Travis Kalanik resigned as head of Uber

Travis Kalanik resigned from his post as executive director of Uber, a taxi call service that he helped found in 2009 and which in a few years has turned into an international transport giant, is now valued at $ 70 billion. According to the NY Times, the shareholders rebellion made »For Kalanik to continue to stay in the post.

Kalanik’s dismissal was the result of a real drama, which began yesterday with a letter from five investors, including one of Uber’s largest investors, venture company Benchmark. In sum, these investors had about 40% of the vote when Uber shareholders voted (some of them had shares with multiplied votes).

In a letter called “Moving Uber Forward,” they demanded the immediate resignation of Kalanik. The 40-year-old businessman spoke with at least one of the members of the board of directors, and after lengthy discussions with some of the investors, he decided to leave. He will remain on the board of Uber.

“I love Uber more than anything else in the world, and at this difficult moment in my personal life, I accepted the request of investors to give way, so that Uber can return to creation instead of being distracted by another fight, ”wrote Kalanik in an official statement.

The board of directors noted in a statement that this decision gives the company "space for the full adoption of this new chapter in the history of Uber."

Travis Kalanik played an important role in aggressively promoting Uber to new markets, as a result of which the company became the global hegemon of a fundamentally new service - an intermediary between taxis and passengers. At the same time, the company has recently been shaken by a number of scandals, including with corporate culture due to sexual harassment against women and discrimination. It was said that such a corporate culture with a dismissive attitude towards women comes from the very top (read, from Kalanika). In recent months, Uber has dismissed more than 20 employees during an investigation into corporate culture.

The company was accused of unnecessarily closely spying on passengers and drivers, in collaboration with law enforcement agencies (overflowing personal data about customers). Recently, there has been a scandal due to the fact that Uber is using a program that allows denying service to people who could potentially be associated with the authorities (a tool called Greyball tracks among customers possible civil servants who prey on Uber drivers and doesn’t allow them to take a taxi ). In addition, Uber received a lawsuit from Waymo (Google) - a former employee of this company downloaded over 14,000 proprietary and confidential design files for various Waymo hardware systems, including lidar circuit boards for unmanned vehicles, then he founded the Otto startup - which immediately bought the company Uber.

Now the question arises: who will come to the place of Kalanik and dare to lead the "toxic" company?