8 ms·

Travis is a phenomenal salesman and fundraiser. Travis convinced Kapor that, amongst other things, Uber was a platform for democratizing transportation, citing

Travis is a phenomenal salesman and fundraiser. Travis convinced Kapor that, amongst other things, Uber was a platform for democratizing transportation, citing things like racism amongst taxi cabs to spin Uber as social good. So now you have a company that isn't actually what it pitched itself to be. But that's not true. Uber is still a platform for democratizing transportation. It has more or less completely fixed the issue of racism in taxi cabs (or auto rickshaws), which was previously a daily experience for me. In Maharashtra they've literally made an enemy of Shiv Sena, racist/nationalist political party, because they are undercutting the Marathi autowales. It's also improving women's safety worldwide, which is a major issue outside the west. Literally days after an Uber driver raped a passenger in Delhi, my girlfriend at the time still insisted on taking a radio taxi home (wasn't Uber, which was shut down for a little bit) because she felt safer than in an auto rickshaw or taxi. Uber is working - fairly successfully - to partially fix the issue of cronyism in governments around the world. They've taken private battles public and shown the world exactly how much people like Bill DeBlasio hurt the public. This would all be a huge net gain for the world even if every >$150k/year engineer at Uber was horribly mistreated/marginalized/had their butt patted before shifting to another $150k/year engineering job. The Kapors are not calling out Uber based on a utilitarian calculation. Uber is still exactly the force of good they promised to be, and their goals align just fine with the stated goals of the Kapors. It's just that their personality doesn't appeal to the zeitgeist, and it looks like that matters more to the Kapors than the actual good they do.

notaboutme 10y ago
My girlfriend gets harassed by Uber drivers all the time, to the point where she had to switch to using Lyft or call the regular car services here in NYC (which used to be amazing pre-Uber, by the way). The one time I took Uber Pool in Brooklyn the driver refused to let a black couple into the car, which we all protested and complained about, but nothing came of it. In New York Uber isn't necessarily safer or less racist, although I'd concede it probably is in other countries.
- oh_sigh 10y ago
  Does your girlfriend give those drivers 1 star reviews? For what it's worth, my girlfriend has taken an uber in NYC 100+ times, and has never complained about any kind of harassment from an Uber driver. She's complained to me about sidewalk/subway harassment, and workplace harassment, so I don't think there is a reason she would hide Uber harassment from me. Also: Regular car services were horrible pre-Uber...which is why Uber took over NYC car transit. It was basically: Call up a number, get answered by a guy with a heavy accent on a low quality landline, tell him what you want, and hope and pray that he understood what you said and the car shows up. If it doesn't, call another company and repeat.
  - arkades 10y ago
    There may be some miscommunication here. There are the 555-DRYV car services that are precisely what you described, and then there are the private car services that you routinely see lining up on Park Ave. to collect the glut of lawyers that had to stay past 8pm. The latter are fantastic.
  - bogomipz 10y ago
    There are hundreds of car services in New York City. Most New Yorkers have one or two they have learned work well for their neighborhood and provide good service and stick with those. Car services are no different than any other consumer service, there are a good ones and bad ones. Also why does it matter if they have a "thick accent"? You are suggesting that the communication is so poor that people regularly need to hang up and call another car service? This is simply hot true. There are times when you might need to call another service because they might be backed up but certainly not due to of a total communication failure.
  - wiseleo 10y ago
    Can't rate a driver who didn't start a trip. That's how they fly under the radar. Forcing the driver to be the one who cancels will get them on the radar and out of the system. Excessive cancel rates get drivers deactivated more than anything.
cstejerean 10y ago
In the US at least Uber hasn't done a very good job at eliminating racial discrimination. A study has found that drivers continue to discriminate, this time based on the race they assume based on the person's name. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-31/study-finds-racial-discrimination-by-uber-and-lyft-drivers https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-31/study-fin...
- splintercell 10y ago
  I don't know whatever Lyft is doing, but I have a super low rating on Lyft than on Uber and I behave the same in both the cases.
  - joatmon-snoo 10y ago
    Wait, as a driver?
    - splintercell 10y ago
      No as a customer
    - splintercell 10y ago
      No as a customer.
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  The actual study says they are doing a very good job - traditional taxis discriminate vastly more than Uber/Lyft/Flywheel. Look at the tables at the end, it's easy to see a HUGE delta for traditional taxis, compared to relatively small (albeit statistically significant ones) for Uber. https://faculty.washington.edu/dwhm/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/TNC_Main_NBER.pdf https://faculty.washington.edu/dwhm/wp-content/uploads/2016/...
dtornabene 10y ago
there is a pretty frequent drumbeat of stories about drivers being racist/sexist. not to mention that this is a company one of whose VPs threatened to go after a journalist that wrote critically of it. not exactly a social "good", that. I'd love to see stats on how and where Uber is actually "fighting cronyism" as well, instead of just rote ideology.
orf 10y ago
Moving cab drivers from company X to company Y won't change human nature and 'more or less fix... racism'.
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  Getting kicked off the service for rejecting too many rides/being a jerk to passengers and getting low ratings/etc won't change human nature. It'll just change the nature of people who drive for Uber.
  - kelnos 10y ago
    I'm fine with racist people having trouble finding jobs. Or only being able to take jobs where they don't have to interact with other people. If you can't make a person less racist, marginalizing them so they do less harm is the next best thing.
- lazaroclapp 10y ago
  No, but accepting the ride before seeing the passenger's face does reduce discrimination. Just like blind resume reading does (although, see sibling comment by cstejerean). "More or less fix racism" is a wild exaggeration, but being safer, less-discriminatory and less-corrupt than taxi services in parts of the developing world is quite a feasible bar to meet for Uber and they in fact do often meet that bar. That said, one can meet that standard, and provide a better/cheaper transportation service and everything else in Uber's mission without standing for a toxic workplace environment for women, no matter how much they are or aren't paid. There is exactly one profession where the amount of money you are being paid justifies tolerating unwanted sexual overtures and is not the profession software developers are signing up for.
- geofft 10y ago
  Why do you think that's true? 150 years ago, which is only a handful of generations, it was widely accepted in America that people of certain races were only technically human and were better fit for slavery than for living a full human life. That position is an extreme minority these days. What changed? Nobody eloquently argued that idea away, we merely made the culture that relied on that idea economically unviable (at gunpoint). We didn't even do a very good job of making alternative ideas more economically viable, and that hurt us deeply for the majority of that time. If we move racist employees from company X to failing company Y, we make a non-racist culture more economically viable. People who are only weakly racist generally choose to give up on spreading their ideas (even if they still hold them) to choosing an economically worse option. People who are undecided are more likely to hear about or be part of the non-racist culture than the racist one. That is, historically, how we have been fixing racism. It hasn't been working perfectly by any means, but it's been remarkably effective.
mikeleeorg 10y ago
I think what is at issue here isn't Uber's external accomplishments, but it's internal culture. It's great that Uber has been able to reduce racism in your area. But it doesn't change the allegations that there are deep dysfunctions internally.
Uhhrrr 10y ago
I agree that Uber has a net positive social impact, but the Kapors are nevertheless right to try to force change here. 1) They have more direct control over, and responsibility for, Uber corporate behavior. 2) Uber corporate culture might bleed over to the customer experience. 3) The behaviors in practice at Uber are not good for anyone, even the "high-performing" assholes whose behavior is excused. Those behaviors keep talented prospective employees away and make current employees less effective.
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  Uber may, in fact, have an HR problem that needs fixing. I'll wait for the investigation to find out - Fowler seems fairly credible, but far too many incidents like this seem fabricated/unsupported/implausible, and get traction mainly because the media loves them. I was only disputing the specific point I quoted. Even if everything Susan Fowler said is true, Uber is still a social good that is fixing racism in taxi cabs.
JumpCrisscross 10y ago
> Uber...has more or less completely fixed the issue of racism in taxi cabs When I first moved to New York, I had a roommate. He was Brown educated, on prominent City boards and sharply dressed. Regularly, I'd have to climb out of bed and walk to our corner of 30th Street and 5th Avenue, a decent neighbourhood, to hail him a cab. The reason? He's black. I got used to quibbling with cab drivers over "broken" credit-card machines (magically resurrected when I threatened to call the TLC, their regulator). And dealing with my out-of-borough destinations being inconvenient. Or having drivers on their phones the whole way. Yellow Taxis have gotten measurably better since Uber entered the scene. Credit owed where it's due.
- KKKKkkkk1 10y ago
  I live in the South Bay, and every time I try to take Uber to SFO, the driver arrives, finds out the destination is SFO, apologizes, and cancels the ride. So apparently the problem is not fully solved.
  - sowbug 10y ago
    Isn't SFO a good fare? It's a long drive from the South Bay, and the driver is certain to find another passenger quickly after dropping you off. Maybe I don't understand what makes a good fare.
    - mahyarm 10y ago
      They have somewhere to go to and by the time they drop you off at SFO, they wont be able to make their appointment. Or they don't want to be stuck in inefficient traffic. Also incentives are based on trip count, not trip length as far as I understand. It's a problem that needs to be fixed in big cities with these apps. But the reason why they reject in these cases has nothing really to do with the person, but the action/destination. Definitely an improvement.
      - wastedhours 10y ago
        Yeah, that really surprised me when I saw an ad for driver recruitment that the initial incentive is a trip count one. Sure they have some anti-abuse system in there, but seems like a weird one to lead with in big cities where you could rack up 20 short trips in quick succession.
sulam 10y ago
> their personality doesn't appeal to the zeitgeist There's also the minor matter of breaking federal law. You can call this "the zeitgeist" if you like, but if I was an Uber investor I would be concerned that the company is leaving itself wide open to multiple class action lawsuits. The amount of their funding used to fight the many suits against them is also more generally concerning. Lyft doesn't seem to get into the same battles they do, so clearly it's possible to achieve good without being raging assholes while doing it.
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  From what I can tell, lyft doesn't do the same good as Uber. Uber does battle with corrupt politicians, exposes them to the public and opens cities up to competition. Then Lyft free-rides on this, follows them in and makes money. When is the last time Lyft prevented someone like DeBlasio from helping the taxi cartel rip off consumers?
  - sulam 10y ago
    At the end of the day, Travis is a war-time CEO who is always going to be fighting things that keep his company from being as successful as it can be. This may sound good, but people like this are why we have laws. They need regulation. Look back 150 years if you doubt that.
sbarre 10y ago
You kind of had me until you used someone's salary and work opportunities as an excuse for their harassment mattering less, or being overlooked. Harassment is harassment.
- geofft 10y ago
  Yup. There are things in the world that are kinda bad, but worth imposing on people for the greater good of society (e.g., taxes, jury duty, bans on raw milk). There are things in the world that are really bad, and no amount of greater good justifies them. Harassment is one of them. Part (but not all!) of the reason for this is that not every $150K/engineer is getting harassed, only some are, and some are doing the harassing, and in particular, those who are doing the harassing are, by all reports, not actually helping Uber's social mission effectively. If you're willing to sacrifice something about engineers to help Uber change the world for the better, sacrifice the people who take time out of their workday to proposition the people they manage, or who ignore their boss because they're trying to get themselves promoted, or who create and cancel projects to create the illusion of work, or who interpret people who sabotage their teammates as high performers. (And sacrifice them by firing them or better yet not hiring them, not by harassing them.)
  - jolux 10y ago
    This harassment calls to mind the most negative possible stereotypes of silicon valley tech bros. Misogynistic, rude, deeply unpleasant people to be around. The question is how did those people get into Uber in the first place, and why are they allowed to stay while all of their victims leave? I don't give a fuck how much that woman was getting paid, it is not conditional on her receiving sexual harassment from her supervisors. It is conditional on her doing her goddamn job, and making people feel unsafe by directly propositioning them obviously interferes with that.
  - yummyfajitas 10y ago
    How do you decide which things are really bad, and no amount of greater good justifies them? As a society, we've made the decision that traffic regulation, gun regulation or preventing the sale of loose cigarettes does justify the police gunning people down or choking them to death. (Note that after Eric Garner and Philando Castille, no one advocated eliminating the rules that got them killed.) So why is an unpleasant work environment somehow one of those things that are unjustified no matter what?
sumedh 10y ago
> because they are undercutting the Marathi autowales. Vast majority of the cab drivers are from the Northern states. The natives of Mumbai dont want to drive cabs.
soneca 10y ago
"their personality doesn't appeal to the zeitgeist" Really? The only problem you see at Uber is that their personality doesn't appeal to the zeitgeist? They are unpopular for superficial reasons and that's it?
codeisawesome 10y ago
> This would all be a huge net gain for the world even if every $150k/year engineer at Uber was horribly mistreated/marginalized/had their butt patted before shifting to another $150k/year engineering job. Are you saying that it's okay to be harassed if the pay is high? If so, please examine your own mind for its blind spots and learn a bit of humility, before sounding high strung and judgemental about others'.
emcq 10y ago
Based on this and subsequent posts, it seems like you're making an "ends justifies the means" argument. Does the ends justify the means here? Not really. Lyft is arguably similar to Uber but without so many alleged and evidenced wrongs. We can quibble about how similar they are, if Lyft would be successful without Uber, how successful Lyft is, etc. but the fact remains that a sizable competitor in this space doesn't have as many faults and seems to be doing just fine for a startup. Does the ends justify the means ever? Perhaps. But it is often an argument made in hindsight to diminish real wrongs for the sake of theoretical utility, when in reality there are many levels of gray that have fewer wrongs and similar theoretical utility.
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  I was only disputing this claim: Travis convinced Kapor that, amongst other things, Uber was a platform for democratizing transportation, citing things like racism amongst taxi cabs to spin Uber as social good. So now you have a company that isn't actually what it pitched itself to be. I did not make any "ends justify the means" arguments, or claim that what happened (if Fowler is to be believed) is acceptable.

notaboutme 10y ago

My girlfriend gets harassed by Uber drivers all the time, to the point where she had to switch to using Lyft or call the regular car services here in NYC (which used to be amazing pre-Uber, by the way). The one time I took Uber Pool in Brooklyn the driver refused to let a black couple into the car, which we all protested and complained about, but nothing came of it. In New York Uber isn't necessarily safer or less racist, although I'd concede it probably is in other countries.

oh_sigh 10y ago
Does your girlfriend give those drivers 1 star reviews? For what it's worth, my girlfriend has taken an uber in NYC 100+ times, and has never complained about any kind of harassment from an Uber driver. She's complained to me about sidewalk/subway harassment, and workplace harassment, so I don't think there is a reason she would hide Uber harassment from me. Also: Regular car services were horrible pre-Uber...which is why Uber took over NYC car transit. It was basically: Call up a number, get answered by a guy with a heavy accent on a low quality landline, tell him what you want, and hope and pray that he understood what you said and the car shows up. If it doesn't, call another company and repeat.
- arkades 10y ago
  There may be some miscommunication here. There are the 555-DRYV car services that are precisely what you described, and then there are the private car services that you routinely see lining up on Park Ave. to collect the glut of lawyers that had to stay past 8pm. The latter are fantastic.
- bogomipz 10y ago
  There are hundreds of car services in New York City. Most New Yorkers have one or two they have learned work well for their neighborhood and provide good service and stick with those. Car services are no different than any other consumer service, there are a good ones and bad ones. Also why does it matter if they have a "thick accent"? You are suggesting that the communication is so poor that people regularly need to hang up and call another car service? This is simply hot true. There are times when you might need to call another service because they might be backed up but certainly not due to of a total communication failure.
- wiseleo 10y ago
  Can't rate a driver who didn't start a trip. That's how they fly under the radar. Forcing the driver to be the one who cancels will get them on the radar and out of the system. Excessive cancel rates get drivers deactivated more than anything.

cstejerean 10y ago

In the US at least Uber hasn't done a very good job at eliminating racial discrimination. A study has found that drivers continue to discriminate, this time based on the race they assume based on the person's name. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-31/study-finds-racial-discrimination-by-uber-and-lyft-drivers https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-31/study-fin...

splintercell 10y ago
I don't know whatever Lyft is doing, but I have a super low rating on Lyft than on Uber and I behave the same in both the cases.
- joatmon-snoo 10y ago
  Wait, as a driver?
  - splintercell 10y ago
    No as a customer
  - splintercell 10y ago
    No as a customer.
yummyfajitas 10y ago
The actual study says they are doing a very good job - traditional taxis discriminate vastly more than Uber/Lyft/Flywheel. Look at the tables at the end, it's easy to see a HUGE delta for traditional taxis, compared to relatively small (albeit statistically significant ones) for Uber. https://faculty.washington.edu/dwhm/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/TNC_Main_NBER.pdf https://faculty.washington.edu/dwhm/wp-content/uploads/2016/...

dtornabene 10y ago

there is a pretty frequent drumbeat of stories about drivers being racist/sexist. not to mention that this is a company one of whose VPs threatened to go after a journalist that wrote critically of it. not exactly a social "good", that. I'd love to see stats on how and where Uber is actually "fighting cronyism" as well, instead of just rote ideology.

orf 10y ago

Moving cab drivers from company X to company Y won't change human nature and 'more or less fix... racism'.

yummyfajitas 10y ago
Getting kicked off the service for rejecting too many rides/being a jerk to passengers and getting low ratings/etc won't change human nature. It'll just change the nature of people who drive for Uber.
- kelnos 10y ago
  I'm fine with racist people having trouble finding jobs. Or only being able to take jobs where they don't have to interact with other people. If you can't make a person less racist, marginalizing them so they do less harm is the next best thing.
lazaroclapp 10y ago
No, but accepting the ride before seeing the passenger's face does reduce discrimination. Just like blind resume reading does (although, see sibling comment by cstejerean). "More or less fix racism" is a wild exaggeration, but being safer, less-discriminatory and less-corrupt than taxi services in parts of the developing world is quite a feasible bar to meet for Uber and they in fact do often meet that bar. That said, one can meet that standard, and provide a better/cheaper transportation service and everything else in Uber's mission without standing for a toxic workplace environment for women, no matter how much they are or aren't paid. There is exactly one profession where the amount of money you are being paid justifies tolerating unwanted sexual overtures and is not the profession software developers are signing up for.
geofft 10y ago
Why do you think that's true? 150 years ago, which is only a handful of generations, it was widely accepted in America that people of certain races were only technically human and were better fit for slavery than for living a full human life. That position is an extreme minority these days. What changed? Nobody eloquently argued that idea away, we merely made the culture that relied on that idea economically unviable (at gunpoint). We didn't even do a very good job of making alternative ideas more economically viable, and that hurt us deeply for the majority of that time. If we move racist employees from company X to failing company Y, we make a non-racist culture more economically viable. People who are only weakly racist generally choose to give up on spreading their ideas (even if they still hold them) to choosing an economically worse option. People who are undecided are more likely to hear about or be part of the non-racist culture than the racist one. That is, historically, how we have been fixing racism. It hasn't been working perfectly by any means, but it's been remarkably effective.

mikeleeorg 10y ago

I think what is at issue here isn't Uber's external accomplishments, but it's internal culture. It's great that Uber has been able to reduce racism in your area. But it doesn't change the allegations that there are deep dysfunctions internally.

Uhhrrr 10y ago

I agree that Uber has a net positive social impact, but the Kapors are nevertheless right to try to force change here. 1) They have more direct control over, and responsibility for, Uber corporate behavior. 2) Uber corporate culture might bleed over to the customer experience. 3) The behaviors in practice at Uber are not good for anyone, even the "high-performing" assholes whose behavior is excused. Those behaviors keep talented prospective employees away and make current employees less effective.

yummyfajitas 10y ago
Uber may, in fact, have an HR problem that needs fixing. I'll wait for the investigation to find out - Fowler seems fairly credible, but far too many incidents like this seem fabricated/unsupported/implausible, and get traction mainly because the media loves them. I was only disputing the specific point I quoted. Even if everything Susan Fowler said is true, Uber is still a social good that is fixing racism in taxi cabs.

JumpCrisscross 10y ago

> Uber...has more or less completely fixed the issue of racism in taxi cabs When I first moved to New York, I had a roommate. He was Brown educated, on prominent City boards and sharply dressed. Regularly, I'd have to climb out of bed and walk to our corner of 30th Street and 5th Avenue, a decent neighbourhood, to hail him a cab. The reason? He's black. I got used to quibbling with cab drivers over "broken" credit-card machines (magically resurrected when I threatened to call the TLC, their regulator). And dealing with my out-of-borough destinations being inconvenient. Or having drivers on their phones the whole way. Yellow Taxis have gotten measurably better since Uber entered the scene. Credit owed where it's due.

KKKKkkkk1 10y ago
I live in the South Bay, and every time I try to take Uber to SFO, the driver arrives, finds out the destination is SFO, apologizes, and cancels the ride. So apparently the problem is not fully solved.
- sowbug 10y ago
  Isn't SFO a good fare? It's a long drive from the South Bay, and the driver is certain to find another passenger quickly after dropping you off. Maybe I don't understand what makes a good fare.
  - mahyarm 10y ago
    They have somewhere to go to and by the time they drop you off at SFO, they wont be able to make their appointment. Or they don't want to be stuck in inefficient traffic. Also incentives are based on trip count, not trip length as far as I understand. It's a problem that needs to be fixed in big cities with these apps. But the reason why they reject in these cases has nothing really to do with the person, but the action/destination. Definitely an improvement.
    - wastedhours 10y ago
      Yeah, that really surprised me when I saw an ad for driver recruitment that the initial incentive is a trip count one. Sure they have some anti-abuse system in there, but seems like a weird one to lead with in big cities where you could rack up 20 short trips in quick succession.

sulam 10y ago

> their personality doesn't appeal to the zeitgeist There's also the minor matter of breaking federal law. You can call this "the zeitgeist" if you like, but if I was an Uber investor I would be concerned that the company is leaving itself wide open to multiple class action lawsuits. The amount of their funding used to fight the many suits against them is also more generally concerning. Lyft doesn't seem to get into the same battles they do, so clearly it's possible to achieve good without being raging assholes while doing it.

yummyfajitas 10y ago
From what I can tell, lyft doesn't do the same good as Uber. Uber does battle with corrupt politicians, exposes them to the public and opens cities up to competition. Then Lyft free-rides on this, follows them in and makes money. When is the last time Lyft prevented someone like DeBlasio from helping the taxi cartel rip off consumers?
- sulam 10y ago
  At the end of the day, Travis is a war-time CEO who is always going to be fighting things that keep his company from being as successful as it can be. This may sound good, but people like this are why we have laws. They need regulation. Look back 150 years if you doubt that.

sbarre 10y ago

You kind of had me until you used someone's salary and work opportunities as an excuse for their harassment mattering less, or being overlooked. Harassment is harassment.

geofft 10y ago
Yup. There are things in the world that are kinda bad, but worth imposing on people for the greater good of society (e.g., taxes, jury duty, bans on raw milk). There are things in the world that are really bad, and no amount of greater good justifies them. Harassment is one of them. Part (but not all!) of the reason for this is that not every $150K/engineer is getting harassed, only some are, and some are doing the harassing, and in particular, those who are doing the harassing are, by all reports, not actually helping Uber's social mission effectively. If you're willing to sacrifice something about engineers to help Uber change the world for the better, sacrifice the people who take time out of their workday to proposition the people they manage, or who ignore their boss because they're trying to get themselves promoted, or who create and cancel projects to create the illusion of work, or who interpret people who sabotage their teammates as high performers. (And sacrifice them by firing them or better yet not hiring them, not by harassing them.)
- jolux 10y ago
  This harassment calls to mind the most negative possible stereotypes of silicon valley tech bros. Misogynistic, rude, deeply unpleasant people to be around. The question is how did those people get into Uber in the first place, and why are they allowed to stay while all of their victims leave? I don't give a fuck how much that woman was getting paid, it is not conditional on her receiving sexual harassment from her supervisors. It is conditional on her doing her goddamn job, and making people feel unsafe by directly propositioning them obviously interferes with that.
- yummyfajitas 10y ago
  How do you decide which things are really bad, and no amount of greater good justifies them? As a society, we've made the decision that traffic regulation, gun regulation or preventing the sale of loose cigarettes does justify the police gunning people down or choking them to death. (Note that after Eric Garner and Philando Castille, no one advocated eliminating the rules that got them killed.) So why is an unpleasant work environment somehow one of those things that are unjustified no matter what?

sumedh 10y ago

> because they are undercutting the Marathi autowales. Vast majority of the cab drivers are from the Northern states. The natives of Mumbai dont want to drive cabs.

soneca 10y ago

"their personality doesn't appeal to the zeitgeist" Really? The only problem you see at Uber is that their personality doesn't appeal to the zeitgeist? They are unpopular for superficial reasons and that's it?

codeisawesome 10y ago

> This would all be a huge net gain for the world even if every $150k/year engineer at Uber was horribly mistreated/marginalized/had their butt patted before shifting to another $150k/year engineering job. Are you saying that it's okay to be harassed if the pay is high? If so, please examine your own mind for its blind spots and learn a bit of humility, before sounding high strung and judgemental about others'.

emcq 10y ago

Based on this and subsequent posts, it seems like you're making an "ends justifies the means" argument. Does the ends justify the means here? Not really. Lyft is arguably similar to Uber but without so many alleged and evidenced wrongs. We can quibble about how similar they are, if Lyft would be successful without Uber, how successful Lyft is, etc. but the fact remains that a sizable competitor in this space doesn't have as many faults and seems to be doing just fine for a startup. Does the ends justify the means ever? Perhaps. But it is often an argument made in hindsight to diminish real wrongs for the sake of theoretical utility, when in reality there are many levels of gray that have fewer wrongs and similar theoretical utility.

yummyfajitas 10y ago
I was only disputing this claim: Travis convinced Kapor that, amongst other things, Uber was a platform for democratizing transportation, citing things like racism amongst taxi cabs to spin Uber as social good. So now you have a company that isn't actually what it pitched itself to be. I did not make any "ends justify the means" arguments, or claim that what happened (if Fowler is to be believed) is acceptable.