Uber’s CEO doesn’t use Uber drivers anymore and neither should you.
beware the app that follows you even after you delete it
When Uber’s famous bad boy CEO Travis Kalanick needs to get from here to there, he whips out his phone and….texts his personal driver.
That’s right, the CEO of Uber doesn’t use the Uber app
….not since he was publicly recorded shouting at one of his drivers, accusing him of lying and lack of personal accountability. Travis’ version of personal accountability for the incident was not to start behaving better with his employees, but to hire a private car service for himself and avoid the hassle of talking to them altogether.
What does this say about Uber’s core values? To find its own service so uncomfortable to use, the CEO makes a choice that literally defeats the purported purpose of a ride-sharing service.
That’s like Elon Musk choosing to drive a Hummer instead of a Tesla.
Uber Company core values are listed as vision, quality obsession, innovation, “going toe to toe with colleagues,” fierceness, execution, communication, and “super-pumpedness.”
Based on these core values Uber’s product or service could be literally anything — they could plausibly describe core attributes of American Ninja Warriors.
Why a product manager at a ride arranging service would need to be ‘fierce’ is puzzling. Why a marketing manager would be ‘super pumped’ about clandestinely scraping Lyft user ride receipts to target Uber riders is downright disturbing. Why anyone would go “toe-to-toe with colleagues” in order to trick competitor drivers out of their income is…well, kinda morally bankrupt.
If core value words reflect how the CEO wants employees to see the company, well, these are a bit dubious, with notions of service and the customer notably absent. But words are easy. Actual values are reflected by actual actions. And based on its CEO actions, Uber appears to value trickery, abuse and contempt, all in the name of growth.
For awhile, chase growth at all costs has probably seemed like a good strategy — Uber operates in 311 cities in 58 countries, and it could be worth as much as $70 billion. In 2014 Travis Kalanick entered the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans at position 290, with an estimated net worth of $6 billion.
But then again, maybe not: Uber lost $2.8 billion in 2016, and probably at least that much again in its failed bid to compete with China’s Didi Chuxing service.
In the early days of Uber, when it was still “UberCab”, CEO Ryan Graves wrote in a company blog post:
“Our goal for all UberCab users, called clients, is for you to feel like a baller every time you use UberCab.”
The urban dictionary defines a baller as “A person who finds success and wealth. The source of income is usually unknown by others, but can tell wealth by the “baller’s” attire and usually cocky attitude.”
Sounds less like a mission statement than a “What Travis Wants To Be When He Grows Up” statement.
I don’t know about other Uber users, but I don’t really want or need to feel like a baller when I schedule a ride with Uber. I just want to get from here to there, and feel like like my choice is a better, smarter deal for everyone involved — for me, for the driver, for the city. The smartness of my choice is measured in all kinds of ways: i.e. a faster trip, a cheaper price, a happier driver, less car and parking congestion than would have been the case had I chosen a cab, or to drive myself, or to walk or ride my bike.
After reading Susan Fowler’s blog post about her treatment at “Boober” (a nickname Travis himself coined), my finger hovered over the Delete button. But I was still prioritizing convenience over my own values, so I called the incident Strike Two and waited to see if Uber would give me another, final reason to stop using the app.
Today, that reason surfaced, in the form of a New York Times story of Apple CEO Tim Cook calling Travis to his offices in 2015 after Apple had discovered that Uber engineers were ‘fingerprinting’ iPhones even after the Uber app had been deleted from the devices, “violating Apple’s privacy guidelines” as Tim Cook politely frames it. Uber does not deny that it follows users even after deleting the app, but claims to limit the practice to ‘eliminate fraud’. What’s your trust level on this one? Mine’s pretty low.
In the same story the Times reports Uber’s tactic of ordering and canceling competitor Lyft rides en masse, gleefully screwing over drivers and customers because #winning.
Uber values are reflected by Uber actions, and Uber actions appear to have no values whatsoever — all values are trumped by the goal of growth at all costs, extraction capitalism at its finest.
I’m not the only one to think this: citing Uber’s “approach and conduct” London’s regulatory agency Transport for London (TfL) announced that it feels Uber is“not fit and proper” to continue doing business in London, and will cease allowing it to at the end of September 2017.
Strike three, Uber. You’re out. I will watch with interest as blockchain technology disintermediates the Ubers of the world, companies led by CEOs like Travis who want to be a baller at all costs, even and especially at the expense of the employees and customers who make it all possible.
Blockchain puts Uber out of a job and lets the taxi drivers work with the customer directly
~Ethereum blockchain founder Vitalik Buterin
As Don Tapscott memorably predicts in his book Blockchain Revolution, today’s big disrupters are about to get disrupted. Uber, Airbnb, TaskRabbit and other so-called ‘sharing economy’ platforms “do not share — they aggregate”, taking a hefty sharkbite of profits and collecting data for further financial exploitation. Sharing is the last thing these companies are about.
In the next generation of the internet, blockchain technology will supersede middlemen like Uber, enabling drivers to to reap the lion’s share of their ride sharing service — a kind of ‘super Uber’, or SUber, as Tapscott calls it.
SUber instead of Boober. That’s a ride I’m up for.
