7 ms·

Here's the conversation that took place: Travis: So we are reducing the number of black cars in the next few months. Fawzi: It’s good. Travis: You probab

Here's the conversation that took place: Travis: So we are reducing the number of black cars in the next few months. Fawzi: It’s good. Travis: You probably saw some email. Fawzi: I saw the email [that says] it starts in May. But you’re raising the standards and dropping the prices. Travis: We’re not dropping the prices on Black. Fawzi: But in general. Travis: In general, but we have competitors. Otherwise we’d be out of business. Fawzi: Competitors? You had the business model in your hands, you could have the prices you want but you choose to buy everybody a ride. Travis: No, no no. You misunderstand me. We started high-end. We didn’t go low-end because we wanted to. We went low-end because we had to because we’d be out of business. Fawzi: But people are not trusting you anymore. Do you think people will buy cars anymore? ... I lost $97,000 because of you. I'm bankrupt because of you. You keep changing every day. You keep changing every day. Travis: Hold on a second. What have I changed about Black? Fawzi: You changed the whole business! You dropped the prices. Travis: On Black? Bullshit. Fawzi: We started with $20. Travis: You know what, some people don't like to take responsibility for their own shit. They blame everything in their life on somebody else. Good luck! Fawzi: Good luck to you too, I know that you aren’t going to go far.

dongslol 10y ago
Personally, I didn't find this disproportionately disrespectful. The driver makes a couple unsubstantiated claims (perfectly ok--it's a car discussion). Travis does the same. The driver starts making accusations ("you keep changing every day"). Travis asks for clarification. The driver keeps up his attack ("You changed the whole business! You dropped the prices.") If someone accused me in such a fashion, and persisted despite me asking for clarification and trying to actually explain my view to them, I'd probably be a lot more vitriolic than Travis was. (It's a character flaw of mine.) And saying that some people don't like to take responsibility for their own shit is, well, true? I don't like that billionaires are held to a different standard. People say, "they don't need protection; they're rich." Ok, but if you discount something a billionaire says for no reason other than that they're rich and have easy lives, you're not a dispassionate truthseeker.
- gingerbread-man 10y ago
  The Fowler post is grounds for questioning Kalanick's leadership; this just shows that he's not in PR mode 24/7. Being kind-of-a-dick is tolerable, as long as you're good at your job. The bigger leadership issue is that he can't seem to maintain happy drivers (or employees.)
  - jhayward 10y ago
    > Being kind-of-a-dick is tolerable, as long as you're good at your job It's hard to believe someone would say this today. It seems you missed the whole point of the "but he's a high performer" excuse that Uber has (allegedly) been making when not addressing harassment and worse.
    - mi100hael 10y ago
      I think there's a difference in being "kind of a dick" and criminal discrimination and harassment.
- btian 10y ago
  From the Bloomberg article - > In 2012, Uber Black cost riders $4.90 per mile or $1.25 per minute in San Francisco, according to an old version of Uber's website. Today, Uber charges $3.75 per mile and $0.65 per minute. The least a CEO could have said is to thank the driver for his feedback and promise to look into it. Just because you're disrespectful doesn't mean the CEO of a consumer facing company can treat its partners like that.
  - dongslol 10y ago
    I spent the last half hour thinking about this on and off, trying to shift my perspective. I feel sort of guilty. Advocating for objectivity and dispassionate truthseeking is the second easiest way to curry favor on HN, and it feels cheap. (The easiest is still outrage, never to be topped anywhere :)) If anything, I find it sort of funny that Travis got mad. He handled it pretty well at first; they were just having an honest disagreement. Then it was like he just decided, "fuck it, I've had a bad day, and I don't need to take this guy's shit." He might meditate on the fact that this guy spends his evenings being the reason that Uber's business model works.
gragas 10y ago
I completely agree with Travis and I don't think he did anything wrong. I think it was a bad move on his part to apologize for the video.
- gpawl 10y ago
  It's a good tactic -- blow off all the worse things you do, then apologize for the one time you weren't at fault, people notice and give you sympathy, and start to forget those worse things.
  - dongslol 10y ago
    That's interesting; I hadn't thought of that.
  - intrasight 10y ago
    Wow. That's a wow.
- fstuff 10y ago
  This comment on reddit explains it well /r/cars/comments/5wrdk2/comment/decxcxi
- Hydraulix989 10y ago
  He wasn't apologizing to say he was sorry, he was apologizing to try to regain public favor after a very bad public relations disaster. You see these public statements with fake apologies after PR meltdowns all of the time (BP Oil Spill, ENRON, etc.). It's glorified damage control. I doubt the people whose behalf they are for really feel sorry in any of them.
synicalx 10y ago
Why should he have to apologise for this? This is normal 'robust' conversation between an employer and an employee who have a disagreement. The driver is apparently bankrupt (well done), so I would not be at all surprised if he deliberately tried to bait Travis into this conversation so he'd have a story to sell. At the end of the Bloomberg article where this surfaced, they noted that the driver got 1 Star for that ride - I find it hard to believe that anyone other than Uber and the driver would have been able to know that.
- creativityhurts 10y ago
  Actually the driver rated Kalanick 1 star: > Later, the Uber driver app prompts him to rate Kalanick, as he does all his riders. Kamel gives him one star.
  - StavrosK 10y ago
    It wasn't a meaningful encounter.
  - synicalx 10y ago
    Ah he did indeed, I misread that. In that case the driver almost certainly sold this story.
- cylinder 10y ago
  You one of those who never ever talks to their Uber drivers? Talk to them sometime. Here in NYC, it's their full time gig, requires TLC license and expensive commercial insurance paid upfront. Not to mention the car which is financed. People take a big risk investing in Uber driving and they get lured with deceptive ads promising "guaranteed income" they can't actually attain. The money the drivers are making is an absolute joke now, especially since you're required to drive UberPool. People relied on Uber, not thinking they would try to screw their own so called "partners."
  - cmdrfred 10y ago
    > People relied on Uber For future reference, that is always a bad idea no matter what the company.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
txdv 10y ago
A snarky comment, that is it?
imh 10y ago
Here's the video of that part: https://youtu.be/gTEDYCkNqns?t=3m54s https://youtu.be/gTEDYCkNqns?t=3m54s (starting at 3:54)
nothrabannosir 10y ago
Sorry to bother you with this meta stuff but could you please remove the four space indent? :/ this makes it impossible to read on mobile. I tried to copy paste it, but safari :(
- taoufix 10y ago
  Here you go : Travis: So we are reducing the number of black cars in the next few months. Fawzi: It’s good. Travis: You probably saw some email. Fawzi: I saw the email [that says] it starts in May. But you’re raising the standards and dropping the prices. Travis: We’re not dropping the prices on Black. Fawzi: But in general. Travis: In general, but we have competitors. Otherwise we’d be out of business. Fawzi: Competitors? You had the business model in your hands, you could have the prices you want but you choose to buy everybody a ride. Travis: No, no no. You misunderstand me. We started high-end. We didn’t go low-end because we wanted to. We went low-end because we had to because we’d be out of business. Fawzi: But people are not trusting you anymore. Do you think people will buy cars anymore? ... I lost $97,000 because of you. I'm bankrupt because of you. You keep changing every day. You keep changing every day. Travis: Hold on a second. What have I changed about Black? Fawzi: You changed the whole business! You dropped the prices. Travis: On Black? Bullshit. Fawzi: We started with $20. Travis: You know what, some people don't like to take responsibility for their own shit. They blame everything in their life on somebody else. Good luck! Fawzi: Good luck to you too, I know that you aren’t going to go far.
fstuff 10y ago
This comment on reddit explains it well /r/cars/comments/5wrdk2/comment/decxcxi
- zapu 10y ago
  I wonder why this is getting downvotes. There is a lot of insight about the situation in the linked comment.
  - Jaruzel 10y ago
    Except it's not linked. It's an unclickable relative URL. Also, if I wanted to read about this on Reddit, I'd be over on Reddit. I'm here because I want to read the comments from HN users.
    - epmaybe 10y ago
      That second point doesn't really make sense to me. You're reading links submitted on hacker news by other readers, isn't this basically the same thing? An HN user is telling you that he read something that was particularly useful to the conversation at hand and wanted to share it, what's wrong with that?
      - Jaruzel 10y ago
        Maybe it's my anti-Reddit bias coming out, I dunno. shrug (Which is ironic as I'm a Reddit mod on an active sub with ~4,500 members)
    - sotojuan 10y ago
      I don't understand why people say this. Aside from the default subs, the rhetoric of HN is rarely any better than Reddit's.
      - MaxfordAndSons 10y ago
        It's a totally subjective debate, but IMHO, while the highest quality Reddit comments might be just as good as the highest quality HN comments, I think both the floor and median comment quality levels are much lower on Reddit. Also HN comments are 95% serious in tone. While joking isn't disallowed, and the occasional high concept satirical comment might get mass upvoted, most jokes are ignored or downvoted. Not the case on Reddit.
tnone 10y ago
Ffs why use code formatting? This is unreadable on mobile.
- SilasX 10y ago
  Agreed. I don't know why people post it as monotype or why HN still renders it so you have to side-scroll. If "that's how you got it", it takes five seconds to fix. Here you go: Travis: So we are reducing the number of black cars in the next few months. Fawzi: It’s good. Travis: You probably saw some email. Fawzi: I saw the email [that says] it starts in May. But you’re raising the standards and dropping the prices. Travis: We’re not dropping the prices on Black. Fawzi: But in general. Travis: In general, but we have competitors. Otherwise we’d be out of business. Fawzi: Competitors? You had the business model in your hands, you could have the prices you want but you choose to buy everybody a ride. Travis: No, no no. You misunderstand me. We started high-end. We didn’t go low-end because we wanted to. We went low-end because we had to because we’d be out of business. Fawzi: But people are not trusting you anymore. Do you think people will buy cars anymore? ... I lost $97,000 because of you. I'm bankrupt because of you. You keep changing every day. You keep changing every day. Travis: Hold on a second. What have I changed about Black? Fawzi: You changed the whole business! You dropped the prices. Travis: On Black? Bullshit. Fawzi: We started with $20. Travis: You know what, some people don't like to take responsibility for their own shit. They blame everything in their life on somebody else. Good luck! Fawzi: Good luck to you too, I know that you aren’t going to go far.

dongslol 10y ago

Personally, I didn't find this disproportionately disrespectful. The driver makes a couple unsubstantiated claims (perfectly ok--it's a car discussion). Travis does the same. The driver starts making accusations ("you keep changing every day"). Travis asks for clarification. The driver keeps up his attack ("You changed the whole business! You dropped the prices.") If someone accused me in such a fashion, and persisted despite me asking for clarification and trying to actually explain my view to them, I'd probably be a lot more vitriolic than Travis was. (It's a character flaw of mine.) And saying that some people don't like to take responsibility for their own shit is, well, true? I don't like that billionaires are held to a different standard. People say, "they don't need protection; they're rich." Ok, but if you discount something a billionaire says for no reason other than that they're rich and have easy lives, you're not a dispassionate truthseeker.

gingerbread-man 10y ago
The Fowler post is grounds for questioning Kalanick's leadership; this just shows that he's not in PR mode 24/7. Being kind-of-a-dick is tolerable, as long as you're good at your job. The bigger leadership issue is that he can't seem to maintain happy drivers (or employees.)
- jhayward 10y ago
  > Being kind-of-a-dick is tolerable, as long as you're good at your job It's hard to believe someone would say this today. It seems you missed the whole point of the "but he's a high performer" excuse that Uber has (allegedly) been making when not addressing harassment and worse.
  - mi100hael 10y ago
    I think there's a difference in being "kind of a dick" and criminal discrimination and harassment.
btian 10y ago
From the Bloomberg article - > In 2012, Uber Black cost riders $4.90 per mile or $1.25 per minute in San Francisco, according to an old version of Uber's website. Today, Uber charges $3.75 per mile and $0.65 per minute. The least a CEO could have said is to thank the driver for his feedback and promise to look into it. Just because you're disrespectful doesn't mean the CEO of a consumer facing company can treat its partners like that.
- dongslol 10y ago
  I spent the last half hour thinking about this on and off, trying to shift my perspective. I feel sort of guilty. Advocating for objectivity and dispassionate truthseeking is the second easiest way to curry favor on HN, and it feels cheap. (The easiest is still outrage, never to be topped anywhere :)) If anything, I find it sort of funny that Travis got mad. He handled it pretty well at first; they were just having an honest disagreement. Then it was like he just decided, "fuck it, I've had a bad day, and I don't need to take this guy's shit." He might meditate on the fact that this guy spends his evenings being the reason that Uber's business model works.

gragas 10y ago

I completely agree with Travis and I don't think he did anything wrong. I think it was a bad move on his part to apologize for the video.

gpawl 10y ago
It's a good tactic -- blow off all the worse things you do, then apologize for the one time you weren't at fault, people notice and give you sympathy, and start to forget those worse things.
- dongslol 10y ago
  That's interesting; I hadn't thought of that.
- intrasight 10y ago
  Wow. That's a wow.
fstuff 10y ago
This comment on reddit explains it well /r/cars/comments/5wrdk2/comment/decxcxi
Hydraulix989 10y ago
He wasn't apologizing to say he was sorry, he was apologizing to try to regain public favor after a very bad public relations disaster. You see these public statements with fake apologies after PR meltdowns all of the time (BP Oil Spill, ENRON, etc.). It's glorified damage control. I doubt the people whose behalf they are for really feel sorry in any of them.

synicalx 10y ago

Why should he have to apologise for this? This is normal 'robust' conversation between an employer and an employee who have a disagreement. The driver is apparently bankrupt (well done), so I would not be at all surprised if he deliberately tried to bait Travis into this conversation so he'd have a story to sell. At the end of the Bloomberg article where this surfaced, they noted that the driver got 1 Star for that ride - I find it hard to believe that anyone other than Uber and the driver would have been able to know that.

creativityhurts 10y ago
Actually the driver rated Kalanick 1 star: > Later, the Uber driver app prompts him to rate Kalanick, as he does all his riders. Kamel gives him one star.
- StavrosK 10y ago
  It wasn't a meaningful encounter.
- synicalx 10y ago
  Ah he did indeed, I misread that. In that case the driver almost certainly sold this story.
cylinder 10y ago
You one of those who never ever talks to their Uber drivers? Talk to them sometime. Here in NYC, it's their full time gig, requires TLC license and expensive commercial insurance paid upfront. Not to mention the car which is financed. People take a big risk investing in Uber driving and they get lured with deceptive ads promising "guaranteed income" they can't actually attain. The money the drivers are making is an absolute joke now, especially since you're required to drive UberPool. People relied on Uber, not thinking they would try to screw their own so called "partners."
- cmdrfred 10y ago
  > People relied on Uber For future reference, that is always a bad idea no matter what the company.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

txdv 10y ago

A snarky comment, that is it?

imh 10y ago

Here's the video of that part: https://youtu.be/gTEDYCkNqns?t=3m54s https://youtu.be/gTEDYCkNqns?t=3m54s (starting at 3:54)

nothrabannosir 10y ago

Sorry to bother you with this meta stuff but could you please remove the four space indent? :/ this makes it impossible to read on mobile. I tried to copy paste it, but safari :(

taoufix 10y ago
Here you go : Travis: So we are reducing the number of black cars in the next few months. Fawzi: It’s good. Travis: You probably saw some email. Fawzi: I saw the email [that says] it starts in May. But you’re raising the standards and dropping the prices. Travis: We’re not dropping the prices on Black. Fawzi: But in general. Travis: In general, but we have competitors. Otherwise we’d be out of business. Fawzi: Competitors? You had the business model in your hands, you could have the prices you want but you choose to buy everybody a ride. Travis: No, no no. You misunderstand me. We started high-end. We didn’t go low-end because we wanted to. We went low-end because we had to because we’d be out of business. Fawzi: But people are not trusting you anymore. Do you think people will buy cars anymore? ... I lost $97,000 because of you. I'm bankrupt because of you. You keep changing every day. You keep changing every day. Travis: Hold on a second. What have I changed about Black? Fawzi: You changed the whole business! You dropped the prices. Travis: On Black? Bullshit. Fawzi: We started with $20. Travis: You know what, some people don't like to take responsibility for their own shit. They blame everything in their life on somebody else. Good luck! Fawzi: Good luck to you too, I know that you aren’t going to go far.

fstuff 10y ago

This comment on reddit explains it well /r/cars/comments/5wrdk2/comment/decxcxi

zapu 10y ago
I wonder why this is getting downvotes. There is a lot of insight about the situation in the linked comment.
- Jaruzel 10y ago
  Except it's not linked. It's an unclickable relative URL. Also, if I wanted to read about this on Reddit, I'd be over on Reddit. I'm here because I want to read the comments from HN users.
  - epmaybe 10y ago
    That second point doesn't really make sense to me. You're reading links submitted on hacker news by other readers, isn't this basically the same thing? An HN user is telling you that he read something that was particularly useful to the conversation at hand and wanted to share it, what's wrong with that?
    - Jaruzel 10y ago
      Maybe it's my anti-Reddit bias coming out, I dunno. shrug (Which is ironic as I'm a Reddit mod on an active sub with ~4,500 members)
  - sotojuan 10y ago
    I don't understand why people say this. Aside from the default subs, the rhetoric of HN is rarely any better than Reddit's.
    - MaxfordAndSons 10y ago
      It's a totally subjective debate, but IMHO, while the highest quality Reddit comments might be just as good as the highest quality HN comments, I think both the floor and median comment quality levels are much lower on Reddit. Also HN comments are 95% serious in tone. While joking isn't disallowed, and the occasional high concept satirical comment might get mass upvoted, most jokes are ignored or downvoted. Not the case on Reddit.

tnone 10y ago

Ffs why use code formatting? This is unreadable on mobile.

SilasX 10y ago
Agreed. I don't know why people post it as monotype or why HN still renders it so you have to side-scroll. If "that's how you got it", it takes five seconds to fix. Here you go: Travis: So we are reducing the number of black cars in the next few months. Fawzi: It’s good. Travis: You probably saw some email. Fawzi: I saw the email [that says] it starts in May. But you’re raising the standards and dropping the prices. Travis: We’re not dropping the prices on Black. Fawzi: But in general. Travis: In general, but we have competitors. Otherwise we’d be out of business. Fawzi: Competitors? You had the business model in your hands, you could have the prices you want but you choose to buy everybody a ride. Travis: No, no no. You misunderstand me. We started high-end. We didn’t go low-end because we wanted to. We went low-end because we had to because we’d be out of business. Fawzi: But people are not trusting you anymore. Do you think people will buy cars anymore? ... I lost $97,000 because of you. I'm bankrupt because of you. You keep changing every day. You keep changing every day. Travis: Hold on a second. What have I changed about Black? Fawzi: You changed the whole business! You dropped the prices. Travis: On Black? Bullshit. Fawzi: We started with $20. Travis: You know what, some people don't like to take responsibility for their own shit. They blame everything in their life on somebody else. Good luck! Fawzi: Good luck to you too, I know that you aren’t going to go far.