Image copyright ERIC PIERMONT/AFP/Getty 
 
 Uber boss Travis Kalanick has resigned as chief executive after pressure from shareholders. 
 
 His resignation comes after a review of practices at the firm and scandals including complaints of sexual harassment. 
 
 Last week he said he was taking an indefinite leave of absence following the sudden death of his mother in a boating accident. 
 
 Mr Kalanick will remain on the board of the ride-hailing firm. 
 
 Five major Uber investors demanded Mr Kalanick's immediate resignation as chief executive, the New York Times said. 
 
 Mr Kalanick reportedly said: "I love Uber more than anything in the world and at this difficult moment in my personal life I have accepted the investors request to step aside so that Uber can go back to building rather than be distracted with another fight." 
 
 Uber's board said in a statement: "Travis has always put Uber first. This is a bold decision and a sign of his devotion and love for Uber. 
 
 "By stepping away, he's taking the time to heal from his personal tragedy while giving the company room to fully embrace this new chapter in Uber's history. We look forward to continuing to serve with him on the board." 
 
 Analysis: Dave Lee, BBC North America technology reporter, San Francisco 
 
 Surely the most dramatic fall from grace the start-up world has ever seen, a scalp so big it will have chief executives across this city sitting bolt upright, and thinking: "If Travis can get booted out of Uber… no-one is safe." 
 
 What started out as a PR inconvenience has left the company without, to name just a few, a chief executive officer, chief operating officer, chief technology officer and chief financial officer. Uber is in tatters, engulfed by its own aggression. 
 
 Mr Kalanick embodied his company's prevailing attitude: success at all costs. It saw Uber dominate the ride-sharing world, his chutzpah enabling the company to attract investment so effectively that last year Uber alone raised more money than the entire UK start-up scene. 
 
 But in doing so he didn't play fair. He created a company that deceived local regulators, neglected the well-being of employees, wound-up drivers, troubled investors, obtained a rape victim's medical records and allegedly stole trade secrets from a rival. 
 
 All this time Uber's investors will have been weighing things up. What's more risky to their investment - removing the man who made Uber what it is, or keeping him on? For the first time it's become the latter - and Mr Kalanick is out the door. 
 
 Dan Primack, business editor of the Axios news service, was one of the first to report the investor demands for Mr Kalanick to go. 
 
 Mr Primack said a group of investors, but particularly Bill Gurley of venture capitalist firm Benchmark, had put pressure on Mr Kalanick to resign. 
 
 "It's important to note: Travis controlled the board in terms of votes, so really, it was a vey big uphill climb for [Mr] Gurley and the other investors to get this done," Mr Primack said. 
 
 Uber's future prospects were now "pretty bright", Mr Primack added. 
 
 The firm has been searching for a chief operating officer, but now can seek out Fortune 500 chief executives to take over the top spot, he said. 
 
 Scandals 
 
 The ride-hailing company has had a series of recent controversies, including the departure of other high-level executives. 
 
 Eric Alexander, the former head of Uber's Asia-Pacific business, left after a report that he had obtained the medical records of a woman who was raped by an Uber driver in 2014. 
 
 Mr Alexander reportedly shared them with Mr Kalanick, senior vice-president Emil Michael and others. 
 
 Mr Alexander was fired earlier this month, and Mr Michael later left Uber. 
 
 Board member David Bonderman made a sexist remark at a meeting about workplace practice recommendations last week and then resigned as a director. 
 
 In February Uber said it was investigating "abhorrent" sexual harassment claims made by former Uber engineer Susan Fowler. 
 
 This month Uber said it had fired more than 20 staff and had taken action against others following a review of more than 200 HR complaints that included harassment and bullying. 
 
 There has also been a lawsuit from Google's parent company, Alphabet, over alleged theft of trade secrets related to driverless cars. ||||| Uber C.E.O. Travis Kalanick, whose aggressive style helped turn the ride-hailing start-up into a global, $70 billion business, has resigned following months of scandal at the company he co-founded. 
 
 For a time, Kalanick’s commitment to winning at all costs made him legendary among his peers, and venerated in the press. But the same unapologetic approach that Kalanick brought to business also bred a corporate culture rife with sexism and harassment, according to numerous allegations by current and former employees, resulting in two investigations and dozens of layoffs as Uber, the world’s most valuable privately held tech company, raced to clean up its public image. Late Tuesday night, a group of shareholders including Benchmark, Menlo Ventures, Lowercase Capital, Fidelity Investments, and First Round Capital reportedly went further, convincing Kalanick to permanently resign. “I love Uber more than anything in the world and at this difficult moment in my personal life I have accepted the investors request to step aside so that Uber can go back to building rather than be distracted with another fight,” Kalanick said in a statement first reported by The New York Times. Kalanick had taken a leave of absence from the company earlier this month, following the tragic death of his mother in a Memorial Day weekend boating accident. 
 
 Kalanick will be rightly hailed for his role in rapidly growing Uber from an ambitious, app-based ride-hailing service into a sprawling logistics empire with operations in more than 500 cities across the world. But it also bears repeating that the toxic culture that triggered a series of investigations into the company, ultimately culminating in more than 20 Uber employees being fired for human-resources-related offenses, was shaped by Kalanick and those close to him. During his tenure as C.E.O., Kalanick made jokes about picking up women on demand and made secret plans to sabotage his rivals. Earlier this year, a former engineer, Susan Fowler, published a blog post alleging that Uber’s human-resources team had systematically ignored her reports of sexual harassment during the year she worked for the company. Soon after, dozens more employees came forward with their own stories describing a sexist workplace environment. 
 
 In recent months, Kalanick was caught on camera berating his Uber driver. There was a federal inquiry into Uber’s use of a tool to evade authorities and regulators. The company was sued by Google for allegedly stealing its driverless car technology, then accused of a “cover-up scheme” to hide the evidence. (Uber has flatly denied the allegations in the suit.) Uber, Kalanick, and two of the company’s former senior executives who have left the company amid scandal in recent weeks—Emil Michael and Eric Alexander—are now being sued by a woman who was raped by her Uber driver in India in 2014, for defamation and intrusion of privacy after it was revealed that Alexander had obtained her medical records and shared them with other executives. A board member resigned just last week, hours after he made a sexist crack during an all-hands meeting intended to discuss sexism and other problems at the company. 
 
 Kalanick’s downfall reflects a failure of leadership and an inability to mature as a company, not the result of any media witch hunt. Still, that hasn’t stopped some in the tech community from lamenting his exit. “Travis leaving Uber is a big loss, and very frustrating for people who know him,” Alexia Tsotsis, a former editor for tech news outlet TechCrunch, tweeted on Tuesday night. “He’s not the monster the media turned him into,” she added, as though Kalanick were the victim of some irresponsible hit piece and not months of careful, objective reporting from some of industry’s most respected reporters. Others, like Benchmark’s Bill Gurley—an early Uber investor and a board member who was reportedly among those demanding Kalanick’s resignation—were likewise complimentary of the resigned C.E.O. “There will be many pages in the history books devoted to @travisk - very few entrepreneurs have had such a lasting impact on the world,” he tweeted. 
 
 Already, comparisons are being made between Kalanick’s exit and when Steve Jobs was booted from Apple in 1985. “This is shocking. It’s this generation’s version of Steve Jobs being kicked out of Apple,” Axios editor Dan Primack said. “I know—not apples/apples since he’s staying on the board, wasn’t the founder, etc.” Twitter users have drawn the same comparison over and over again, despite the fact that Jobs was fired unceremoniously over what amounts to a leadership dispute and not a series of scandals involving alleged harassment and retaliation in the workplace. 
 
 At the end of the day, Uber is the culture Kalanick created. Employees were reportedly discriminated against and harassed by their employer. Kalanick had all the opportunity and power in the world, for years, to change Uber’s culture. Instead, he was complicit in allowing it to metastasize to the point where former U.S. attorney general Eric Holder and his law firm had to be called in to audit the company, resulting in a series of recommendations to bring Uber in line with what would ordinarily be considered baseline corporate standards and practices (limiting alcohol provided at corporate events; creating a board oversight committee; and providing mandatory human-resources and leadership training, to name a few). Painting Kalanick as a victim of the media absolves him of personal responsibility for what went wrong at Uber. He doesn’t need your sympathy. Save it for those at Uber—and in Silicon Valley, more broadly—who have suffered the consequences.
– The bumpy ride is over for Uber's Travis Kalanick: After a shareholder revolt, Kalanick has stepped down as chief executive of the company he co-founded in 2009. Sources tell the New York Times that the resignation came after "hours of drama" on Tuesday, with five of the company's biggest shareholders demanding he step down immediately. "I love Uber more than anything in the world and at this difficult moment in my personal life I have accepted the investors' request to step aside so that Uber can go back to building rather than be distracted with another fight," said Kalanick, who has dealt with multiple scandals involving the company this year as well as the death of his mother in a boating accident last month. Kalanick, who announced last week that he was taking an indefinite leave of absence, will remain on the company's board. At least 15 other top execs, including key Kalanick allies, have already left the company this year, the Washington Post reports. The surprise resignation caps what is "surely the most dramatic fall from grace the start-up world has ever seen," according to BBC technology analyst Dave Lee. Kalanick's aggressive, "success at all costs" mentality attracted a lot of investment, but he "created a company that deceived local regulators, neglected the well-being of employees ... obtained rape victims' medical records, and allegedly stole trade secrets from a rival," Lee writes.