Uber’s Lesson: Silicon Valley’s Start-Up Machine Needs Fixing
And if we want Silicon Valley to create better start-ups — which we should, for everyone’s
sake — the Valley would be wise to now examine Uber’s entrails and find another way.
Over the next few days you may hear a revisionist defense of Uber and Mr. Kalanick
that will go like this: Uber was fighting an entrenched and monopolistic cabal — taxi companies and their captured regulators — so it had to act more like a wolf than a sheep.
So this was also a failure of excess: There is just so much private money in the world
that Uber was able to shun the public markets indefinitely, a decision held up as wise by many of its enablers, who argued that tech companies need to be insulated from stock-market investors who might not understand their businesses.
Mr. Kalanick, meanwhile, was allowed to operate more or less solo, to micromanage a company
that grew to enormous scale, and was left alone even when the firm’s problems became plain to see.
But one lesson should rise above the others: This was not just Mr. Kalanick’s failure — it was far bigger.
If Uber had been forced to go public sooner — if it couldn’t raise billions at the drop of a hat from the
likes of Saudi Arabia — it would have opened itself up to much-needed scrutiny and potential reform.
