Despite the unethical and immoral behavior of Uber executive leadership, from the outside, Uber seems to have a better safety profile than Lyft. They added safety features to the app, such as emergency service requests, long before Lyft did. Both companies probably did it in response to sexual assaults that both companies enabled, but Uber took quicker action.
I've seen some truly horrifying behavior from Lyft in terms of safety that makes me cautious of wanting to use the app, despite liking Lyft's public presence better. I suspect it's in the interest of growth and gaining market share to have things like lax-er driver background checks so they get more drivers. In the end it ends up hurting them a lot more, and can lead to terrible things for riders.
This is actually a good thing. Companies that can execute while rotating leadership are companies of rules, principles, etc, not companies of people. This is a very good thing.
So then it sounds like within this, part of what we think of as the prevailing morality can actually be defined as the behavior of companies who have been around for long enough. This is probably why a lot of companies seem to get away with "bad" behavior: people who think of the behavior as bad simply don't know the rules. Just be sure to throw in a token fine or fire a middle manager in order to preserve the illusion.
And yet— still the same ship, right? It would be fascinating to have some insider stories about whether overhauling the upper management has actually changed the culture of the company, or if it's largely the same attitudes and behaviours at play.
I joined Uber a few months before Travis left. I can share a few things that come to mind:
- shortly after Dara joined, he sent a company-wide email to the effect of "all corporate espionage projects must be halted effectively now"
- he introduced a new guiding motto: "We do the right thing. Period." and repeatedly refers back to it
- he found out about a previously undisclosed data leak and went ahead and made a proper public disclosure. The CSO had to leave the company and eventually got charged as a result[0]
- on an all-hands meeting centrally themed on making things better after the Fowler scandal fallout, a board member made a cringey sexist joke. He had to resign from the board that afternoon. This incident spoke volumes about how discrimination culture was no longer going to be tolerated.
- around the same time, as part of the HR revamp, a number of policies were introduced (training courses, anon hotline)
- there was a huge internal project called 180 days of change in response to the wave of scandals. This encompasses the safety features, along with improvements to the driver UX to make it easier to understand their income, among other things (which I hear were very well received by users).
edit: this and some other questionable hires and moves by Cloudflare made me do everything I can to avoid using CF services. I have many of CF hosts in my blacklist now.
I've seen some truly horrifying behavior from Lyft in terms of safety that makes me cautious of wanting to use the app, despite liking Lyft's public presence better. I suspect it's in the interest of growth and gaining market share to have things like lax-er driver background checks so they get more drivers. In the end it ends up hurting them a lot more, and can lead to terrible things for riders.