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Uber's troubles this week is proof that Silicon Valley can give really great answers to the wrong questions.
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Take the quintessential SV tech question: "How do we make the world a better place?" The missing part? "And for whom?"
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Uber might have asked the first (though honestly even that is questionable, but lets pretend) but it never thought about the 2nd.
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And like every other SV startup, the answer to the 2nd was embedded in the company even if it was never asked: "For people just like us"
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And that "us" is white, male, and upper-class. All this talk about whatever number of principles, but that's the prime principle...
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That's why there will never be good culture at Uber. Not ever. They're systematically & ideologically opposed to answering "For whom?"
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It's the whole damn product. If what you do as a company is harmful, you can't run that company in a way that isn't.
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So Uber, and likely many of its peers, will forever find themselves host to toxic workplaces for anyone who isn't white, male and rich.
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Once we get distracted from Uber again it'll go back to being exactly that, and will always end up that way until the day it shuts down.
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The solve for this problem is systematic & enormous change. It has to be in the CS courses in college, in networking events, in offices.
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The resistance is incredibly high. The fight will be long. The solutions will have to be radical. We have to start by asking right questions
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They will ask us to 'just trust them' & we have to say no. Continually & constantly remember not to trust them. Their interests are not ours
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Making the world a better place is impossible if we don't have all the types of people out there in the world represented in a project.
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Uber shows if your only value is increasing profit, lack of a broader view will end up making you less profit. wsj.com/articles/uber-ceo-says-he-needs-leadership-help-after-video-shows-him-slamming-driver-1488347091?mod=e2fb