I personally feel like David Cush (Former Virgin America CEO) should be the guy at the top of their list - he was previously on the shortlist in the COO search and if there is one person who understands building a transportation brand that people love its him.
Customers raved about Virgin America (and still do) even though they were largely a no frills airline - it shares a lot of similarities with Uber
I once lost a quarter billion in company value by bringing in a big brand name corporate CEO to satisfy VCs instead of continuing to make do with nothing but still-emerging domain experience and a passion for learning and evolving the customer experience.
In this kind of business, if the CEO isn’t relentlessly and ruthlessly proxying the customer needs, it will probably have a bad time.
Only on HN can a mere mortal like me read an offhand comment by a fellow commenter, claiming to have lost a quarter billion dollars (and believe it to be true).
Yeah contrast that with Immelt who oversaw a 50% decline in GE's market cap since taking the helm in 2000. Drastically under-performing the S&P 500 over the same time period.
I can understand the board's desire to put an elder-statesman style CEO in place to reign the "kids" in, but just because he went to Harvard doesn't make him an effective CEO.
I would rather have Uber crash and burn under the stewardship of Kalanick (unlikely scenario) than have the same happen under a clueless board and a replacement CEO (likely scenario).
I said it before and you can mark my word. This decision to hire Immelt as Travis' replacement only goes further to solidify my claim. Bad decision. Very bad decision.
I agree. Immelt is an HBS educated manager. <- Full stop. That's the only thing about him. He has no Silicon Valley experience and worked for the GE his whole life. The only thing I would hire him for is to stabilize the company to finally go public. I bet the VC's plan exactly for that. I would not expect any innovation in Ubers business from now on. Immelt will bring Uber in shape for Wall Street, VCs cash out and then the whole thing can go to hell. As bad as Kalanick was, he was aggressive and hungry for success. Immelt is nothing of that. Bye bye Uber.
I hadn't seen it that way but like @dna_polymerase pointed out above, it may very well be. I still maintain it's myopic and undeserving of a company I'd like to think of as the next facebook/amazon/google/microsoft
These are outfits that have provided tremendous value to the entire planet. My view was that Uber could have followed the same trajectory. Now, not so much anymore.
I'm not sure this is a good idea. Immelt feels too much like a manufacturing guy. Marissa Mayer sounds like a good choice, but again I don't think she's the right fit. They need someone who understands both software, and transportation. I think they should choose David Abney, CEO of UPS, or Gary Kelly of Southwest.
Mayer is a terrible choice. If nothing else, her tenure at Yahoo! showed how little emotional intelligence she has. That's the last thing you'd want in a replacement for an allegedly out of touch douche bag like Kalanick.
I don't think Uber will last too long. The founder instilled a very bad culture from the very beginning. Travis is everything wrong with the valley right now.
-2 for stating facts backed up by a fairly concise source. Bravo.
What I referenced actually happened. Mayer gathered most of Yahoo in a confidential meeting and read them a cryptic excerpt from a children's book that nobody understood. If wasting everyone's time in that manner isn't condescending, then I don't know what is.
Here's an excerpt:
Mayer held the book up to show its last illustration. It was a drawing of a little red-haired boy riding a merry-go-round pony.
Hardly anyone could see the page.
No one understood what Mayer was trying to say.
Later on in the excerpt and in "Marissa Mayer and the Fight to Save Yahoo!" readers learn that Mayer was trying to say that, like Bobbie who finds joy riding a merry-go-round, Mayer values experiences over possessions — and that for her, Yahoo had been a great experience so far.
Marissa's tenure at yahoo was not successful. She was unable to turn around the company, made acquisitions that were too late, or didnt work. What about her tenure at yahoo was convincing of her ability to be a good CEO?
She did good work at Google, both in software engineering, user experience planning, and handling a large high-revenue department (Adwords).
Which from the sound of it might make her a better CTO than CEO, but I certainly wouldn't judge her just by Yahoo. She likely has the capacity to do well at a growing company, with a clear path to profit (aka no more pivoting), which is exactly what Uber is and Yahoo was not.
I don't want to be ageist but I believe there is a correlation between your age and ability to understand a paradigm shift. I think Jeffrey Immelt and I've also heard speculation about Meg Whitman are a bit 'old school' for this role. Not solely based on age but it's a factor. The sharing economy and the idea eventually autonomous cars are the play - is in fact in my opinion a radical shift in the way thing have been, the world Jeff and Meg led.
Age is a factor though in how people think and perceive the world yeah? I do apologize thankfully I'm not in a position where my bias hurts anyone but myself and I'll work on my thinking.
Let's work from a definition here; I think this is the kind of "ageism" we're talking about (sourced from dictionary.com):
> a tendency to regard older persons as debilitated, unworthy of attention, or unsuitable for employment.
I think this clarifies things, doesn't it? Even if you somehow objectively prove that older workers are unsuitable, or less suitable, for employment, that doesn't make a philosophy against hiring older workers not-ageist. It just means that ageism is correct (to be clear: hypothetically. I am not endorsing that view).
Mistakes are made all the time. I swear to you, there's an exaggerated amount of hate towards Travis. You'd think he's the devil. What has he done that's so bad? He simply founded a company that was super successful within a short time, with an idea that seems so easy that everyone thinks they could've done it and along the way some missteps were made.
Are you sure you would've done better? Would you like it if the plurality of stakeholders in your ecosystem vilified you in a similar way? I'm sure you wouldn't. Cut Travis some slack!
> He simply founded a company that was super successful within a short time, with an idea that seems so easy that everyone thinks they could've done it and along the way some missteps were made.
Yeah, I suppose if you elide every reason he was removed he doesn't sound so bad.
"Trust, but verify" is well-regarded modus operandi. Why is it acceptable in other circumstances but not this one?
If "trust, but verify" can be a legitimate threat mitigation strategy, how does one conduct the verification in good faith and avoid such verification being labeled as being an "attempt to discredit"?
I honestly don't see how rape differs from any other accusation of wrongdoing with respect to due process. Is it not the right of the accused to question the accounts of their accuser and conduct their own investigation?
Customers raved about Virgin America (and still do) even though they were largely a no frills airline - it shares a lot of similarities with Uber