Whoever Uber anoints to replace former CEO Travis Kalanick inherits a role with mighty challenges. Yet the new Uber CEO will also have the opportunity to redefine the company's culture and direction. Robin Chase, the founder and former CEO of Zipcar, draws up a suggestion of that person’s opening address.
Imagine surfers on the crest of an enormous wave.
They have to be perfectly positioned to catch it.
They have to have had years of experience behind them in order to survive it.
Employees, investors, drivers, and riders—we in this community are on that surfboard. The future of cars is self-driving cars. And the future of self-driving cars is not the sale of cars. It is the sale of trips: transportation as a service. For every person. For every trip. Everywhere.
To meet this future we will need every person on the planet to be able to open our app, put in a destination, and go. A vast, multi-trillion-dollar global market is in flux. All those once-separate public and private transportation dollars are roiling together, recombining in a new way: shared private transportation, or private public transportation. Cheaper, more convenient, and even faster than driving your own car. None of today’s status quo companies currently has what it will take to win; most won’t survive.
In order for Uber to find itself on the crest of this wave when it comes, and navigate a long exhilarating ride, there are four simple requirements.
Become a trusted brand.
Become a beloved workplace.
Become the desired partner.
Build a solid financial base.
A Trusted Brand. If you spend any time in conversation with people about self driving cars, you’ll know that trust—or distrust—is their number one preoccupation. Once you’ve emptied the well of trust, it takes a long time to fill it again. If you want people to try something new, get into a driverless car, and desire sharing over ownership, they really have to trust you. Tragically, and through our own unforced errors, Uber has emptied that well repeatedly over the last years. I’m not going to promise to restore that trust, because we haven’t earned the right for you to be swayed by just words. But I will act to change our culture and values in the hopes that at some point you will be convinced that we are trustworthy.
A Beloved Workplace. The best and the brightest minds are always in demand. Great companies inspire. People want to be a part of a larger vision. Just making money is not enough to get millennials (or the rest of us!) to stay. Witness Silicon Valley, where company-hopping is rampant despite the near ubiquitous wealth of perks. What’s missing is that bigger mission, an honest desire to improve the lives of your customers and your world, ethically. Uber has such an opportunity here. Transportation is the glue that makes or breaks our routine daily lives. Transportation contributes to 14% of the world’s CO2 emissions. Access to quality transportation is the single largest barrier to escaping poverty. There is so much opportunity for Uber to make a difference, but our intent must be genuine.
A Desired Partner. If ever there were a company dependent on relationships with partners, it is Uber. There are the hundreds of thousands of unaffiliated drivers that Uber relies on to make their business today work. The trust and delight in the opportunity presented by the early Uber has now been replaced by suspicion. Nobel-prize-winning economist Elinor Ostrom would tell us that those drivers need more control over the rules of their engagement on Uber’s shared platform. We need to work with them and they with us as we band together together to plan for this transition. When the time comes, Uber will have to choose—will we work on behalf of our drivers, or will we throw them away? My preference is clear and unwavering: We are united with our drivers. It would be a travesty and a waste of a diverse local knowledge to walk away from a workforce half a million strong whose transition into the new economy can role model just transition for all.
Government regulators—who control licensing and access to streets, curbs, and passengers, and who currently have a lot to say about self-driving cars on their roads—have been trained negatively by Uber. I’ve heard tales of deep distrust of Uber from leaders in Leipzig, Bogota, and Washington. That stops now.
The self-driving future will be reliant on very close working relationships. One vertically integrated company can’t own it all. The skill sets are too diverse, and many are extraordinarily challenging: manufacturing and selling the cars themselves (the hardware); the deeply complex and difficult self-driving technology (mostly software); high-quality and low-cost maintenance of large dispersed fleets of vehicles; the truly dynamic wireless connectivity necessary between vehicles, the built environment, and the cloud; a totally new insurance product; and yes, the customer-facing service with its ability to understand and smoothly deliver on millions of real-time transactions involving unique origins, destinations, preferences, pricing, and real-world repetitive but unique exceptions that will number in the hundreds of thousands.
In all of these partnerships, Uber needs to become the best partner—the one you would choose over any other. And it won’t just be about money. Trust, service quality, and guaranteed delivery will matter more. Did I mention trust? Yes, but I’m mentioning it again.
A Solid Financial Base. When this wave comes, in three—or five—years, Uber has to have survived financially, and be ready to invest more. The amount of money it has raised to date (more capital than any other private sector company), it’s latest valuation ($70 billion in the last round), and its burn rate (several billion dollars last year, eight years since its founding), puts Uber in a precarious financial position. We have to get our finances under control. Dedicated focus on the long-term market, constant returning to the principles laid out here, and shedding distractions will guide our every hire and every expense.
So there you have it. Four simple requirements: Trust, Employees, Partnerships, and Solvency. Sadly, it doesn’t make a great acronym. But it could make a great company. Uber has so much to work with! A name that has become a verb, millions of transactions to learn from, great employees and partners ready to step up, the opportunity of the century looming just ahead—and a board and investors that share the long-term vision and should provide the runway to execute.
I’m a businesswoman, not a business historian, but I can’t think of a company that has succeeded in such a monumental cultural turnaround. But I’d love to—need to—see Uber succeed in a cultural, social, and financial transformation, because it is desperately needed throughout our economy. To achieve that success we must have a vision of the larger good, recognize that actual success is not measured in the next quarter but progress toward a sustainable, just long-term, and finally, to truly appreciate and value the contribution of everyone involved.
Now let’s build the future of transportation. And did I mention trust?
