Uber’s culture crisis

A former Uber engineer is suing the company, claiming sexual harassment, retaliation and discrimination based on her sex and race.

In her suit, Ingrid Avendaño — a Latina — details what she calls an “intolerable” work environment where she was subject to sexual harassment and paid less than her male and white counterparts, with little action from the company to remedy those issues.

Former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has found his new job.

The controversial Silicon Valley entrepreneur is joining a startup called City Storage Systems that focuses on repurposing distressed real estate assets like parking lots or abandoned strip malls and turning them into spaces suited for new industries, such as food delivery or online retail.

For years, Uber has focused on the rider as the primary customer in lieu of investing in drivers. But now, the company is attempting to rectify its frayed relationship with its three million drivers.

So what is it really like to be an Uber driver dealing with day-in and day-out troubles at the company?

On a busy evening in February 2017, while America watched the New England Patriots face off against the Atlanta Falcons in the Super Bowl, Uber’s former CEO Travis Kalanick was having his own sort of showdown.

It started off as a friendly UberBlack ride. Kalanick, who sat between two women in an SUV, shimmied to Maroon 5 as the driver, Fawzi Kamel, brought them to their destination.

Uber is facing fresh questions from the U.S. Congress after it initially suppressed details about a data breach that affected more than 57 million of its drivers and riders in 2016.

In a series of letters sent to the ride-hailing company on Monday, Democrats and Republicans alike pressed Uber to detail why it hadn’t informed customers sooner, whether it has spoken with law enforcement agencies about the matter and what exactly it’s doing to help drivers whose sensitive data was stolen.

Uber has yet another lawsuit on its hands.

In a new complaint seeking class action status, two women — who are maintaining anonymity — are asking a court to force the $69 billion ride-hail company to change many of its driver screening and other practices on behalf of all U.S. riders who were “subject to rape, sexual assault or gender-motivated violence or harassment by their Uber driver in the last four years.”

In one of many efforts to reset the company’s much-bent-and-very-banged-up values, Uber’s new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi presented new rules of the road to the staff today at an all-hands meeting.

It included the most obvious of bromides: “We do the right thing. Period.”

The latest Silicon Valley head scratcher: How can Uber, one of the most sought-after startup investments, sell shares at two separate valuations?

Short answer: because it can. Slightly longer answer: because it’s selling on a secret marketplace, and you can distort almost anything when fewer people are subject to the deal.

Point for ousted Uber CEO Travis Kalanick: Under the company’s current voting agreement, Uber is obligated to seat two directors, former Xerox CEO Ursula Burns and former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain. He appointed both to Uber’s board yesterday.

While that agreement is part of litigation (now in private arbitration) that one of the car-hailing company’s biggest investors, Benchmark, is waging against him, only a successful attempt by the venture firm to stay the action will stop them from joining at a planned Tuesday board meeting.

Dave Clark, who has headed external affairs for Uber for several years, is leaving his job, although he will remain an adviser to the car-hailing company.

Clark confirmed he was departing and added that he would also be advising Uber co-founder Garrett Camp’s Expa startup accelerator and also Kitty Hawk, which is a “flying car” effort backed by Google founder and Alphabet CEO Larry Page. There, Clark will help with strategic development (presumably figuring out how to invent a safer Flubber).

Uber’s car-sharing feature UberPool is a critical service for the company’s vision — more passengers and thus more fares per ride — but it has been long derided by the drivers providing the service. Many complained it was too much additional work for the same if not less money, others complained of having to pick up a series of passengers who aren’t going in the same direction.

Now, the embattled ride-hail company is tackling the problems of UberPool as part of its campaign to improve conditions for drivers.

Since Uber hired former Expedia exec Dara Khosrowshahi as CEO just a few weeks ago, he and its board have been intensely focused on bringing on more adult supervision to the car-hailing company.

That’s, of course, the cliched Silicon Valley formula to heal hot-headed young startups in need of course correction. Except, in the case of Uber, it’s a necessity given the paucity of top managers there after the departure and/or firings of many leaders.

Morale at Uber has been at an all-time low over the past few months, with its myriad public scandals. While many employees are hopeful that the company will have a fresh start now that new CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has started, a group of six staffers have taken matters into their own hands.

In an effort to spread positivity throughout the company, this handful of unnamed employees created a website called Good People + Good Things, and put up posters promoting positivity throughout the Uber’s San Francisco headquarters this morning, sources said.

The past year has been a PR nightmare for Uber, as the ride-sharing company has committed all sorts of blunders — legal and otherwise. Uber has been accused of sexual harassment, stealing trade secrets and profiteering off protests.

But do customers care? It seems so.

The selection of a new CEO by Uber’s board of directors has not quashed the legal fight between its members.

Lawyers for ousted CEO Travis Kalanick on Monday filed new papers in the lawsuit brought by Benchmark, the venture firm that is suing Kalanick for fraud. Despite their disagreements over Uber’s direction and over the CEO search, both Benchmark and Kalanick remain on the board.

To say Hewlett Packard Enterprise CEO Meg Whitman has the board of Uber over a barrel now that former General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt pulled out of its highly dysfunctional CEO search effort this morning is perhaps too much.

Let’s just say that she’s driving the car, deciding on the route and not paying for the gas. This, even though she has not formally presented her vision to the board or even re-entered the process.

Former GE head Jeff Immelt has pulled out of the race to become Uber CEO and just tweeted his withdrawal from the process. Immelt, who is currently in Northern California, presented his vision for the car-hailing giant in a bid to lead it on Friday.

No longer.

After deliberating for two days on Friday and Saturday, according to several sources close to the situation, Uber’s board is expected to vote on a new CEO today. But the outcome was still being worked out late tonight and remains unclear.

And because this is Uber, all this could change, of course.

Uber investor Shervin Pishevar, who is trying to make other Uber investor Benchmark’s life a holy hell, has filed yet another legal bullet today, demanding company paperwork on whether the Silicon Valley venture firm leaked confidential information.

Ironies pile on top of ironies here, don’t they? This Uber mess has been one of the leakiest ships I have encountered since my time on the S.S. Yahoo, with all kinds of information flowing from all sides at all times to all reporters.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise CEO Meg Whitman has tweeted firmly that she will not be Uber CEO. She has made definitive public statements — one of which includes a nifty country music reference — that she will not be Uber CEO. Those who have spoken to her about being Uber CEO all say that the longtime Silicon Valley tech exec has repeated a Shermanesque statement that she cannot imagine any significant change or offer that would convince her to run the place.

In addition, according to sources, Whitman will also not appear at a board meeting tomorrow where two other candidates — former GE head front-runner Jeff Immelt and only one another dark-horse candidate — will present their visions for the future of Uber in the final stretch of the leadership selection process.

Uber is rolling out its third group of driver-friendly improvements, this time focused on flexibility. The company started introducing these new features in June with the addition of the long-sought-after tipping feature.

Since then, drivers have earned a total of $50 million in tips, according to Regional General Manager of U.S. & Canada Rachel Holt.

For most of the year to date, Uber and President Donald Trump often seemed to be in competition for the scandal of the day. Sometimes Uber has been in the news because of its ties to the president; at other times, it was because of its own internal culture. At the moment, Uber is making headlines mostly because of a mess at the executive level, as the company searches for a replacement for ousted CEO Travis Kalanick and deals with myriad lawsuits.

To help you keep up, here’s a timeline of everything Uber has been through this year.

Former General Electric chairman Jeff Immelt has become the front-runner candidate to become CEO of Uber, according to numerous sources with knowledge of the situation.

While the tension on the board of the car-hailing company remains high — due of late to an ugly lawsuit that one of its major investors, Benchmark, is waging against its ousted co-founder and CEO Travis Kalanick — sources said that a majority of the board is coalescing around the experienced Immelt.

I never met a messy corporate memo that I did not love to publish.

And it’s the same with all the media covering the ever-worsening civil war that is taking place at Uber these days. Which is why you should look no further than the leaks and counter-leaks of letters and memos and legal briefs and whatnot from the two sides vying for power to understand the state of play at the car-hailing company.

Uber has been having a crappy year. But its chief U.S. rival Lyft can’t afford to get complacent, Lyft director of product Taggart Matthiesen says.

“If you look at our strategy and how we’re evolving our product, that’s not something that we evaluate,” Matthiesen said in response to a question about how long he thinks consumers will choose Lyft over Uber based on branding on the latest Recode Decode. “We are continuing to try and improve the experience. At some point that stuff will probably fade away.”