Is Uber the MySpace of ride-hailing companies?
After this week, Uber is forever changed. Co-founder Travis Kalanick was forced to resign as CEO after pressure from investors over recent scandals.
Those scandals? Where to begin: There are the allegations of sexual harassment and HR incompetence from Susan Fowler Rigetti. There's the ongoing lawsuit from Alphabet's Waymo that alleges Uber benefited from intellectual property that the now-fired head of self-driving may have stolen. There's the Greyball program that the company used to evade regulators and is now being investigated. There are the reports that Uber's leadership team obtained and viewed the medical records of a rider in a rape case. There's...
You get the point. Uber has been been having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year. But does the exit of Kalanick -- who had been on leave from the company and will remain on the board -- signal a new direction for Uber?
On this week's MashTalk, Pete is joined by a panel of Uber experts, including Farhad Manjoo from The New York Times, JP Mangalindan from Yahoo Finance, and Kerry Flynn from Mashable's business team to answer that very question. Also up for discussion: What kind of person should lead the company next? What about the internal petition to reinstate him? Will Kalanick's downfall change Silicon Valley startup culture at all? And, if you're an Uber user, what should your takeaway be from all this?
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Topics Uber
Pete Pachal was Mashable’s Tech Editor and had been at the company from 2011 to 2019. He covered the technology industry, from self-driving cars to self-destructing smartphones.Pete has covered consumer technology in print and online for more than a decade. Originally from Edmonton, Canada, Pete first uploaded himself into technology journalism at Sound & Vision magazine in 1999. Pete also served as Technology Editor at Syfy, creating the channel's technology site, DVICE (now Blastr), out of some rusty HTML code and a decompiled coat hanger. He then moved on to PCMag, where he served as the site's News Director.Pete has been featured on Fox News, the Today Show, Bloomberg, CNN, CNBC and CBC.Pete holds degrees in journalism from the University of King's College in Halifax and engineering from the University of Alberta in Edmonton. His favorite Doctor Who monsters are the Cybermen.
