As Uber investor Shervin Pishevar and Recode executive editor Kara Swisher sat down Tuesday for Vanity Fair’s fourth-annual New Establishment Summit in Los Angeles, Uber’s board was going to battle in faraway San Francisco. At stake: ousted C.E.O. Travis Kalanick’s vice-like grip on the company he co-founded and now plans to reconquer.
“We all hope this is Travis’s last stand,” one person close to the situation told Recode earlier on Tuesday. “He has to be stopped from fighting, which is all he knows how to do.” Instead, Uber’s board ultimately split the difference, Axios’s Dan Primack reports, voting to ditch super-voting rights, equalizing the voting power of shareholders, and expanding the board, while proceeding with a sale of its shares to Japanese tech firm SoftBank. The board didn’t approve governance changes that would have kept Kalanick from taking over the company again, leaving an opening for the “Steve Jobs”-like comeback he has been telling people he hopes to orchestrate. A shareholder vote is still required to finalize the SoftBank deal. The company released a statement welcoming new board directors Ursula Burns and John Thain, whose surprise appointment yesterday by Kalanick proved that he remains a skilled operator—and a major threat to new C.E.O. Dara Khosrowshahi’s reign.
Onstage at the V.F. Summit as the vote went down, Pishevar, a loyal Kalanick defender and managing director of Sherpa Capital, dismissed the corporate intrigue as “a bit of Shakespearean melodrama” and argued that changing the company’s governance structure, as rival Benchmark Capital has proposed, would “strip those rights away from early investors and employees and advisers” at Uber. He also threatened to sue if those rights were taken away. “What Benchmark has done is not just legally wrong by morally wrong,” said Pishevar, who has threatened to sue Uber exec Ryan Graves and co-founder Garrett Camp if they side with Benchmark. “We’ll do a class action suit against those that would vote to take away those rights that were hard-earned.”
In characteristically grandiloquent style, Pishevar’s attorneys issued a statement before the vote denouncing the “ill-advised vote,” warning against doing “irreversible and cataclysmic damage” to the company, and threatening to “pursue any and all legal recourse” if the measure was approved. Luckily for Pishevar and his legal team, the Uber board didn’t move forward with the proposal.
That doesn’t mean that the boardroom intrigues are over at Uber, where Khosrowshahi is struggling to turn the page after a long year of scandals under Kalanick’s watch. “They built something that is remarkable,” Swisher said onstage Tuesday, of Uber. “How he built it is a whole other question. They had an expression at Facebook, which is ‘move fast and break things.’ And they’ve broken a lot of fucking things.”
John Kerry, 68th United States Secretary of State, Bill McGlashan, co-founder and C.E.O., the Rise Fund, and Walter Isaacson during the panel Venture Charity: The Rise of Impact Investing.
Photograph by Justin Bishop.
Ted Sarandos, chief content officer, Netflix, filmmaker Ava DuVernay, and Andrew Ross Sorkin during the panel Platform Thriving: Storytelling in the New Media Age.
Photograph by Justin Bishop.
Evan Spiegel, co-founder and C.E.O. Snap Inc., Walter Isaacson, and Andrew Ross Sorkin.
Photograph by Justin Bishop.
Ted Sarandos.
Photograph by Justin Bishop.
Evan Spiegal and Walter Isaacson during the panel “Snap” Into Action.
Photograph by Justin Bishop.
The Wallis Annenberg Center.
Photograph by Justin Bishop.
Vanity Fair Summit’s Storytelling in the New Media Age panel.
Photograph by Justin Bishop.
