Bill Gurley Is Leaving Uber’s Board

I remain flabbergasted by all of this upheaval at Uber. What's happening is the sort of housecleaning I would expect if the company had to file for bankruptcy or got caught flat out bribing judges or something. But really, what triggered all this was acting like jerks.

It seems to me, what should have happened (a long time ago) was that they got shut down for systematically breaking the law, or encouraging others to do so. That would have made sense.

But instead they are getting flayed alive by not much more than bad press for being jerks. Makes no goddamn sense.

You're assuming the current board didn't have this planned for a long time. Let them break the law to get things done, then clean house after the stage was properly set. I STILL think that people are downplaying the Otto thing way too much, especially on this site.

It's easy to say that they're going to win in court... but this is GOOGLE - they're going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars and likely a decade trying to win this thing. Google isn't going to stop until they've exhausted literally every legal avenue possible. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if a good portion of this isn't Uber's board trying to save the company from that legal battle - fire Kalanick, boot *Gurley, then license the tech from Waymo that was previously stolen.

And Google does not need to win. At the scale of Google v. Uber, getting injunctions, delays, and bogging down Uber's self driving car efforts are valuable on their own.