Super Pumped _ The Battle for Uber - Mike Isaac Page 0,106
Uber was reviewing the use of Greyball over Uber’s entire history. The US Department of Justice opened a probe into Uber’s use of Greyball and whether or not it was lawful; the inquiry widened to Philadelphia, Portland, and other cities where it had been used. Uber already had the reputation for being uncooperative and aggressive. Now, people were calling them potential criminals.
Attrition rates started climbing. Employees stopped wearing their Uber-branded T-shirts in public. During the Trump council revolts two months prior, protesters had handcuffed themselves to the front doors of Uber’s headquarters; now there were demonstrators out front almost weekly. The company’s reputation got so bad, employees stopped showing up to work. At one point, two of the remaining policy team employees in the office started rolling a ball down the entire length of Uber’s cement corridors—thousands of feet from one end to the other—just to see if anyone would notice.
No one did; no one was there.
After the offsite incident, the video of Travis berating a driver, and now the use of Greyball inviting federal investigation, Jeff Jones was done—he needed to get the hell out of Uber.
The entire reason he was hired was to fix the broken relationships between Uber and its hundreds of thousands of drivers. The driver video alone would have been enough to scuttle his efforts. When Uber cut rates in 2015, rather than worry about the effects lower income would have on drivers, Kalanick was giddy. To Travis, lowering prices meant raising demand. Growth would explode again, and growth—not the concerns of his drivers—was Travis’s top priority.
It didn’t matter to Kalanick that drivers were logging more trips and picking up more people—basically doing twice the work—to make the same amount of money. It didn’t matter that drivers were commuting absurd distances to busy cities like San Francisco—often from places two hours away, but occasionally as many as six hours away—sleeping in their cars overnight on side streets and empty parking lots for the chance at more rides per hour. It didn’t matter that San Francisco lacked sufficient public bathrooms for drivers, forcing them to find coffee shop bathrooms, or, more often, make do elsewhere. And it certainly didn’t matter that drivers pulling dayslong shifts were overworked and under-slept.
Kalanick had no sympathy for drivers and their bills—vehicle wear and tear, medical insurance, among many others—and classified them all as 1099 freelance workers. The entire business model was based on Uber minimizing the company’s responsibility over its drivers.
Drivers did find ways to push back. They formed unofficial unions, and used forums like UberPeople to congregate, share information, and organize walkouts and other protests. Harry Campbell, an aerospace engineer who drove for Uber and Lyft on the side, started a personal blog to document tips and insights. He called it The Rideshare Guy. Drivers were starving for more help and support from Uber; instead, they found it amongst themselves.
Reporting to Kalanick, Jeff Jones was powerless to help them. As he surveyed the wreckage of the past six months, Jones decided to pull the ripcord. On March 19, 2017, Recode ran a story saying Jeff Jones, Uber’s president of ridesharing, had resigned from Uber, with sources claiming his departure was directly due to the string of controversies that plagued the company.
Kalanick tried to fight back in the press. He had his communications staff leak a memo to Recode. In it, Kalanick said Jones left after being passed over as a potential chief operating officer. But Jones wasn’t going to let his former boss trash him without a fight. After Uber’s statement, he sent an on-the-record comment to Recode, in which he directly blamed the company’s leadership culture for his departure:
I joined Uber because of its Mission, and the challenge to build global capabilities that would help the company mature and thrive long-term.
It is now clear, however, that the beliefs and approach to leadership that have guided my career are inconsistent with what I saw and experienced at Uber, and I can no longer continue as president of the ride sharing business.
There are thousands of amazing people at the company, and I truly wish everyone well.
In the world of carefully worded corporate communiques, this was Jones giving it to Kalanick with both barrels.
Jones’s maneuver worked. After time off, he would eventually go on to be hired as president and chief executive officer of H&R Block, the tax preparation giant. He moved to Kansas City, Missouri, home of H&R Block’s headquarters, and still lives there with his wife.