Uber did the essence of what a startup was supposed to do, it identified multiple pains(inconsistent and ineffective personal transportation) and solved it. Th

Uber did the essence of what a startup was supposed to do, it identified multiple pains(inconsistent and ineffective personal transportation) and solved it. The private transportation(taxis) market was scattered around the world and was run by cartels which favored little progress, each local cartel had different levels of influence within the local political sphere, Uber came in each market with a disregard for the law and fought legal battles one by one, they won some, lost some. But this was the only way in this business, Uber had the balls for it. Problem is that unlike Apple they can't just make the iPod or iMac or iPhone of the transportation industry, when it comes to transportation people care about one thing: going from point A to B quickly and safely and as cheap as possible. This makes it extremely difficult for Uber to differentiate itself from competitors. So after beating (some) taxi companies they now had to deal with different competitors on different markets, once again, they did the startup thing to do, raise money and get market share, profits are just a consequence, growth is king. This rubbed on all levels of Uber, from the drivers/customers experience to the workplace, growth comes above all, they had disregard for non-competitiveness with the Otto deal, they ignored sexual harassment complaints to avoid termination of key staff. Fail or succeed, let the Uber story be a learning for everyone, Travis might have been a great CEO who led his company to unprecedented levels, maybe he really is a winner, but he still was the acting CEO of a company who failed to address serious allegations on all fronts including sexual harassment. Of course, all mythic CEO's come with their fair share of controversy, was Apple not successful Jobs would have just been regarded as an individual who abused his employees, Zuckerberg famously called his first users "dumb fucks", Spiegel has his fair share of controversies.