Uber co-founder Garrett Camp, who has not been involved in Uber’s day-to-day operations for quite some time, shed some light on Uber’s future today in a post on Medium. He said, among other things, that “recent events have left me upset and deeply reflective.”
Here’s a key nugget from his post.
“All companies have growing pains. And because Uber grew so fast these growing pains are much more serious,” Camp wrote. “Over the years we have neglected parts of our culture as we have focused on growth. We have failed to build some of the systems that every company needs to scale successfully. But what matters now is that we know what needs to be changed. We must update our core values, listen better to employees and riders, and prioritize our drivers.”
Notably, Camp made no mention of Travis Kalanick, the company’s CEO who recently went on a leave of absence. While he did say the answer to “What went wrong?” is that Uber did not listen “well enough to those who got us here…our team and especially our drivers,” Camp did not mention anything about sexual harassment or a toxic work environment.
Despite everything, Camp says that he still believes Uber can succeed, and even have “10x the impact it has today.” The caveat, of course, is “once we have additional leadership and training in place, and evolve our culture to be more inclusive and respectful.”
Uber’s workplace harassment report, which came out last week, provided some recommendations for the company to move forward. Two of those recommendations were to give Uber’s head of diversity and inclusion, Bernard Coleman, a C-level role and reallocate the responsibilities of Kalanick.
I’ve reached out to Camp and will update this story if we hear back.