Uber Founder Travis Kalanick Leaves Board, Severing Last Tie

In 2009, Mr. Kalanick and Mr. Camp started Uber as a black-car service that riders could hail from their phone. Mr. Kalanick stepped into the role of chief executive in 2010 and oversaw a period of rapid growth at the company. He often flouted local regulations, pushing Uber to expand to new cities as rapidly as possible.

Mr. Kalanick’s stepping-on-toes behavior became the cultural norm at Uber, which came to be known for its willingness to value growth at all costs. Uber quickly expanded into more than 70 countries and became the dominant ride-hailing service in most of them. It also started delivering food and developing autonomous vehicles.

But 2017 was a year of reckoning for Mr. Kalanick and Uber: A former engineer at the company (who is now an editor in the Opinion section of The New York Times) spoke publicly about her experiences of sexual harassment at Uber and said her managers did nothing to curb the behavior. A video of Mr. Kalanick berating an Uber driver who questioned him over falling wages also emerged. And revelations about Uber’s efforts to spy on competitors and thwart regulators surfaced.

Other scandals came to light that year. A woman who was raped during a 2014 Uber ride in India sued Mr. Kalanick and the company after it emerged that executives at the company had obtained her medical records in an effort to discredit her. Waymo, a Google-owned competitor in the race to develop self-driving cars, sued Uber for theft of trade secrets. Uber settled both lawsuits.

The onslaught proved too much for Uber’s major investors, and Mr. Kalanick resigned in June 2017. Mr. Camp, his co-founder, remains on Uber’s board.

Dara Khosrowshahi, a former executive at the travel company Expedia, was appointed as Mr. Kalanick’s replacement and tasked with cleaning up Uber’s culture.

“Very few entrepreneurs have built something as profound as Travis Kalanick did with Uber,” Mr. Khosrowshahi said in a statement on Tuesday. “I’m enormously grateful for Travis’s vision and tenacity while building Uber, and for his expertise as a board member. Everyone at Uber wishes him all the best.”

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/24/technology/uber-travis-kalanick.html?emc=rss&partner=rss