I care a lot about Uber.
Their latest outrage has attracted a lot of negative press
this week, and rightly so. A reassuring number of people are horrified at the
company’s SVP proposing a million-dollar
scheme to invade the personal lives of journalists and smear them, though, to
my disappointment, I’ve seen only a few people remark on how alarmingly specific
that supposedly off-the-cuff proposal was, and, surprisingly, none on how come that
SVP had already dug enough dirt about a journalist to make ‘a particular and
very specific claim about her personal life’.
I think it’s easy to get scandal fatigue over endless tales
of corporate malfeasance, and if I were to be as engaged by every other
corporate scandal as I have been on this one, I’d have no time for anything
else. I’d like to explain why Uber’s myriad tales of wrongdoing is such a
personal matter to me, and why I think, whether you care or not, the outcome
could make a big difference to your life too.
It wasn’t just through ruthless determination that Kalanick
and co. got Uber where it is today. Greasing the wheels of their steep ascent was
a king’s ransom in venture capital. Today, a few very rich people stand to become
very much richer from the company’s years of exponential growth, and none of
them wants to upset the applecart by calling out their misdeeds. Remarkably,
even the
do-no-evil company has taken sides with the don’t-get-caught
one and hasn’t dared to say a peep throughout this whole scandal.
(And by ‘scandal’, I’m referring not to Emil Michael’s
recent moment of candor, but to the whole pattern of wrongdoing that speaks to
the heart of Uber’s corporate culture. Many others have documented their
ethical record better than I ever could; let me just encourage you to search
for yourself).
My key point is this: if, as a society, we allow Uber’s playbook
to succeed, then the big lesson that investors and startups alike will take
home is that playing dirty is the new key to success. In very little time,
expect a race-to-the-bottom of corporate ethics as amorality becomes the metric
by which a new wave of startups will compete.
And that’s why it’s so personal to me. Being an INFP, I have a creative side that
yearns to pioneer new ideas, and an idealism that clings to the belief that
they can be taken at their merits. It’s upsetting to see a company portray
itself as a scrappy young David, facing the Goliathan powers of incumbents and regulation;
only to grow big and, as
Nick Gillespie points out in Time, start a campaign to work with local
governments to entrench their position and use regulation to shut out
competition.
It’s that preoccupation with killing off their rivals, and
the shameless
dirty tricks they’ve engaged in to do it, that disturbs me so viscerally. And
it shows no sign of abating. In his Business
Insider article, Henry Blodget remarks that Uber’s latest round of financing,
in which they’re seeking to raise (if rumors are to believed) $1-2 billion,
make no sense from a product point of view. A company that stands only as a
middleman between supply and demand, and whose solution is already mature and
operating at scale, doesn’t need anything like that amount of additional funding.
But it does make a lot of sense from the perspective of:
“When a competitor enters an Uber market, one investor in an Uber-competitor says, Uber immediately and radically cuts its prices. Uber then happily loses money on each ride, knowing that the new competitor, with inferior scale, will lose even more money on each ride. Uber bleeds the competitor until the competitor realizes that Uber will do whatever it takes to crush it. The competitor then often gives up and withdraws — and Uber raises its prices again.”
Just for the record, I don’t want to suggest that other
issues aren’t important too. Misogyny,
disregard
for privacy, callous
disregard for customers’
safety,
etc.
are very serious issues in themselves. But in the grand scheme of things, I
think that outsiders will see them less as keys to Uber’s success, and more as
things that they’ve been able to get away with. Nobody’s about to create a
startup that competes on disregard for privacy, whereas I genuinely fear a huge
glut of money will flow into those who can prove themselves the most anticompetitive.
Some influential figures have called
for a replacement of senior management. Even if it were to happen, it’s not
enough. To forgive the company after a change at the top would be to reward
all, including those forced out, with the spoils of victory, and the harm done
to the competition (and indeed, to competition in general) would be
irreparable.
It takes so little
for customers to switch providers. There’s a small handful of companies
offering services so identical that using an alternative demands nothing more
than a change of habit.
Please, I implore
you. Make the switch. You’ll lose nothing, and in the long run, have much to
gain.
