Uber Document Shows Ex-Google Engineer Possessed Secret Files
Due-diligence report revealed Anthony Levandowski had Google files on its self-driving-car project, including 50,000 emails
.. Waymo said the report shows Mr. Levandowski stole Google files, accessed them after leaving the company and tried to destroy the evidence. “Knowing all of this, Uber paid $680 million for Mr. Levandowski’s company, protected him from legal action, and installed him as the head of their self-driving-vehicle program,”.. Investigators said in the report that, during one interview, they caught Mr. Levandowski trying to empty the trash bin on his computer. And another former Google employee searched the internet for instructions to secretly delete files from his computer before interviews with investigators, according to the report.
London Deems Uber Unfit to Operate in the U.K. Capital
Mr. Khosrowshahi has said Uber could go public in as little as 18 months. The threat of a London shutdown is likely to raise new questions among potential investors about the company’s global growth prospects.
“The truth is that there is a high cost to a bad reputation,” Mr. Khosrowshahi said Friday in an internal email reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. “Irrespective of whether we did everything that is being said about us in London today (and to be clear, I don’t think we did), it really matters what people think of us.”
.. the company lost at least $3 billion last year on sales of $6.5 billion
.. At the same time, Uber has abandoned efforts to establish an independent foothold in China and Russia.
.. “3.5 million Londoners who use our app…will be astounded by this decision.” He said the regulator and London’s mayor had “caved in” to pressure from a small group of people “who wanted to restrict customer choice.” He said 40,000 licensed Uber drivers in London could lose work.
.. In 2015, London Transport proposed a raft of rules that would restrict Uber, including requiring a mandatory five-minute wait time between ordering a ride and pickup.
.. The authority didn’t provide details on specific violations, but said Uber fell short in a number of areas, including its approach to driver background checks and reporting serious criminal offenses.
.. As part of Greyball, Uber has been able to use software to hide its drivers from government officials by showing them dummy versions of its app with fake cars trawling the streets.
.. The relatively high cost of a black cab has helped make Uber popular here. A four-mile trip in the middle of a weekday costing at least £16 ($21.64) in a black cab, compared with £8 on Uber
Why Travis Kalanick didn’t survive at Uber
From the moment his leave was announced, some people who knew the famously hard-charging Kalanick were skeptical that — based on how he had managed the company over eight years — he could change in the ways needed to allow him to return.
.. “A vacation doesn’t fix what he suffers from.”
.. the investors began talking daily over email, in texts and meeting in person for coffee, according to one source. By the weekend, Gurley’s venture capital firm, Silicon Valley-based Benchmark, began to pass around a draft of a letter urging Kalanick to voluntarily step down.
.. The letter — signed by five major Uber shareholders, including Gurley’s Benchmark and other top names such as Menlo Ventures, Chris Sacca’s Lowercase Capital and mutual fund firm Fidelity Investments — demanded Kalanick’s resignation
.. One moment three months ago, when Kalanick was still firmly in charge at Uber, crystallized how Kalanick was struggling to remake himself and the corporate culture. Kalanick appeared before a group of Uber’s female engineers in Palo Alto, Calif., for what was supposed to be an informal question-and-answer session.
.. He said he had met with Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg to discuss Facebook’s unconscious bias training. But Kalanick did not propose a plan to replicate that kind of training or any other concrete ideas. He only conveyed a vague notion that something needed to change.
.. Among the recommendations the board adopted included more management training and a rethinking of Uber’s 14 cultural values, items that Kalanick himself was instrumental in creating.
.. Kalanick had told Calacanis he scored an impressive 1580 out of 1600 on his SAT
.. As Uber grew, Lacy and her writers repeatedly clashed with Kalanick and the company. They wrote articles critical of how Uber treated its drivers and how female riders, in particular, faced harassment. The tension boiled over in 2014 when a BuzzFeed journalist heard Uber executives float a plan to research the private lives of writers whose coverage they did not like, particularly Lacy
“They wanted to go after my family,” Lacy said. “I’ve been in the valley for 20 years. This is not normal.”