-rigetti. “Yeah, we call that Boob-er”: Mickey Rapkin, “Uber Cab Confessions,” GQ, Feb. 27, 2014, https://www.gq.com/story/uber-cab-confessions. video of Kalanick: Eric Newcomer, “In Video, Uber CEO Argues with Driver over Falling Fares,” Bloomberg, Feb. 28, 2017, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-02-28/in-video-uber-ceo-argues-with-driver-over-falling-fares.

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When the two most senior and important leaders of a company are a party to women being treated as objects—as Kalanick and Michael were in that bar in Seoul—it is not hard to imagine how this might poison company culture and lead cases like Susan Fowler’s to be overlooked. Again, an external investigation documented forty-seven claims of sexual harassment at Uber. I reached out to Emil Michael about five months after he had left Uber, on the heels of Holder’s investigation. In a statement, he was both defensive and apologetic, clearly affected by the public reaction to Uber’s cultural unraveling and his role in it. He told me that he worked hard to build a diverse team, including women, at Uber, and said he deeply regretted “attending and failing to prevent” the visit to the South Korean bar.

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CHAPTER 4: DINNER WITH WOMEN ENGINEERS Fowler joined Uber: Susan J. Fowler, “Reflecting on One Very, Very Strange Year at Uber,” www.susanjfowler.com, Feb. 19, 2017, https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very-strange-year-at-uber. Fowler did not have the typical: Susan J. Fowler, “Twenty Books That Shaped My Unconventional Life,” www.susanjfowler.com, Aug. 17, 2016, https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2016/8/15/20-unconventional-books-that-changed-my-life. “He was trying to stay”: Fowler, “Reflecting on One Very, Very Strange Year at Uber.” claimed that a “smear campaign”: Susan Fowler, “Research for the smear campaign has begun.

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chris Urmson, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, data science, Didi Chuxing, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, family office, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hustle culture, impact investing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lolcat, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, money market fund, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, off grid, peer-to-peer, pets.com, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, WeWork, Y Combinator

Chapter 22: “ONE VERY, VERY STRANGE YEAR AT UBER . . .” 213 85 percent of Uber engineers were men: Johana Bhuiyan, “Uber has Published Its Much Sought After Diversity Numbers For the First Time,” Recode, March 28, 2017, https://www.recode.net/2017/3/28/15087184/uber-diversity-numbers-first-three-million. 213 Like sailing “over the moon”: Maureen Dowd, “She’s 26, and Brought Down Uber’s C.E.O. What’s Next?,” New York Times, October 21, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/21/style/susan-fowler-uber.html. 215 “I don’t use Uber”: Dowd, “She’s 26, and Brought Down Uber’s C.E.O.” 215 “SREs worked to keep the service online”: Chris Adams, “How Uber Thinks About Site Reliability Engineering,” Uber Engineering, March 3, 2016, https://eng.uber.com/sre-talks-feb-2016/. 217 Performance reviews were little more: Megan Rose Dickey, “Inside Uber’s New Approach to Employee Performance Reviews,” TechCrunch, https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/01/inside-ubers-new-approach-to-employee-performance-reviews/. 219 losing upwards of $9,000 per vehicle: Greg Bensinger, “Uber Shutting Down U.S.

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Chapter 27: THE HOLDER REPORT 269 already fired twenty people: Mike Isaac, “Uber Fires 20 Amid Investigation into Workplace Culture,” New York Times, June 6, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/06/technology/uber-fired.html. 270 “He definitely has my confidence”: Anita Balakrishnan, “Uber Board Member Arianna Huffington Says She’s Been Emailing Ex-Engineer About Harassment Claims,” CNBC, March 3, 2017, https://www.cnbc.com/2017/03/03/arianna-huffington-travis-kalanick-confidence-emailing-susan-fowler.html. 273 “Uber has a long way to go”: Emil Michael, “Email from Departing Uber Executive,” New York Times, June 12, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/06/12/technology/document-Email-From-Departing-Uber-Executive.html. 274 “For the last eight years”: Entrepreneur Staff, “Read Travis Kalanick’s Full Letter to Staff: I Need to Work on Travis 2.0,” Entrepreneur, June 13, 2017, https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/295780. 278 Bonderman was a shuffling giant: Henny Sender, “Breakfast with the FT: David Bonderman,” Financial Times, June 20, 2008, https://www.ft.com/content/569a70ae-3e64-11dd-b16d-0000779fd2ac. 278 239th richest man in the world: “#667 David Bonderman,” Forbes, https://www.forbes.com/profile/david-bonderman/#27d33dd32fce. 280 the entire contents of the presentation: JP Mangalindan, “LEAKED AUDIO: Uber’s All-Hands Meeting Had Some Uncomfortable Moments,” Yahoo!

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And now, just a few years after leaving Penn, Susan Fowler was a site reliability engineer at Uber, the glittering unicorn of Silicon Valley. Uber represented an entirely new challenge: how to succeed in one of the most aggressive, most masculine, and most high-profile companies in Silicon Valley. The same month Uber hired her, Fowler met the love of her life. Chad Rigetti had “Michael Fassbender–worthy” good looks and an enthusiasm for quantum computing theory. Fowler was attracted to him almost immediately. At the end of their first date—dinner and a movie—Fowler reached for her iPhone to call for an Uber home. “No, no, no,” Rigetti said.

Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work by Alex Rosenblat

"Susan Fowler" uber, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, business logic, call centre, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive load, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, death from overwork, digital divide, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Google Chrome, Greyball, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, Lyft, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, performance metric, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, proprietary trading, Ralph Waldo Emerson, regulatory arbitrage, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social software, SoftBank, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, Tim Cook: Apple, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, urban planning, Wolfgang Streeck, work culture , workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

http://exuberation.com/regions-and-travels-publisher/326-free-designated-drivers-in-24-cities-in-the-us; DrinkingandDriving.org, “Prevention Tools,” www.drinkinganddriving.org/designated-driver-services/. 63. Alex Rosenblat, “Is Your Uber/Lyft Driver in Stealth Mode?” Uber Screeds, July 19, 2016, https://medium.com/uber-screeds/is-your-uber-driver-in-hiding-484696894139. 64. Judgment of December 20, 2017, Asociación Profesional Élite Taxi v. Uber Systems Spain SL, EU:C:2017:981, http://curia.europa.eu/juris/documents.jsf?num=C-434/15. 65. Charlotte Alter, “UN Women Breaks Off Partnership with Uber,” Time, March 23, 2015, http://time.com/3754537/un-women-breaks-off-partnership-with-uber/. 66. Susan Fowler, “Reflecting on One Very, Very Strange Year at Uber,” Susan Fowler (blog), February 19, 2017, www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very-strange-year-at-uber. 67.

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Fowler, “Reflecting on One Very, Very Strange Year at Uber,” February 19, 2017, Susan Fowler (blog), www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very-strange-year-at-uber. 87. Kara Swisher, “With Her Blog Post about Toxic Bro-Culture at Uber, Susan Fowler Proved That One Person Can Make a Difference,” ReCode, June 21, 2017, www.recode.net/2017/6/21/15844852/uber-toxic-bro-company-culture-susan-fowler-blog-post. 88. Reuters, “Uber Picks Dallas and Dubai for Its Planned 2020 Flying Taxi Launch,” Fortune, April 25, 2017, http://fortune.com/2017/04/26/uber-dallas-dubai-2020-flying-taxi-launch/. 89.

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In December 2017, the European Union Court of Justice dealt a serious blow to the power of that rhetoric when it ruled that Uber is a cab company, not a technology company.64 For perspective, there is no equivalent ruling in the United States that undermines Uber’s “we’re a technology company” spin. Not all groups that Uber works to conscript are equally cooperative. The United Nations women’s group cut off their partnership with Uber shortly after banding together in order to create 1 million jobs for women by 2020, after the UN realized that Uber is associated with undermining labor protections and hurting marginalized workers.65 Additionally, in 2017, a former Uber engineer, Susan Fowler, penned a firsthand account of the sexual harassment she experienced while she worked at Uber’s corporate office, which sparked a much larger cultural discussion of the sexual harassment in Silicon Valley.

Whistleblower: My Journey to Silicon Valley and Fight for Justice at Uber by Susan Fowler

"Susan Fowler" uber, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Big Tech, Burning Man, cloud computing, data science, deep learning, DevOps, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fault tolerance, Grace Hopper, Higgs boson, Large Hadron Collider, Lyft, Maui Hawaii, messenger bag, microservices, Mitch Kapor, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, TechCrunch disrupt, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, work culture

To make matters worse, there was a brand-new story in the papers about me or Uber every single day. I was able to push aside the small stories, but the bigger ones were impossible to ignore. The day after my blog post, Travis Kalanick and Uber hired Eric Holder, the former U.S. attorney general under President Obama, and Tammy Albarrán, a partner at the law firm Covington & Burling, to “conduct an independent review into the specific issues relating to the work place environment raised by Susan Fowler, as well as diversity and inclusion at Uber more broadly.” The investigation, Uber announced, would be overseen by Arianna Huffington and Uber’s chief HR officer, Liane Hornsey.

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Another friend said that when she requested a lawyer be present in her interview with Uber’s lawyers, they refused to allow it. Yet another friend told me that at the end of his interview one of the lawyers demanded to know what exactly Susan Fowler might be planning next. If Uber employees declined to meet with the investigators or requested a lawyer, they were sternly reprimanded. One of the women from the LadyEng group showed me an email that she had received from Uber’s legal team in which she and other employees were told that if they didn’t meet with Uber’s investigators, they would be fired. They were also told that they were not allowed to bring lawyers to these meetings; according to Uber’s legal team, employees did not have the right to have a lawyer present because “this is not a police interrogation.”

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., author. Title: Whistleblower : my journey to Silicon Valley and fight for justice at Uber / Susan Fowler. Description: [New York] : Viking, [2020] | Identifiers: LCCN 2019034425 (print) | LCCN 2019034426 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525560128 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525560135 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Sexual harassment—California—Santa Clara Valley (Santa Clara County) | Sexual harassment of women—California—Santa Clara Valley (Santa Clara County) | Whistle blowing—California—Santa Clara Valley (Santa Clara County) | Uber (Firm)—Corrupt practices. Classification: LCC HD6060.5.U52 S36 2020 (print) | LCC HD6060.5.U52 (ebook) | DDC 305.42092 [B]—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019034425 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019034426 Viking is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity.

Unleashed by Anne Morriss, Frances Frei

"Susan Fowler" uber, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, Black Lives Matter, book value, Donald Trump, future of work, gamification, gig economy, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Greyball, Jeff Bezos, Netflix Prize, Network effects, performance metric, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, super pumped, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture

A #deleteUber campaign began shortly after the company appeared to take advantage of a taxi strike in response to President Trump’s travel ban. A few months later, Uber engineer Susan Fowler blogged about her experience of harassment and discrimination in a culture she convincingly portrayed as ruthless.1 Footage then emerged of Kalanick interacting with an Uber driver, where he appeared dismissive of the difficulties of earning a living in a post-Uber world. Other charges leveled at the company in this period reinforced Uber’s reputation as a cold-blooded operator that would do almost anything to win. It did not help the company’s position that some of its challenges had morphed into public reckonings with ills that plagued the rest of the tech sector, too.2 These included inertia and confusion when it came to building safe and healthy workplaces.

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Dempsey, “Mission Command White Paper,” Office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Washington, DC, April 2012. 8. Gallup, State of the Global Workforce (New York: Gallup Press, 2017). Chapter 2 1. Susan Fowler, “Reflecting on One Very, Very Strange Year at Uber,” Susan Fowler (blog), February 19, 2017, https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very-strange-year-at-uber. 2. Kara Swisher, ubiquitous journalist, entrepreneur, and conscience of the tech sector, was writing regularly about the urgent need for stronger leadership and accountability in the industry. 3. These ideas were explored in a TED talk Frances gave called “How to Build (and Rebuild) Trust” (TED Talk, TED2018, Vancouver, April 13, 2018). 4.

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McCord tells the complete story herself in her terrific book, Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility (USA: Silicon Guild, 2017). 7. Mike Isaac, Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2019), 265. 8. Anyone who cares about getting culture right should read Susan Fowler, Whistleblower: My Journey to Silicon Valley and Fight for Justice at Uber (New York: Viking, 2020). 9. Dara Khosrowshahi, “Uber’s New Cultural Norms,” LinkedIn (blog), November 7, 2017, https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ubers-new-cultural-norms-dara-khosrowshahi/. 10. We admire the practices of world-class leadership coaches like Jerry Colonna, who has dedicated his career to helping leaders disrupt the path from personal history to company dysfunction.

Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies by Reid Hoffman, Chris Yeh

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, database schema, DeepMind, Didi Chuxing, discounted cash flows, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, Ford Model T, forensic accounting, fulfillment center, Future Shock, George Gilder, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, high-speed rail, hockey-stick growth, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, initial coin offering, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, late fees, Lean Startup, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, oil shale / tar sands, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Quicken Loans, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, thinkpad, three-martini lunch, transaction costs, transport as a service, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, web application, winner-take-all economy, work culture , Y Combinator, yellow journalism

Just remember to save a few ships to fend off attacks from those pesky pirates! From Captain to Admiral At the time of the writing of this book, the ridesharing company Uber was Silicon Valley’s most valuable start-up (and second globally to its frenemy, China’s Didi Chuxing), despite having spent most of 2017 in the news for a number of serious problems and scandals. Some of these issues were due to clearly unethical behavior, including internal problems, such as the sexual harassment reported by the former Uber engineer Susan Fowler, and various external attempts to subvert free competition, regulation, and the press, such as creating fake accounts to poach drivers from its rival Lyft (as reported by The Verge), developing software (Greyball) to prevent law enforcement and regulators from accessing the service, and then-COO Emil Michael suggesting that the company spend money to hire opposition researchers to intimidate journalists.

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You can’t run a Village the same way you run a Tribe, and you can’t run a City the same way you run a Village. But without structure, you won’t make it to the next stage of growth. It appears that Kalanick’s discomfort with Uber feeling “big” led to a dysfunctional organizational structure in which he clung to his previous ways. In the absence of a cohesive management team, Uber seemed to operate on a model that Susan Fowler described in her personal blog as “a game-of-thrones political war” with managers fighting for advancement: The ramifications of these political games were significant: projects were abandoned left and right, OKRs were changed multiple times each quarter, nobody knew what our organizational priorities would be one day to the next, and very little ever got done.

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For successful blitzscaling, the competitive advantage comes from the growth factors built into the business model, such as network effects, whereby the first company to achieve critical scale triggers a feedback loop that allows it to dominate a winner-take-all or winner-take-most market and achieve a lasting first-scaler advantage. For example, Uber’s strategy of aggressive city-by-city expansion allows its customers to hail rides with fewer delays than its competitors. Uber wants you to be able to get a ride faster with Uber than with anyone else. This attracts more customers, which attracts more drivers, which increases the liquidity of the marketplace, which allows customers to hail rides even more quickly, which attracts more customers, and so on. Early Uber investor Bill Gurley laid out Uber’s strategy in his 2012 blog post “All Markets Are Not Created Equal.” As the company grows, they are able to facilitate more cars on the road, and along with their investment in route and load optimization, this allows for shorter and shorter pickup times.

Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World by Meredith Broussard

"Susan Fowler" uber, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, Dennis Ritchie, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker Ethic, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, life extension, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, payday loans, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Saturday Night Live, school choice, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, TechCrunch disrupt, Tesla Model S, the High Line, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, work culture , yottabyte

It shows up later in the behavior of tech CEOs like Travis Kalanick, who in 2017 was ousted from his top position at Uber for (among other things) creating a culture of sexual harassment. Kalanick also had the attitude that laws didn’t matter. He launched Uber in cities worldwide in defiance of local taxi and limousine regulations, created a program called Greyball to help Uber computationally evade sting operations by law enforcement, was captured on camera verbally abusing an Uber driver, and looked the other way when Uber drivers raped passengers.10 According to a blog post by former Uber engineer Susan Fowler, Kalanick’s tech managers were almost cartoonishly incompetent at dealing with the harassment complaints Fowler lodged.

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Flew, Terry, Christina Spurgeon, Anna Daniel, and Adam Swift. “The Promise of Computational Journalism.” Journalism Practice 6, no. 2 (April 2012): 157–171. doi:10.1080/17512786.2011.616655. Fowler, Susan J. “Reflecting on One Very, Very Strange Year at Uber.” Susan Fowler (blog), February 19, 2017. https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very-strange-year-at-uber. Gomes, Lee. “Facebook AI Director Yann LeCun on His Quest to Unleash Deep Learning and Make Machines Smarter.” IEEE Spectrum (blog), February 18, 2015. http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intelligence/facebook-ai-director-yann-lecun-on-deep-learning.

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Dormehl, “Why John Sculley Doesn’t Wear an Apple Watch (and Regrets Booting Steve Jobs).” 8. Lewis, “Rise of the Fembots”; LaFrance, “Why Do So Many Digital Assistants Have Feminine Names?” 9. Hillis, “Radioactive Skeleton in Marvin Minsky’s Closet.” 10. Alba, “Chicago Uber Driver Charged with Sexual Abuse of Passenger”; Fowler, “Reflecting on One Very, Very Strange Year at Uber”; Isaac, “How Uber Deceives the Authorities Worldwide.” 11. Copeland, “Summing Up Alan Turing.” 12. “The Leibniz Step Reckoner and Curta Calculators—CHM Revolution.” 13. Kroeger, The Suffragents; Shetterly, Hidden Figures; Grier, When Computers Were Human. 14. 

Your Computer Is on Fire by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, Kavita Philip

"Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital divide, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, financial innovation, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Multics, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, postindustrial economy, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, telepresence, the built environment, the map is not the territory, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, Y2K

., “Google Walkout: Global Protests after Sexual Misconduct Allegations,” Guardian (November 1, 2018), https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/nov/01/google-walkout-global-protests-employees-sexual-harassment-scandals; Susan Fowler, “Reflecting on One Very, Very Strange Year at Uber,” personal blog (February 19, 2017), https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very-strange-year-at-uber; Maya Kosoff, “Mass Firings at Uber as Sexual Harassment Scandal Grows,” Vanity Fair (June 6, 2017), https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/06/uber-fires-20-employees-harassment-investigation. 3. For instance, many of the leaders of the Google Walkout have been forced to leave the company.

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., Gender Codes: Why Women Are Leaving Computing (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2010); American Association of University Women, Solving the Equation: The Variables for Women’s Success in Engineering and Computing (Washington, DC: AAUW, 2015). 5. Susan Fowler, “Reflecting on One Very Strange Year at Uber,” personal blog (February 2, 2017), https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very-strange-year-at-uber; Alyssa Newcomb, “#MeToo: Sexual Harassment Rallying Cry Hits Silicon Valley,” NBC News (October 23, 2017), https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/metoo-sexual-harassment-rallying-cry-hits-silicon-valley-n813271, and Lydia Dishman, “This ‘Me Too’ Timeline Shows Why 2017 Was a Reckoning For Sexism,” Fast Company (December 6, 2017), https://www.fastcompany.com/40504569/this-me-too-timeline-shows-why-2017-was-a-reckoning-for-sexism; Louise Matsakis, “Google Employee’s Anti-Diversity Manifesto Goes ‘Internally Viral,’” Vice (August 5, 2017), https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/kzbm4a/employees-anti-diversity-manifesto-goes-internally-viral-at-google. 6.

…

Like California’s wildfires, the software industry’s lack of diversity has generated a lot of heat but no real solutions. NSF data show that between 1993 and 2013, the percentage of women in computer science occupations actually declined from 31 percent to 24 percent.4 Scandals rocked Silicon Valley in 2017: former Uber engineer Susan Fowler divulged a pattern of sustained and egregious sexual harassment at that company; leading venture capitalists were ousted for sexual misconduct; and a viral Google memo argued that “biological causes . . . may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership.”5 But data points to society—not biology—as the cause, since the proportions are very different in some other countries: in Malaysia, for example, half of all computer science degrees are earned by women.6 For years the big tech companies resisted disclosing their embarrassingly low diversity numbers, until civil rights activist Reverend Jesse Jackson appeared at a Google shareholders’ meeting in May 2014 and demanded the release of this data.

Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, carbon credits, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, computer age, cross-subsidies, dark pattern, data is the new oil, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, game design, growth hacking, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, It's morning again in America, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, laissez-faire capitalism, Lean Startup, light touch regulation, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

If Chamath had continued to question Facebook’s mission, it is quite possible that the people he hired at the company, and those who knew him, might begin to question their leaders’ and company’s choices. The result might be a Susan Fowler Moment, named for the Uber engineer whose blog post about that company’s toxic culture led to an employee revolt and, ultimately, the departure of the executive team. What made Fowler so important was that Uber’s management team, board of directors, and investors had done nothing for years to change the toxic culture, despite a steady flow of bad news about it. Fowler framed the problem in a way that no one could deny, causing the employees to demand change.

…

Fowler framed the problem in a way that no one could deny, causing the employees to demand change. That is precisely what Palihapitiya did in his remarks at Stanford. It’s easy to imagine that Facebook might do whatever it took to prevent a Susan Fowler Moment. Chamath’s reversal triggered an insight. The window for Facebook to make a graceful exit from its predicament would not stay open forever. The opportunity to follow the example of Johnson & Johnson after the Tylenol tampering crisis of the 1980s would last only as long as Facebook could credibly plead ignorance of its misdeeds. Chamath had presented Facebook with a teachable moment.

…

With open source stacks as a foundation, engineers could focus all their effort on the valuable functionality of their app, rather than building infrastructure from the ground up. This saved time and money. In parallel, a new concept emerged—the cloud—and the industry embraced the notion of centralization of shared resources. The cloud is like Uber for data—customers don’t need to own their own data center or storage if a service provides it seamlessly from the cloud. Today’s leader in cloud services, Amazon Web Services (AWS), leveraged Amazon.com’s retail business to create a massive cloud infrastructure that it offered on a turnkey basis to startups and corporate customers.

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World by Clive Thompson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 4chan, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, blue-collar work, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, don't repeat yourself, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, false flag, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hockey-stick growth, HyperCard, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, ImageNet competition, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Larry Wall, lone genius, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microdosing, microservices, Minecraft, move 37, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, no silver bullet, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, OpenAI, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, planetary scale, profit motive, ransomware, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, techlash, TED Talk, the High Line, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Zimmermann PGP, éminence grise

“one very, very strange year”: Susan Fowler, “Reflecting on One Very, Very Strange Year at Uber,” SusanJFowler.com, February 19, 2017, accessed August 19, 2018, https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very-strange-year-at-uber. stalk their ex-girlfriends: Will Evans, “Uber Said It Protects You from Spying. Security Sources Say Otherwise,” Reveal News, December 12, 2016, accessed August 19, 2018, https://www.revealnews.org/article/uber-said-it-protects-you-from-spying-security-sources-say-otherwise. after a female journalist: Sarah Lacy, “Uber Executive Said the Company Would Spend ‘A Million Dollars’ to Shut Me Up,” Time, November 14, 2017, accessed August 19, 2018, http://time.com/5023287/uber-threatened-journalist-sarah-lacy.

…

There’s even been some pushback to the frat-house-style culture of many Silicon Valley firms. Consider Uber: In February 2017, the programmer Susan Fowler single-handedly shone a light into its culture, with a blog post describing “one very, very strange year” of working there. The company had a famously hard-driving, macho culture. Fowler enjoyed the insane pace of work and her talented colleagues; in her few spare hours, she authored a best-selling book on programming “microservices.” But she quickly discovered that harassment ran wild at Uber. Not long after Fowler had arrived, her manager propositioned her, via chat, for sex.

…

after a female journalist: Sarah Lacy, “Uber Executive Said the Company Would Spend ‘A Million Dollars’ to Shut Me Up,” Time, November 14, 2017, accessed August 19, 2018, http://time.com/5023287/uber-threatened-journalist-sarah-lacy. he calls it “Boob-er”: Mickey Rapkin, “Uber Cab Confessions,” GQ, February 27, 2014, accessed August 19, 2018, www.gq.com/story/uber-cab-confessions. had been forced out: Mike Isaac, “Uber Founder Travis Kalanick Resigns as C.E.O.,” New York Times, June 21, 2017, accessed August 19, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/21/technology/uber-ceo-travis-kalanick.html. Chris Sacca and Justin Caldbeck: Sage Lazzaro, “6 Women Accuse Prominent Tech VC Justin Caldbeck of Sexual Assault and Harassment,” Observer, June 23, 2017, accessed August 19, 2018, http://observer.com/2017/06/justin-caldbeck-binary-capital-sexual-assault-harssment; Becky Peterson, “ ‘Shark Tank’ Judge Chris Sacca Apologizes for Helping Make Tech Hostile to Women—after Being Accused of Inappropriately Touching a Female Investor,” Business Insider, June 30, 2017, accessed August 19, 2018, https://www.businessinsider.com/chris-sacca-apologizes-after-accusation-of-inappropriate-touching-2017-6; “Dave McClure Quits 500 Startups over Sexual Harassment Scandal,” Reuters, July 4, 2017, accessed August 19, 2018, http://fortune.com/2017/07/03/dave-mcclure-500-startups-quits; Maya Kosoff, “Silicon Valley’s Sexual-harassment Crisis Keeps Getting Worse,” Vanity Fair, September 12, 2017, accessed August 19, 2018, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/09/silicon-valleys-sexual-harassment-crisis-keeps-getting-worse.

Wild Ride: Inside Uber's Quest for World Domination by Adam Lashinsky

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, asset light, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Benchmark Capital, business process, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, DARPA: Urban Challenge, Didi Chuxing, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, gig economy, Golden Gate Park, Google X / Alphabet X, hustle culture, independent contractor, information retrieval, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, new economy, pattern recognition, price mechanism, public intellectual, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, Steve Jobs, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Tony Hsieh, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, young professional

Furthermore, when she reached out to Uber, a customer-service representative apologized and gave her a $30 credit—but initially failed to confirm that the driver had been punished or kicked off the platform. The sentiment also reached into the workforce of Uber itself. In February 2017, a former Uber engineer named Susan Fowler posted a story online titled “Reflecting on One Very, Very Strange Year at Uber.” She described allegations of having been sexually harassed by her male superior and then having her complaints ignored by Uber’s human resources department. Kalanick took to Twitter to call the allegations “abhorrent and against everything Uber stands for and believes in.” He also said the post was the first he’d heard of Fowler’s complaint, and he formed a committee that included board member Arianna Huffington and former U.S. attorney general Eric Holder to investigate.

…

When Kalanick first called Tusk in 2011, Uber couldn’t afford to pay the fee, so Kalanick offered Tusk Uber stock instead. That small piece of Uber was worth more than $100 million five years later. Launching Uber was like waging a multifront war. In Denver, for example, the Colorado Public Utilities Commission proposed rules to contain Uber in the months after it started operating, in mid-2012. Uber fought back with a social-media-oriented public-relations blitz that worked with riders who liked the service and drivers eager for the cash they suddenly were earning. In a blog post addressed to the “Uber-Faithful,” the company warned that proposed rule changes would make Uber’s pricing model illegal (which it compared to telling hotels they couldn’t charge by the night), ban Uber drivers from downtown Denver (“TAXI protectionism at its finest”), and make it illegal to partner with limousine companies.

…

If Kalanick was feeling the heat, it would only get worse for him and for Uber. The “Operation SLOG” campaign against Lyft had solidified a sense of Uber’s nefariousness among a growing slice of the tech-aware public. “Hopefully people understand what an evil company UBER is and boycott their service,” read one comment on The Verge, which published the exposé of Uber’s campaign against Lyft. Said another: “What can you expect when UBER’s CEO is another one of those Ayn-Rand loving libertarian nutjobs.” It became politically correct in some coastal cities to avoid Uber altogether. Then, in November 2014, Uber hosted a dinner in New York with influential journalists in which it hoped to put the company in a better light.

Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech by Sara Wachter-Boettcher

"Susan Fowler" uber, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, AltaVista, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, Grace Hopper, Greyball, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, job automation, Kickstarter, lifelogging, lolcat, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, microaggression, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, real-name policy, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Tactical Technology Collective, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, upwardly mobile, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce, work culture , zero-sum game

So let’s look more closely at how clinging to meritocracy myths can turn a tech company toxic, why doing so keeps the industry from becoming more representative, and what happens when an organization decides to do things differently. THE MERITOCRACY MELTDOWN On a fall day in 2015, Susan Fowler showed up for her first day of work as a site reliability engineer at Uber. She was thrilled: her department was new, her coworkers were smart, and she was told she could join any project she wanted. She spent a couple weeks in training, and then joined an engineering team that focused on her area of expertise. Her first day on the team, everything changed: her direct manager propositioned her for sex over chat.

…

Travis Kalanick, “A Profound Apology,” Uber Newsroom (blog), February 28, 2017, https://newsroom.uber.com/a-profound-apology. 19. Mickey Rapkin, “Uber Cab Confessions,” GQ, February 27, 2014, http://www.gq.com/story/uber-cab-confessions. 20. Nitasha Tiku, “Uber CEO on Driver ‘Assault’: It’s Not Real and We’re Not Responsible,” Valleywag, September 16, 2013, http://valleywag.gawker.com/uber-ceo-on-driver-assault-its-not-real-and-were-n-1323533057. 21. Alison Griswold, “Uber Is Designed So That for One Employee to Get Ahead, Another Must Fail,” Quartz, February 27, 2017, https://qz.com/918582/uber-is-designed-so-that-for-one-employee-to-succeed-another-must-fail. 22.

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Twenty bucks says you’ll want to throw your phone in a river and move to a cabin off the grid by the time you’re done. 5. Andrew J. Hawkins, “Uber Wants to Track Your Location Even When You’re Not Using the App,” Verge, November 30, 2016, http://www.theverge.com/2016/11/30/13763714/uber-location-data-tracking-app-privacy-ios-android. 6. Jon Russell, “Uber’s Moral Compass Needs Recalibration,” TechCrunch, November 19, 2014, https://techcrunch.com/2014/11/19/uber-off. 7. Kai Ryssdal, “Uber’s Data Makes a Creepy Point about the Company,” Marketplace, Minnesota Public Radio, November 18, 2014, http://www.marketplace.org/2014/11/18/business/final-note/ubers-data-makes-creepy-point-about-company. 8.

Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work by Sarah Kessler

"Susan Fowler" uber, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, call centre, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, do what you love, Donald Trump, East Village, Elon Musk, financial independence, future of work, game design, gig economy, Hacker News, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, job automation, law of one price, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, post-work, profit maximization, QR code, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator

Uber didn’t give in on tipping until it faced a public relations crisis in 2017. Susan Fowler, a former employee at the company, published a blog post that documented a culture of sexual harassment and misogyny at the company, which led to an internal investigation that ultimately resulted in the firing of 20 employees and the ousting of Travis Kalanick, who resigned amid a shareholder revolt. The company was so desperate to mitigate the impact of this news that on a steamy summer day in New York City, it plopped a giant block of ice near Union Square, inside of which were “collectable cones” that could be taken to McDonald’s for ice cream (Uber had in previous years delivered free ice cream in the summer, but this was a truly over-the-top display).

…

The tech blog trumpeted each “Uber for X” app’s arrival with headlines such as: POSTMATES AIMS TO BE THE UBER OF PACKAGES—AND MORE WOULD YOU USE AN UBER FOR LAWNCARE? BLACKJET, THE UBER OF PRIVATE JETS, RELEASES ITS IPHONE APP SO I FLEW IN AN “UBER FOR TINY PLANES” MEET STAT, THE STARTUP THAT WANTS TO BE UBER FOR MEDICAL TRANSPORT Startups made Uber for food. Uber for alcohol. Uber for cleaning. Uber for courier services. Uber for massages. Uber for grocery shopping. Uber for car washes. Even Uber for weed. Uber itself hinted that it would take its business model far beyond transportation: “Uber is a cross between lifestyle and logistics,” Uber CEO Travis Kalanick told Bloomberg.

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“That was the best day of my life,” Abe told me. Now feeling duped by Uber, Abe would use a similar strategy. “KC [Kansas City] UBER DRIVERS: The time has come to unite as one voice!” he wrote on his Uber Freedom Facebook page in July 2015. “We need to make a stand and unite as one and tell Uber, enough is enough! Join the organization that will ensure KC drivers are treated fairly.” Ten days earlier, he wrote, Uber had lowered rates in Atlanta by 22%, the first big cut in the short time Abe had been driving for Uber. “What is stopping them from lowering them [here]?” Abe asked. Around the same time, Uber deactivated Abe. The company hadn’t, according to Abe, provided an explanation, but he believed the decision was made in retaliation for his organizing activities (rather than, say, as a reaction to his habit of shotgunning rides).

The Smartphone Society by Nicole Aschoff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, global value chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, late capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planned obsolescence, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yottabyte

Ordinary folks with a decent vehicle were promised a path to financial independence and the chance to be their own boss. Uber’s prestige and popularity made it a desirable place to work for young software engineers and computer programmers. The company promoted an image of a work-hard, play-hard environment where employees were changing the world and having fun doing it. Travis Kalanick, the face of the company when he was its CEO, was a media darling with reporters apt to marvel at his brightly colored sneakers and boyish charm. Uber’s glow faded fast, however, after Susan Fowler, a young software engineer at Uber, clued the world in on what really went on at the company.

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For an interesting discussion, see also Yan Leng, Santistevan, and Pentland, “Familiar Stranger.” 3. Rivoli, “New York City Will Propose Minimum Wage for Uber, App Drivers.” 4. Desai, “How to Beat Uber.” 5. For information on ongoing campaigns see the website of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance, http://www.nytwa.org. See also Fitzsimmons, “Uber Hit with Cap as New York City Takes Lead in Crackdown.” Uber responded to the cap by suing the city in February 2019 to overturn the cap. The case was ongoing when this book went to press. For more, see Hawkins, “Uber Sues to Overturn New York City’s Cap on New Ride-Hail Drivers.” 6. Roose, “After Uproar, Instacart Backs Off Controversial Tipping Policy.” 7.

…

App jobs are a testing ground for employers to see how far they can go in externalizing both work and workers, to see how much they can force workers, consumers, and governments to take on the costs of production. Uber, the largest provider of app jobs in the United States, shows this externalization at work. Drivers provide their own vehicle (paying for gas, repair costs, and insurance) and phone, while Uber provides only the software and its network. Uber takes a 25 percent cut from each ride, yet drivers are not considered employees and the company is not responsible for their safety. Uber is also not responsible for the safety of its consumers (riders) nor the increased congestion and pollution it causes in urban centers.

The Four: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Divided and Conquered the World by Scott Galloway

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Bob Noyce, Brewster Kahle, business intelligence, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, commoditize, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, Didi Chuxing, digital divide, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of journalism, future of work, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, passive income, Peter Thiel, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, Tesla Model S, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, working poor, you are the product, young professional

There have been a series of reports that Uber management uses the technology’s ability to track riders in real time for entertainment or other personal reasons, including members of the press.27 In France, Uber ran an ad campaign that, at best, was sexist, and arguably suggested that Uber was a great way to hire an escort service.28 In 2016, Uber paid a $20,000 fine as part of an investigation by the New York attorney general into the misuse of its tracking capability.29 Worst of all, Uber’s likability took a major hit with Susan Fowler’s corporate sexual discrimination charges in February 2017.30 Actions by midlevel and C-level management ranged from callous to reprehensible in dozens of instances. Scrappy start-ups can sometimes get away with this sort of thing, but industry giants are expected to display greater maturity. Heads should have rolled, and some did, if months later. In June 2017, despite recommendations by external counsel that sought to reallocate the responsibilities of Kalanick, the board initially didn’t fire Kalanick; instead he announced he was taking an unlimited leave of absence.

…

Aspirational horsemen always show a willingness to go to market in ways unavailable to their old-guard competition. Uber, for example, operates in blatant contravention of the law in many, perhaps just about all, of its markets. It has been banned in Germany; Uber drivers are fined in France (but Uber pays the fines);13 and various U.S. jurisdictions have ordered Uber to cease operations.14 And yet, investors—including governments—are lining up to hand the company billions. Why? Because they sense that, in the end, the law will give way before Uber does; Uber is inevitable. And they are probably right. There are laws, and there are innovators. Good money is on the innovators. Uber not only evades the regulations traditionally applicable to car-for-hire services; it also evades labor law by posing as an app that links independent drivers—a posture that nobody seriously believes.

…

The app is already auto-populating your destination based on travel history, aging in reverse. Uber isn’t known as much of an accelerant, because very few people know anybody who works for Uber HQ. Uber only has a few thousand employees, and they’re very technically literate. Uber has figured out a way to isolate the lords (8,000 employees) from the serfs (2 million drivers), who average $7.75/hour, so its 4,000 employees can carve up $70 billion vs. $2 million on an hourly wage.25 So, Uber has said to the global workforce, in hushed but clear tones: “Thanks, and fuck you.” Can a car service really justify Uber’s $70 billion private-market valuation? Doubtful. But Uber is more than just a car service.

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us by Dan Lyons

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, antiwork, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hacker News, hiring and firing, holacracy, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Gruber, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parker Conrad, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, RAND corporation, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, web application, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

They also point out that they made the investment in Uber before they committed to social-impact investing.) The big win on Uber came with baggage. Uber had built a toxic culture that was the antithesis of everything the Kapors stood for. There was no diversity. Women were treated horribly. So while the investment added to the Kapors’ bank account it also became a blot on their reputation. In February 2017 Uber was engulfed in scandal after Susan Fowler, a former engineer at the company, published an essay on Medium describing sexual harassment that had driven her to leave the company. Soon other women from Uber came forward with similar stories about an abusive workplace. Uber tried to put out the fire by creating a team to investigate the complaints, led by Eric Holder, the former attorney general of the United States.

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In the hands of a bad employer those options can make people incredibly vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. That is reportedly what happened at Uber. For several years after its founding in 2009, Uber was the hottest tech unicorn in the world. Getting a job at the San Francisco ride-sharing company was like winning a golden ticket. But Uber’s managers took full advantage of that. Uber became a toxic, stressful place to work, with bullying, allegations of sexual harassment, and a notoriously cruel culture. “It’s a money cult” is how a former worker described Uber to BuzzFeed in 2017. “People are putting up with massive amounts of abuse, mental abuse.”

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An Automaton Class Uber manages its three million drivers almost entirely with software. Why not? The company makes no secret of the fact that it hopes one day (as soon as possible) to get rid of human drivers entirely and replace them with self-driving cars. For now, the ride-sharing company treats human drivers as poorly as it can and keeps them at arm’s length. Software becomes a barrier between worker and employer. To the driver, what is Uber? Where is it located? What does it look like? Uber is a black box. Uber is an app on a smartphone screen. Drivers rarely talk to actual human managers at Uber, except when being recruited, and sometimes not even then.

New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World--And How to Make It Work for You by Jeremy Heimans, Henry Timms

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, battle of ideas, benefit corporation, Benjamin Mako Hill, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, British Empire, Chris Wanstrath, Columbine, Corn Laws, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, death from overwork, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, game design, gig economy, hiring and firing, holacracy, hustle culture, IKEA effect, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, job satisfaction, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Jony Ive, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Occupy movement, post-truth, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Snapchat, social web, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, TED Talk, the scientific method, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Weeks later, another surge of deletions occurred after a former Uber corporate employee, Susan Fowler, blew the lid off the company’s culture of sexual harassment on her blog. Uber was reduced to sending messages to users who were trying to delete the app, pleading with them and saying it was “deeply hurting.” The media had a field day with these stories, compounded by more internal strife and the leak of a video of Kalanick arguing with one of his own drivers. Kara Swisher and her popular technology blog Recode were a critical voice (in both senses), shifting opinion against Travis and Uber. Kalanick had raised more venture capital than any start-up ever had, and in the end it was five of Uber’s big investors who put the dagger to Kalanick.

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“your friend with a car”: Dimosthenis Kefallonitis, “Lyft.me, Your Friend with a Car,” Consumer Value Creation, January 22, 2014. Uber is defined by its remoteness: Alanna Petroff, “The Rise and Fall of Uber CEO Travis Kalanick,” CNNMoney, June 21, 2017. “The reason Uber”: Chris Smith, “Uber Wants to ‘Get Rid of the Dude in the Car’ with Driverless Taxi Service,” TechRadar, May 8, 2014. It all began when Uber: Caroline O’Donovan, “Uber Just Cut Fares in 80 North American Cities,” BuzzFeed, January 9, 2016. “In true Uber fashion”: Harry Campbell, “Uber to Cut Rates in More Than 100 Cities,” The Rideshare Guy (blog), January 8, 2016. www.therideshareguy.com.

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Over the years, Uber had almost seemed to delight in picking fights with others in its circle. In 2014, Travis Kalanick explained Uber’s worldview this way: “We’re in a political campaign, and the candidate is Uber and the opponent is an asshole named Taxi.” (It is fair to say, given Kalanick’s own personal brand, that Taxi might see its opponent in similar terms.) Initially, Uber could rely on the support and energy of its drivers. But, as Fast Company’s Sarah Kessler observed, taxi drivers and Uber drivers began to recognize their common interests in the fight for better pay and conditions. Uber’s sudden rate cut in 2016 led taxi drivers and Uber drivers in the United States to form joint protests to avoid a “race to the bottom.”

Masters of Scale: Surprising Truths From the World's Most Successful Entrepreneurs by Reid Hoffman, June Cohen, Deron Triff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, call centre, chief data officer, clean water, collaborative consumption, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, desegregation, do well by doing good, Elon Musk, financial independence, fulfillment center, gender pay gap, global macro, growth hacking, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, knowledge economy, late fees, Lean Startup, lone genius, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Network effects, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, polynesian navigation, race to the bottom, remote working, RFID, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, work culture , Y Combinator, zero day, Zipcar

There were run-ins with regulators, taxi firms, and even Uber’s own drivers. Uber saw a backlash in its key markets and withdrew from some, such as China. Back home, Uber’s controversial approach to charging higher fares at peak times came to a head with the #DeleteUber campaign. And then there was Uber’s notorious, hyperaggressive “bro” culture. In February 2017—six months before Dara became CEO—a blog post by former Uber engineer Susan Fowler blew the lid off the misogyny and harassment that was rife at the company. As the only woman on Uber’s board of directors, Arianna Huffington had become deeply involved in trying to fix the company’s culture.

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So Dara saw firsthand that it’s possible to survive and come back from even the most devastating setback. But still…walking into Uber in 2017? When asked what that must have been like, Dara responds: “I’m sweating because I’m remembering that first week.” A bit of background on just what Dara was walking into: First it should be acknowledged, without a doubt, that Uber was a huge success. Fueled by more than $22 billion in VC funding, Uber had, by 2017, become nearly ubiquitous, operating in six hundred cities around the world. But its size came with a cost; as Uber scaled rapidly, its culture began to veer out of control, owing to a combination of toxic leadership and questionable business tactics.

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Dara knew that to right the ship at Uber, he’d need to firmly end the era of rule-breaking pirates, while encouraging the many ethical warriors he found among its ranks. From the outset, he took a leadership approach that he’d begun to develop in his years working for Barry Diller as head of the travel website Expedia. Rather than coming in and trying to impose a new culture on Uber, Dara wanted to see if he could encourage the people already there to help shape and guide the necessary transformation. So Dara immediately asked the Uber employees: What do you think should represent the culture of Uber going forward?

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US by Rana Foroohar

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, future of work, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PageRank, patent troll, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, price discrimination, profit maximization, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, search engine result page, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, warehouse robotics, WeWork, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

The ubiquitous ride-hailing business he founded had been drawing criticism from municipal lawmakers and union activists—particularly in large cities like New York and San Francisco—for years, but their PR crisis reached a boiling point following a series of scandals that started with a blog post from a former engineer, Susan Fowler, alleging harassment and rampant sexism at the company. That news went viral in the same month that Waymo, an autonomous vehicle unit owned by Google’s parent company, Alphabet, filed a federal lawsuit against the ridesharing company alleging that a software engineer had stolen its trade secrets and taken them to Uber, which is developing its own autonomous vehicles. This was followed only five days later by a shocking video showing the CEO himself blowing up at an Uber driver who deigned to complain about the company’s payment system.1 Uber’s own dashcam recorded the interaction, in which the driver claimed to have gone bankrupt after investing $97,000 in a high-end car in order to drive for uberBLACK, only to find that rates began falling and the service was being dropped in favor of cheaper cars.

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Rana Foroohar, “Privacy Is a Competitive Advantage,” Financial Times, October 15, 2017. Chapter 8: The Uberization of Everything 1. Leslie Hook, “Uber: The Crisis Inside the ‘Cult of Travis,’ ” Financial Times, March 9, 2017. 2. Video of Kalanick arguing with an Uber driver over fares can be accessed here: https://www.youtube.com/​watch?v=gTEDYCkNqns. 3. Katy Steinmetz and Matt Vella, “Uber Fail: Upheaval at the World’s Most Valuable Startup Is a Wake-Up Call for Silicon Valley,” Time, June 15, 2017. 4. Sheelah Kolhatkar, “At Uber, a New CEO Shifts Gears,” The New Yorker, March 30, 2018. 5. Hook, “Uber.” 6. Eric Newcomer, Sonali Basak, and Sridhar Natarajan, “Uber’s Blame Game Focuses on Morgan Stanley After Shares Drop,” Bloomberg Businessweek, May 20, 2019. 7.

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The Plight of the Gig Worker “Gig work” seems to have reached a new apex with the rise of companies like Uber. Consider the typical non-medallion taxi driver in New York, who might work for three or more companies at once: Uber, Lyft, and perhaps even an unlicensed cab firm. There is some truth to the claim that such people are essentially entrepreneurs, with all the freedom that working for themselves entails. With Uber, drivers set their own hours and are in a sense their own boss, something Kalanick always lauded as highly empowering. “There is a core independence and dignity you get when you control your own time,” he told me in 2015. Fair enough. But that’s about all Uber drivers are in control of.

Alpha Girls: The Women Upstarts Who Took on Silicon Valley's Male Culture and Made the Deals of a Lifetime by Julian Guthrie

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, blockchain, Bob Noyce, call centre, cloud computing, credit crunch, deal flow, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, game design, Gary Kildall, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, information security, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, new economy, PageRank, peer-to-peer, pets.com, phenotype, place-making, private spaceflight, retail therapy, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, Teledyne, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, UUNET, web application, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce

Female entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley were coming forward to say they had been afraid until now to report the misconduct of certain venture capitalists. Susan Fowler, an engineer at Uber, accused her company of fostering a toxic culture of sexism. Uber CEO Travis Kalanick had quipped to a reporter in an interview years earlier that he should call the company “boober” for all the women he gets “on demand.” New allegations of abuse and bad behavior seemed to make headlines every day. Everyone at the Broadway Angels table knew someone who was accused of misconduct or worse. Shervin Pishevar, the Menlo partner and Uber investor who had moved into Sonja’s old office, was being accused of sexual harassment and assault by a handful of women.

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Sonja had spent countless hours under the tutelage of her father, who had been a professor of civil engineering and the director of the Center for Transportation Studies at the University of Virginia. Sonja told Carolan and Pishevar, “Point-to-point public transport is the holy grail of public transportation. Uber enables point-to-point public transport using existing resources and creating jobs.” She was relentless this time in sharing her views of the importance of the company. Menlo succeeded in landing a deal with Uber and led the Series B investment with $26 million of the $39 million round. (Other Series B investors included Jeff Bezos and Goldman Sachs.) Around the same time, Sonja helped engineer the sale of one of her earlier investments, Q1 Labs, to IBM.

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It had given rise to more new companies and industries than anywhere else in the world, including such technology giants as Hewlett-Packard, Fairchild Semiconductor, Intel, Teledyne, ROLM, Amgen, Genentech, Advanced Micro Devices, Tandem, Atari, Oracle, Apple, Dell, Electronic Arts, Compaq, FedEx, Netscape, LSI, Yahoo!, Amazon, Cisco, PayPal, eBay, Google, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Tesla, Facebook, YouTube, Uber, Skype, Twitter, and Airbnb. But Mary Jane and the other Alpha Girls would need steel in their spines to stay the course, and they would pay a steep emotional price along the way. They would be betrayed when they least expected it. Silicon Valley, teeming with youthful testosterone, is a deceptively rough arena, where bullying, bias, dysfunction, and subjugation are part of the rules of engagement.

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future by Sebastian Mallaby

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 90 percent rule, Adam Neumann (WeWork), adjacent possible, Airbnb, Apple II, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Bob Noyce, book value, business process, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Didi Chuxing, digital map, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dutch auction, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, family office, financial engineering, future of work, game design, George Gilder, Greyball, guns versus butter model, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Masayoshi Son, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, microdosing, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, mortgage debt, move fast and break things, Network effects, oil shock, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, plutocrats, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, super pumped, superconnector, survivorship bias, tech worker, Teledyne, the long tail, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban decay, UUNET, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Vision Fund, wealth creators, WeWork, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Zenefits

An ex-employee named Susan Fowler detailed repeated instances of sexual harassment at Uber, and her complaints went viral. Kalanick attempted to apologize and regroup, hiring a pair of prestigious law firms to investigate. But before the month was over, two new crises blew up. Furious that Uber had poached one of its key scientists, Google sued the firm for stealing its driverless-car technology. Then a damning video of Kalanick surfaced, apparently confirming what many suspected: the CEO was a jerk, and Uber was a jerk company. The video, recorded by a camera on an Uber car’s dashboard, showed Kalanick in the backseat, squirming awkwardly to music and flanked by two women.

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In February 2011, a year before investing in WeWork, Benchmark led the Series A for a ride-hailing startup called Uber. Unlike in the case of Theranos, its magic was authentic: push a button and a car came, no trickery necessary. Unlike WeWork, Uber was smack in the center of Benchmark’s sweet spot: a West Coast startup headed by a battle-hardened entrepreneur, with technology at the core of its promise. WeWork was blowing smoke when it claimed to be a “platform” with “network effects,” but Uber was the real thing. As Uber grew, there would be more cars, shorter waiting times, and the convenience of hailing Ubers in multiple cities. The prime mover behind Benchmark’s Uber bet was Bill Gurley, who had joined the partnership in 1998, three years after it got started.

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BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 68 According to Crunchbase, Didi raised money at a $23.5 billion pre-money valuation in June 2016 and again at a $33.6 billion pre-money valuation in September, after swallowing Uber China. Uber’s 18 percent stake would have been worth something close to the $6 billion implied by the second number. Uber sold some of its stake in Didi in September 2020, when it was valued at $6.3 billion. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 69 Unlike in the case of WeWork, where Benchmark got lucky with SoftBank’s willingness to buy some of its stake, Gurley had not had the opportunity to sell a single share in Uber. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 70 Sheelah Kolhatkar, “At Uber, a New C.E.O. Shifts Gears,” New Yorker, March 30, 2018.