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Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

I think close to 100% of successful entrepreneurs would agree with the statement "You can, and must break some rule, push the envelope, and engage in questionable behavior when building a company - the challenge is in always remembering where the line is, and never crossing it."

Uber clearly crossed the line when their executives voiced out load their frustration with the media and then continued talking and imagined how nice it would be to give the media a taste of their own medicine and do all sorts of reporting on them personally.

It's fine to have those little fantasies in your head - but that's as far as it can ever go. What's troubling is that the Uber exec honestly thought it was acceptable to give words to those thoughts... I'm wondering if alcohol was involved.

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The difference is in what is being broken. A rule can be some conventional wisdom that is wrong, where the rule breaker is innovating through the barrier of complacency or it can be an ethical or moral consensus, a social rule, they break that may or may not be right. And those are much more troublesome. The absolute vs relative ethics debate alone makes it a nightmare to begin with.

Let's not mince words - Uber is not a tech company, what is their unique and newly developed technology? They are exploiting a loophole and operating unlicensed minicabs, profiting from the arbitrage of lower costs of not having to comply with regulation. Why is anyone surprised that they have a generally fuzzy idea about "rules"? It is on the regulators to shut them down.

Let's not go overboard. Uber's real time tracking, checkin, and reservation of cars, in conjunction with dynamic surge pricing to guarantee there will always be a vehicle, is pretty damn innovative - when it works. I use Uber a lot, and in the bay area, it's world class in terms of providing time estimates of arrival. In Dubai - not so much.

So - yes, lots of missteps by Uber, particularly on the ethics front, but don't discount how they revolutionized the real time tracking/reservation of cars.

This is exactly it.

When Uber is breaking the rules that protect a tiny medallion-holding, rent seeking cartel, that's a positive for society.

When Uber is just end-running around sensible public licensing of taxis in cities without medallion cartels that's not really doing anything for society.

When Uber sabotages Lyft, promotes misogyny and threatens vile character assassination of journalists for negative coverage that's just Uber being repulsive and is a negative for society.

I hope more areas go down the road Seoul is supposedly going with their aim for a universal taxi app.

"Breaking rules" is one thing. Showing completely immoral behavior is another.

Uber didn't "cross the line", they are miles off course on the wrong side.

The report you are quoting from yesterday seems to be more Valleywag gossip talk for pageviews most likely taken out of context (look at all the internet rage it has generated just on this site) than actual evil wrongdoing.

No, that actually happened. The exec and his CEO have even admitted to and apologized for it. Not one of them has denied any of the terrible quotes attributed to the Uber executive.

Sure they stated they could also hire people to dig up dirt on the reporters private lives who are trying to write gossip articles about Uber exec's private goings on, I don't really see any issue with that.

The amount of quotes in that article meant that this was not a one-line joke, but a full-blown description of some fantasy. Like somebody going on and on about the ways they would kill their ex-wife or something.

It's one thing to feel antagonised by someone, it's another to build out some revenge fantasy in detail.

Giving a gossip columnist a taste of their own medicine is really that bad?

That's interesting missing context - Was this all in response to Sarah writing about the private lives of Uber Execs? I thought it was in response to her writing about the Companies Behavior. If not excusing the idea of writing about the private lives of the reporters, it certainly provides context that didn't exist before.

Agreed. Besides, they've never acted upon those words. It was essentially a thoughtcrime.

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