Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…It seems very true predictively and reasonably. Yeah. I mean, drivers are feeling like they’re getting the short end of the stick. Uber claims that they’re the customer but they’re changing the take rate so the drivers get less. With riders, they’re feeling like they’re getting the short end of the stick on surge pricing too. And this will probably be last week by the time we release this episode and there’ll be new sense then. But just the horrible news coming out of the Uber engineering organization yesterday with the misogynistic, sexist behavior that Uber has moved incredibly fast, everything in the name of winning. And there’s a lot of problems there. I think that I’m not totally sure this is a tech theme that apples to every other company but we’re certainly seeing in other companies too where as everyone is either a disciple of Bezos or let’s just call it a disciple of boldness, we’re really seeing a lot of this churn in the wake and I think as a lot of these mega unicorns get ready to start going public, that’s going to be a major issue for them. Yeah, no doubt. I do think it was interesting that Uber kind of came late to developing its values and when it did, when Travis did present them to the company in 2015, they very much mirror Amazon. In fact, some of them are quite similar. And I think it’s a company that to some extent that it’s still searching for its identity. First of all, I don’t jump to conclusions about the… I’ll say I don’t jump to broad conclusions about the engineer who blogged about her time at Uber. I think it's deplorable what she went through. But it's hard to reach broad conclusions about a company culture from an anecdote. And we will see if others kind of follow their wake and how well Uber does in investigating and addressing her claims. But I mean, I think it’s true that this is a company that as they all are in a rapidly growing internet world, that was marked by a lot of chaos early on. I talked to lots of Uber employees and Airbnb employees in my book whose experiences kind of mirrored the folks at Amazon early on, just chaos, the busiest year or two years of their life kind of traumatized when they get in when they leave. But I certainly don’t want to make excuses for Uber on what that sexual harassment, those allegations, but I think we’re going to have to watch. And I think calmer heads hopefully will prevail before we kind of reach broad conclusions. Let me put it this way. I think it’s unfair to the many accomplished women who work at Uber and have leadership positions to just dismiss it as a “frat boy culture.”…

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