Uber employees are relieved to finally have a new CEO. At his first all-hands meeting on Aug. 30, Dara Khosrowshahi made a gentle but sly dig at the protracted search process that had pitted him against corporate icons Jeff Immelt of General Electric and Meg Whitman of Hewlett Packard.
On Thursday night (Aug. 31), billionaire Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a defense of Dreamers, immigrants who were brought into the US illegally as children. That’s because US president Donald Trump is threatening to scrap Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the Obama-era program more commonly known as “DACA,” that allows those children to live and work without punishment.
It’s been only a day, but the new CEO of Uber has already brought some much-needed maturity to the embattled ride-hailing company.
In an unfortunate marketing slipup, Airbnb sent a “floating world” themed marketing email to users on Monday (Aug. 28) as Hurricane Harvey continued to engulf Houston, Texas.
To become the next CEO of Uber, Expedia’s Dara Khosrowshahi may need to leave a lot of money behind.
In the end it wasn’t Jeff Immelt. Or Meg Whitman.
Jeff Immelt has withdrawn himself from contention to be the next CEO of Uber.
Uber drivers have long sought an opt-out from UberPool, Uber’s on-demand carpooling service. Starting today, the company is giving them one—kind of.
Uber is experimenting with giving a key decision-making power to drivers, making good on its “be your own boss” tagline.
Remember the good old days when Uber and its investors all got along? YouTube does. Here is a 2013 video in which Benchmark Capital’s investment guru Bill Gurley positively gushes about Uber co-founder and then-CEO Travis Kalanick:
Uber driver Steve Fleck wasn’t expecting to drive to Cincinnati when he picked up a passenger at the MGM Grand Detroit a few minutes after 5:30am on Aug. 2. The ride-hailing company doesn’t reveal rider destinations to its drivers until after they accept a trip, a feature designed to keep drivers from discriminating against customers headed to poorer and less accessible neighborhoods historically underserved by taxis. But that Wednesday morning it also meant Fleck didn’t learn his rider had booked a four-hour trip across state lines until the passenger was already climbing into his car.
Benchmark Capital is attempting to wrest control of Uber from ousted CEO Travis Kalanick.
Uber’s executive suite is practically deserted.
What if it turned out that all the driverless cars being tested by all the driverless car companies weren’t actually driverless, but just cars with human drivers hidden inside of them, say inside the front seat?
When angel investor Jason Calacanis wrote Elon Musk a check for the first Tesla Model S, he never thought he’d actually see the car.
Uber plans to shutter Xchange Leasing, its US subprime car leasing operation, the Wall Street Journals reports. Uber executives decided to wind down Xchange, a wholly owned subsidiary, after realizing that the average loss per vehicle was 18 times what they had thought. From the Journal:
Uber’s “next chapter” won’t include Travis Kalanick as CEO, co-founder Garrett Camp said in an Aug. 7 email to employees.
A typical home in San Francisco costs well over $1 million. But a street full of them? That can be a bargain.
Grubhub is buying online food ordering platform Eat24 from Yelp for $287.5 million in cash, the companies said today.
Late last month, Jason Calacanis messaged me on Twitter to invite me to dim sum in New York. We had never exchanged messages on Twitter before, but I must have followed him at some point because he was an early investor in Uber. “Alison, dim sum in nyc this week for my book launch,” he wrote. “Angel broke the top 50 on Amazon, in it I talk about my five unicorn angel investments 🦄🦄🦄🦄🦄.” This was followed by a link to his book on Amazon and another unicorn emoji.
Uber made an early play for global domination. It launched in Paris, its first international city, in December 2011. Six breathless years later, Uber operates in 76 countries and more than 450 cities.
Wall Street was really looking forward to Amazon’s second-quarter earnings. On Wednesday (July 26) the stock climbed 1.2% in anticipation of the results, pushing Amazon into the elite half-trillion-dollar-company club, and making founder and chief executive Jeff Bezos the richest man in the world.
Amazon’s second-quarter earnings are due out this afternoon. Investors will be watching for the usual stuff—profit, revenue, the performance of Amazon Web Services, any tidbits about Amazon Prime and the Amazon Echo—plus any additional details on Amazon’s planned acquisition of Whole Foods. They’re expecting earnings of $1.39 per share on revenue of about $37 billion.
Over the weekend the New York Times profiled Bozoma Saint John, a former Apple executive who Uber hired in June as its first-ever chief brand officer. The story ran on the front of the Sunday Styles section, beneath a photo of Saint John that filled three-quarters of the page, and under the headline, “Saving Uber.”
