
Ask HN: You are named CEO of Uber, what do you do in “180 days of change”? - thechut
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?<p>Some examples:<p>- What would you do to motivate 14k employees who have been turned upside down?<p>- How do you slow the burn without mortgaging the future of the company?<p>- How do you balance driver and rider demands?
======
nailer
\- 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
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.

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

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

~~~
mabbo
Ironically I've had that on my profile for _years_.

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

~~~
a2tech
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
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.

~~~
twobyfour
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
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.

~~~
twobyfour
But he's not suggesting that they change their ethics and stop abusing local
laws. Rather, he's suggesting engaging in unethical anticompetitive practices
that abuse regulation to create barriers to entry. That's just a change of
tactic, not a change of mindset.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Is lobbying politicians unethical and anti-competitive?

------
YCode
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
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic)

------
bsvalley
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
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
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.

~~~
CydeWeys
They can't afford to take the loss, though. They are running out of runway and
have less than a year less. They are already _huge_ ; at some point they have
to make the shift to being profitable.

------
atemerev
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
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
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
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
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
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
He was famously wrong in that particular instance...

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

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

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

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

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

------
hluska
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.

