Hi all, it's Eric. This month marks two years since Uber Technologies Inc. Chief Executive Officer Dara Khosrowshahi was selected for his new job. Asked about the occasion by Bloomberg TV's Emily Chang he replied, cheerily: "This is the moment where the mettle of Uber is tested." And noted, "Every great company has to go through tough times."
For Uber, though, those tough times have lasted longer than expected.
On Thursday the Washington Post reported that Uber's "internal tracking tools and external polling firms" put brand sentiment near where it was back in the days of #DeleteUber. The story also discusses Uber's recent marketing layoffs and penny pinching. It quotes an employee yearning for the company's former leader, Travis Kalanick. And the piece concludes with investor Jason Calacanis calling for "#thereturnoftheking." Calacanis even compared Kalanick's possible return to that of Steve Jobs to Apple. (Jobs had NeXT Computer. Kalanick has CloudKitchens. Both businesses are adjacent to the companies they co-founded, and then were ousted from.)
This month, which might have been a celebratory look forward for Uber's new CEO, is instead chock-full of drama for the ride-hailing giant, mostly left over from an earlier era. Besides the Washington Post story, New York Times writer Mike Isaac's sharp new book about Uber comes out next week, and chronicles Kalanick's shortcomings. And to top it off, prosecutors this week charged Anthony Levandowski, a central figure in Uber's greatest hits of scandals, with 33 counts of trade secret theft.
Uber fired Levandowski in May 2017!
Instead of being relegated to the dustbin of history, though, Uber is still dealing with what in hindsight was an abysmally bad acquisition of Levandowski's driverless trucking company, Otto. Uber's own hired investigators told the company before the acquisition that Levandowski said he, "(a) possessed Google information; (b) met with a number of Google employees about joining his start-up company; (c) met with Uber executives, while employed at Google, about forming a new company; and (d) destroyed highly confidential Google proprietary information he had stored on five disks on his personal Drobo5D, including source code, files, and software pertaining to self-driving cars." (Those investigators could never prove he destroyed the files by the way.)
The fact that prosecutors are just now getting around to charging Levandowski raises the question of what other dubious past decisions will get dredged back up. Whatever happened to investigations in Greyball, questionable foreign payments, pricing practices and other issues? The federal government finally seems to be cracking down on tech companies. Juul learned that the hard way this week.
Possibly torn between Uber's residual scandals and its lingering dominance, Khosrowshahi hasn't exactly done everything he could to blot out the company's history. Kalanick still sits on its board of directors. And Levandowski's co-founder at Otto works at Uber today, running the company's freight business.
Of course, even if Uber could forget its past, that wouldn't change its financial situation. The company's massive losses and sagging stock price are sinking its narrative. If Uber's stock price weren't under water, we'd have a very different gloss on Khosrowshahi's tenure.
It's worth remembering, as Uber's recent weak performance surfaces nostalgia for its heady rise, that many of the company's challenges today are rooted in yesterday's problems. Uber's task for a while now has been to innovate and grow, and simultaneously find a way to slash costs. Kalanick didn't seem to have a clear plan for either.
But even if Khosrowshahi can figure out the business part of Uber, he seems perpetually stuck in the lingering shadows of Kalanick's regime. Is the answer really just to put the guy who thrust Uber into chaos back in charge? —Eric Newcomer
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