In Video, Uber CEO Argues With Driver Over Falling Fares with Uber Driver
In Video, Uber CEO Argues With Driver Over Falling Fares
Travis Kalanick tells a driver to take responsibility for
his problems and boasts about a tough culture.
by Eric Newcomer February 28, 2017, 12:39 PM PST
When Uber Chief Executive Officer Travis Kalanick takes
an Uber, he prefers a black car, the high-end service his company introduced in
2010. On this particular night in early February—Super Bowl Sunday—Kalanick is
perched in the middle seat, flanked by two female friends. Maroon 5’s “Don’t
Wanna Know” plays, and Kalanick shimmies. He clutches his smartphone as the
three make awkward conversation. The two women ask when his birthday is, and
marvel that he’s a Leo. One of his companions appears to say, somewhat inaudibly,
that she’s heard that Uber is having a hard year. Kalanick retorts, “I make
sure every year is a hard year.” He continues, “That’s kind of how I roll. I
make sure every year is a hard year. If it’s easy I’m not pushing hard enough.”
There’s no question that it’s been a hard year for
Kalanick and Uber—or really, a bad year compressed down into an awful three
months. And it keeps getting worse. That pleasant conversation between Kalanick
and his friends in the back of an Uber Black? It devolved into a heated
argument over Uber’s fares between the CEO and his driver, Fawzi Kamel, who
then turned over a dashboard recording of the conversation to Bloomberg. Kamel,
37, has been driving for Uber since 2011 and wants to draw attention to the
plight of Uber drivers. The video shows off Kalanick's pugnacious personality
and short temper, which may cause some investors to question whether he has the
disposition to lead a $69 billion company with a footprint that spans the
globe.
Uber declined to comment on the video.
In December, Uber pulled its self-driving cars off the
road in San Francisco after the California Department of Motor Vehicles said
they were operating illegally without an autonomous vehicle license. In
January, more than 200,000 people uninstalled their accounts, and #DeleteUber
trended on Twitter, after the company was accused of undermining a New York
taxi union strike protesting President Donald Trump’s refugee ban. On Feb. 2,
Kalanick reluctantly left his spot on Trump’s business advisory council to
appease the company’s liberal-leaning employees and users—not to mention its
many immigrant drivers. On Feb. 19, a former software engineer at Uber wrote a
blog post alleging that she had been propositioned for sex by her manager and
that when she’d taken the issue to human resources, an HR rep had said that he
wouldn’t be punished, in part, because he was a “high performer.” On Feb. 23,
Alphabet’s autonomous car company Waymo sued Uber and its self-driving car
company Otto, accusing an Uber employee of stealing trade secrets by
downloading 14,000 files onto an external hard drive. On Monday, Uber’s head of
engineering resigned after the company said it learned that he had faced a
sexual harassment complaint at Alphabet, his former employer. He denied the
allegations.
“Some people don't like to take responsibility for their
own shit.”
The company has responded to the former engineer’s
allegations by hiring the former U.S. attorney general Eric Holder to
investigate the female software engineer’s claims. “What’s described here is
abhorrent & against everything we believe in. Anyone who behaves this way
or thinks this is OK will be fired,” Kalanick wrote on Twitter. On Waymo’s
claims that Uber has stolen trade secrets, an Uber spokeswoman said, “We have reviewed
Waymo’s claims and determined them to be a baseless attempt to slow down a
competitor, and we look forward to vigorously defending against them in court.”
Despite it all, Uber’s business is growing, week after
week. This is the service that Kalanick and his friend, Garrett Camp, dreamed
up. Get a car in an instant, just like James Bond. They weren’t the first
people to have that idea, but they were the ones who won—or at least the ones
who have gotten the furthest. Camp stepped back and became chairman of the
board, while Kalanick turned Uber into a global endeavor that operates in more
than 400 cities. The company, which has its headquarters on Market Street in
San Francisco, has more than 11,000 corporate employees. It has many more
drivers—millions of them, scattered all over the world, working as independent
contractors, without the health care and other benefits typically provided to
full-time employees.
And the gig has gotten harder for longtime drivers. In
2012, Uber Black cost riders $4.90 per mile or $1.25 per minute in San
Francisco, according to an old version of Uber's website. Today, Uber charges $3.75 per mile and $0.65 per
minute. Black car drivers get paid less and their business faces far more
competition from other Uber services.
“That’s kind of how I roll. I make sure every year is a
hard year. If it’s easy I’m not pushing hard enough.”
Kalanick has a reputation for being ferociously
competitive and hard-charging. He’s the guy who has bragged about having earned
the second-highest rank on Nintendo’s Wii tennis game. He’s still dogged by the
fact that he once referred to Uber as “Boob-er” because it improved his dating
prospects. Current and former employees say he can be empathetic when the mood
strikes—or tyrannical when it doesn’t. Kalanick loves fighting over a good
idea, which sometimes means admitting that his isn’t the best one.
“Toe-stepping” is one of Uber’s cultural values.
Kalanick is trying to be a better listener. He met with
more than 100 of Uber’s female employees at a meeting last week meant to
address the morale crisis that followed the former software engineer’s blog
post. Kalanick sounded some of the right notes, standing in front of the crowd.
“There are people in this room who have experienced things that are incredibly
unjust,” he said, according to a recording obtained by Buzzfeed. “I empathize
with you, but I can never fully understand, and I get that. I want to root out
the injustice. I want to get at the people who are making this place a bad
place, and you have my commitment to make that happen, and I know it doesn't
end there.”
Like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg before him, Kalanick is
trying to learn how to empathize and communicate. But Kalanick at 40, compared
with 32-year-old Zuckerberg, is having to change his ways later in life, and
he’s often reluctant to tread too far from his intuitions. Even when Kalanick
tries to empathize in his own way—which often means jumping into a dialectical
argument of sorts— his temper can occasionally flare.
In Kamel's car, for example, Kalanick is seemingly at
ease as the ride ends and his friends hop out of the car.
“You have a good one,” says the driver.
Kalanick says with an air of familiarity, “Good to see
you man.”
Kamel replies, “Good to see you, too.”
Kalanick thinks the ride is over. But having the CEO in
his car is an opportunity Kamel has been waiting for.
“I don’t know if you remember me, but it’s fine,” Kamel
says. The pair begin talking shop, and Kalanick explains that they’re going to
cut down on the number of black cars, which will reduce competition and should
be good for Kamel.
Then Kamel says what every driver has been dying to tell
Kalanick: “You’re raising the standards, and you’re dropping the prices.”
Kalanick: “We’re not dropping the prices on black.”
Kamel: “But in general the whole price is—”
Kalanick: “We have to; we have competitors; otherwise,
we’d go out of business.”
Kamel: “Competitors? Man, you had the business model in
your hands. You could have the prices you want, but you choose to buy everybody
a ride.”
Kalanick: “No, no no. You misunderstand me. We started
high-end. We didn’t go low-end because we wanted to. We went low-end because we
had to because we’d be out of business.”
Kamel: “What? Lyft? It’s a piece of cake right there.”
Kalanick: “It seems like a piece of cake because I’ve
beaten them. But if I didn’t do the things I did, we would have been beaten, I
promise.”
The two bat that idea around, and Kamel brings the
conversation back to his losses.
Kamel: “But people are not trusting you anymore. … I lost
$97,000 because of you. I'm bankrupt because of you. Yes, yes, yes. You keep
changing every day. You keep changing every day.”
Kalanick: “Hold on a second, what have I changed about
Black? What have I changed?”
Kamel: “You changed the whole business. You dropped the
prices.”
Kalanick: “On black?”
Kamel: “Yes, you did.”
Kalanick begins to lose his temper. “Bullshit,” he says.
Kamel: “We started with $20.”
Kalanick: “Bullshit.”
Kamel: “We started with $20. How much is the mile now,
$2.75?”
Kalanick: “You know what?”
Kamel: “What?”
Kalanick: “Some people don't like to take responsibility
for their own shit. They blame everything in their life on somebody else. Good
luck!”
Kamel: “Good luck to you, but I know [you're not] going
to go far.”
The door slams. Kamel drives away. Later, the Uber driver
app prompts him to rate Kalanick, as he does all his riders. Kamel gives him
one star.
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