The Uber Story: Fraud, Betrayal, Death & Cars

uber's the most ethically challenged company in silicon valley the story of uber begins on a winter's night in paris in 2008. two friends travis and garrett stood waiting for a taxi which was late they were cold frustrated and wondering if their cap was ever going to show up at all but as with any good entrepreneurs every problem is a potential opportunity that night in paris planted a seed in their minds that would lead to a billion dollar empire but this is not your typical business story the story of uber is littered with scandals and controversy at every single turn because whilst the idea for uber was in many ways revolutionary it was also illegal [Music] travis kalanick faced relentless bullying when he was young and often threw himself into his work as an escape as a teenager he sold kitchen knives in his local neighborhood cold crawling door to door and honing his natural sales skills a talent that would later prove invaluable in helping him pitch investors for money but before starting uber travis had dropped out of college to work on another entrepreneurial venture called scour a peer-to-peer search engine for files that was a little like napster and just like napster it would get sued into oblivion scour got sued for 250 billion dollars because of copyright infringements meaning the company had to declare bankruptcy travis was bitter about this and went on to start what he calls a revenge business the name of the company is called red swoosh the idea was the same peer-to-peer technology but i take those 33 litigants that sued me and turn them into customers so now those dudes who sued me are now paying me travis would eventually sell this business for millions of dollars giving him the money needed to start an even bigger project uber [Music] travis and his friend garrett had become increasingly frustrated with taxi companies and figured there had to be a better alternative but it was actually during a james bond movie that the idea for uber came to them in one scene bond tracked a car across a map using his phone and this would form the basis of their new app which was originally called ubercab and launched publicly in 2010 in san francisco ubercab aimed to solve the problems of a traditional taxi experience firstly you could order an uber with the touch of a button on your phone rather than calling someone secondly you could watch the car's journey across the map so you knew it was on its way and how long it would take thirdly uber had luxury black cars with leather interiors which would show up spotless complete with chilled bottles of water in the back and finally the payment would be seamless the ride would be automatically charged to your card so you didn't have to mess about with change or a tip in other words it was originally a luxury black cab and limousine service to give you a small taste of the james bond experience and thus getting an uber quickly became a status symbol in the wealthy san francisco area it was a great start for the company at least for the first few months then on october 20th the transportation agency showed up at uber's offices and informed them that what they were doing was against the law now at this point all of uber's drivers were licensed professional drivers registered with local transportation offices so uber felt this was incredibly harsh but apparently there were strict rules about running a taxi business and uber was breaking them one element of this was the uber didn't actually own the cars themselves they were getting professional drivers to use their own cars which saved uber huge amounts of money but created some legal issues the local authorities told them for every day ubercab was in operation the company faced fines of up to five thousand dollars per trip not just that but they said the uber team could face up to 90 days in jail for each day that the company remained operational the small uber team was both devastated and terrified most of them were in their 20s some had just come straight from college and now they were being threatened with fines and potential jail time one of them nervously asked what do we do but one man wasn't worried travis kalanick uber co-founder and ceo told the office confidently we do nothing we ignore it he went on to say that they'd simply drop the cab part of their name and just be known as uber he announced we're not a taxi company we're a technology company so these rules and regulations don't apply travis would frequently come up with creative definitions like this that would save the company billions of dollars but create a lot of controversy for example he also said that drivers of uber weren't employees they were partners thus meaning uber didn't have to give them employment rights or benefits of course travis knew the authorities were unlikely to see his way of thinking on these issues so he prepared for war [Music] travis knew that if he could get enough people using the uber app they'd see it was a better way to travel and at that point the authorities wouldn't be able to shut them down without facing huge public backlash but they had to move quickly so uber struck a deal with a tnt to buy thousands of iphones in bulk at a discounted price they would then hand these out to drivers pre-programmed to run uber's software they also offered them cash bonuses for completing a certain number of trips per week this immediately brought lots of new drivers onto their network very quickly then to get riders uber offered to give away the first trip completely free after all who wouldn't want a free taxi ride uber would then give the second and third trip away at a discounted price to encourage them to use the service again believing that if someone had tried it a few times they'd see the value and be willing to pay full price in future this strategy was incredibly expensive since the company lost money on every ride but it paid off because soon many people started exclusively using uber instead of normal taxis and then uber began expanding into other cities by replicating this same strategy offering generous promotions up front along with referral bonuses so the app became popular very quickly meaning that by the time the city's authorities started questioning what uber was doing and whether it was even allowed they already had a loyal active user base then whenever local authorities threatened them uber would send out alerts to users on the app with a button to easily sign a petition supporting uber or even a button to email their local representatives to express their support for uber using a pre-filled email template whenever uber sent out these alerts via their app local councils and regulators would soon find their inboxes flooded with people saying they support uber and don't want it to be shut down uber would also organize protests outside city hall and ask users of the app to come and make their voices heard although in one particular protest in new york not many uber users showed up to support them so uber just told all their employees from one of their offices to go and protest instead the local authorities didn't realize that most of the support was coming from paid uber employees but in travis's view uber wasn't doing anything wrong he said there's been so much corruption and cronyism within the taxi industry where corrupt taxi cartels pay corrupt politicians to protect them so if you ask for permission upfront you'll never get it he believed uber was better for both riders and drivers but that there was no way they could win by playing by the rules so he completely ignored them however in 2012 the battle between uber and regulators became much more fierce when uber launched a new service called uberx which allowed almost anyone to be a driver for the company which opened up all kinds of new legal issues and by this point city officials had already realized that uber wasn't very cooperative so they instead threatened drivers and essentially said if we catch anyone driving for uber we'll find you clamp your cars and tow them away the idea was to scare people to stop them from using the app so uber would never gain any momentum but travis and uber were already several moves ahead firstly they regularly sent out notices on the app saying that any fines or fees incurred whilst driving for uber would be fully reimbursed travis viewed these as just another business expense but the real genius was the uber developed a secret system so that local cities wouldn't catch them and it was called grey ball travis knew the authorities would download the uber app themselves so they could track the cars within the app however uber developed a software to detect when police regulators or local council members tried to join the app and then they would grab all them which is effectively like shadow banning if you get grabeled you can still open the app but it looks like there are no cars driving on the map and if you try to order a ride it just tells you there's no drivers nearby whereas if you viewed uber with a normal non-greyballed account you'd see that really there were loads of nearby drivers now how did uber know who to grab all well firstly they use location data and if you downloaded or used uber from certain areas like a police station or government offices you'd get flagged uber could then check the personal data of that account including things like their credit card information and cross-reference that with social media to check if it was a real user trying to use the app or if it was someone associated with a government agency or law enforcement or anyone who might be trying to shut uber down the gravel software also detected suspicious activity like someone opening and closing the app lots of times without ordering a ride uber even recruited xcia nsa and fbi employees to help them improve the greybull software as well as to spy on local government officials and track where they went essentially uma built their own corporate espionage team and it worked there are countless stories of authorities ordering an uber hoping to catch the uber driver in the act and find them for breaking the rules but instead suddenly their order would get cancelled as supposedly there were no uber drivers using the app the authorities just thought that people were following their warnings and not driving for uber when in reality they were seeing a fake map with all the cars hidden because they'd been greyballed so they had no chance of catching uber or its drivers of course uber kept this operation highly secret in fact it wasn't until 2017 when an investigation discovered that uber had been invading local authorities for years by using these systems digital equivalent of that sort of greed is good mentality the gordon gecko kind of mentality which is we we will do this we can do this and no one's going to stop us uber also spent vast sums of money on lobbying governments to legalize their service so by the time the uber's secret grable operation was discovered and people realized the deceptive practices they'd been using uber were already up and running legally in most major cities and was too popular to shut down just like travis had planned all along once uber had support and leverage in a city it's reported that they treated negotiations with local authorities like hostage situations basically once uber knew they had the power and the public support they used that to get legislation changed to accommodate their business model such as changing the laws about contract workers so that uber didn't have to give drivers full employment benefits of course uber's battles would never really stop even to this day just look at uber in the news right now and you'll see people protesting uber and some cities banning it all together but in those early years uber devised a systematic playbook for evading the rules and outwitting the local authorities and that's what allowed them to expand so rapidly the only problem was that an even bigger battle was just beginning [Music] travis got a call one morning from a friend of his facebook founder mark zuckerberg mark told him that all his employees at facebook were going crazy over a new app called lyft now it's actually still debated to this day whether lyft copied uber or uber copied left because even though uber started first remember when they first began they were a luxury black cab service it wasn't until 2012 the year lyft launched when uber became a more affordable service that let anyone drive for them suddenly these two ride-sharing apps offering the same service were going head-to-head and most people who know travis well have commented one thing in any form of competition he seeks nothing less than utter domination travis believed there could only be one winner and he would stop at nothing to make sure he was on the winning side so he wasn't afraid to play dirty for example one of lift's most effective marketing techniques was to hold driver events small parties with food and games to try and get local communities interested in driving for lyft but uber would frequently crash these parties and hand out promotion codes where drivers could get free money if they joined uber instead of lyft they basically hijacked the parties lyft was paying for and recruited people to join uber instead another promotion technique lyft used was giving out giant pink mustaches that drivers could put on the front of their cars a fun and simple gesture designed to make lyft more recognizable in response uber put up billboards everywhere lift was operating urging people to shave the stash and come use uber instead uber also created a vast amount of fake accounts on lyft so they could track the locations of lyft drivers and feed all of this data into another secret software they created called hell the reason for the name is because uber also had a system called heaven which was a god view map of all uber drivers active on their system but hell was the opposite a god view map of lyft drivers the reason for this was that then uber could figure out which drivers were using both uber and left uber would then offer those drivers extra rides and cash bonuses so they always took jobs with uber instead of left the goal was to get these drivers to stop using lyft completely because uber seemingly paid them more money when really uber were deliberately paying them higher than their other drivers to lure them away from a competitor once they stopped using lift the bonuses would end and uber didn't stop there for any drivers who were exclusively using lyft and not uber they would order a ride on the lift app from a location near that particular driver and when the driver showed up an uber employee would try and recruit them to join uber instead it's even reported that sometimes uber employees would use burner phones and hold on lots of left rights all at once and then cancel the rides at the last second in later years when the public found out how uber had been sabotaging lyft and stealing their drivers they faced a lot of backlash but travis and uber didn't think they'd done anything wrong they believed business was a competition and you had to do whatever it takes to win not just that but it seemed travis enjoyed the fight he would even troll lift's founder on twitter however perhaps one of the biggest reasons uber did so well compared to lyft was that travis would find out whenever lyft had investor meetings to raise money and then he would immediately call those investors straight afterwards to tell them that uber would be raising money very soon as well investors knew uber was the bigger company and since they couldn't invest in two rivals investors often backed out of any deals with lyft to invest in uber instead it also helped that travis was a natural showman he had a real talent for dazzling investors and getting them hyped about how huge uber was going to be he'd tell them that one day uber wouldn't just transport people but transport every good you can think of and deliver anything to anywhere and thus could be a serious rival to amazon he'd get investors excited about his vision but then after the meeting he wouldn't reply to them for a little while to make it seem like he didn't really need the money which just made the investors even more eager to invest it wasn't long before uber was getting some huge investments from venture capital funds including a staggering 258 million dollars from google ventures and of course more investors meant uber had more money to spend on expansion and marketing so they were always going to have an advantage over competitors by having a bigger budget here's just a few examples of some of the publicity stunts uber pulled to get more attention look valentine's day we distributed tens of thousands of roses to thousands of drivers every girl who got in a car after 4 pm was handed a rose by the driver in president's day um in dc we did what we call an uber cade okay escalade town car escalade american flags all the way down one out of every 20 people that push the button and ubercade rolls up but hold up hit the brakes whilst uber's publicity stunts might seem like all fun and games let's be clear the story of uber has a much darker side so far we've seen uber be unethical in their efforts to beat left and we've seen uber break the law to outwit local authorities but believe me things are about to get even more controversial before we get to the next chapter i want to tell you about today's video partner first base an all-in-one incorporation platform that's helping founders easily launch a us-based business from anywhere in the world as an entrepreneur you want to be focusing on running the business not dealing with complex paperwork but with first base they'll take care of all of that for you they'll help you incorporate your company get a tax id open a business bank account and get free tax and legal advice you'll even get access to 150 000 worth of free credits and discounts on major software and services your business will likely need so if you want to turn your idea into a real business first base makes it fast and simple just visit the link below and use the code magnates10 to get 10 off [Music] the rise of uber left doug shifter financially ruined he wrote on facebook when the taxi industry started i averaged 40 to 50 hours a week but i cannot survive any longer working 120 hours i am not a slave and i refuse to be one shortly afterwards doug drove to city hall put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger is certainly not the only driver who has taken their own life and cited uber as the reason in india one driver who couldn't make his car loan payments on time committed suicide which led to an angry mob of drivers showing up at uber's offices carrying his dead body shouting that if uber's wages weren't so low that driver would still be alive today now travis's view on uber was simple we're making drivers lives a hell of a lot better they're making a lot more money they're making ends meet they're living their american dream and uber's helping them do that riders are getting around town much more efficiently i'm not sure who hurts from this and some people would agree with travis that uber was simply a more innovative and efficient system that gives drivers a way to earn extra money and passengers cheaper and easier rides win-win right well not necessarily many others have pointed out that whilst drivers may earn more at first glance that money is then eaten up by fuel taxes and car maintenance often leaving them with less than minimum wage plus uber drivers don't have secure employment or many of the benefits they would normally get with a taxi company not to mention the fact that letting almost anyone be a driver opens up all kinds of safety risks to the public needless to say neither taxi drivers nor taxi operators were going to let uber win without a fight literally countless anti-uber movements have been staged by taxi operators and drivers such as causing a gridlock on the road in protest of uber it's also reported that in some countries there are taxi cartels which had ties to organize crime who would assault uber drivers steal their cars or even light them on fire in some places such as mexico there are reports of uber drivers literally being killed with many people suspecting local taxi operators this was an all-out war between uber and traditional transportation the truth is everyone has their own opinion on whether uber are the good guys or the bad guys in this story but what's undeniable is that wherever uber went they were constantly surrounded by controversy in 2014 a 26 year old ordered an uber to take her home after a late night at the office it was a long trip and she dozed off in the back of the car when her driver noticed he changed route and switched off his phone making him untraceable to uber and the police he found a secluded area to park and climbed into the back of the car and raped her he then threatened to kill her if she told the police as he drove off she managed to snap a photo of his number plates and thankfully the police were able to catch him but the story went viral and many people blamed uber's lack security this simply reinforced beliefs that uber wasn't safe some countries even temporarily banned ride-hailing services like uber completely now of course given the huge number of rides taken with uber incidents like this always seem like a possibility and of course traditional taxi companies have had horror stories like this too but many people felt uber had lowered the bar so much to become a driver which had added a higher risk and despite many more horrific incidents like this over the years uber refused to raise the entry requirements to become a driver there are even reports that are uber hq whenever a sexual assault victim decided not to pursue litigation or police evidence wasn't conclusive enough the uber team would cheer it also emerged that credit card thieves have been using uber for both drug trafficking and sex trafficking and because of all the free cash bonuses uber gave away to new drivers uber had been inadvertently funding all kinds of criminal activity now i would argue that when uber first began public sentiment towards the company was very positive uber was cheaper innovative and it was the underdog going against traditional transportation but as the years went by public sentiment began to shift news articles broke about how uber had used grebel to deceive cities and how they'd use black hat tactics to try and crush lyft and other competitors and the bad press just kept coming for example it was found that in indonesia uber had been bribing police officers and they've been forging receipts for those illegal bribes so they could count them as business expenses uber also faced serious data and privacy issues at one point travis changed uber's settings so the app could track people even after they'd ended their ride because he wanted to see where people went after being dropped off by their uber it's also reported uber looked at the data of individual users such as celebrities to see where they were traveling and when in later years uber paid hackers a hundred thousand dollars to cover up a massive data breach that exposed the personal data of 57 million uber customers uber would also have to pay 28.5 million dollars to settle a lawsuit because uber had falsely advertised that it had industry-leading background checks which it evidently didn't but one of the biggest pr disasters of all for uber came in 2017 when taxi drivers were striking to protest trump's ban on muslim countries uber ignored the strike which meant they rendered the strike ineffective and they profited from the fact that taxi drivers weren't driving many people were outraged and delete uber began trending on twitter over half a million people deleted their accounts and likely many more millions deleted the app from their phone lyft who had almost been crushed by uber suddenly had a resurgence as people switched to using them instead this incident combined with everything else meant uber's public reputation was reaching a new all-time low uber had still been growing and expanding but public sentiment towards them had been worsening day by day and i'd love to tell you that this is the part of the story where uber turn it all around where they win back public trust and solve all their issues but i can't tell you that because things are about to get even worse [Music] travis was desperate for uber to become popular in china since it's a market of nearly one and a half billion people but very few international tech companies do well in china so travis invested billions of dollars into giving away free rides and bonuses to drivers just like uber had done when it started out in other cities however in china this didn't go quite so well scammers in china started purchasing caseloads of cheap smartphones and set half of them up with driver accounts and half of them up with passenger accounts a scammer would then request rides from one of their passenger phones and use one of their driver phones to accept it they'd then drive around the streets with dozens of phones spread across the seats now remember the rides were all free for the passenger phones because of uber's promo codes and the driver phones still kept the money for the ride too plus the driver accounts got extra bonus money that uber was offering to new drivers in other words the scammers were getting paid twice for every fraudulent trip they did and after riding around for hours and racking up a huge fare the driver would simply cash out the money completely reset the phones and repeat the process again with brand new uber accounts so basically scammers were making loads of money by exploiting uber's promo codes and uber was losing millions and millions of dollars on fake trips the thing is because of an apple privacy update uber were not allowed to track imei numbers which is the unique number associated to every smartphone therefore they couldn't tell when fraudsters were just wiping their iphone and making a brand new uber account to claim the free bonus payments over and over again and yet despite all of the money uber was losing to scammers travis refused to cancel the promotions because he knew uber wouldn't succeed in china if they didn't offer riders and drivers free money for initially joining so instead uber found a way to bypass apple's rules they inserted some hidden code into their app to track the data they needed which would help them stop scammers making multiple new accounts from the same device but doing this completely broke apple's terms of service uber disguised the code so the app store moderators wouldn't notice but apple did eventually find out and they were furious they threatened to ban uber from the app store completely in many ways this example epitomizes uber because on one hand they felt they were simply doing what was necessary to beat corruption and save their company but on the other hand it's yet another case of uber completely disregarding the rules and just doing whatever they wanted but even without all the scammers trying to rip uber off things were hard enough for uber and china as it was because there was a rival app that offered the same service called dd and because they were a chinese company the chinese government heavily favored them dd would also pay local taxi operators to protest uber and send fake texts to uber drivers telling them uber had closed down that they could come work for them instead didi also told some employees to go undercover and apply for a job at uber then if they got hired they acted as moles collecting private internal information about uber and its plans and strategies when uber had begun in the u.s it was them who were the ones using such shady practices but in china the tables had turned eventually after billions of dollars of losses on fraud uber made a deal with dd where uber would stop operating in china but get a 17.7 equity stake in their business uber's investors were actually very happy about this but travis was frustrated he hadn't won the battle he'd wanted to be the first silicon valley entrepreneur to truly crack china and he didn't like the idea of compromising instead of winning even if it did make financial sense the whole experience with china had really just made travis even more cynical and truly believing the entire world was against him and uber and in a way he was right even uber's own drivers had started to turn on them and travis ended up getting into an argument with an uber driver that got recorded on the car's dash cam and went viral what you dropped the prices on on black yes you did with twenty dollars we started with twenty dollars know how much is the mile now 275 you know what what some people don't like to take responsibility for them they blame everything good luck in the middle of all of this controversy uber's other co-founder garrett who had taken a much less active role in the business publicly confirmed uber's plans to get involved with self-driving cars is this something that you think is going to play a big role in uber's future i mean i think it's pretty much inevitable i mean it is going to happen of course self-driving cars would eliminate the need for drivers and so many uber drivers saw this as yet more proof uber didn't care about them at all however from uber's point of view they felt they had to start working on self-driving cars because otherwise another company like google could come out with a ride-sharing app of their own that uses self-driving cars that could put uber out of business so uber actually started poaching some of google's self-driving engineers so they could work on this technology for uber unfortunately this actually led to yet another lawsuit for uber because google claimed that uber had tried to steal trade secrets from them about their self-driving vehicles however the real irony to all of this was that whilst uber was busy fighting attacks on all fronts regulators competitors public backlash driver backlash china google lawsuits and more uber's biggest threat of all wasn't any of these things uber's biggest threat of all was itself [Music] work was everything to travis all he thought about was building a great company he often wouldn't wash his clothes see his friends he'd be working all hours of the day on growing uber and he expected the same of his employees in his view being uber wasn't a job it was a mission employees often kept working even after they went home this reports that some staff were seeing therapists to deal with the burnout and intensity of the job although ironically many of them missed their appointments due to being too busy at work but there were several reasons uber employees gave so much to the job one of them was that travis always positioned uber as us versus them travis loved the book the art of war and he created a siege mentality within the company that it was uber against the world that they were constantly in an existential fight but it wasn't just that travis is also a showman and a very charismatic leader so when he told you that you were part of this important world-changing mission you believed him and he believed it himself they all felt that the 12-hour work days would be worth it in the end they'd be part of history and eventually get a big payout employees at uber also loved that travis trusted them with a lot of power to make big decisions without needing approval travis basically wanted an army of young and hungry entrepreneurs and he would assign each of them to a different city and tell them to go and make uber a success there using whatever tactics or budget they deemed necessary this is how uber was able to act so fast it wasn't structured like a normal big bureaucratic organization travis had all these small teams each focused on conquering individual cities this worked incredibly well sometimes but it also meant that teams at uber weren't just fighting competitors they were fighting against each other internally and occasionally even backstabbing each other since they were acting as individual teams rather than one united company now i realize so far i've used a lot of war and battle language when talking about uber but that's because that's how travis saw it himself business was war and whilst this attitude was responsible for a lot of uber's growth it was also the reason for a lot of uber's controversies and the competitive dog eat dog alpha culture they ended up creating however uber also embodied the mantra work hard play hard it was an uber tradition to throw a huge party for hitting targets and travis would fly employees all around the world for various celebrations one particularly infamous uber party was their x2vx event hosted in las vegas which cost the company around 25 million dollars each employee was given a prepaid credit card filled with money to spend and travis even got beyonce to perform at the events yeah quite a contrast to your traditional work party in fact travis announced beyonce and her husband jay-z were now investors in uber although technically travis had simply given them stock for attending the event but still for uber's young workforce it was surreal to be partying with global celebrities unfortunately the exciting culture of uber also had a much darker side and there was one incident in particular which really set in motion travis's ultimate downfall but before we get to that it's important to acknowledge that in the early days of uber saying you worked there was something to brag about it was only as the years went by and public sentiment towards the company changed that the opinions of their own employees started to change as well some employees quit completely saddened by what the company had become and all the controversy and scandals that surrounded it and one of uber's biggest scandals that caused a lot of that was when a past employee called susan fowler accused the company of systematic sexual misconduct susan said that her boss had sexually harassed her but the hr had dismissed the allegations because it was his first offense and he was a valuable part of the team however it was later revealed that this was not the first accusation of sexual harassment against this employee and uber had frequently ignored the claims against him when this information became public other uber employees started speaking up about the misogyny harassment and abuse they'd faced from senior employees at uber the floodgates were open and all the details of uber's misconduct and toxic culture became very public to traverse his credit he acted quickly and ordered an independent investigation into the company's culture when they finished they compiled a report with their findings it contained hundreds of allegations of physical violence sexual assault and many other accusations made by current and former uber employees it was far worse than travis could have imagined just reading the report was sickening uber's culture had become toxic and until now a lot of it had been swept under the carpet once again travis sprung into action and uber held a company-wide meeting where all of the uber board were on stage to discuss how they could improve uber's culture it was notable that at the time there was only one woman on the board ariana huffington she spoke on stage to the uber employees reassuring them that she'd be focusing on addressing the issues of sexism within uber's culture she also pointed out that now that there was one woman on the board it would likely mean there would soon be a second female board member as well however at that very moment one of the mailboard members interrupted her and said actually what it shows us is much likely to be more talking the room fell silent in the middle of a company-wide presentation that was meant to show everyone that uber was addressing its issues with sexism one of the male board members had just made a sexist joke about women talking too much seriously that was real leaked audio you just heard unsurprisingly this story made yet more controversial headlines for uber and to many people it proved that uber's culture problems started at the very top of the company it also didn't help that in a gq profile travis had previously told a reporter that he called uber boober because attracting women was so much easier now that he was the ceo of a big company uber had also had to apologize a few years before that for running a promotion in france to advertise free rides from incredibly hot chicks it genuinely seemed that uber was simply bouncing from one controversy to another and each incident just chipped away at uber's reputation a little further travis was already a tense person but the pressure and stress of everything going on left him feeling suffocated at one point it's reported that travis collapsed on all fours and broke down muttering i'm terrible and in the middle of all of this chaos surrounding uber the lawsuits the sexism the negative media attention everything travis then got a call that his parents had been involved in a freak boating accident which had hospitalized his father and killed his mother shortly after this in june 2017 travis announced he was taking a leave of absence from uber to work on himself and he vowed that when he returned he would be a better leader and a better person but little did travis know he would never be coming back [Music] breaking news uber ceo travis kalanick resigning overnight amid recent scandals kalanick is out entirely at least as ceo of uber reportedly under pressure from some of the startups largest shareholders within a month of travis taking his leave of absence to work on himself he resigned as uber ceo however this was not by choice the uber board and investors had forced him out as they blamed him for many of uber's controversies in fact one of uber's early investors benchmark capital sued travis over fraud allegations a vc firm suing one of its own ceos was a big deal and it just shows how far they were willing to go to get rid of travis travis understandably felt betrayed and hurt especially when it was leaked that he'd been forced to resign instead of it being by choice and travis was right to phil hurt because whilst he's undeniably a polarizing character let's be very clear it's quite likely uber would never have become the giant company it is today if it weren't for travis travis had studied jeff bezos and the way he ran amazon especially his focus on reinvesting profits in pursuit of continual growth and expansion and that was partially why uber grew so rapidly travis also admired the way bezos pushed amazon into new markets and travis had tried to do the same with uber this led to some failures like uber rush but also some huge successes like ubereats food delivery and travis still had plenty more ideas on how to expand uber further into other new and exciting markets but he'd never get to do that instead travis had been kicked out of his own company it had been a wild journey starting from that night in paris with his friend garrett to building a billion dollar company that's completed over 20 billion trips worldwide but finally for travis kalanick this was the end of the ride [Music] since the departure of travis uber has been much steadier the new ceo has been focused on repairing the relationship with drivers and improving brand perceptions with customers sure there's still been a few controversies like an uber self-driving car killing a pedestrian and protests against uber from its own drivers and taxi companies would never really stop however compared to when travis was in charge uber mostly stayed out of the headlines which investors were very relieved by so when uber had its ipo which is the sale of its shares to the public investors believed the demand would be booming now that uber was in safer hands however on the first day of uber's shares trading on the stock market uber's dollar value decreased more than any other ipo on wall street since 1975. in other words the public were not that sold on uber now you may be wondering if the reason for that is because uber's reputation is still tainted from all their various scandals but actually the reason might simply be the uber is still losing money every year sure it's very common in the first few years of a business to prioritize growth over profit just like amazon did so successfully but uber is now over a decade old and yet they lost 8.51 billion dollars in 2019 and 6.77 billion dollars in 2020. just to be clear if you started a business today and made a sale of one dollar and did nothing else all year you could legitimately claim to be more profitable than uber by a huge margin of course i'm being facetious here uber will argue they are simply still in the growth and expansion phase and profits will come later down the road but clearly investors aren't quite as confident sure without travis's ceo uber looks steadier and a more mature company but at what cost without travis's relentless drive for rapid expansion his constant hunger for innovation and his merciless desire to win at all costs is uber gonna stagnate are they still going to take on the world in the same way they had with travis and uber without travis is a little like apple without steve jobs still very successful but it will never be quite the same it's unclear whether that's a good thing for uber or not but what is clear is that uber is a tale of breaking all the rules and defying all the odds and somehow coming out on top and whilst travis has been kicked out of uber he's now a billionaire with an even bigger chip on his shoulder so this may well not be the last you hear of travis kalanick question how does whatsapp make money and how did tick tock suddenly take over the world all of these questions and more are being answered on this channel where you can watch all our business movies and documentaries totally free just click one of these videos now to move on to the next episode and don't forget to turn on the notification bell if you want to see more content like this very soon

Channel: MagnatesMedia

Views: 2,023,588

Keywords: the story of Uber, Uber story

Id: ISIjlRExdpE

Length: 42min 48sec (2568 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 13 2021