Hubert Horan: Can Uber Ever Deliver? Part Twenty-One: Mike Isaac’s
Book Ignores Economics and Financial Results and Gets the Uber
Story Almost Entirely Wrong

By Hubert Horan, who has 40 years of experience in the management and
regulation of transportation companies (primarily airlines). Horan has no
financial links with any urban car service industry competitors, investors
or regulators, or any firms that work on behalf of industry participants

One of the recurring themes of this series has been the poor quality of Uber
coverage in the mainstream business and tech press.

On September 3rd, Mike Isaac, who has been covering Uber for the New York
Times since 2014, published Super Pumped! The Battle For Uber.[1]

Isaac’s central argument is that Uber is a fundamentally successful company
that was nearly undone by ‘[CEO Travis] Kalanick’s boundary-pushing behavior,
unabashed pugnacity, and eventually, the CEO’s own personal decline.” (p. xviii).
“Uber was the unicorn to end all unicorns” (p. 6), with the potential to “drag the
entire transportation industry out of the analog world and into the digital one”
(p. 64). Uber represented the “best and worst of Silicon Valley” (p.xviii). It was
“a company worth tens of billions of dollars that succeeded in changing the way
we move through the world, yet nearly destroyed itself in a bonfire of bad
behavior, ugly decisions, and greed” (p. xx) and provides a cautionary tale “about
how blind worship of startup founders can go wildly wrong” and threaten the
survival of “a multi-billion dollar empire.” (p. xix). The misogyny and rest of the
bonfire of  bad behavior directly reflected Kalanick’s personality, and became
rampant because Kalanick prevented the Board from exercising normal discipline
and control.

Isaac argues that Uber was brought back from the depths of its 2017 crises when
key Board members realized “Uber didn’t have an image problem, it had a Travis
problem” (p.235) and began to assert their role as the adults in the room, initiating
the “Battle for Uber”. When an outside investigation led by former Attorney General
Eric Holder produced damming findings, the Board forced Kalanick’s resignation
as CEO. Since his hiring, new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has worked to “systematically
undo nearly everything his predecessor had stood for.” (p. 331)

Every component of Isaac’s argument is wrong.

[...]

continua qui: https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/09/hubert-horan-can-uber-ever-deliver-part-twenty-one-mike-isaacs-book-ignores-economics-and-financial-results-and-gets-the-uber-story-almost-entirely-wrong.html