San Francisco Magazine: “The Smartest Bro in the Room”

You get in the habit of not identifying yourself as an Uber employee when you’re a passenger, that’s for sure, a former corporate staffer tells me. A lot of people say they work at another company in the building when getting picked up or dropped off at HQ.

Ellen Cushing

Great profile on the founder of Uber, Travis Kalanick, with lots of information about the founding and evolution of the company. You know you’re stepping on enough toes when your own employees won’t admit they are working at Uber! Somehow I doubt this rough way of doing business is going to benefit the company – and the thousands of people partnering with them – in the long term.

All along, this brazen approach has been matched by Kalanick’s rhetoric. We’re in this political campaign, and the candidate is Uber, and the opponent is an asshole named Taxi, Kalanick told the audience at a tech conference earlier this year. Nobody likes him, he’s not a nice character, but he’s so woven into the political fabric and machinery that a lot of people owe him favors. We have to bring out the truth about how dark and dangerous and evil the taxi side is.

But who do you ‘vote’ for, if the challenger is just as bad as the incumbent (or worse)?