Ask HN: You are named CEO of Uber, what do you do in “180 days of change”?

43 points by thechut 8 years ago | 55 comments

Of course the proper job of a CEO is to put a team in place to do all these things. However, the point of the question is if it were your company and things to control, how would you keep the train on the tracks?

Some examples:

- What would you do to motivate 14k employees who have been turned upside down?

- How do you slow the burn without mortgaging the future of the company?

- How do you balance driver and rider demands?

nailer 8 years ago |

- I'd purge: disclose everything that needs to come out fully and immediately

- Throw away self driving cars for now. The tech will become commoditised. Almost everyone at YC in November was doing self driving motorcycles (I have no idea why either).

- I'd closely align Uber with consumers and environmental groups rather than falling in with taxi industry corruption. lobbying etc. Make cities change laws to benefit their citizens: let ride sharing exist so they can get picked up in rough neighborhoods (PS, abandon tipping, it breaks this), allow Uber cars in public transport lanes (because they are public transport), make sure ride sharing has dedicated space at the airport. Be tough to local governments when you need to be tough, but better yet, have consumers be tough for you. Expose the risks that cities like Austin have put consumers in by replacing Uber with Facebook groups of strangers. Expose cities like London where the normal black cabs frequently illegally refuse to pick up passengers and the mayor wants to 'protect' them because they're 'historical'. Ride sharing is for everyone.

agitator 8 years ago | |

Uber is a money machine right now. For many people all over the world, it's the go-to for taxi services and food deliveries. It would be stupid for them not to invest in self-driving cars. It's something that affects the core of their business and revenue. If Tesla comes out with full autonomy much sooner than they can, Uber is out of business. You can't compete with not having to pay drivers. If another player with self-driving tech starts selling the technology to OEM's, then uber is right where it's at. But if it succeeds before the others, then it's profits and future success will be astronomical. If Uber wasn't working on self-driving tech, it would be a huge mistake.

stinkytaco 8 years ago | |

I honestly don't think the terms "ride sharing" have fooled anyone long term. It's clever marketing, but everyone thinks Uber is a taxi service and they use them as such. This isn't necessarily the right thing to think, but I don't think you convince any city council by couching it in those terms.

But yes, pursuing changing laws rather than trying to fall in with them is probably the right solution, but not a 180 day solution.

rajington 8 years ago | |

I really don't know if SDCs would become commoditized, lots of startups doing it are more indicative that they're all trying to win rather than be a small player in a large industry. VCs in the area are probably betting on acquisitions, I think it'll be incredibly hard for that space to be more than two or three top players.

Finnucane 8 years ago |

Since I have no interest in seeing them survive, I'd take a the Bob Nardelli/Melissa Meyer approach of guaranteeing a nice golden parachute for myself, then drive the company over the cliff, and collect the payout on the way out the door.

Or, give up on the model of turning drivers into serfs for the benefit of privileged hipsters and focus on more mass-transit solutions.

johnpython 8 years ago | |

This is the correct answer. Dismantle the company, exit with a good payout, and give back some of it in philanthropy.

thrill 8 years ago |

1. I'd have a Come To Jesus meeting with my Board and ask them why they were so accepting of the poisonous environment. Not everyone would survive that Saving Private Ryan opening scene.

2. If I survived the previous activity, then having already once been assigned the position of CEO in a company destroyed by the previous management, I'd be as transparent as I could to all interested parties (that would include more than the investors) about the challenges and opportunities.

3. If I was still kicking after that, I'd implement (many) of the two dozen pages of notes I took from being an Uber driver for a year to see what it was about. I like talking with (a variety of) people, and a "taxi driver" is like a bartender in the natural sharing of thoughts for many passengers (who are poor to rich, small to large business people, ranging from unknown to runway-model-famous people).

4. Passengers would not be feeling like they were guessing about a) the fare, or b) the quality of the car, or c) the quality of the driver.

5. Drivers would not be treated as third-class citizens.

mabbo 8 years ago |

Step 1: Begin with culture.

Get every single employee involved. Have a very big summit with the single goal: creating the culture that Uber should aspire to be, and coming up with a distinct plan for how they're going to get there. Engineers like to solve problems, and it's clear there's a big one here that has been identified.

Once we have our goal of who we want to be as a company, there will need to be continual work to make sure we're still aligned on that goal, aligned on that culture. There will be people who need to leave, by their own choice or not, based on whether they want to and can be part of that change.

Probably worth hiring Fowler to be part of it, if she's willing.

Step 2: Cut some losses.

This Uber/Waymo thing? It's time to settle. It's clear that even if somehow Uber is innocent in all this, we're not going to win the case in court. Come to Google and say "We're sorry we let this happen. We want to be better than that. Waymo and Uber have the same goals in mind, so let's work together." It'll be expensive, but it'll be cheaper than never having self-driving cars.

Step 3: Plan.

Come up with 1, 3, 5, and 10 year plans. Where does Uber intend to be at each of those milestones? How do they relate to each other? On what day is Uber profitable? How does Uber stop the bleeding? And are these milestones achievable while still meeting the cultural goals from step 1? If not, come up with better goals. If I can't find a way to profitability without meeting the cultural goals, I step down and let a better leader step up.

Uber board, let me know when you're ready for my bold and inspiring leadership.

edshiro 8 years ago | |

Just wanted to say I love your description about opinions being like shirts that sometimes need changing.

mabbo 8 years ago | | |

Ironically I've had that on my profile for years.

romanovcode 8 years ago | |

> Get every single employee involved.

So naive. You have 12k employees and loads of business problems and you want to get 12k employees involved in some culture bullshit. Most of them will probably not even care about such event.

mabbo 8 years ago | | |

The people who are incapable of caring about this problem are exactly the ones who have enabled it to happen. They are the root of the problem. And as I said above, some people will need to leave.

Company culture isn't bullshit, it's what makes or breaks a company. Uber has neglected this very important nutrient, and I think will die if it doesn't fix it.

dbot 8 years ago |

Uber needs to focus on customer loyalty - having a base of loyal customers means they can engage in licensing deals with the true automakers.

How to build loyalty? Create a rewards/milage program similar to airlines. Most business travelers commit to one airline because of the status and perks they receive. Some Uber perk ideas include:

1. priority response during high demand

2. free "upgrades" from UberX to higher class vehicles when demand/wait time allows

3. partnership with airline lounges to get access when traveling

a2tech 8 years ago |

1) Support the self driving thing for another round of funding, then stuff it. I agree with someone else in the thread-its too blue sky now to be wasting money on. Let other companies chase it into the ground then license it when its commercially viable

2) Refocus on the core product. Drop the tipping, convert more drivers through incentives or slightly bumping fare payouts on the backend. They can pull some of the cash they'll save from dumping self-driving tech on this. People won't use competitors if they don't have drivers and the fares are higher

3) They should really consider having a few real employees in hot markets that screen first time drivers and their cars. I've had a few drivers show up in vehicles that technically met Uber's standards, but were really shitbuckets. Thats not the image Uber wants to present.

eugeniub 8 years ago | |

Without something like self-driving, what differentiates Uber from Lyft and other future competitors? A 1.5 star App Store rating? Greyball?

a2tech 8 years ago | | |

The car companies are all perusing self driving technology. It's realistically years and years out. If uber hoovers up the drivers now, there won't be (in wide spread consumer perception) competition in the future because uber will have driven the other competitors out of business.

frgtpsswrdlame 8 years ago |

Keep focus on self-driving through the next funding cycle (for the hype) then drop it like a hot potato. It is way too long term for Uber to be burning money on it, they have immediate short-term problems.

I'd probably try to rebrand as the new, legal Uber and start spending money on lobbying local politicians. The "taxi-app" market has almost no switching costs and so Uber has almost no pricing power. They'll need to fix this to ever run a profit. Effectively Uber exists because it broke the laws that created barriers to entry. If it wants to continue to exist it needs to erect new barriers that protect it and keep out competition.

castis 8 years ago | |

> If it wants to continue to exist it needs to erect new barriers that protect it and keep out competition.

If making it illegal for competition to exist is the only way to keep Uber running then it shouldn't keep running.

blowski 8 years ago | | |

Erecting barriers to entry is what every single business tries to do. Whether it's buying patents, spending vast sums of money on your brand, monopolising key resources - they're all trying to do the same thing.

wonder_bread 8 years ago | |

Is Uber's brand as bad across the rest of the world as it is in the tech news echo chamber? Simply curious how ubiquitous news of the turmoil has become

twobyfour 8 years ago | |

So instead of changing the culture, basically pretend that the only problem Uber has is damage to its brand because its lack of ethics was finally called out?

pavel_lishin 8 years ago | | |

That's not how I read it.

You're right, frgtpsswrdlame totally skipped over that Uber currently seems like a rampant shit-show from the outside - I can't imagine any women applying to work there - but he did address two concrete issues Uber has that aren't just "brand damage": focusing too much on self-driving tech, and their flagrant disregard for local laws.

YCode 8 years ago |

First spend a few weeks going to the employees in key areas and one/a few on one asking them what needs changed.

It's been my experience that the people on the ground know what's wrong with the company, they just don't have the authority or vision to do anything about it.

Then look for the most common threads and how to tackle those.

Naive, I know. But it's what I would do.

jerf 8 years ago | |

I'd say it's less "naive" than thinking you've got the correct diagnosis for a multi-billion multi-national dollar company off of a collective, oh, let's be generous and call it an hour of reading news articles about a company (time spent chewing the fat on HN and other fora don't much count), and therefore have the correct prescription for it as well.

I'd certainly say I wouldn't be surprised to get in there and discover that, yes, corporate culture is the biggest problem, but it must also be remembered that that could just be the availability heuristic at play [1]. It could also easily be a second-order effect of some more fundamental problem. Or it could end up hardly even rating in the top 3 problems. I don't know. Neither does anybody else here, really. Not because people here are particularly bad people or anything, it's just that quite likely nobody really knows; a culture tends to be blind to its own pathologies (or it would fix them; there's a selection effect in play) so there may be literally nobody currently on Earth who has a good grasp on the true problem, let alone a solution.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic

bsvalley 8 years ago |

1. Hire Chris Lattner who just left Tesla to take over self-driving initiative.

2. Ask Chris Sacca to come out of retirement and to get more involved in Uber's strategy.

3. Find a COO like yesterday.

4. Shut down Uber eats and Uber rush and double down on self-driving initiative.

5. Make the team leaner, more agile and eliminate 1s layer of management (engineering managers, etc.). Dev teams should be %100 autonomous driven (not managed) by product managers.

6. Eliminate Tips.

7. Pay Uber drivers way more and have them sign a special contract (can't sign-up with other competitors).

8. Increase passenger engagement during a ride by providing location-based deals, events, etc. A twitter-like app to use while riding an Uber.

etc... this is just a short list.

CydeWeys 8 years ago | |

The thing about tipping is that it actually helps to solve one of Uber's biggest problem: Their cash burn rate. Tipping allows them to move a good chunk of their driver costs onto their customers, same as how it works for servers in restaurants. I understand the ideological opposition to it, but they might not be able to afford to not have tipping.

bsvalley 8 years ago | | |

It's a trade off, company versus customer experience. For a private company like Uber it's a no brainer. They should take the loss to make the user experience better and to acquire more users. Low cost and frictionless payment, that's what they should be aiming for the long run. Asking for your users to pay more while lowering your drivers paychecks is a recipe for failure at that stage of the game.

bmm6o 8 years ago | |

> have them sign a special contract (can't sign-up with other competitors).

IANAL but it seems like this would kill the case that drivers are "independent contractors" and that would have a huge impact on their cost structure.

atemerev 8 years ago |

Nice try, Thuan. :)

I would have run a management buyout (this is why the smear campaign started, right? 70 billion is way too expensive, and valuation needed to be put down fast, while making plausible reasons for that — congratulations, it worked).

Then, I'd have fired half of those 14k employees (really? for a startup?), and finally pivoted by rolling out their geo-matching API for everybody to run their own businesses and services on it (they should have it for like 2 years already). The first one who will provide something like AWS for shared economy wins!

maxxxxx 8 years ago |

I don't think there is a path for them to be a self sustaining business on the scale their valuation demands. With the investment money they have taken and the resulting growth expectations I don't think they can do much without disappointing their investors massively. If their valuation goes down a lot of employees will leave. I wouldn't be too surprised if they got bought by someone in the future.

maxfurman 8 years ago |

Raise fares and cut costs. Uber has a lot of revenue, but they are wasting it on the self-driving moonshot among other things. Unfortunately this will mean firing a big chunk of those 14k employees but if the company goes bankrupt they will all be unemployed.

Acknowledge the reality that Uber will not conquer the world and is not worth seventy billion dollars by taking a down round (assuming they need to raise money).

temp-dude-87844 8 years ago |

1. Admit 'we can do better' and purge management ranks. Bring in some reliable, non-rockstar talent from the industry, and start a corporate responsibility blog.

2. Cut costs. Reduce headcount, relocate (out of SF/SV) or offshore dev work. Spin off or sell off expensive ventures, like self-driving research -- there are too many companies working on self-driving, it's not smart to compete with them in-house. Partner with one instead.

3. Increase revenue and maximize rider capture.

- Reduce fare subsidies in metros with lower competition, but offer a loyalty program for riders.

- Institute Expand high-margin LoS like UberRUSH, the courier service. Forge contracts with surburban/exurban governments to provide transportation services; try to absorb government subsidides.

- Monetize data collected during normal operations: partner with market research firms, expand incidental mapping operations to reduce reliance on external maps.

- Deepen partnerships with automakers, and make preferred partnerships with sites that are frequent origins and destinations.

- Think about usecases: not just cab-hailing in one's hometown, but offering safe passage to high-profile sites in foreign metros while one is travelling. Make people choose Uber for the same reasons they discretionarily choose another brand: consistency of experience, trust, and perks; i.e. don't compete solely on price. Make partnerships that support these use-cases.

Companies to be wary of: Google, Amazon, and automakers with whom they have no pre-existing relationship.

Companies to court: HERE Maps (owned by Volkswagen, BMW, and Daimler); hyperlocal providers like FourSquare, Snapchat; car-sharing companies like Zipcar; arch-rivals of their competition like Facebook, Walmart (!); AirBnb and hotel chains.

stinkytaco 8 years ago |

Have a series of summits to discuss culture. Have focus group meetings with everyone from execs to drivers in the room. Hire a new HR director or put someone into place that can overhaul the reporting system. Do sensitivity trainings, retreats, summits, whatever. This directly a addresses the harassment issue. I don't know much about how harassment reporting works, but there has to be some sort of standard that HR professionals are trained in.

Then I would raise fares and remove tipping. Improve the customer experience.

Finally I would hire more local employees to monitor on-the-ground operations like drivers, cars, and service. Set up a mentoring program to help drivers get started and stay on. No one is fooling anyone by treating them like contractors. For customers, drivers are the face of the company. I'm brought to mind of Disney's "cast member" concept. The lowest employees on the totem pole are the ones your customers see the most, invest in them.

skywhopper 8 years ago |

Michael Dell may have put it best: "What would I do? I'd shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders."

atemerev 8 years ago | |

He was famously wrong in that particular instance...

zack12 8 years ago | |

Only if there is any money left by then.

kpil 8 years ago |

Reorg like crazy. At the end of the turmoil announce that my work as an goodlike management doctor has been done and everything is now on track for the less gifted but down to earth management that is now necessary, exit, laugh all the way to the bank, and find some other suckers to trick.

gaius 8 years ago | |

Or just do nothing at all - the Mayer gambit. The payoff's the same.

emilsedgh 8 years ago |

I don't know why is everybody so much against the driverless cars project. I think its a nice R&D project that could pay off really really big. I don't think it costs a lot of money comparing what they are burning nowadays.

I think they should:

* Make sure HR problems are actually resolved internally. Its not a big problem to solve I think.

* Try to grow in more towns and countries aggressively.

* Use the economics of scale to bring down the costs for drivers so they can keep the cost down without paying from VC money. For example:

Buy insurance in bulk for their drivers,

Contract repair shops for their drivers,

Even buy cars in bulk and lease them out to drivers.

mindcrime 8 years ago | |

I don't know why is everybody so much against the driverless cars project.

I think it's at least partly because many people think that truly autonomous driver-less cars are much further away than they seem. (Disclaimer: put me in this camp). That is, getting 90% of the way to a truly driver-less car is hard enough... but it's the second 90% that really kills ya.

Also, assuming driver-less cars do become a "thing", there's no particular reason to think that Uber will perfect them to such a degree that gives them any kind of competitive advantage. In the end, (as this theory goes), car companies will still be the people making cars in the future, and if Uber wants driver-less cars, they will just buy them from GM, Tesla, Toyota, Mercedes or whoever.

tossapp9 8 years ago |

1. Fix their terribly redesigned Android app and revert to the pre-facelift version.

edshiro 8 years ago | |

Really? Surely there must be more serious and immediate problems than that.

greedo 8 years ago |

Sell. Find a company/sucker willing to buy it and return the money to shareholders. Uber is dead. It just doesn't know it yet.

mapster 8 years ago |

pay attention to operations 100%. lyft morale. keep lowish profile publicly.

sngz 8 years ago |

sell the company to verizon and then resign and get paid millions

hluska 8 years ago |

I assume that the CEO of Uber has three major goals. These goals are to stop the steady flow of ugly PR, slow the company's burn rate, and prepare the company for a liquidity event. Because of recent turmoil, I don't think that Uber has any shot of an IPO in the next two years.

Since 180 days really isn't enough time to onboard a COO or CFO, I would only focus on damage control. I would need those executives to help curb the burn rate.

Step 1:

Before I accepted the job, I would accept that there is a very high probability that this will end badly and that my reputation will never recover. I would wonder whether the VCs who were instrumental in bringing me in would stand by me when this goes to hell, or would I take the lion's share of the blame?

So, I would make sure that my compensation from Uber was properly invested so that I could survive the rest of my life if I could never get another job. And, I would work with a very competent money manager to optimize every single dollar that I would get from Uber.

Step 2:

If Uber is going to reach a liquidity event, it needs some highly competent executives who can take leadership of their respective areas. At this point, Uber badly needs a CEO/COO/CFO troika that can work together. Therefore, my first real step as CEO would be to help the board recruit solid AAA+ players for the two remaining positions.

Step 3:

While recruitment was ongoing, I would undertake two major initiatives in tandem. First, I would conduct my own investigation into what happened and learn as much about the previous culture that I could. There is a very high probability that this investigation would lead to a new round of firings. Therefore, the second initiative would be to be completely transparent and wholly public about what is going on. I have to assume that every single thing that I would do would be heavily scrutinized by the media, investors and stakeholders. Therefore, I would get in front of it and send weekly emails to employees/investors that were cross posted on a blog. If journalists want to see fire, they can see the same fire that I see. In a news vacuum, it gets more tempting to print dubious sources who may or may not actually be telling the truth.

Step 4:

Once I had a solid grasp on what happened (and once I knew that the bad apples were all promoted to Uber customers, or maybe drivers), I would start fixing the culture. Hopefully, by this point, we would have at least a COO on board. With her help, I would make sure that HR was fully independent and powerful. Simply put, the new Uber would have a strong 'no asshole' rule.

Step 5:

SDC be damned....Uber drivers need to be promoted to first class citizens within the Uber ecosystem. Once I was fairly confident that the culture now marginalized assholes, I would work closely with drivers. I would argue that Uber drivers have an incredible understanding of all the efficiencies and inefficiencies within Uber's market. Therefore, we need to empower drivers and encourage them to come forward with any suggestions to make their jobs better. I argue that Uber is closely tied to their drivers. As drivers succeed and make money, Uber should succeed and make even more.

In 180 days, sadly, I don't think I would have the chance to put a true focus on rider demands. In fact, I'm not even sure that I would have time to engage the drivers. But, these five steps are my perfect case.