Kalanick ‘has to go’
In a Feacebook post, Scoble says Kalanick should resign:
When I first started work at Microsoft an exec pulled me aside and told me how I could get fired. Pissing off journalists and analysts were very high on the list. This is how culture gets translated.
It is why I now believe Travis Kalanick has to go. It is the only way to reboot the culture there and have Uber regain its loved status…This company has deeply wounded itself. The investors should insist that Travis go. Then it should repair its relationship with Sarah Lacy and it should be made clear that being anti journalist or anti woman will not be tolerated at all. This wound is a lot deeper than I thought and IS changing consumer behavior. Travis, if I were you I would resign and help your company heal.
Responds to Uber threat
Lacy responds to Michael’s comments:
No, these new attacks threatened to hit at my only vulnerability. The only part of my life that I’d do anything to protect: My family and my children. In that moment outside an Indian restaurant in London, I stood numb listening to Smith asking me if I had a comment, and I thought of my kids. They were somewhere covered in kitten and dinosaur pajamas giggling and running through the house in a last ditch effort to fight bedtime. Maybe they were looking up at the moon, remembering how many times I’ve told them I’d always be somewhere looking at the same moon even if I couldn’t be there to rock them.
And criticizes the company culture.
And lest you think this was just a rogue actor and not part of the company’s game plan, let me remind you Kalanick telegraphed exactly this sort of thing when he sat on stage at the Code Conference last spring and said he was hiring political operatives whose job would be to “throw mud.” I naively thought he just meant Taxi companies. Let me also remind you: This is a company you trust with your personal safety every single time you use it. Let me also remind you: The executive in question has not been fired.
She lists the investors in Uber and says she will contact each of them directly.
Threatens Lacy
Smith reports that, at a dinner at Manhattan’s Waverly Inn, hosted by Iam Osborne, and attended by Edward Norton and publisher Arianna Huffington, Michael outlines the notion of spending “a million dollars” to hire four top opposition researchers and four journalists. That team could, he said, help Uber fight back against the press:
[they’d look into] your personal lives, your families,” and give the media a taste of its own medicine.
Michael expresses outrage at Lacy, who had recently accused Uber of “sexism and misogyny,” and who had wrote of deleting her Uber app after the company hired french prostitutes to promote its service in France.
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 at no point suggested that Uber has actually hired opposition researchers, or that it plans to. He cast it as something that would make sense, that the company would be justified in doing.
In a statement through Uber Monday evening, Michael says he regretted them and that they didn’t reflect his or the company’s views.
The remarks attributed to me at a private dinner — borne out of frustration during an informal debate over what I feel is sensationalistic media coverage of the company I am proud to work for — do not reflect my actual views and have no relation to the company’s views or approach. They were wrong no matter the circumstance and I regret them.
PandoMonthly Fireside Chat
Calacanis talks with Sarah Lacy about how poker strategy is like entrepreneurship, various pieces of advice for entrepreneurs, and how family relationships like his strained relations with his father can affect people’s careers:
You show me a great entrepreneur and I’ll show you a f-cked-up relationship with one of their parents
Dark career moments
Calacanis talks with Lacy about how his career has been driven by his father’s failed efforts at entrepreneurship as a bar and restaurant owner and how he has felt the need to prove something to his parents:
I think I was also proving it to myself
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51Z5gBW–2c
Disrupt backstage
Conway and Lee talk to Tech Crunch‘s Sarah Lacy backstage at the event about continuing growth in tech. Conway:
Silicon Valley and New York are spawning even more important companies, and more of them, because the internet watershed is not over yet. It’s still early days.
Conway says the industry is close to a recruiting crisis which underscores the growth:
We are going to get as bad as 1998
Lee on how angel investors contribute:
There are lesser evils than a lot of really bright, talented engineers who want to give it a shot
