The earliest instance of this that I can find is from Mikko Leskelä’s Twitter feed.
I’ve heard a lot of jokes about building software, but this one’s new to me! And yes, it’s funny because it’s true — we’ve all seen projects where the one thing that seems to be set in stone is the delivery date.
If you haven’t read Susan Fowler’s article, Reflecting on One Very, Very Strange Year at Uber, open a new tab and read it now. She worked at Uber as a site reliability engineer, when site reliability engineering was a new team at the company, and “things were just chaotic enough that there was exciting reliability work to be done.” It’s a story that starts with great promise, and devolves into one of harassment, circling the wagons boy’s club-style, and an HR department even more abominable than the stereotypical one.
Among her experiences, she lists:
These are just the “highlights” of her story; you should really read the whole thing.
There will be people who will dismiss Fowler’s claims, saying things like: “I’ve seen women in tech that accused their male-dominated teams in sexism just because they couldn’t keep up with the rest of team”. That’ll be a hard claim to make of Fowler, as she now works for Stripe, who have a pretty thorough vetting process (I’ve been through it), and considering that she’s taken her skill and experience at Uber and distilled it into the O’Reilly book Production-Ready Microservices.
Y’know, just like this guy promised to devote his life to going after his wife’s real killer.
Months of talking to Uber HR did her no good, but posting an article on her blog got a quick reaction from Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, who released this statement:
“I have just read Susan Fowler’s blog. What she describes is abhorrent and against everything Uber stands for and believes in. It’s the first time this has come to my attention so I have instructed Liane Hornsey our new Chief Human Resources Officer to conduct an urgent investigation into these allegations. We seek to make Uber a just workplace and there can be absolutely no place for this kind of behavior at Uber — and anyone who behaves this way or thinks this is OK will be fired.”
It’s a lovely statement, but you’ve got to take into account things that Kalanick has said, the kind of company culture he’s engendered (remember, company culture is largely a top-down thing), and the things that execs have done under that culture, including casually threatening journalists with smear campaigns.
Uber board member Arianna Huffington tweeted this announcement soon after:
Just talked w/ Travis & as a representative of Uber’s Board I will work w/Liane to conduct a full independent investigation starting now 1/2
— Arianna Huffington (@ariannahuff) February 20, 2017
Here’s a notable tweet in response to Rigetti Fowler’s article:
@susanthesquark I find no coincidence in the fact that 1 of most morally bankrupt people I’ve met went to recruit at uber and thrives there
— Anthony Via Corrado (@ViaCorrado) February 19, 2017
In case you were wondering, the photo of the sour-looking portly gentleman is of Auric Goldfinger from the James Bond Book and film, who has this to say about coincidences:
“Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action.”
Let’s replace enemy action with established patterns of behavior at Uber, and look at what’s publicly known about the company, shall we?
At a dinner party in November 2014 thrown by Uber at a time when they were trying to convey to the public that they weren’t as bad as the media made them out to be, Uber Senior VP Business Emil Michael suggested countering negative reports with a smear campaign. He suggested spending “a million dollars” to hire opposition researchers and journalists to look into “your personal lives, your families” and as Buzzfeed (who had an editor in attendance at that shindig) puts it: “give the media a taste of its own medicine.”
When someone at the dinner countered that a plan like that would be a problem for Uber, Michael replied: “Nobody would know it was us.”
Ben Smith, Buzzfeed’s Editor-in-Chief wrote:
Michael was particularly focused on one journalist, Sarah Lacy, the editor of the Silicon Valley website PandoDaily, a sometimes combative voice inside the industry. Lacy recently accused Uber of “sexism and misogyny.” She wrote that she was deleting her Uber app after BuzzFeed News reported that Uber appeared to be working with a French escort service. “I don’t know how many more signals we need that the company simply doesn’t respect us or prioritize our safety,” she wrote.
At the dinner, Michael expressed outrage at Lacy’s column and said that women are far more likely to get assaulted by taxi drivers than Uber drivers. He said that he thought Lacy should be held “personally responsible” for any woman who followed her lead in deleting Uber and was then sexually assaulted.
Then he returned to the opposition research plan. Uber’s dirt-diggers, Michael said, could expose Lacy. They could, in particular, prove a particular and very specific claim about her personal life.
Michael ended up having to apologize to Sarah Lacy publicly…
@sarahcuda I would like to apologize to you directly. My comments were wrong and I deeply regret them.
— Emil Michael (@emilmichael) November 18, 2014
…but when he called her to talk off the record and explain his comments, she quite astutely refused: “You threaten my family and you want to chat off record? Um no.”
If you check LinkedIn, you’ll see that Michael is still Uber’s SVP of Business.
In a July 2016 article in Pando, Sarah Lacy wrote about the departure of Renee Atwood, who was then the head of Uber HR:
Renee Atwood is either the least self interested person in Silicon Valley or she knows something about Uber the rest of us don’t.
Until Wednesday, Atwood was the head of HR for Uber, a job she’d taken after four years at Google. Hers should have been the easiest job in Silicon Valley: Head of HR for the highest valued, more anticipated IPO candidate we’ve seen since Facebook. The unicorn-iest unicorn in an era of more than 150 unicorns.
She joined Uber in 2014– when the company’s valuation was a “mere” $13 billion, compared to near $70 billion today. Smart bet. When she joined Uber had just 600 employees– what Google had in year five. Today it has more than 5,000. By all metrics she seems to have done an amazing job in a period of insane hyper growth.
So let’s recap:
- After years at Google Atwood jumps to the next hottest thing: Check!
- In just two years the value of the company she joined has jumped from $13 billion to close to $70 billion indicating a massive, massive payday coming for her: Check!
- She’s the gatekeeper between every young aggressive candidate who wants to be part of the hottest company in all startups and her only job is to vet the right ones: Check!
That story sounds like a senior manager’s Silicon Valley dream.
And then what happened Wednesday? Atwood announced she was leaving Uber…. For Twittter.
Twitter!
Not Airbnb. Not even a troubled decacorn like Dropbox or Pinterest. Not even a still surging goliath like Facebook.
Twitter. The company that can’t seem to keep a head of product. The place “with no plan B.” Atwood left what should be the easiest job in HR in Silicon Valley for what should be one of the hardest. It’s like leaving as Facebook’s head of HR just before the IPO to go to Yahoo. Even without knowing the specifics of her contract at either place it’s safe to say Renee Atwood just turned down a major potential payday for one of the most thankless jobs in tech.
Sources close to the situation confirm that Atwood was not pushed. She was recruited away by Twitter. The sound you just heard was Uber CEO Travis Kalanick punching the wall in his famous “war room.”
Where to start with the news other than that it’s a colossally bad sign for Uber?
Here’s a tweet from 2015:
The person who tweeted deleted their original account and now has a protected one, because the whistleblowing in the tech and corporate worlds seems to follow this pattern:
Tess Rinearson, an engineer at the blockchain network-building company Chain, was getting an email from an Uber recruiter often enough that she has a boilerplate response that reads as follows:
Thanks for reaching out. I really do appreciate that you took the time to check out my writing, and I’m sure the technical problems you’re solving are genuinely interesting.
However, I am a woman, and Uber’s track record on women scares me. The latest, on women who have been assaulted via Uber, felt particularly jarring. But also: The gendered attacks on a prominent woman in tech, the sexualized ads in France…
I just don’t think I’d be a culture fit.
(And, as a backend engineer, it doesn’t seem like a place I’d get a lot of respect, either.)
A little less than a year ago I had the “pleasure” to interview at Uber. I didn’t know much about the company at the time, other than that they were big. I was looking for work already and Uber’s recruiter reached out to me, so I figured to give it a shot.
…and closes with:
Hopefully Uber will be able to grow up into a professional and respectful place of employment. Until then I am sticking with Lyft, even if it costs me a few dollars extra.
When Chris Messina announced his new job as Uber’s Developer Experience Lead in January 6, 2016, he wrote:
Uber is not without controversy and misunderstanding. I see this, know this, and am vigilant about this. Facebook too, in its early days, was not without controversy. The future arrives in mysterious and abrupt ways, and in the present, is often a messy and rambunctious guest.
…
…Uber has certainly had its fair share of criticism in its pursuit of the future, but it is not nostalgic. It is competitive, fierce, and entrepreneurial — and these are traits that I’ve found in most of the companies that I’ve rooted for over the past ten years living and working in Silicon Valley.
I interpreted this as “They have a reputation for being terrible, but the future is made by terrible people! Stock options ahoy!”
He announced his resignation exactly a year later with the standard farewell platitudes. A better indication of why he left appears in a tweet he made yesterday in response to Fowler’s article:
This is outrageous and awful. My experience with Uber HR was similarly callous & unsupportive; in Susan’s case, it was reprehensible. https://t.co/eSiOuHSMjU
— Chris Messina (@chrismessina) February 19, 2017
Illustration by Susie Cagle. Click to see the source.
It’s not just Uber’s well-compensated techies who are treated badly; the drivers are even worse off, as shown in Dave Craige’s January 2016 article, Not Cool, Uber.
It wasn’t that long ago that Uber was telling the Washington Post that an UberX driver working 40 hours a week makes a median wage of almost $75,000 in San Francisco and over $90,000 in New York City. The New York Post followed up with a report that said that once you factor in the 20% “skim” that the company makes, sales tax, a worker’s compensation payment to the Black Car Fund, and expenses, New York UberX drivers make 30 cents an hour more than New York cabbies.
Also in late 2014, BuzzFeed’s Johana Bhuiyan made an arrangement with Uber’s New York General Manager Josh Mohrer to take rides with 11 randomly-selected UberX drivers and review their pay statements. She got 8 pay statements — 2 of the drivers weren’t comfortable disclosing that information, and “Uber did not provide pay statements for the last driver”.
She found that the expenses take a significant slice of an UberX’s driver’s money, and once you factor them in, an UberX driver is making cabbie wages — or less.
Until 2015, Uber had a relationship with Santander Bank, who provided financing for “driver-partners” (not employees) who needed cars, but had to drop it when it became clear that Santander was making expensive subprime loans and illegally repossessing cars financed for U.S. Armed Forces veterans.
In late 2015, they partnered with Westlake Financial, whose subsidiary Wilshire Consumer Credit, has a reputation for providing predatory auto title loans and had been hit with $44 million in fines and restitution by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for “deceiving consumers by calling under false pretenses, and using phony caller ID information, falsely threatening to refer borrowers for investigation or criminal prosecution, and illegally disclosing information about debts to borrowers’ employers, friends, and family.”
They’re not above sabotaging the competition. In August 2014, Uber gave 177 “brand ambassadors” burner phones and credit cards to order and then cancel rides from their competitor, Lyft. As you might expect, Uber denied that they’d never get involved in these sorts of shenanigans, but leaked documents indicate that Uber was indeed behind the plot.
In a 2014 Vanity Fair profile, Uber CEO Travis Kalanick admitted to playing a tried-and-true trick in order to derail Lyft’s fundraising round:
The most recent target that Kalanick has had in his crosshairs is rival ride-sharing app Lyft, which attaches giant pink mustaches to the grilles of its cars. Kalanick readily admits to trying to tamper with a recent fund-raising round that Lyft was doing.
“We knew that Lyft was going to raise a ton of money,” says Kalanick. “And we are going [to their investors], ‘Just so you know, we’re going to be fund-raising after this, so before you decide whether you want to invest in them, just make sure you know that we are going to be fund-raising immediately after.’ ”
If you haven’t watched it yet, take a 12-minute break and watch this insightful people from the people at Cracked:
As superstar programmer David Heinemeier Hansson writes in his blog:
Uber is what you get when you take Silicon Valley’s most toxic values, add billions of dollars in venture capital, and spice it with endless adoration from a fawning tech press. The resulting cocktail has turned as putrid as it’s been potent. And the inebriated corporate culture of Uber is acting as reckless and callous as a dangerous drunk.
If you feel like canceling your Uber account after reading Fowler’s story and all the background info above, the steps for doing so are listed above. As he writes (the emphasis is mine):
So it’s time for the consumers of Uber to do what its board, venture capitalist-backers, and royal protectors never will: Impose real consequences on Uber for its appalling behavior. Because without the approval of riders, Uber is nothing. None of the billions of dollars in funding will do anything to save them, if enough people say “enough” and stop using the app.
I get that may well be a bit inconvenient at times. And alternatives like Lyft may not be squeaky clean either. But these are all excuses for people trying to avoid the bare minimum a consumer can do when faced with a company that repels it: Stop buying. It’s really that simple. You don’t have to print any signs, you don’t even have to go to a rally, just #DeleteUber, and you’ll sleep just that tiny bit better tonight.
Thanks to Guy Barrette for the find!
I’m going to start with a controversial statement: in theory, Tampa Bay Startup Week 2017 should amount to nothing.
Good — I’ve got your attention now.
It’s an easy argument to make. Tampa Bay’s cities — Tampa, St. Pete, and Clearwater — don’t have the sort of entrepreneurial or tech cachet that other places, from the usual suspects Silicon Valley, Austin, and Seattle to upstarts like Raleigh and Boulder. They’re overshadowed by other Floridian cities: Miami and Orlando, places that are known even internationally. The bay geographically fractures the area, and the locals see the bridges as barriers that prevent them from visiting their nearby sister cities. What could the well-intentioned team behind Tampa Bay Startup Week 2017 possibly hope to accomplish?
If we — the organizers and we, the people for whom they organize this annual event — play our cards right, their accomplishments could be bigger than anyone dreamed. This sort of thing has been done before, quite notably in 1976, at a seemingly unremarkable event in a failing city in England that would later be known as “The Gig That Changed the World”.
The Free Trade Hall in Manchester, England.
You could draw a number of parallels between Manchester, England and Detroit, Michigan, especially in the 1970s. Both were cities that grew to become industrial powerhouses in the first part of the 20th century, and both saw their fortunes decline drastically and become bleak urban wastelands after World War II. Both would also end up changing the course of music history in unexpected ways.
The Sex Pistols.
In June of 1976, a still relatively unknown band called the Sex Pistols played a concert at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall. There were a mere 42 people, which is respectable for a band that plays at your local bar on a Tuesday night, but it doesn’t seem like the sort of gig that would “change everything”, until you consider who was in attendance and what they did afterwards:
Two art school student friends, Howard Devoto and Pete Shelley organized the event. They ended up forming their own punk band, Buzzcocks, whose single, Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve) has wound up in some of the most unlikely places: covered by Fine Young Cannibals in the ’80s and Thursday for the 2004 video game Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland, and featured in the soundtracks for the 1986 film Something Wild and the 2004 film Shrek 2.
Tony Wilson, who hosted a TV show featuring the still-new punk rock movement, and Martin Hannett were there. They would go on to become a key figure in the Manchester and alt-rock scene by:
Steven Patrick Morrissey was also in attendance. He’d ditch his first two names and go on to become the King of Mope and lead vocalist of The Smiths, who would go on to inspire just about every emo rock band that followed.
And finally, three young men named Ian Curtis, Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook. Inspired by the performance, Hook would buy his first guitar, and the three would form a band named the Stiff Kittens, which would later go by the name Warsaw, after which they’d finally settle on the name Joy Division. They would go on to become one of the best-known and influential New Wave bands. After Curtis’ suicide, the remaining members who would go on to become New Order, who’ve influenced anyone who’s ever plugged in a MIDI cable into a synthesizer. To this day, New Order’s Blue Monday is the best-selling 12″ single of all time.The headlining act (the Sex Pistols) and the organizers (who’d go on to form the Buzzcocks) of this poorly attended, seemingly insignificant gig were so influential that they’d end up in Jack Black’s lesson in School of Rock…
You can see the Sex Pistols and Buzzcocks listed under “Punk”. Click here to see the full blackboard.
…and the concertgoers from that gig would go on to build the foundations of alternative rock and influence a lot of people who took up the electric guitar, synthesizer, or turntables.
In theory, this concert should’ve amounted to nothing, but in the end it changed everything in the music world.
The Gig That Changed the World brought together people with similar interests who were passionate about what they did. Its attendees saw that popular music was changing, and after being inspired by a group of troublemakers, decided that they could be part of that change. They went on to create music their way, and they made their mark on the world.
The people behind Tampa Bay Startup Week (the 2015 team is pictured above) may not look punk rock, but they’ve most certainly got its DIY, “we have an idea and we’re going for it” spirit. Like the Pete Shelley and Howard Devoto organizing the Sex Pistols gig, they’re a band of troublemakers putting on an event on a shoestring budget (yes, Chase is sponsoring, but without them, the budget would likely go from shoestring to none), and at the moment, it isn’t being noticed by most of the world outside “the other bay area”.
Like the music scene in Manchester the mid-late 1970s, the work-life dynamic in Tampa Bay in the mid-late 2010s is undergoing some big changes:
The team at Tampa Bay Startup Week have done their part by organizing their event for Tampa and St. Pete, just as Shelley and Devoto did back in 1976 by bringing the punk rock to Manchester. How the rest of the story ends is up to us.
I’ll repeat what I said at the start of this article: In theory, Tampa Bay Startup Week should amount to nothing. In practice, and as shown by music history, if we take inspiration from the event, make friends and connections, and take action, it could be that gathering that changed the world.
Visit Tampa Bay Startup Week’s site to find out what’s up this week!
For those of you who’d like to know more about The Gig That Changed Everything, here’s the BBC’s special on the event, titled I Swear That I Was There:
This article is the 2017 revision of an article I posted in 2015.
This year’s Tampa Bay Startup Week is living up to its name by taking place on both sides of Tampa Bay, with many of the big events on the Tampa side on Monday, February 13th through Wednesday, February 15th, followed by big events on the St. Petersburg side on Thursday, February 16th through Friday, February 17th.
Tampa Bay Startup Week brings together entrepreneurial types in the Tampa Bay area — techies, creatives, marketers, and businesspeople — to highlight the opportunities and resources available to them, bring them together, provide the ideas and inspiration, and help grow the local self-starter business scene.
You may not think of Tampa as an entrepreneurial hotspot, but according to the 2015 report of the Kauffman Index of Startup Activity for Metropolitan Areas, the Tampa/St. Petersburg/Clearwater area’s in top 25 (ranked #20), and ranked ahead of places you’re more likely to associate with entrepreneurship, including:
Chase doesn’t sponsor just any city’s Startup Week. To qualify, it’s got to meet the criteria of density, government regulations, culture, talent, and access to said talent. In Money’s 2015 roundup of the 5 best big cities, they named Tampa the best city in the southeast. It’s got great weather, an airport that punches above its weight class, low cost of living (moving here was like getting a big raise, there’s no state income tax, the median house price is low compared to most U.S. cities), and as I’ve posited before, the “Florida Man” factor is actually a blessing in disguise:
Tampa is the number one city in Realtor.com’s top 10 cities that people are flocking to, according to the study they published last May. In their top 10 list, which includes Austin, Orlando, Raleigh, and Portlandia, Tampa features the lowest median house price and lower unemployment rates than Raleigh and Portland, two cities more associated with tech.
Tampa Bay still has a long way to go if it wants to become a haven for startups, entrepreneurship, and technological development, but it does have a lot of the raw material and right elements, combined with easy access to beaches, Disney, the Space Coast, and a beautiful subtropical climate.
If you’re in the area this week, come to a Tampa Bay Startup Week event (see the event calendar on their site), meet people, and see what’s possible here!
I’ll be catching the kickoff party at the Rialto Theater, which will feature Tampa Mayor Bob Buckhorn, Michele Grace from Chase (who are sponsoring Tampa Bay Startup Week), and Tampa Bay Startup Week organizers Trey Steinhoff, Gracie Leigh Stemmer, and Ryan Sullivan. The Rialto is a beautiful space, and it’s worth checking out, especially if you’ve never been there before.
I work in the internet of things space, so plan to catch a couple of the IoT talks on Tuesday morning:
On Wednesday, Brad Feld — entrepreneur, author, blogger, and venture capitalist at Foundry Group in Boulder, Colorado — will be giving a presentation (alas, via Skype, not live) — on how to impact your startup community. If you’d like an idea of what these principles are, see my notes on his 2012 presentation in Toronto.
Thursday’s big evening event features a panel of local founders who’ve managed to raise at least $1 million for their companies — the CEOs of Presence (formerly Check I’m Here), PikMyKid, and PeerFit — who’ll share what they’ve learned on their path to their successes.
Tampa Bay Startup Week will wrap up Friday evening with a closing party in St. Pete at another great space: Nova 535. St. Pete mayor Rick Kriseman will speak, as will Startup Week organizer Gracie Leigh Stemmer.
It’s all spelled out in this slide:
Photo via Clark Alloway and the Cult of the Dead Cow.
The text of the slide:
We’re building self-driving cars and planning Mars missions — but we haven’t even figured out how to make sure people’s vacuum cleaners don’t join botnets.
I’m reminded of those photos that show that “decisions were made”:
Want to find out more about botnets? Check out this article of mine from October 2016, when I wrote about the big Mirai botnet attack.
At the next Tampa iOS Meetup, you’ll learn how to make a Magic 8-Ball app…
…and an executive decision-maker app…
…and a fortune cookie app…
…because under the hood, they’re all the same thing!
Learn how to write your own apps for iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, and Apple Watch at Tampa iOS’ Meetup, the Tampa Bay area’s meetup for beginning programmers and developers new to iOS development. Our next session — the one where we’ll cover writing Magic 8-Ball/executive decision-maker/fortune cookie apps — will take place on Tuesday, February 28th, 2017 at 6:30 p.m. at Wolters Kluwer’s Westshore office (1410 North Westshore Blvd, suite 400). This meetup is free to attend.
The meetup will have two parts:
The meetup works best if you bring a Mac laptop with the current version of Xcode (the tool we’ll use to develop iOS apps) installed. If you don’t have one, don’t worry; you don’t need one for the presentation part, and we can form teams for the workshop.
For more details about our upcoming meetup and to sign up to attend, visit our event page.
Tampa iOS Meetup wouldn’t be possible without the help of Wolters Kluwer, who are providing us with the space for the meetup, as well as food and drinks. For their kindness and generosity, I salute them with a filet mignon on a flaming sword!