Uber’s head of developer product leaves citing Kalanick’s ouster

Uber employee and can answer this:

Travis had a deep empathy for the challenges of building successful products, and would offer tremendous grace and thoughtful advice to his team solving problems in the trenches. When projects went sideways, and we presented numbers that were less than stellar, Travis was both empathetic and optimistic while offering actionable guidance and a path forward.

"Bro culture" is a loaded term and the wrong one to describe the environment Travis cultivated. He had tremendous focus on the problems at hand and pushed his team to operate with a sense of urgency to solve them. If anything I think he cared too much about each individual problem, which propelled his teams forward but sometimes left him too deep in the details of his business rather than focusing on the big picture.

Former Uber employee here.

> Did Kalanick really set up and encourage a bro Culture?

No, not at all. He's a grown man and unbelievably serious about Uber.

> Did he respect fellow employees as humans

Yes. Always.

> or was just running behind business success?

I don't know what this means, but Travis Kalanick is absolutely the main reason that Uber has grown faster than almost any other company in history.

I'm not related to Uber in anyway, but being a man with a longer tenure in a company shouldn't be a reason to discount someone's opinion (or possibly in your comment's case, hinting that they were the reason for toxicity).

We (I work at Uber) dealt with insane growth in a toxic fashion and are now paying down the debt of letting toxicity rule us for the last three years. I'm still of the opinion that we are doing that, even if it's only to enable the shareholders to make their money. And we're doing that through efforts that, anywhere else, would be noteworthy and exciting. Everyone I work with has various classes of stories like these, but by and large the non-minority men have not been so negatively affected as those who don't have that going for them. I've been through the ringer myself, but I've been in a spot where I can come out ahead despite having been in the same reporting structure as Susan Rigetti.

A lot of us are still here in hope that the folks like Saad, Gandahar and Kalanick who have left are replaced with people with an ounce of emotional intelligence like Frances Frey. Folks who are in a position and mindset to force the structure of the company to grow. Seeing Kalanick apologists like Saad leave is one of the best signs we might finally be ready to do that. It's going to be a long slow slog of 'losing' people like them until we're in a place where we're not actively villains, but I still think the company could do it or I'd be gone.