Travis Kalanick Quotes

Uber, a car service start-up founded by Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp, has been giving out free rides during Austin’s SXSW conference for several years. During a single week, thousands of potential Uber customers—tech-obsessed, high-income young adults who cannot find a cab—are motivated to try out this service. One year Uber offered free rides. Another year, it offered BBQ delivery. Instead of spending millions on advertising or countless resources trying to reach these potential users in their respective cities, Uber just waited for the one week a year when they were all in one place and did something special. And Uber did this because a few years earlier they’d watched Twitter take SXSW by storm with a similar collaboration with the conference. This is thinking like a growth hacker—it’s how you get the most bang for your buck and how you get it from the right people.

In the eyes of Travis Kalanick, Uber’s co-founder and chief executive, the entire system was rigged against startups like his. Like many in Silicon Valley, he believed in the transformative power of technology. His service harnessed the incredible powers of code—smartphones, data analysis, real-time GPS readings—to improve people’s lives, to make services more efficient, to connect people who wanted to buy things with people who wanted to sell them, to make society a better place. He grew frustrated by people with cautious minds, who wanted to uphold old systems, old structures, old ways of thinking. The corrupt institutions that controlled and upheld the taxi industry had been built in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, he thought. Uber was here to disrupt their outmoded ideas and usher in the twenty-first.

But Adam had another reason to be excited. A deal this large would typically diminish the founders’ control over the company. Miguel wasn’t especially concerned, having already transferred some control to his cofounder. But as part of the deal, Adam engineered a change to WeWork’s charter with the help of Jen Berrent, WeWork’s new general counsel, that gave him ten votes for each share of the company he owned. The arrangement would give him roughly 65 percent of the votes on any company matter. These “supervoting” shares had become popular in Silicon Valley, where founders feared losing control of their companies. Mark Zuckerberg had negotiated a similar deal, as had Travis Kalanick at Uber. Many investors were so eager to get in on the small group of start-ups that could make plausible arguments for world domination that they often believed they had no choice but to accept such founder-friendly terms. But giving so much control of a company to an entrepreneur who had never run a business of this size before was a risk. As the deal was finalized, Bruce Dunlevie, Neumann’s first major investor, tried pushing back on the arrangement. But Benchmark wasn’t eager to lose favor with Neumann, and it didn’t have much standing in the fight, having just given Travis Kalanick similar control at Uber. Dunlevie relented, but not before offering a warning to Berrent and WeWork’s board. “I’ll just leave you with this thought,” Dunlevie said. “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Here, I must say that some terminology in the language of finance is slightly misleading. Uber’s “loss” largely means heavy investments in other businesses and stock-based compensation stemming from the company's initial public offering. Unsurprisingly, Travis Kalanick, Uber’s co-founder, sold nearly $1 billion in company shares the moment Uber’s IPO lockup period (read: the timeframe when you can’t sell your shares) was over. Duh. When a company files for an IPO instead of bankruptcy, the IPO should be renamed a bailout—because modern business solutions require modern business jargon. #sarcasm