Uber’s rough ride

By Joe Nocera

Thursday, Nov. 27, 2014 | 2:03 a.m.

The Uber app is a thing of beauty.

You click a button, and it immediately shows you your location. You hit another button, and it tells you how quickly an Uber car will arrive to take you where you want to go. If you want a ride during a heavy commuter time, it will charge you more — surge pricing, as they call it at Uber — but you’ll know in advance how much extra, and you’ll be given a chance to decide whether to accept. On the app, you can keep track of the car that is coming to get you. Sure enough, the car arrives, you hop in and off you go. The fare is charged via the app, so no cash changes hands between the driver and the customer.

Uber does what the best Internet companies do. It disrupts a business model that has existed for a long time. In the case of Uber, that industry is the taxi business, which, almost everywhere, is highly regulated. Taxi drivers hate Uber. In many cities, they protest against it — or fight it in court. In some cities, a service like Uber’s is against the law.

But, if you live in a place like New York City, Uber is a godsend. It is nearly impossible to get a cab in Manhattan when it is raining, or during the “shift change” that starts around 4 or 5 in the afternoon, right when people are getting out of work and need a taxi most. There are only 14,000 or so cabs in Manhattan, which is not nearly enough. Thanks to Uber, getting a ride someplace is much easier than it was before the company arrived on the scene.

What’s more, unlike many startups, Uber appears to be a pretty well-run company. Although it is now 5 years old, it is already in more than 200 cities. It dominates the rival car services like Lyft. And it has a valuation of around $17 billion.

So how does all of that — the cleverness to come up with the idea, the skill to create the company, the discipline to make it work — square with the portrait of Uber that has emerged this week?

It appears to be a company run by juveniles.

On Monday, Ben Smith, editor of Buzzfeed, published an article about a conversation he had had with Emil Michael, a top Uber executive, in which Michael suggested Uber might do “opposition research” into the private lives of reporters, especially Sarah Lacy of Pando Daily, who has been a fierce critic of the company. Michael thought he was speaking off the record, but even so. It’s the sort of revenge fantasy one would expect a serious corporate executive to have outgrown.

The Buzzfeed article unleashed a torrent of other criticism about the company. Uber’s chief executive, Travis Kalanick, once told GQ magazine the company should be called “Boober” because it made it so easy for him to get women.

The company has reportedly run a dirty-tricks campaign against Lyft, including ordering rides that are then canceled, and trying to damage its ability to complete a round of financing. Uber has been rumored to track the rides of its customers, in violation of its own privacy rules. And so on.

Peter Thiel, the well-known investor, has described Uber as the most “ethically challenged” company in Silicon Valley. (Thiel, it should be noted, has money in Lyft.)

Part of the problem is, to an unusual degree, Uber has an “us-versus-them” mentality. That attitude manifests itself when the company is fighting taxi regulations or other obstacles the taxi establishment places in its path. But it also seeps into the way it views everyone it comes into contact with, including journalists.

But part of it is there simply isn’t anybody in Silicon Valley willing to tell Uber’s principals to grow up.

They have a hot company that is disrupting an outmoded industry — and, therefore, they are lionized, not matter how boorish their behavior. They are like the star football player at State U. who can get away with anything because he scores touchdowns on Saturday. Engineering talent and business savvy don’t necessarily impute maturity.

One of the smartest moves Google’s founders made was tlo hire Eric Schmidt, a technology veteran, to be the chief executive until one founder, Larry Page, felt he was ready to run the company. Ditto for Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, who hired Sheryl Sandberg to give the company the ballast he wasn’t ready to provide.

Companies that never grow up tend to go the way of Groupon or MySpace, two now-faded comets. As good as Uber’s app is, there are limits to how much bad publicity it can absorb before it hurts the bottom line.

At Uber, the inmates are running the asylum. That needs to change, while there’s still time.

Joe Nocera is a columnist for The New York Times.