Travis Kalanick stepped down Tuesday as chief executive of Uber, the ride-hailing service that he helped found in 2009 and built into a transportation colossus, after a shareholder revolt made it untenable for him to stay on at the company.

Mr. Kalanick’s exit came under pressure after hours of drama involving Uber’s investors, according to two people with knowledge of the situation, who asked to remain anonymous because the details were confidential.

Earlier on Tuesday, five of Uber’s major investors demanded that the chief executive resign immediately. The investors included one of Uber’s biggest shareholders, the venture capital firm Benchmark, which has one of its partners, Bill Gurley, on Uber’s board. The investors made their demand for Mr. Kalanick to step down in a letter delivered to the chief executive while he was in Chicago, said the people with knowledge of the situation.</s>Uber Technologies Inc co-founder Travis Kalanick stepped down as chief executive of the ride-hailing service, following intense pressure from investors, a company spokesman said on Wednesday.

Kalanick's resignation comes after a months-long investigation led former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, who was hired by Uber to look into its culture and workplace practices after a female former employee publicly accused the company of what she described as brazen sexual harassment.

Five large investors, including venture capital firm Benchmark, demanded that the CEO resign immediately in a letter delivered to Kalanick while he was in Chicago, the New York Times reported citing people with knowledge of the situation.

In the letter, titled "Moving Uber Forward," the investors also said the company needed a change in leadership.

Kalanick discussed with at least one Uber board member and after hours of discussions with some of the investors, he agreed to step down, the report said. He will remain on Uber board.

"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," the paper quoted Kalanick as saying.

Kalanick told employees last week, he will take time away from Uber, part of the series of measures the ride-hailing company is taking to claw its way out from under a mountain of controversies.</s>DETROIT (CBSMiami/AP) — Uber co-founder and CEO Travis Kalanick has announced his resignation amid pressure from investors.

Uber’s board said in a statement that Kalanick is taking the time to heal from the death of his mother in a boating accident “while giving the company room to fully embrace this new chapter in Uber’s history.” He will remain on the Uber Technologies Inc. board.

The move comes as Uber, the world’s largest ride-hailing company, was having trouble morphing from a free-wheeling startup into a mature company that can stanch losses and post consistent profits. After eight years of phenomenal growth by upending the taxi business, Uber had reached a point where the culture that created the company had become an albatross that threatened to kill it.

In a statement, the 40-year-old co-founder said his resignation would help Uber go back to building “rather than be distracted with another fight,” an apparent reference to efforts on the board to oust him.

It was unclear who would replace Kalanick.

The resignation came after a series of costly missteps under Kalanick that damaged Uber’s reputation including revelations of sexual harassment in its offices, allegations of trade secrets theft and a federal investigation into efforts to mislead local government regulators.

On Tuesday, the company embarked on an 180-day program to change its image by allowing riders to give drivers tips through the Uber app, something Kalanick had resisted. Drivers have said that Kalanick didn’t value their labor even though it was the heart of the San Francisco-based company.

Uber’s board said in a statement that Kalanick had “always put Uber first.”

But under Kalanick, the company developed a reputation for ruthless tactics that have occasionally outraged government regulators, drivers, riders, and employees. The company often flouted city regulations for taxi companies with a culture that encouraged “Principled Confrontation.”

The company’s hard-charging style has led to legal trouble. The U.S. Justice Department is investigating Uber’s past usage of phony software designed to thwart local government regulators who wanted to check on whether Uber was carrying passengers without permission.

A key step toward Kalanick’s downfall came in February when former Uber engineer Susan Fowler posted a personal essay about the year she spent at Uber, writing that she was propositioned by her manager on her first day with an engineering team. She reported him to human resources, but was told he would get a lecture and no further punishment because he was a “high performer,” she wrote.

That caught the board’s attention and brought outside investigations that led to the firing of 20 people including some managers. Former Attorney General Eric Holder conducted one of the probes, finding that the male-dominated Uber didn’t have the most basic policies to protect workers from harassment. Holder’s report suggested procedures that most companies have had for years such as using performance reviews to hold leaders accountable.

Also, Kalanick lost his temper in an argument with an Uber driver who was complaining about pay. The profanity-laced confrontation was caught on a video that surfaced in February. Afterward, Kalanick said he needed management help and had to grow up. The company began searching for a chief operating officer.

In March, board member Arianna Huffington expressed confidence that Kalanick would evolve into a better leader. But Huffington, a founder of Huffington Post, suggested time might be running out.

He’s a “scrappy entrepreneur,” she said during the call, but one who needed to bring “changes in himself and in the way he leads.”

During the past year, several senior managers left the company including the president and chief financial officer.

Outside experts said the only way to change Uber’s culture was for Kalanick to step aside. But Uber’s ownership and voting structure made it difficult to oust him.

Kalanick took an indefinite leave of absence earlier this month, in part to deal with a personal tragedy. In May, his mother was killed and his father hurt in a boating accident on a California lake.

Uber was having trouble dealing with its success. It posted a $708 million first-quarter loss, unable to turn $3.4 billion in revenue into a profit. The loss narrowed from the $991 million it posted in the previous quarter.

Investors have talked about selling stock in Uber to the public. The company was valued at near $70 billion the last time it sought capital.</s>SAN FRANCISCO - In the end, the traffic jam of internal and external issues at Uber proved too paralyzing for its hard-charging co-founder and CEO Travis Kalanick, who late Tuesday night Pacific time resigned from the ride-hailing company he helped found in 2009.

Kalanick stepped down after receiving a letter from some of the largest investors in the company, according to a report in The New York Times.

The letter, titled "Moving Uber Forward," asked that the CEO depart immediately but also assist in the search for his successor as well as a chief financial officer, according to anonymous sources quoted in the report. Uber has been without a CFO, among a few of the company's vacant top positions, for a few years.

The Times report included a statement from Kalanick. “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,” he said.

Uber confirmed to USA TODAY that Kalanick's statement obtained by the Times was accurate.

While the 40-year-old CEO's departure comes as a bit of a surprise given both his determination to stay at the helm as well as the support he appeared to have mustered from some key board members, Kalanick leaving also is the easiest way for Uber to signal to employees, investors and customers that it truly means to overhaul its leaky ship.

Among the investors asking for Kalanick's resignation were representatives from First Round Capital, Lowercase Capital, Menlo Ventures, Fidelity Investments and Benchmark Capital. Benchmark partner Bill Gurley is on Uber's board, along with Kalanick and co-founder Garrett Camp.

Kalanick will remain on the board, the report said. Because of the way Uber's voting shares are distributed, founders Kalanick and Camp are likely to both exert considerable influence on major company decisions even without being part of senior leadership.

Whoever takes the top job at Uber will be facing a staggeringly broad array of challenges, so much so that it remains unclear just what sort of industry experience — technology? transportation? consumer products? — would best suited for the overhaul at hand.

Kalanick departs as Uber continues to grapple with a host of problems that range from a toxic and sexist work culture to pursuing aggressive business practices that often have skirted the legal line.

One technological innovation, dubbed Greyball, allowed Uber to both track and send a fake app to regulators that might be investigating the company. Greyball is now being reviewed by federal officials for possible criminal charges.

And after buying a new self-driving trucking company called Otto last summer for around $680 million, Uber quickly learned in a lawsuit filed by Google's self-driving car company Waymo that Otto's founder and Uber's new head of self-driving tech, Anthony Levandowski, had apparently stolen thousands of trade secrets files from Google before leaving.

Levandowski has been among a series of top Uber executives who have either resigned or been fired since the beginning of the year. They include senior vice president Emil Michael, who was a longtime confidant of Kalanick as well as a controversial figure in a range of Uber missteps that include illegally obtaining the medical records of an Indian woman who was raped by her Uber driver.

The February blog post of former Uber engineer Susan Fowler led to a three-month internal investigation by former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, whose recommendations, released last week, included tighter oversight of the company's board and senior executives as well as an overhaul of its human resources practices.

Kalanick has long been seen inside and outside the company as integral to both the company's meteoric rise as well as its recent crash. Kalanick shrugged aside opposition from taxi unions and municipal officials to barge his company into hundreds of cities in more than 80 countries in just eight years.

In the process, his tactics rankled rivals and regulators but also contributed to Uber being able to raise upward of $15 billion and become the world most valuable tech startup with a valuation approaching $70 billion.

But inside a company that was quickly mushrooming in size — Uber doubled to 10,000 employees in 2016 alone, and now has 12,000 on the payroll — all was not well.

The blog post that took down a CEO

The extent of the dysfunction was made plain in Fowler's post, which described an environment where not only was it common for a male boss to make a sexual advance toward a female employee, but that reporting such an incident was often met by shrugs from HR and warnings that further complaints could mean a bad review.

By all accounts, Kalanick appeared to be shocked and chastened by Fowler's revelations. In February, he held emotional meetings with employees, vowed to seek assistance with his management style, and embarked on a search for a chief operating officer who would be his decision-making equal.

All the while, Uber board member Arianna Huffington and other executives continued to support Kalanick as CEO, suggesting that he was capable of change and possessed the drive the company needed to continue on its ambitious mission.

As for Kalanick's well documented frat-like comments and behavior in past years, new Uber HR boss Liane Hornsey told USA TODAY recently that she suffered "cognitive dissonance every day, because I read that I’m working for this highly aggressive, highly confrontational guy and I don’t find that at all.”

Throughout the past months of turmoil, Kalanick himself kept a low profile, canceling tech conference appearances and shunning interviews.

Then in late May, Kalanick's mother and father were involved in a boating accident near Fresno, Calif.. His mother died, and his father has remained in serious condition. The CEO, who is close with his parents, raced to their side and has been on an informal leave of absence since.

Last week, just before Holder's recommendations were made public, Kalanick announced that he would be taking an indefinite leave and put the company in the hands of his leadership group, which consists of 14 senior executives.

In the wake of that decision, corporate change-management experts told USA TODAY that such a leadership vacuum was likely to create further instability in a company that desperately needed a firm hand on the tiller.

They also cautioned that while Uber might be the 10-ton gorilla in the ride-hailing space with lots of cash in the bank, a failure to address its internal leadership and culture issues could allow rival Lyft to fill the gap with disgruntled riders.

A variety of studies have shown that Lyft has gained market share on Uber since the crisis hit, and that its brand is perceived as more rider- and driver-friendly.

On Tuesday, Uber abruptly announced that it was adding a tipping option to its app, a feature that has long been a part of Lyft and something for which Uber's drivers had long been clamoring.

But clearly there was also a push in a variety of powerful corners to truly jump start the company by asking Kalanick to leave.

"You can change your company's policies, but without new leadership your culture won't change because the policies and the people won't be aligned," Micah Alpern, who consults on culture strategy for A.T. Kearney, said presciently last week. "At the very least, they need a new COO, a CFO and some sort of acting CEO, fast."</s>Uber CEO Travis Kalanick resigned as the head of the ride-sharing company on Tuesday.

Uber CEO Kalanick’s decision to resign was made to appease investors that were seeking just such an action. The group of investors sent a letter to Kalanick while he was in Chicago to pressure him into resigning from the company.

Uber CEO Kalanick also confirmed the pressure by saying that he was resigning so as not to start another fight at the company. The Uber CEO said that he accepted the request from investors to leave and that he wants the company to continue moving forward, even without him at its head.

While Uber CEO Kalanick may no longer be the head of the company, he will still be involved with it as part of its board. The push for his resignation came after an investigation into the culture of the company and claims of sexual harassment, reports Reuters.

Uber saw several complaints that there was sexism that wasn’t being addressed. These built up and it was in February that it finally announced that an investigation would take place. The claims said that the company had a “frat culture” to it.

Uber CEO Kalanick’s decision to resign from the company also comes after he had been on a leave of absence. That leave started earlier this month. The reason for the leave was the death of Kalanick’s mother in an accident. He said that he needed time to grieve and to sort himself out before returning to manage the ride-sharing company.

As of this writing, William White did not hold a position in any of the aforementioned securities.</s>Travis Kalanick stepped down Tuesday as chief executive of Uber, the ride-hailing service that he helped found in 2009 and that he built into a transportation colossus, after a shareholder revolt made it untenable for him to stay on at the company.

Travis Kalanick stepped down Tuesday as chief executive of Uber, the ride-hailing service that he helped found in 2009 and that he built into a transportation colossus, after a shareholder revolt made it untenable for him to stay on at the company.

Kalanick’s exit came under pressure after hours of drama involving Uber’s investors, according to two people with knowledge of the situation, who asked to remain anonymous because the details were confidential.

Earlier Tuesday, five of Uber’s major investors demanded that the chief executive resign immediately. The investors included one of Uber’s biggest shareholders, the venture capital firm Benchmark, which has one of its partners, Bill Gurley, on Uber’s board. The investors made their demand for Kalanick to resign in a letter delivered to the chief executive while he was in Chicago, said the people with knowledge of the situation.

In the letter, titled “Moving Uber Forward” and obtained by The New York Times, the investors wrote to Kalanick that he must immediately leave and that the company needed a change in leadership. Kalanick, 40, consulted with at least one Uber board member, and after hours of discussions with some of the investors, he agreed to step down. He will remain on Uber’s board of directors.

“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.

The move caps months of questions over the leadership of Uber, which has become a prime example of Silicon Valley startup culture gone awry. The company has been exposed this year as having a workplace culture that is rife with sexual harassment and discrimination, and has pushed the envelope in dealing with law enforcement and even partners. That tone was set by Kalanick, who has aggressively turned the company into the world’s dominant ride-hailing service and upended the transportation industry around the globe.

Kalanick’s troubles began earlier this year after a former Uber engineer detailed what she said was sexual harassment at the company, opening the floodgates for more complaints and spurring internal investigations. In addition, Uber has been dealing with an intellectual property lawsuit from Waymo, the self-driving car business that operates under Google’s parent company, and a federal inquiry into a software tool that Uber used to sidestep some law enforcement.

Uber has been trying to move past its difficult history, which has grown inextricably tied to Kalanick. In recent months, Uber has fired more than 20 employees after an investigation into the company’s culture, embarked on major changes to professionalize its workplace, and is searching for new executives including a chief operating officer.

Kalanick last week said he would take an indefinite leave of absence from Uber, partly to work on himself and to grieve for his mother, who died last month in a boating accident. He said Uber’s day-to-day management would fall to a committee of more than 10 executives.

But the shareholder letter indicates that his taking time off was not enough for some investors who have pumped millions of dollars into the ride-hailing company, which has seen its valuation swell to nearly $70 billion. For them, Kalanick had to go.

The five shareholders who demanded Kalanick’s resignation include some of the technology industry’s most prestigious venture capital firms, which invested in Uber at an early stage of the company’s life, as well as a mutual fund firm. Apart from Benchmark, they are First Round Capital, Lowercase Capital, Menlo Ventures and Fidelity Investments, which together own more than a quarter of Uber’s stock. Because some of the investors hold a type of stock that endows them with an outsize number of votes, they have about 40 percent of Uber’s voting power.

Kalanick’s resignation opens questions of who may take over Uber, especially since the company has been so molded in his image. And Kalanick will probably remain a presence there since he still retains control of a majority of Uber’s voting shares.

Taking a startup chief executive to task so publicly is relatively unusual in Silicon Valley, where investors often praise entrepreneurs and their aggressiveness, especially if their companies are growing fast. It is only when those startups are in a precarious position or are declining that shareholders move to protect their investment.

In the case of Uber — one of the most highly valued private companies in the world — investors could lose billions of dollars if the company were to be marked down in valuation.

Uber, which has raised more than $11 billion from investors since its founding in 2009, has a wide base of shareholders apart from the ones who signed the letter. Uber’s investors also include TPG Capital, the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia, mutual fund giants like BlackRock and wealthy clients of firms like Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs.

In the letter, in addition to Kalanick’s immediate resignation, the five shareholders asked for improved oversight of the company’s board by filling two of three empty board seats with “truly independent directors.” They also demanded that Kalanick support a board-led search committee for a new chief executive, and that Uber immediately hire an experienced chief financial officer.</s>Travis Kalanick, who co-founded Uber in 2009, has been on a leave of absence from the ride-hailing service. When Uber announced Kalanick's sabbatical last week, the company said he needed time to grieve the recent death of his mother.

At the same time, Uber officials also announced that the company was adopting new policies to improve its workplace environment — including ones meant to help it fight sexual harassment and to change a corporate culture blamed for allowing workplace misconduct to flourish.

Kalanick said there was much to be improved at the company and that he would be working on a team that could lead "Uber 2.0."

But Uber's five major investors apparently were working on their own plan to lead the company forward. On Tuesday, they demanded that Kalanick resign immediately, according to the Times:



"Mr. Kalanick's exit came under pressure after hours of drama involving Uber's investors, according to two people with knowledge of the situation, who asked to remain anonymous because the details are confidential. "In the letter, titled "Moving Uber Forward" and obtained by The New York Times, the investors wrote to Mr. Kalanick that he must immediately leave and that the company needed a change in leadership. Mr. Kalanick, 40, consulted with at least one Uber board member and after hours of discussions with some of the investors, he agreed to step down. He will remain on Uber's board of directors."



The Times also published a statement from Kalanick:



"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."



With no clear successor to Kalanick, Uber's focus now is the search for a new leader. In March, President Jeff Jones quit after less than six months on the job.

The new CEO will have a full plate. Valued at around $70 billion, Uber is one of the largest private companies in the world.

But its reputation has suffered over the harassment reports, and the company has also faced challenges to its labor and competition practices, as well as a lawsuit from Google's parent company over its self-driving vehicle program.</s>Travis Kalanick, the founder of Uber has reportedly stepped down as CEO of the ride-hailing service. Kalanik had founded the company in 2009 and helped in building it into a transportation giant. The New York Times reported that Kalanick’s resignation has come following a shareholder revolt within the company. Earlier there were reports that Kalanick was likely to take a leave of absence from the ride-hailing company, but no final decision was made. According to a Reuters report, Emil Michael, senior vice president and a close Kalanick ally, had left the company too.

Kalanick’s move comes as Uber has been hit with a plethora of controversies recently. Earlier, Kalanick had reportedly taken a leave of absence recently. In a statement obtained by NYT, Kalanick 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.”

The ride-hailing service has faced various troubles in 2017. From various allegations of sexual harassment to a video surfacing with Kalanick engaging in a heated argument with a driver to a big lawsuit from Google’s Waymo self-driving car unit, the company has witnessed a lot of troubles. Uber had reportedly fired more than 20 employees when there was a probe into its work culture.

The NYT report cited two anonymous sources who were close to the discussions and said that Kalanick’s exit came after “hours of drama” between the company’s investors, out of which five people had demanded his immediate resignation.

In the letter, titled “Moving Uber Forward,” company investors had said that Uber needed a change in leadership. Kalanick discussed with at least one Uber board member and after hours of discussions with some of the investors, he agreed to step down, the report said. However, he will remain on Uber board.</s>Travis Kalanick, who co-founded Uber in 2009, has been on a leave of absence from the ride-hailing service. When Uber announced Kalanick's sabbatical last week, the company said he needed time to grieve the recent death of his mother.

At the same time, Uber officials also announced that the company was adopting new policies to improve its workplace environment — including ones meant to help it fight sexual harassment and to change a corporate culture blamed for allowing workplace misconduct to flourish.

Kalanick said there was much to be improved at the company and that he would be working on a team that could lead "Uber 2.0."

But Uber's five major investors apparently were working on their own plan to lead the company forward. On Tuesday, they demanded that Kalanick resign immediately, according to The New York Times:



"Mr. Kalanick's exit came under pressure after hours of drama involving Uber's investors, according to two people with knowledge of the situation, who asked to remain anonymous because the details are confidential. "In the letter, titled "Moving Uber Forward" and obtained by The New York Times, the investors wrote to Mr. Kalanick that he must immediately leave and that the company needed a change in leadership. He will remain on Uber's board of directors."



Mike Isaac, The Times reporter who broke the story, in an interview on NPR's Morning Edition, said that Kalanick, 40, consulted with at least one Uber board member and after hours of discussions with some of the investors, he agreed to step down.

Kara Swisher, executive editor of Recode, confirmed that Kalanick resigned. She talked to Morning Edition hosts David Greene and Steve Inskeep about her story posted on the technology news website:



"Kalanick had become a giant liability to the car-hailing company for a growing number of reasons, from sketchy business practices to troubling lawsuits to a basic management situation that was akin to really toxic goat rodeo. "Thus, he had to go, even though some sources said he had the voting power to stay."



With no clear successor to Kalanick, Uber's focus now is the search for a new leader. In March, President Jeff Jones quit after less than six months on the job.

The new CEO will have a full plate. Valued at around $70 billion, Uber is one of the largest private companies in the world.

But its reputation has suffered over the harassment reports, and the company has also faced challenges to its labor and competition practices, as well as a lawsuit from Google's parent company over its self-driving vehicle program.</s>Uber CEO Travis Kalanick has resigned following a string of controversies that attracted media and regulatory scrutiny to the company he helped found. Bloomberg reports Kalanick’s departure is effective immediately, though he’ll continue to serve on the board of directors.

Kalanick had taken a leave of absence to mourn the passing of his mother, who died in a boating accident just weeks ago, but was asked by five major investors to step down. One of those investors included Benchmark Capital, who wrote a letter demanding his immediate resignation, according to the New York Times. After consulting with at least one Uber board member and holding discussions with the investors, Kalanick agreed to 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.

The embattled CEO’s resignation comes on the heels of other major departures, including head of business Emil Michael and President Jeff Jones. It also follows a number of highly publicized scandals at Uber, including a recent probe into allegations of widespread sexual harassment and an investigation into the company’s use of police-evading “Greyball” software. As a result of the sexual harassment probe, more than 20 employees were fired. Uber was also recently sued by Google’s Waymo autonomous car spinoff for allegedly stealing secrets.

Despite its tarnished public image, Uber continues to rake in massive profits. In the first quarter of 2017, revenue increased by $3.4 billion. The company has been valued at $69 billion, far ahead of its chief rival Lyft. Recently, Uber added a feature to its app that finally allows riders to add a tip for their driver.

Until a new CEO is chosen, Uber will be run by a management committee composed of more than 10 executives.
Uber founder and CEO Travis Kalanick resigns amid pressure from investors due to allegations of sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and corporate misconduct in the company.