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When Steve Jobs was 40, which Travis Kalanick is now, he had been kicked out of the first company he founded (Apple), and his second company (NeXT) was failing
by dowjones 10y ago
When Steve Jobs was 40, which Travis Kalanick is now, he had been kicked out of the first company he founded (Apple), and his second company (NeXT) was failing miserably. Pretty much everything that Steve is remembered fondly for -- his success at Apple and Pixar -- came after 1995.
- gingerbread-man 10y ago> Pretty much everything that Steve is remembered fondly for -- his success at Apple and Pixar -- came after 1995. I strongly disagree. I think Steve is more remembered for the Macintosh than for the iMac/iPod/iPhone/iPad, at least amongst HN readers and the like.
- dowjones 10y agoYou're changing the subject. You imply Travis isn't a good CEO because his company is losing money, whereas Steve Jobs was "was a phenomenally effective CEO." At the age of 40, he most certainly was not.
- gingerbread-man 10y agoThe core presumption of my argument is that Uber isn't really succeeding as a company in the way that Apple (or even NeXt) did at the same "age." There are a lot of articles out there making the case that Uber's current business is not sustainable, and I tend to agree. If NeXt wasn't profitable, it was because their sales hadn't yet caught up with their fixed engineering costs. Uber's unprofitability isn't because they're waiting for sales to grow large enough to cover the cost of their engineering operation, it's because they're heavily subsidizing the unit costs of their business.