David Rosenthal: preference

Transcript context

…I had not thought about this in a while. It's uncomfortable to just hear it blow by blow by blow. Totally. These are just facts. This is terrible. On June 11th, right after this, the Holder Report was issued to the Uber board. It's really bad. The very next day, a senior executive in the company named Emil Michael who was involved in many of these incidents and for a long time, had a reputation at Uber and within Silicon Valley as an effective operator, but it was no surprise that he was involved in these things. He had been involved in a confrontation with the journalist Sarah Lacy a few years earlier. He resigns the next day under pressure from the board based on what was in the Holder Report. Two days later, on June 13th, the board convinces Travis that he needs to take a three-month leave of absence from the company (a) because of everything that's going on and (b) his mother was just killed. Tragically, his father is in critical condition. They asked him to leave the company, he agreed to a three month leave of absence. On that same day–this is incredible. I remember when this happened. I was just watching a train wreck. The same day, there's an all hands meeting at the company led by several of the Uber board meetings. This is the worst. During this meeting, the purpose of which is to talk about all these problems stemming from the Susan Fowler, what she reported within the company, everything going on to talk about the outcome of the Holder Report. David Bonderman, co-founder of TPG, who is on the board from TPG's investment in Uber, is onstage alongside other board members, including Arianna Huffington, who I believe is the only female board member at this point in time at the company. Arianna says to the company, "There's a lot of data that shows that when there's one woman on the board of a company, it's much more likely that there will be a second woman on the board." Bonderman makes the most awful, awful, awful comment that he interjects here to what Arianna just said. He says, actually, what it shows is there's much more likely to be more talking. This is just the total sexist comment like, what? WTF. This meeting was called to try and ease everyone's concerns that we are not a bunch of sexists. What on earth?…

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