#of dropping it and then picking it back up for varying undetermined amount of times?

[avian-hearts]

i can't stop looking at my recent selfship ship drawing with dark cacao IT'S JUST SO CUTE!!!!!!!!! AND THE WAY I DREW BOTH OF US IS CUTE

[goldeneyedgirl]

Fic-Mas Day 7: hybrid.

Hello lovelies. Today I bring you a chunk of one of my massive projects. A pet project, in fact. I have written and rewritten the first 7 chapters so many times, I could almost recite it by heart. 

So, onwards!

(AU in which Alice is the daughter of a vampire-human hybrid, who was raised in an abusive home, and ends up in the care of her father and his husband in Forks. Hybrid biology is a little different - or rather, expanded - from canon. This was basically my attempt at expanding the Twilight universe beyond vampires and werewolves and examine the idea that humans are really the worst. At this point in the story, Alice has arrived in Forks, had a less than welcoming experience with the Cullen kids and met Dr Cullen in a professional capacity.) 

You know when something huge happens to you, and you tick yourself off because somehow you managed to miss all the signs that it was going to happen? But when you think back, there were no real clues - everything that happened was completely innocent and ordinary. There was no way you could have known.

Thursday night turned into one of those. There was no way I could have ever seen it coming.

“Alice, honey, could you run to the gas station and grab some milk?” Simon called from the kitchen, surrounded by pots and pans. “We are completely out, and your father is highly unpleasant without his morning latte.”

Cynthia and I were watching TV; Cynthia was tapping away at her phone with a bowl of popcorn between her crossed legs, and I was flipping through my biology textbook boredly trying to summon the energy to do my homework, some sitcom playing on the television.

“Um, sure,” I said, tossing my book onto the couch and standing up. I’d do pretty much anything to avoid Biology.

“Great, there’s some money here. The gas station is four blocks down, then to your left. Don’t forget your phone,” Simon beamed at me, as he took an enormous knife to a fish that I suddenly felt sorry for, whilst gesturing at a small dish that held spare keys, change and a few folded bills.

Plucking a ten from the bowl, I grabbed my bag and my sneakers. I could kind of understand Simon asking me – Dad was in the shower, Cynthia was already in her pajamas, and I was almost eighteen; much safer than a fourteen-year-old walking the dark streets. Plus, I knew how to defend myself. And this was Forks – as far as Simon knew, a perfectly safe place to walk around after dark.

The walk was cold, seeping in through my hoodie, and I was grateful to spot the gas station, cutting through the alley between the buildings.

The gas station was brightly lit, and clean – it was really more of a mini-mart. I found the milk, and detoured down the candy aisle to snag myself some chocolate. The cashier was some college-aged guy, more interested in his car magazine than me, as he slid the change and my bag across the counter.

Sighing, I headed out, cutting back through the alley, stepping around the dumpster.

I didn’t see anyone.

I didn’t see him until it was too late.

Jasper Cullen; he was standing at the end of the alley, in an army green hunting jacket.

I paused next to the dumpster, my hand tightening around the handles of my bag.

He said nothing, but watched me with a strange and unpleasant look on his face. The back of my neck prickled as I continued walking down the alley. Why didn’t I turn around and walk back to the gas station? Why was he here?

Why would a vampire hang out in dark alleys if they were trying to blend in?

The little voice of logic in the back of my mind was rattling through all the reasons I should stop, but I didn’t. I just kept walking, my hoodie obscuring my face enough that I looked like I was looking at the ground when I was really keeping an eye on him. He was unmoving, his hair in his eyes, casually leaning against the brick retaining wall. He could have been any other bored, rebellious teenager.

My problem was my complete stubbornness. I can’t back down from a challenge. I don’t enjoy retreating and regrouping. A one-girl army against the world.  

I just kept walking, not even planning on acknowledging him. I just wanted to get home, back to the warmth of my fathers’ house, the hum of the television. And I would be; in ten minutes, I’d be home, back on the couch with my candy. Simon wouldn’t be happy about me eating chocolate, let alone gas-station candy, before dinner but he wouldn’t stop me this time.

Distracting myself with my daydream of getting home, I didn’t even have time to flinch when Jasper finally moved.

His hand jerked out like a striking snake, clamping around my forearm, dragging me towards him.

I yelped, trying to jerk free, but his grip was like iron. His eyes were completely black, and he was pulling me along, despite my feet scrabbling against the concrete. I was too far away from the gas station now – perhaps I could have gotten the attention of witnesses before, when I was closer to the street, but now we were fully cloistered in the shadows of the alleyway.

He threw me against the brick wall, and pain flared up my back; I choked on my own gasp. The bag containing the milk and candy fell from my grip and the milk burst cold and wet over my sneakers, as I stared up at him, trying to re-orientate myself.

Jasper was staring at me with naked desperation, moving slowly closer to me – his eyes were dark and dull, boring into mine; his jaw set and nostrils flaring slightly. I met his gaze and waited, trying not to show fear. That was important. Fear provokes predators. It gives them power.

It wasn’t easy – I was afraid. Bone-chillingly terrified, to be honest. I kept reminding myself that this wouldn’t be the worst thing I’d lived through. If I survived, of course. And thinking of home, whilst trying not to vomit.

It’s easy for a place to become home, if you think about it. Warm, safe, and with somewhere to sleep and food to eat. That’s all anyone really wants when it comes down to it. But it had taken only a week for me to love that place, the family I’d never known.

He fisted one hand in my hair and twisted my neck harshly to the side. The bones screamed but didn’t break, and I could hear my breathing – shallow and panicked. The even rational voice in my head politely reminded me that I was lucky – lucky he hadn’t snapped my neck or spine, that an ordinary human would be dead  

This, this had been my fear since I had seen them in the cafeteria, and now I was living it.

His teeth pierced my jugular roughly, and I gasped, my hands bracing futilely against his chest. It hurt, but it felt kind of good, too. His mouth felt hot on my throat, and it was only his hands holding me in place that kept me upright. I whimpered as my head swam and then suddenly he tore himself away - it hurt as my skin tore in his mouth, and I dropped to the ground dazed, blood spilling down my throat and shoulder, disgustingly warm.

He was choking and gasping, looking at me with horror before vanishing, and the world around me slowly darkened, until the cold and rough feeling of the pavement under me was all that I was aware of.

And slowly, even that left me.

I don't know how long I was unconscious but suddenly, I felt cold hands on me out of nowhere, only vaguely aware that an undetermined amount of time had passed.

"Mary-Alice? Mary Alice, I’m Esme Cullen," came a gentle voice, “You’ve been hurt, sweetheart.”

I blinked but everything was blurry and I was so tired. Was I sitting up? I didn’t know, and I couldn’t move. A soft, feeble whine of misery came out of my lips, but it didn’t feel like I’d made it. It felt like just breathing was taking up all my energy reserves.

“Holy shit, look at her eyes,” came a male voice.

“We need to get her to Carlisle.”

It felt like I was in a dream, as I was carefully picked up and carried. I could hear and smell the milk and blood dripping from me, feel the roughness of the towel against my torn neck. The coolness of vampire skin seeping through my clothing.

And then I was gone again.

--

A swirl of light, a massive space full of shadows.

My boots clicking on the floor as I walked in, dozens of mirror reflecting my movements.

The sound of my boots changing, and suddenly I was wading through blood. A gasp, and I looked up to see Cynthia in a nightgown, standing at the very edge of the pool of blood, looking scared; Dad and Simon clinging tightly to Cynthia as the blood kept closer to them.

Turning around to see Bella Swan, broken and staring, a mirror shattered all around her.

And the sound of every single mirror shattering into tiny, infinite pieces that sounded like rain as they fell…

--

“Mary-Alice?”

There was light.

It was kind of blue.

“Mary-Alice?��

And highly irritating.

“Mary-Alice?”

I blinked slowly as it shone directly into my eyes.  

“Mary-Alice?” came a pleasant voice.

My vision was blurry, but slowly clearing as I looked around. Dr Cullen was crouched in front of me; I was lying on a couch, with a pillow under my head, and the contents of a first aid kit spread out over a coffee table. The rest of the Cullens were scattered around the room, all with grim expressions of varying degrees.

Nothing like regaining consciousness in a room full of people standing around and staring at you.

At least no one was getting handsy.

I ignored them as I slowly sat up, my head feeling like it was full of sand, but glaring when Dr Cullen moved to assist me. My hand reached up to the bite wound – only to find bandages covering my throat.

“Just a few stitches,” Dr Cullen said, with a pleasant smile. “You lost quite a bit of blood.”

“Mm, I always seem to be misplacing that,” I muttered, testing movement in both my arms and my neck. My back felt like one massive bruise, but I didn’t want to draw attention to that right now. Better than the broken ribs – or paralysis - anyone else would have ended up with. Still, it hurt and would take its sweet time to heal. My neck stung and pulled as I moved, but again, I was alive, and that was all that I ever really hoped for.

Surely I was running out of lives. One of these days, something had to put me down for good.

I looked up at Jasper, standing awkwardly in the corner and scowled. “You know Hale, normally you take a girl out to dinner or something first.” I mentally winced; my voice was slurring and croaky, not exactly the sign of ‘the unstoppable force’ I wanted to portray.

But I was clearly understood, as everyone froze, gaping at me, before Emmett began to laugh. And Rosalie seemed to be intent on murdering me with a glare.

“That answers our next question,” Dr Cullen sighed, gathering up the first aid kit. “How are you feeling?”

“Tired,” I said grumpily, and trying to work out my next step, to get from couch to no-longer-in-the-Cullen-home.

I had learnt through previous experience that I didn’t have a chance of outrunning a vampire, or fighting one hand-to-hand, but I had a few tricks that would usually allow me to navigate myself to safety. Most of the time. With a bit of luck. And my bag always held an aerosol of deodorant and a cigarette lighter, in case of emergency. You can do a lot of damage with those things.

My head was spinning. I wished I was… basically anywhere but here.

Mrs Cullen suddenly appeared at my elbow, holding out a glass of water, with a strangely worried-hopeful expression on her face.

I took the water with a grimace that was meant to be a small smile of thanks.

What? They might have been bloodsuckers, but that didn’t mean I was going to be a complete asshole. After all, Mrs Cullen had come to rescue me, when she could have left me to bleed out in the alleyway and let a mugger or a wild animal take the blame. That was decent of her, and it couldn’t have been easy, with all that blood.

And I didn’t want to annoy them.

“You had a seizure of some kind, and when Esme and Emmett found you, your eyes and lips had turned blue,” Dr Cullen said. “I have a few questions.”

“Okay,” I said. I spied my bag next to the couch and reached for it, trying my hardest to keep a poker face at the pain that had taken up camp everywhere, rifling through for my phone.

Dad and Simon would be losing it. I had gone out to pick up milk.

“You know about us,” Rosalie said suddenly, her eyes flashing angrily.

“I do,” I said, finding the phone – which was flat. I still hadn’t quite gotten a hold of owning a cellphone, let alone remembering to check it and charge it.

“Start talking,” Rosalie snapped.

“Rose, calm down,” Esme said.

“She’s not human,” Edward said suddenly, his gaze flicking towards Jasper. “Her blood…”

Everyone looked at Jasper. He looked ashamed and tired, and I kind of wanted to hug him, even after his exsanguination attempt. It honestly wasn’t the worst thing that a vampire had tried to do to me. He looked like he needed a lifetime of hugs, actually. Maybe it was the blood loss, but I would have given him that hug if it meant I got to cop a feel; it would just a bonus for being a good Samaritan, really.

God, I was completely loopy. Had I hit my head?

“It wasn’t right,” Jasper said slowly. “It was wonderful at first, and terrible. Not thick enough, not warm enough either. At the end, it was like a bitter burn. Just… wrong. Contaminated.”

Everyone swung back to look at me, whilst I pointedly ignored them and jabbed the buttons on my cell phone experimentally. Nothing.

“What … what are you?” Dr Cullen asked me, his curiosity evident.

“I don’t like that question,” I said shortly. “And you get used to the flavour, I’ve heard.” Those stories, ugh. Mom like to use those as threats every time I had protested about anything – from another pointless ‘test’, to refusing to take a bath. It’s why she never, ever went anywhere near Nevada.

I grabbed my blood-stained hoodie off the end of the couch and struggled to pull it on.

“Jesus, what happened?” Emmett blurted out, and did they really have to stare like that?

I looked down, to see the neckline of my shirt had pulled to the side, to reveal the worst of my scars. It ran from the left side of my throat, across my upper chest and ended at my right clavicle. It was faint, invisible to the human eye, but vampire sight would see the webbing and tearing pattern.

“Boston when I was fifteen,” I said, zipping the hoodie up. “I spent my fifteenth birthday in hospital, handcuffed to the bed, so I couldn’t get away quick enough to heal it better.”

No one really knew how to respond to that.

“You’ve got quite a collection of scars,” Dr Cullen tried again. “And more than a few bite marks.”

“I should call my father, he’s probably worried,” I said flatly. “I went to get milk.”

“You cannot expect us to let you leave without telling us something. You know about us,” Rosalie snapped, stepping in front of me. “You should die for that.”

And I looked at them, really looked at them. In their nice clothes, with their nice house. A human girlfriend, and a human job. They had helped me, instead of leaving me to die. Whatever these people were, they weren’t like the vampires I had known.

“You all need to pretend you never met me,” I said finally, meeting her gaze without flinching. “Or you will die for that.”

And then I stood up, and left.

[beatlescartoonimagines]

Norwegian Woods

Request: “Can you do one where you accidentally get infected by the glitch and one of the glitch boys talks to you about how to manage the feelings?” – Anonymous

Warnings: Body horror

Summary: Ever since you came to Dollar Circle, the Cryptid Forest has been a source of intense fascination. After a while, the temptation to visit it becomes too great.

Length: 2923

A/N: The glitch boy I used to help you is Glitch Ringo. Also, I know this is like, really long, and a lot of the beginning is focused on how you get glitched, but there is focus at the end about how to manage the feelings and such!! :::)

Dollar Circle is, in many ways, the best place to be in this strange world.  A safe haven from the crueler of the strange Beatle-creatures that roam the universe, all of the incarnations here are kind to you. OctoRingo especially is very kind to you, making sure you always have enough to eat and that your diet is varied and healthy. Glow George, while difficult for you to understand, gets the point across that he wants to keep you safe as well. This place is overall much safer than the castle, where you know others are stuck.

Well, for the most part.

On the edge of OctoRingo’s realm, small and yet seemingly unending, there is a deep forest. You’ve always been strangely curious of the forest, ever since you popped into this world by ways you can’t quit remember. A few times, Glow George has caught you on the edge of the gardens, staring at the forest. The Cryptid Forest. Every time he catches you, Glow George manages to convey to you that you should not go in there and distracts you, getting you to do something else. But the forest still calls to you.

It’s gotten to the point where you spend almost all your waking hours gardening, helping OctoRingo just to distract yourself. You’re not as strong or as fast or as multi-limbed as him, but because of the amount of time you put into it, you get a similar amount of work done a day. OctoRingo, when he notices, will tell you to take a break and go back home for some tea. He knows that all that work makes you tired, but you don’t want to be left alone with your thoughts. You don’t want to be tempted into going somewhere you know will cause you harm.

You don’t want to sleep anymore either. Your dreams – or perhaps they’re nightmares – all draw you to the forest. You can almost see it, almost touch it. You hear a voice that beckons you, a low voice that doesn’t make any real sense. You can still understand it. It wants you to come to the forest. You want to go into the forest.

There isn’t much you know about the object of your obsessions. You know the cryptids who live in it are much more dangerous than OctoRingo, Glow George, Smorge, Doublennon, or any of the other cryptids who reside in Dollar Circle. The cryptids in the forest were supposed to be cruel, infectious. There were non-Beatles trapped in the forest as well, but otherwise, the forest was and is a mystery.

This morning, you can’t stand it anymore. As you wake up from a dream where you were almost there, you cannot control yourself. You get up and go out into the almost-dawn, the undetermined source of light you ignorantly call the sun barely rising. You feel yourself being pulled as if by a string as you slowly but determinedly pad towards the forest, your feet barely feeling the sand and grass beneath them.

There is a very low hum you can hear immediately upon entering the tree line. The trees, you realise, are very dark. Gnarled and leaf-bare, they somehow managed to crowd out the sky. It’s so dark you can barely see, and as you turn around for a last look at Dollar Circle, you can’t perceive the buildings anymore. All you can see is a nearly blinding light that lets anyone in the Cryptid Forest know when they’re near the edge.

You keep forwards. The sounds you typically associate with a forest are absent here, replaced by the humming and occasionally, something you might mistake for a voice. The snap of someone stepping on a branch randomly cracks from different directions as you go forwards, your head swiveling like an owl’s every time you hear something. For the first time, fear is bubbling in your consciousness, but you keep going, feeling like you know your way.

It feels like time is no longer running. You don’t have a watch, and you can’t see the sky. It seems to be getting darker and darker as you go forwards, your hands trembling as you realise you are cold. The humming is getting louder, and you keep going, not entirely by your own accord. You are being drawn forwards by someone else’s will. Your thoughts are slightly fuzzy, only reacting to what is immediately happening, not thinking any deeper than the surface.

After what you’d judge to probably be thirty minutes, the humming suddenly becomes unbearably loud. You cry out and cover your ears, your shout echoing around you as you drop to your knees in pain. Eyes shut tight, an infinity passes in an instant and suddenly it is silent. You open your eyes slowly. The humming is gone, as is the feeling of needing to go further. Broken from the trance, you are on your own, in the middle of the forest, your thoughts back with you. And you begin to panic.

You have no idea where you are, how deep you went, or even which direction you came from. Jumping to your feet, you glance around, trying to see in the dark. It seems like there is a fog in the trees, keeping you from being able to see more than a few metres in any direction. The fog is… strange. Like it’s full of static. You step forwards to see it better, eyes squinted, but it moves back as you move forwards, keeping the same relative distance to you. You stare at it, trying to decipher if what you’re seeing is accurate, until suddenly something comes at you in the dark.

Letting out an echoing scream, your eyes shut and you collapse to the ground as something grabs you. Its hands are grabbing your wrists, its grip burning your skin and seeming to vibrate. As its hands move, the sensation remains, spreading slowly down your own hands. You open your eyes in panic and look up at what is on top of you, screaming again in reaction. You cannot even perceive its face, but it is everchanging and derelict, left to waste on a contorted body. It is desperately clawing at you, previously unseen jaws opening wide as you close your eyes again. You hear a whisper – the whisper from your dreams, untranslatable but understandable. You open your eyes and it is gone.

Getting to your unsteady feet, you pick a direction and take off running as quickly as you can. You can no longer feel your hands, but all you care about is getting out as the strange burning, tingling numbness spreads slowly up your wrists. You don’t care how much noise you make as your crashing footsteps echo through the trees, searching desperately for the light.

It takes a long time, to the point where your lungs are making it difficult to go on, but you finally can see a growing light. Gasping for air, a strange fuzziness beginning to fill your chest, you burst out into the light and the grass, collapsing to the ground in exhaustion once you feel you’re far away enough from the tree line. Shaking, you swallow hard and stare up at the sky, eyes watering. You finally look down at your hands; if you could, you would have let out another scream. They seem to be in five positions at once, shifting before your eyes, their borders hazy, your flesh and bone seemingly warped and staticky. Feeling the fuzziness in your chest slow down your breathing and quell your leaping heartrate, you close your eyes, losing consciousness about as quickly as you lose feeling in your body.

When you wake, it’s night again. The low humming of the forest prompts you to jump up to your feet, and unsteadily you make your way home. Slamming the door behind you, you’re suddenly overcome with how strange you feel. You can’t really feel your body – it’s like you’re entirely numb, but you can still control yourself. You stumble through your house to the bathroom, with the intention of taking a shower. At least, until you glance to the side and see yourself in the mirror.

With a bloodcurdling, oddly echoing screech, you shatter the lightbulb and the mirror in the bathroom, as well as any other nearby lightbulbs in the house. Your hand clamps over your mouth, and you stare into your now cracked reflection.

Your face is… faded. Everything is still there, but every time you move, it leaves an impression in the air behind it, like moving a source of light quickly in the dark. An imprint on the eye. Your skin, your features, your silhouette are all blurry. Even as you stay entirely still, it’s like parts of you are ever moving, ever changing, a strange fuzzy static appearance having taken over your especially mobile parts. You scramble out of the bathroom and into your bedroom where you have a full-length mirror, filled with both insatiable curiosity and deep-rooted fear.

Your entire body has become corrupted. Your hands and feet especially, up to the elbows and knees, seem to be phasing in and out of existence while staying still. Your abdomen is mostly alright, but your head… you want to scream again, but you slap your everchanging hand over your mouth once more, not wanting to shatter another mirror. Tears fill your eyes, flickering in and out of sight before splattering onto the mirror at full speed, the movement of your features enough to rocket it off.

You’ve become what Glow George had warned you of. You’ve become glitched.

Before your thoughts could continue to spiral in what would inevitably become self-destructive, you hear a loud, multi fisted knock at the door. Someone shouts your name. “Hey! Are you alright? We heard some glass breaking and a scream.” You hear OctoRingo call out. You can’t let him see you like this. He’d know you broke the rules; he’d know you’d become a monster.

Panicking, you scramble for your window, somehow managing to phase through it and fall to the ground outside. “Hey! What was that?” You hear from the front of your house, and you take off running towards the forest. You’re fast, faster than you used to be, but your lack of familiarity with your newly corrupted limbs prevent you from being able to outrun Glow George. He seems to appear next to you as you feel yourself being grabbed. For a moment, you struggle, but as the panic ebbs you collapse into sobs. Blue and olive light reflects on your face as Glow George, concerned and confused, realises who you are and holds you up so you don’t fall to the ground.

You barely register the easily identifiable footsteps of OctoRingo as he catches up to you two, letting out a gasp as he realises who – and what – you are. He bends down and puts a hand on your trembling shoulder, stifling a groan as your corruption feels as though it burns his skin. Luckily, it wasn’t contagious - yet.

OctoRingo tries to ask if you are alright and how you are feeling, but you can’t manage to say anything. You can’t stop crying, so OctoRingo glances up at Glow George. “Let’s bring them back home. I think I know someone who can help.” Your hands – however many you seem to have now – grip onto Glow George’s jacket as he lifts you up, and you continue to sob helplessly into his shoulder as he carries you to OctoRingo’s home.

When you get there, you have run out of tears, but you’re still sniffling miserably and unable to convey a coherent sentence. Glow George sets you down on the couch and sits next to you as you put your heads in your hands, trying to stay calm as you feel the shifting of your face and the shifting of your hands briefly conflict before paralleling each other. You only lift your head as OctoRingo comes into the room and offers you some tea, which you take gratefully. The first sip ends up vibrating onto your shirt, and with a wracked sob, you nearly burst into angry tears. OctoRingo’s quiet affirmations keep you calm, however, and you manage to slowly, slowly consume the remainder of the cup without spilling it or vibrating it into a gas.

“I’ve called someone who can help, and he’s going to come in the morning, okay? It’ll be alright. He can help you. I put something in the tea to help you relax, and I want you to go to sleep, alright? Things will be better in the morning.” OctoRingo assured you in a voice that made you relax. Something about him was very calming. You nod, and they stay with you until you slowly fall asleep on the couch.

You’re woken up by the sound of two Ringos. One was OctoRingo, and the other was more… corrupted. They’re calmly discussing something when their voices suddenly cease. As you slowly sit up, you realise you’d been moved to a bedroom. You blink, the world losing its haze as someone opens the door to the room you’re in. “Yes. They’re awake.”

The other Ringo, as it turns out, is Glitch Ringo. He seems to glide in the room as he moves to sit down next to you, and OctoRingo stays closer to the door as he holds it with three of his hands. “Glitch Ringo can help explain what you’re going through.” Your multi-limbed friend explains, and you nod slowly, turning to Glitch Ringo as OctoRingo nods and leaves the room.

“So you went into the forest.” He begins, and you take a shaky breath before nodding. Obviously your regret is clear on your face, as he looks sorry that he asked so bluntly. “I –” You begin, eyes widening as you hear your own voice. Other than the strange echo, it sounds like it’s been corrupted; recorded on an old VHS player, left to rot, and then fed back onto a computer before being compressed. Putting a hand on your shoulder, Glitch Ringo’s reassuring expression keeps you from losing it again. You swallow hard, before admitting that you felt compelled to go in. Then you explained, stiltedly, what had happened while you were inside.

Glitch Ringo held out his hand, which was clearly experiencing something similar to yours but much milder. You tentatively put yours in his, and suddenly you’re much more aware of your condition. He narrows his eyes. “Huh. I’m not sure who did this to you, but it’s certainly something. This could have destroyed me. If only!” He jokes – half jokes? – and you give a slight chuckle as he inspects the way you’re glitching.

For a few minutes, he keeps a strangely calming hold on your hand as the rampant corruption seems to calm in your system. “I wish I could tell you that this’ll go away, but unfortunately, it won’t. I should know.” That last sentence is said with intense regret, and you can suddenly understand why Glitch Ringo always seems a bit depressed. You sigh, already knowing that this was permanent. How couldn’t it be, with the way it had consumed your entire form? “But don’t let it get you down. It could have been a lot worse.” You probably should have died, his unspoken words in the air practically leap at you. “I know it’s easy to get upset, but there are benefits.” He insists, and you look back up at him.

“I know it doesn’t seem like it, but you’ll get used to it. If you ever feel it taking you over – that fuzzy feeling? Yeah. If you feel it taking you over, just take some deep breaths and keep your mind on yourself. It can be annoying, but it’ll be alright. And if it feels as though it’s too much, you can call me.” You bite your lip and nod. So it was like a disease – a really, really disturbing disease. “It’s alright! It’s not so bad. Like I said, there are benefits. You’ll probably get faster, and sometimes you can do things you couldn’t before. Like the way I skate around? Haha, yeah.” He can see you’re feeling a bit better now. It’s not so bad, you reason to yourself.

For the next hour, Glitch Ringo helps you control your appearance. As you calm down and picture yourself the way you used to be, you find that you can minimize the glitching to the point where you look almost normal. You still look hazy around the edges, but for the most part, it’s alright. You’re alright.

Glitch Ringo gives you a smile and you feel calm again. Not quite like yourself, but a lot better than you had the night before. He offers you a hand and helps you to stand, and you both exit the bedroom, finding OctoRingo and Glow George hanging about very close to the door. “You look much better!” OctoRingo says with a smile as he hands you some tea, and Glow George’s eyes were purple and olive with happiness and worry. You give him a smile, and most of the olive goes away. Most of it.

As you head back home after having tea with everyone, you feel a lot better about yourself. Glitch Ringo gave you his house’s number, and you know you can call him if everything came crashing back to you. You don’t even feel much of the numbness anymore, and soon, you know keeping how you looked in mind would become second nature. This should be alright. You just wish you weren’t a glitch…

… and that you’d never gone in that forsaken forest.

[grgedoors02142]

Uber Fail: Upheaval at the World’s Most Valuable Startup is a Wake-Up Call For Silicon Valley

On the morning of June 13, Uber employees shuffled into an all-hands meeting at the company’s San Francisco headquarters. They came to hear the results of an investigation that, like many in Silicon Valley, they had been anxiously awaiting for months. In February, a former female engineer at the company wrote an exposé describing a workplace plagued by sexism and mismanagement; the explosive allegations led Uber to hire former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s law firm to find out how far harassment and retaliation had gone at the world’s fastest-growing startup. “The process, as you all know, was longer than we thought and more painful than we thought, but it comes to an end today,” board member Arianna Huffington told employees during a presentation in which executives’ voices at times sounded brittle with emotion.

Over the past eight years, the hard-charging ride-hailing company has grown into a global powerhouse worth nearly $70 billion, disrupting the taxi industry in 76 countries and creating an app relied on by millions both for rides and for income. The wildly successful company has also been plagued by scandal from the start. Class-action lawsuits, driver revolts, cringeworthy faux pas by its brash CEO, you name it. But the past few months were something else: the February exposé was followed by a string of revelations so relentless, many started to wonder if Uber was in the midst of an existential crisis. In the end, the Holder report didn’t recommend reform so much as exorcism. The biggest change: CEO Travis Kalanick announced he would be taking a leave of absence, of undetermined length, and would eventually return to a diminished role. He described it as a time to grieve for his mother, who recently died, as well as a time to grow as a CEO. It was an acutely humbling turn for a founder who had cultivated an aura as a brawler. “If we are going to work on Uber 2.0,” Kalanick wrote in a message to the firm’s 14,000 workers, “I also need to work on Travis 2.0 to become the leader that this company needs and that you deserve.”

More is at stake in Uber’s crisis than one company’s future, no matter how much venture capital it has raised. Because Uber is the defining technology success story of this era, its woes–and how it weathers them–are a wake-up call for all of Silicon Valley. This place, having made itself the hope for the future of the U.S. economy, is also producing a fair amount of anxiety. Even before the Holder report, Uber’s unraveling had undermined some of the Valley’s credos: the cult of the founder, the rabid pursuit of growth, the virtue of disruption. Nor was Uber’s failure to address issues of workplace inclusiveness unusual; it was simply spectacular.

In the end, what makes Uber a cautionary tale is not that it’s the only tech company with a winner-take-all worldview or toxins in its culture. It’s that it happens to be one of the most valuable.

If there has been one constant for Uber, it has been extraordinary timing. With shocks of gray on either side of his spiked hair, Kalanick is, at 40, considerably older than many ambitious founders in the Valley. He was born in Los Angeles and studied engineering at UCLA before dropping out in 1998 help to found his first company. His Napster-like file-sharing service ended when some of the world’s biggest media companies sued the startup, forcing Kalanick to take the firm into Chapter 11 bankruptcy. He called his next company a “revenge business” because it provided technology to some of the very companies that had targeted him. It sold for $18.7 million in 2007.

By 2009, Kalanick had moved to the hills of San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood. His townhouse there became an entrepreneurial salon and techie hangout he once described on Twitter as a “church of creative capitalism.” A friend, Garrett Camp, had become enamored with the idea for an app to hail private luxury cars after he was unable to catch cabs in the city. UberCab, as it was then known, started its service in San Francisco in May 2010. By the end of the year, Kalanick had taken over as chief, and the company had changed its name to Uber in order to dodge legal complaints that it was advertising itself as a taxi firm, the first of many squabbles with regulators.

The firm was aggressive. Because taxi companies held monopolies in many cities, Kalanick cast them as the villains in a big-guys-vs.-good-guy drama. The big guys–which he once referred to as a collective “asshole”–were heavily regulated, with laws varying greatly from city to city. And the good guy, Uber, ignored these rules in order to bring consumers a better service–like rides that actually showed up when it was raining or that showed up at all. Ignoring the rules also allowed almost anyone to make money by ferrying around people as Uber drivers. That was attractive to many workers, but caused several cities to ban or suspend the service.

Even amid turmoil–strikes by angry taxi drivers, unresolved questions of legal liability–Uber expanded fast. Smartphones had become common, and consumers, especially the urbanites with disposable income that Uber catered to, were waking up to the new world of apps. Using it had that magic “it just works” element common to revolutionary technology: open the app, press a button, and in a few minutes a chauffeur appears. Customers were also getting familiar with the so-called peer-to-peer economy, renting out people’s private homes on sites like Airbnb. The idea of getting in a car with an unprofessional stranger didn’t sound as crazy as it once would have.

The year 2010 also turned out to be a fine time to start a company. After the financial crisis and the subsequent dearth of exciting tech firms to invest in, Uber came onto the scene promising the kind of world-changing big payday investors craved. The company continually rolled out flashy new services from helicopter rides to puppies on demand. Executives made plans not only to expand worldwide, including China, but also to remake everything from food delivery to driverless cars.

Kalanick’s approach was brazen and nakedly capitalistic. Unlike Google or Facebook, which famously brought in “adults” Eric Schmidt and Sheryl Sandberg to help manage a growing enterprise, Kalanick remained the face of the firm, which he referred to as “Boob-er” in a 2014 interview with GQ because it had made him more popular with women. Traits often ascribed to Steve Jobs–pique, occasional churlishness–were in Kalanick married to the missionary zeal of an engineer who would make the world more efficient if only obstructionists would let him. “He’s a fighter. He is against institutional structures,” Schmidt told TIME in 2015. “He can be disagreeable in that sense that, well, he disagrees.”

Kalanick’s readiness to fight–with lawmakers, competitors, reporters–was at first an asset. Compared to firms like Google, which flew under the radar for years before rubbing up against regulators, Uber was born into conflict. “Everything this company has almost ever done has been a battle,” says Avi Savar, CEO of Dreamit, a startup accelerator and venture-capital firm. That made Uber successful going up against comparatively sclerotic municipal governments in cities like New York, but also encouraged what some employees have described as a bunker-like paranoia among executives.

“When you have a value system that is in some ways a benefit to you in the early days when you’re charging really hard, it can turn into a tragic flaw,” says Stephen Beck, founder of consulting firm cg42. “‘Run fast, break things, and we can pick up the pieces later’ is O.K. until it’s not O.K.”

Even as his penchant for public arrogance increasingly made Kalanick a bête noire to some, it worked for Uber. Between 2009 and today, the company raised more than $15 billion, eventually becoming the most valuable venture-backed company in history. In an era of “unicorns”–startups valued at $1 billion–Uber was the decacorn. Until it looked liked it was on the way to becoming the first hectocorn, valued at $100 billion.

Some of Uber’s problems were on public display. Drivers sued over their legal classification, saying Uber should treat them as employees–with the attendant benefits–if it was going to do things like set the price they could earn per mile. Some complained they weren’t even making minimum wage. Among its millions of riders, horror stories of being assaulted or kidnapped made news, and legal battles ensued over who bore responsibility when people got hurt or mistreated. Competitor Lyft accused Uber of underhanded tactics like calling for and canceling rides to jam up the smaller rival.

Inside Uber, gender and diversity problems festered as they have at other tech firms. Silicon Valley, for all its ingenuity and economic clout, maintains a reputation for inhospitability to women, people of color, anyone who didn’t go to an Ivy League school or is older than a graduate TA. There are the accounts of misbehavior at startups like Tinder and Snapchat. But there are also plenty of studies: one found that women leave tech jobs at twice the rate men do. In another, half or more reported being asked to do menial tasks men aren’t expected to, dealing with unwanted sexual advances and feeling they don’t have the opportunities of male counterparts.

“Tech has a culture that is worse than many other industries. And that culture in the past has been promoted and been a badge of honor,” says Ellen Pao, a venture capitalist at Kapor Capital who sued her previous VC firm for gender discrimination and lost. She would know, having previously tried to rein in machismo-fueled culture as CEO of Reddit.

After her experience working at Uber, where the cultural pillars included “Always Be Hustlin'” and “Principled Confrontation,” software engineer Susan Fowler decided to write the February blog post that became the epicenter of Uber’s shake-up. In a 2,900-word essay, she described a workplace that was not only Darwinian but profoundly sexist. Her experiences ranged from being sexually propositioned by a male manager–who was allegedly never disciplined because he was a “high performer”–to enduring a counterproductive “game-of-thrones political war” and “organizational chaos” as managers tried to one-up each other. Kalanick tweeted that the behavior she described was “abhorrent” and promised an investigation. The next day the company retained Holder’s law firm to look into claims of harassment, discrimination and retaliation as well as “diversity and inclusion at Uber more broadly.”

As Holder’s firm launched into its work–interviewing hundreds of current and former employees, reviewing millions of documents, holding anonymous focus groups–the bad news kept coming. Kalanick was caught dressing down an Uber driver on a dash-cam video. The company became embroiled in a lawsuit about the theft of self-driving technology from rival Google. The widow of an employee tied her husband’s suicide to the company’s aggressive work environment.

Bernard Coleman, Uber’s head of diversity who joined the company in January after doing the same job for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, jokes that the chaos made him feel like he was back on the trail: “The only difference between Uber and a campaign is campaigns end.”

During the drumroll that preceded Holder’s recommendations, a separate investigation by another law firm led to the firing of more than 20 Uber employees. That probe looked into more than 200 claims of infractions like sexual harassment, discrimination and retaliation. It also made it possible to read between the tightly spaced lines of Holder’s 13-page report, offering a point-by-point blueprint for dismantling the culture that made a juggernaut. Its recommendations ranged from increasing the board’s oversight to changing the time of staff meals to accommodate employees with families.

When asked for comment on the report, Uber directed TIME to an email the company’s HR chief, Liane Hornsey, had sent to workers. “There’s lot of incredibly hard work ahead, but I have never felt more confident in a company’s ability to change,” it read in part. “Together, I want us to show the world what a truly incredible redemption story looks like.”

Silicon Valley’s heroes have always been rule breakers: Bill Gates’ willingness to “borrow” a good idea, Jeff Bezos’ disregard for epic losses, Elon Musk’s flouting of the status quo. Being a founder means having the moral flexibility to promote (and raise money for) things that don’t quite exist yet. When Steve Jobs first showed the iPhone in 2007, his demo was mostly artifice; the device barely worked. Which didn’t mean it wouldn’t change the world when it came out.

On their way to epic success, companies like Google and Facebook broke the rules and made their own. Most of us went along with it so long as we were getting better stuff, smarter search, faster phones. Occasionally mistakes are made, such as when it was revealed Facebook data scientists had run social-psychology experiments on unsuspecting users or when a local paper reported that instead of providing air-conditioning at one of its fulfillment centers, Amazon simply stationed ambulances outside to resuscitate downed workers. But so long as proper contrition is made, forgiveness comes easily.

The tech industry subsists on a virtuous cycle of consumer trust in exchange for continually improving and mostly free services. It’s the price of living in a permanent future tense. Plus, who really wants to read a 50-page terms-of-service agreement or wait more than two days for a package?

That bargain may be fraying, though. Lately it seems that Silicon Valley has started to reach the limits of its old maxims. Uber, with its adherence to a Cro-Magnon corporate culture and obsession for breaking rules, is just the case of the moment. Recently, once high-flying firms like Theranos, Hampton Creek and Magic Leap have been brought low by being shown to have perverted the old rules–over-promising or underdisclosing. The more tech companies dressed in Valley values–grand ambitions to innovate and revolutionize–turn out to disappoint, the faster the compact unravels.

It’s not just a matter of mission statements. The Valley’s money culture has changed drastically in the last decade. For one, there’s more cash in the system: some $73 billion in venture capital was injected into U.S. startups in 2016, compared with $45 billion at the peak of the dotcom boom, according to researcher PitchBook. For another, there’s considerably less transparency as more companies stay private longer to avoid pesky old-economy stuff like oversight and governance–174 private companies are each worth at least $1 billion.

“There’s a general sense in Silicon Valley, and there has been for five to 10 years, that it’s all about growth,” says Dan Lyons, a longtime journalist who has written for two seasons of HBO sitcom Silicon Valley. “Not just reasonable growth, but hypergrowth. Do anything you can to get that growth. That in itself causes a lot of problems.”

Then there’s the Valley’s self-image. It has always seen itself as the outlier where engineers can improve the world. Its promises have been commensurate: Facebook isn’t just a place to post your vacation photos, it’s working “to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” Apple isn’t just churning out gadgets, it’s on a quest “to change the world for the better,” as CEO Tim Cook likes to say. And Uber is not just a car service for millennials when they’re too sauced to drive home. It’s on a mission, as Kalanick said in a 2016 TED talk, to have such an impact on U.S. infrastructure that Americans can “reclaim our cities.”

So far, Valley companies have mostly delivered on promises to change our lives and make them better in ways that other industries generally can’t. But if these promises start falling through–if a company like Uber begins to look like a naked grab at monopoly rather than an earnest attempt to make life easier to navigate–the Valley will appear out of touch.

There’s another reason these questions are likely to matter more in the coming years rather than less. The reality is that, somewhere between Xerox Parc and Uber, Silicon Valley achieved escape velocity. Technology is advancing so rapidly that, at this point, it is always going to outpace the law, the government or the public’s capacity to fully understand its ramifications. The genie is never going back into its flip phone. How else could history’s most valuable startup, however troubled, emerge from nothing in eight years? Future startups are going to make decisions that will impact the lives of millions, defining the world the way religions and empires used to. iPhones and tweets and more convenient taxis were one thing. But the wave on the horizon now–artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, nanotechnology–will be something else entirely.

If Uber’s stunning stumble proves anything, it’s that in the absence of any rule makers that can keep up with them, the architects of the new economy–which may be another way of saying, the new world–must hold themselves accountable. And consumers need to be able to trust them to do that well. It’s possible the Valley has never had a trust-testing moment quite like this one.

It’s also possible that what we’re witnessing is the birth of a new Silicon Valley value, the concept of responsible disruption–one that incorporates inclusion and diversity, unsexy and difficult as they may seem, alongside thinking differently.

All of which Uber seems to have at least begun to grasp. The company’s board unanimously voted to accept every recommendation of the Holder report. Kalanick will go on leave. As the executives who remain work to implement the changes, other businesses will be watching to see what happens, how easy it is or isn’t for Kalanick’s “Uber 2.0” to come into being. “The key here is to recognize that we all unequivocally condemn the past,” Huffington told employees in the all-hands meeting, “but we need to judge ourselves going forward from today on what we are doing right now.”

Right now turned out to mean immediately. During the meeting, board member David Bonderman, a partner at private equity firm TPG, interjected with a sexist quip which quickly made the rounds on social media. Within hours, he resigned.

–With reporting by LISA EADICICCO

This appears in the June 26, 2017 issue of TIME. from DIYS http://ift.tt/2sDn1iN

[rtawngs20815]

Uber Fail: Upheaval at the World’s Most Valuable Startup is a Wake-Up Call For Silicon Valley

On the morning of June 13, Uber employees shuffled into an all-hands meeting at the company’s San Francisco headquarters. They came to hear the results of an investigation that, like many in Silicon Valley, they had been anxiously awaiting for months. In February, a former female engineer at the company wrote an exposé describing a workplace plagued by sexism and mismanagement; the explosive allegations led Uber to hire former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s law firm to find out how far harassment and retaliation had gone at the world’s fastest-growing startup. “The process, as you all know, was longer than we thought and more painful than we thought, but it comes to an end today,” board member Arianna Huffington told employees during a presentation in which executives’ voices at times sounded brittle with emotion.

Over the past eight years, the hard-charging ride-hailing company has grown into a global powerhouse worth nearly $70 billion, disrupting the taxi industry in 76 countries and creating an app relied on by millions both for rides and for income. The wildly successful company has also been plagued by scandal from the start. Class-action lawsuits, driver revolts, cringeworthy faux pas by its brash CEO, you name it. But the past few months were something else: the February exposé was followed by a string of revelations so relentless, many started to wonder if Uber was in the midst of an existential crisis. In the end, the Holder report didn’t recommend reform so much as exorcism. The biggest change: CEO Travis Kalanick announced he would be taking a leave of absence, of undetermined length, and would eventually return to a diminished role. He described it as a time to grieve for his mother, who recently died, as well as a time to grow as a CEO. It was an acutely humbling turn for a founder who had cultivated an aura as a brawler. “If we are going to work on Uber 2.0,” Kalanick wrote in a message to the firm’s 14,000 workers, “I also need to work on Travis 2.0 to become the leader that this company needs and that you deserve.”

More is at stake in Uber’s crisis than one company’s future, no matter how much venture capital it has raised. Because Uber is the defining technology success story of this era, its woes–and how it weathers them–are a wake-up call for all of Silicon Valley. This place, having made itself the hope for the future of the U.S. economy, is also producing a fair amount of anxiety. Even before the Holder report, Uber’s unraveling had undermined some of the Valley’s credos: the cult of the founder, the rabid pursuit of growth, the virtue of disruption. Nor was Uber’s failure to address issues of workplace inclusiveness unusual; it was simply spectacular.

In the end, what makes Uber a cautionary tale is not that it’s the only tech company with a winner-take-all worldview or toxins in its culture. It’s that it happens to be one of the most valuable.

If there has been one constant for Uber, it has been extraordinary timing. With shocks of gray on either side of his spiked hair, Kalanick is, at 40, considerably older than many ambitious founders in the Valley. He was born in Los Angeles and studied engineering at UCLA before dropping out in 1998 help to found his first company. His Napster-like file-sharing service ended when some of the world’s biggest media companies sued the startup, forcing Kalanick to take the firm into Chapter 11 bankruptcy. He called his next company a “revenge business” because it provided technology to some of the very companies that had targeted him. It sold for $18.7 million in 2007.

By 2009, Kalanick had moved to the hills of San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood. His townhouse there became an entrepreneurial salon and techie hangout he once described on Twitter as a “church of creative capitalism.” A friend, Garrett Camp, had become enamored with the idea for an app to hail private luxury cars after he was unable to catch cabs in the city. UberCab, as it was then known, started its service in San Francisco in May 2010. By the end of the year, Kalanick had taken over as chief, and the company had changed its name to Uber in order to dodge legal complaints that it was advertising itself as a taxi firm, the first of many squabbles with regulators.

The firm was aggressive. Because taxi companies held monopolies in many cities, Kalanick cast them as the villains in a big-guys-vs.-good-guy drama. The big guys–which he once referred to as a collective “asshole”–were heavily regulated, with laws varying greatly from city to city. And the good guy, Uber, ignored these rules in order to bring consumers a better service–like rides that actually showed up when it was raining or that showed up at all. Ignoring the rules also allowed almost anyone to make money by ferrying around people as Uber drivers. That was attractive to many workers, but caused several cities to ban or suspend the service.

Even amid turmoil–strikes by angry taxi drivers, unresolved questions of legal liability–Uber expanded fast. Smartphones had become common, and consumers, especially the urbanites with disposable income that Uber catered to, were waking up to the new world of apps. Using it had that magic “it just works” element common to revolutionary technology: open the app, press a button, and in a few minutes a chauffeur appears. Customers were also getting familiar with the so-called peer-to-peer economy, renting out people’s private homes on sites like Airbnb. The idea of getting in a car with an unprofessional stranger didn’t sound as crazy as it once would have.

The year 2010 also turned out to be a fine time to start a company. After the financial crisis and the subsequent dearth of exciting tech firms to invest in, Uber came onto the scene promising the kind of world-changing big payday investors craved. The company continually rolled out flashy new services from helicopter rides to puppies on demand. Executives made plans not only to expand worldwide, including China, but also to remake everything from food delivery to driverless cars.

Kalanick’s approach was brazen and nakedly capitalistic. Unlike Google or Facebook, which famously brought in “adults” Eric Schmidt and Sheryl Sandberg to help manage a growing enterprise, Kalanick remained the face of the firm, which he referred to as “Boob-er” in a 2014 interview with GQ because it had made him more popular with women. Traits often ascribed to Steve Jobs–pique, occasional churlishness–were in Kalanick married to the missionary zeal of an engineer who would make the world more efficient if only obstructionists would let him. “He’s a fighter. He is against institutional structures,” Schmidt told TIME in 2015. “He can be disagreeable in that sense that, well, he disagrees.”

Kalanick’s readiness to fight–with lawmakers, competitors, reporters–was at first an asset. Compared to firms like Google, which flew under the radar for years before rubbing up against regulators, Uber was born into conflict. “Everything this company has almost ever done has been a battle,” says Avi Savar, CEO of Dreamit, a startup accelerator and venture-capital firm. That made Uber successful going up against comparatively sclerotic municipal governments in cities like New York, but also encouraged what some employees have described as a bunker-like paranoia among executives.

“When you have a value system that is in some ways a benefit to you in the early days when you’re charging really hard, it can turn into a tragic flaw,” says Stephen Beck, founder of consulting firm cg42. “‘Run fast, break things, and we can pick up the pieces later’ is O.K. until it’s not O.K.”

Even as his penchant for public arrogance increasingly made Kalanick a bête noire to some, it worked for Uber. Between 2009 and today, the company raised more than $15 billion, eventually becoming the most valuable venture-backed company in history. In an era of “unicorns”–startups valued at $1 billion–Uber was the decacorn. Until it looked liked it was on the way to becoming the first hectocorn, valued at $100 billion.

Some of Uber’s problems were on public display. Drivers sued over their legal classification, saying Uber should treat them as employees–with the attendant benefits–if it was going to do things like set the price they could earn per mile. Some complained they weren’t even making minimum wage. Among its millions of riders, horror stories of being assaulted or kidnapped made news, and legal battles ensued over who bore responsibility when people got hurt or mistreated. Competitor Lyft accused Uber of underhanded tactics like calling for and canceling rides to jam up the smaller rival.

Inside Uber, gender and diversity problems festered as they have at other tech firms. Silicon Valley, for all its ingenuity and economic clout, maintains a reputation for inhospitability to women, people of color, anyone who didn’t go to an Ivy League school or is older than a graduate TA. There are the accounts of misbehavior at startups like Tinder and Snapchat. But there are also plenty of studies: one found that women leave tech jobs at twice the rate men do. In another, half or more reported being asked to do menial tasks men aren’t expected to, dealing with unwanted sexual advances and feeling they don’t have the opportunities of male counterparts.

“Tech has a culture that is worse than many other industries. And that culture in the past has been promoted and been a badge of honor,” says Ellen Pao, a venture capitalist at Kapor Capital who sued her previous VC firm for gender discrimination and lost. She would know, having previously tried to rein in machismo-fueled culture as CEO of Reddit.

After her experience working at Uber, where the cultural pillars included “Always Be Hustlin'” and “Principled Confrontation,” software engineer Susan Fowler decided to write the February blog post that became the epicenter of Uber’s shake-up. In a 2,900-word essay, she described a workplace that was not only Darwinian but profoundly sexist. Her experiences ranged from being sexually propositioned by a male manager–who was allegedly never disciplined because he was a “high performer”–to enduring a counterproductive “game-of-thrones political war” and “organizational chaos” as managers tried to one-up each other. Kalanick tweeted that the behavior she described was “abhorrent” and promised an investigation. The next day the company retained Holder’s law firm to look into claims of harassment, discrimination and retaliation as well as “diversity and inclusion at Uber more broadly.”

As Holder’s firm launched into its work–interviewing hundreds of current and former employees, reviewing millions of documents, holding anonymous focus groups–the bad news kept coming. Kalanick was caught dressing down an Uber driver on a dash-cam video. The company became embroiled in a lawsuit about the theft of self-driving technology from rival Google. The widow of an employee tied her husband’s suicide to the company’s aggressive work environment.

Bernard Coleman, Uber’s head of diversity who joined the company in January after doing the same job for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, jokes that the chaos made him feel like he was back on the trail: “The only difference between Uber and a campaign is campaigns end.”

During the drumroll that preceded Holder’s recommendations, a separate investigation by another law firm led to the firing of more than 20 Uber employees. That probe looked into more than 200 claims of infractions like sexual harassment, discrimination and retaliation. It also made it possible to read between the tightly spaced lines of Holder’s 13-page report, offering a point-by-point blueprint for dismantling the culture that made a juggernaut. Its recommendations ranged from increasing the board’s oversight to changing the time of staff meals to accommodate employees with families.

When asked for comment on the report, Uber directed TIME to an email the company’s HR chief, Liane Hornsey, had sent to workers. “There’s lot of incredibly hard work ahead, but I have never felt more confident in a company’s ability to change,” it read in part. “Together, I want us to show the world what a truly incredible redemption story looks like.”

Silicon Valley’s heroes have always been rule breakers: Bill Gates’ willingness to “borrow” a good idea, Jeff Bezos’ disregard for epic losses, Elon Musk’s flouting of the status quo. Being a founder means having the moral flexibility to promote (and raise money for) things that don’t quite exist yet. When Steve Jobs first showed the iPhone in 2007, his demo was mostly artifice; the device barely worked. Which didn’t mean it wouldn’t change the world when it came out.

On their way to epic success, companies like Google and Facebook broke the rules and made their own. Most of us went along with it so long as we were getting better stuff, smarter search, faster phones. Occasionally mistakes are made, such as when it was revealed Facebook data scientists had run social-psychology experiments on unsuspecting users or when a local paper reported that instead of providing air-conditioning at one of its fulfillment centers, Amazon simply stationed ambulances outside to resuscitate downed workers. But so long as proper contrition is made, forgiveness comes easily.

The tech industry subsists on a virtuous cycle of consumer trust in exchange for continually improving and mostly free services. It’s the price of living in a permanent future tense. Plus, who really wants to read a 50-page terms-of-service agreement or wait more than two days for a package?

That bargain may be fraying, though. Lately it seems that Silicon Valley has started to reach the limits of its old maxims. Uber, with its adherence to a Cro-Magnon corporate culture and obsession for breaking rules, is just the case of the moment. Recently, once high-flying firms like Theranos, Hampton Creek and Magic Leap have been brought low by being shown to have perverted the old rules–over-promising or underdisclosing. The more tech companies dressed in Valley values–grand ambitions to innovate and revolutionize–turn out to disappoint, the faster the compact unravels.

It’s not just a matter of mission statements. The Valley’s money culture has changed drastically in the last decade. For one, there’s more cash in the system: some $73 billion in venture capital was injected into U.S. startups in 2016, compared with $45 billion at the peak of the dotcom boom, according to researcher PitchBook. For another, there’s considerably less transparency as more companies stay private longer to avoid pesky old-economy stuff like oversight and governance–174 private companies are each worth at least $1 billion.

“There’s a general sense in Silicon Valley, and there has been for five to 10 years, that it’s all about growth,” says Dan Lyons, a longtime journalist who has written for two seasons of HBO sitcom Silicon Valley. “Not just reasonable growth, but hypergrowth. Do anything you can to get that growth. That in itself causes a lot of problems.”

Then there’s the Valley’s self-image. It has always seen itself as the outlier where engineers can improve the world. Its promises have been commensurate: Facebook isn’t just a place to post your vacation photos, it’s working “to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” Apple isn’t just churning out gadgets, it’s on a quest “to change the world for the better,” as CEO Tim Cook likes to say. And Uber is not just a car service for millennials when they’re too sauced to drive home. It’s on a mission, as Kalanick said in a 2016 TED talk, to have such an impact on U.S. infrastructure that Americans can “reclaim our cities.”

So far, Valley companies have mostly delivered on promises to change our lives and make them better in ways that other industries generally can’t. But if these promises start falling through–if a company like Uber begins to look like a naked grab at monopoly rather than an earnest attempt to make life easier to navigate–the Valley will appear out of touch.

There’s another reason these questions are likely to matter more in the coming years rather than less. The reality is that, somewhere between Xerox Parc and Uber, Silicon Valley achieved escape velocity. Technology is advancing so rapidly that, at this point, it is always going to outpace the law, the government or the public’s capacity to fully understand its ramifications. The genie is never going back into its flip phone. How else could history’s most valuable startup, however troubled, emerge from nothing in eight years? Future startups are going to make decisions that will impact the lives of millions, defining the world the way religions and empires used to. iPhones and tweets and more convenient taxis were one thing. But the wave on the horizon now–artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, nanotechnology–will be something else entirely.

If Uber’s stunning stumble proves anything, it’s that in the absence of any rule makers that can keep up with them, the architects of the new economy–which may be another way of saying, the new world–must hold themselves accountable. And consumers need to be able to trust them to do that well. It’s possible the Valley has never had a trust-testing moment quite like this one.

It’s also possible that what we’re witnessing is the birth of a new Silicon Valley value, the concept of responsible disruption–one that incorporates inclusion and diversity, unsexy and difficult as they may seem, alongside thinking differently.

All of which Uber seems to have at least begun to grasp. The company’s board unanimously voted to accept every recommendation of the Holder report. Kalanick will go on leave. As the executives who remain work to implement the changes, other businesses will be watching to see what happens, how easy it is or isn’t for Kalanick’s “Uber 2.0” to come into being. “The key here is to recognize that we all unequivocally condemn the past,” Huffington told employees in the all-hands meeting, “but we need to judge ourselves going forward from today on what we are doing right now.”

Right now turned out to mean immediately. During the meeting, board member David Bonderman, a partner at private equity firm TPG, interjected with a sexist quip which quickly made the rounds on social media. Within hours, he resigned.

–With reporting by LISA EADICICCO

This appears in the June 26, 2017 issue of TIME. from DIYS http://ift.tt/2sDn1iN

[chpatdoorsl3z0a1]

Uber Fail: Upheaval at the World’s Most Valuable Startup is a Wake-Up Call For Silicon Valley

On the morning of June 13, Uber employees shuffled into an all-hands meeting at the company’s San Francisco headquarters. They came to hear the results of an investigation that, like many in Silicon Valley, they had been anxiously awaiting for months. In February, a former female engineer at the company wrote an exposé describing a workplace plagued by sexism and mismanagement; the explosive allegations led Uber to hire former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s law firm to find out how far harassment and retaliation had gone at the world’s fastest-growing startup. “The process, as you all know, was longer than we thought and more painful than we thought, but it comes to an end today,” board member Arianna Huffington told employees during a presentation in which executives’ voices at times sounded brittle with emotion.

Over the past eight years, the hard-charging ride-hailing company has grown into a global powerhouse worth nearly $70 billion, disrupting the taxi industry in 76 countries and creating an app relied on by millions both for rides and for income. The wildly successful company has also been plagued by scandal from the start. Class-action lawsuits, driver revolts, cringeworthy faux pas by its brash CEO, you name it. But the past few months were something else: the February exposé was followed by a string of revelations so relentless, many started to wonder if Uber was in the midst of an existential crisis. In the end, the Holder report didn’t recommend reform so much as exorcism. The biggest change: CEO Travis Kalanick announced he would be taking a leave of absence, of undetermined length, and would eventually return to a diminished role. He described it as a time to grieve for his mother, who recently died, as well as a time to grow as a CEO. It was an acutely humbling turn for a founder who had cultivated an aura as a brawler. “If we are going to work on Uber 2.0,” Kalanick wrote in a message to the firm’s 14,000 workers, “I also need to work on Travis 2.0 to become the leader that this company needs and that you deserve.”

More is at stake in Uber’s crisis than one company’s future, no matter how much venture capital it has raised. Because Uber is the defining technology success story of this era, its woes–and how it weathers them–are a wake-up call for all of Silicon Valley. This place, having made itself the hope for the future of the U.S. economy, is also producing a fair amount of anxiety. Even before the Holder report, Uber’s unraveling had undermined some of the Valley’s credos: the cult of the founder, the rabid pursuit of growth, the virtue of disruption. Nor was Uber’s failure to address issues of workplace inclusiveness unusual; it was simply spectacular.

In the end, what makes Uber a cautionary tale is not that it’s the only tech company with a winner-take-all worldview or toxins in its culture. It’s that it happens to be one of the most valuable.

If there has been one constant for Uber, it has been extraordinary timing. With shocks of gray on either side of his spiked hair, Kalanick is, at 40, considerably older than many ambitious founders in the Valley. He was born in Los Angeles and studied engineering at UCLA before dropping out in 1998 help to found his first company. His Napster-like file-sharing service ended when some of the world’s biggest media companies sued the startup, forcing Kalanick to take the firm into Chapter 11 bankruptcy. He called his next company a “revenge business” because it provided technology to some of the very companies that had targeted him. It sold for $18.7 million in 2007.

By 2009, Kalanick had moved to the hills of San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood. His townhouse there became an entrepreneurial salon and techie hangout he once described on Twitter as a “church of creative capitalism.” A friend, Garrett Camp, had become enamored with the idea for an app to hail private luxury cars after he was unable to catch cabs in the city. UberCab, as it was then known, started its service in San Francisco in May 2010. By the end of the year, Kalanick had taken over as chief, and the company had changed its name to Uber in order to dodge legal complaints that it was advertising itself as a taxi firm, the first of many squabbles with regulators.

The firm was aggressive. Because taxi companies held monopolies in many cities, Kalanick cast them as the villains in a big-guys-vs.-good-guy drama. The big guys–which he once referred to as a collective “asshole”–were heavily regulated, with laws varying greatly from city to city. And the good guy, Uber, ignored these rules in order to bring consumers a better service–like rides that actually showed up when it was raining or that showed up at all. Ignoring the rules also allowed almost anyone to make money by ferrying around people as Uber drivers. That was attractive to many workers, but caused several cities to ban or suspend the service.

Even amid turmoil–strikes by angry taxi drivers, unresolved questions of legal liability–Uber expanded fast. Smartphones had become common, and consumers, especially the urbanites with disposable income that Uber catered to, were waking up to the new world of apps. Using it had that magic “it just works” element common to revolutionary technology: open the app, press a button, and in a few minutes a chauffeur appears. Customers were also getting familiar with the so-called peer-to-peer economy, renting out people’s private homes on sites like Airbnb. The idea of getting in a car with an unprofessional stranger didn’t sound as crazy as it once would have.

The year 2010 also turned out to be a fine time to start a company. After the financial crisis and the subsequent dearth of exciting tech firms to invest in, Uber came onto the scene promising the kind of world-changing big payday investors craved. The company continually rolled out flashy new services from helicopter rides to puppies on demand. Executives made plans not only to expand worldwide, including China, but also to remake everything from food delivery to driverless cars.

Kalanick’s approach was brazen and nakedly capitalistic. Unlike Google or Facebook, which famously brought in “adults” Eric Schmidt and Sheryl Sandberg to help manage a growing enterprise, Kalanick remained the face of the firm, which he referred to as “Boob-er” in a 2014 interview with GQ because it had made him more popular with women. Traits often ascribed to Steve Jobs–pique, occasional churlishness–were in Kalanick married to the missionary zeal of an engineer who would make the world more efficient if only obstructionists would let him. “He’s a fighter. He is against institutional structures,” Schmidt told TIME in 2015. “He can be disagreeable in that sense that, well, he disagrees.”

Kalanick’s readiness to fight–with lawmakers, competitors, reporters–was at first an asset. Compared to firms like Google, which flew under the radar for years before rubbing up against regulators, Uber was born into conflict. “Everything this company has almost ever done has been a battle,” says Avi Savar, CEO of Dreamit, a startup accelerator and venture-capital firm. That made Uber successful going up against comparatively sclerotic municipal governments in cities like New York, but also encouraged what some employees have described as a bunker-like paranoia among executives.

“When you have a value system that is in some ways a benefit to you in the early days when you’re charging really hard, it can turn into a tragic flaw,” says Stephen Beck, founder of consulting firm cg42. “‘Run fast, break things, and we can pick up the pieces later’ is O.K. until it’s not O.K.”

Even as his penchant for public arrogance increasingly made Kalanick a bête noire to some, it worked for Uber. Between 2009 and today, the company raised more than $15 billion, eventually becoming the most valuable venture-backed company in history. In an era of “unicorns”–startups valued at $1 billion–Uber was the decacorn. Until it looked liked it was on the way to becoming the first hectocorn, valued at $100 billion.

Some of Uber’s problems were on public display. Drivers sued over their legal classification, saying Uber should treat them as employees–with the attendant benefits–if it was going to do things like set the price they could earn per mile. Some complained they weren’t even making minimum wage. Among its millions of riders, horror stories of being assaulted or kidnapped made news, and legal battles ensued over who bore responsibility when people got hurt or mistreated. Competitor Lyft accused Uber of underhanded tactics like calling for and canceling rides to jam up the smaller rival.

Inside Uber, gender and diversity problems festered as they have at other tech firms. Silicon Valley, for all its ingenuity and economic clout, maintains a reputation for inhospitability to women, people of color, anyone who didn’t go to an Ivy League school or is older than a graduate TA. There are the accounts of misbehavior at startups like Tinder and Snapchat. But there are also plenty of studies: one found that women leave tech jobs at twice the rate men do. In another, half or more reported being asked to do menial tasks men aren’t expected to, dealing with unwanted sexual advances and feeling they don’t have the opportunities of male counterparts.

“Tech has a culture that is worse than many other industries. And that culture in the past has been promoted and been a badge of honor,” says Ellen Pao, a venture capitalist at Kapor Capital who sued her previous VC firm for gender discrimination and lost. She would know, having previously tried to rein in machismo-fueled culture as CEO of Reddit.

After her experience working at Uber, where the cultural pillars included “Always Be Hustlin'” and “Principled Confrontation,” software engineer Susan Fowler decided to write the February blog post that became the epicenter of Uber’s shake-up. In a 2,900-word essay, she described a workplace that was not only Darwinian but profoundly sexist. Her experiences ranged from being sexually propositioned by a male manager–who was allegedly never disciplined because he was a “high performer”–to enduring a counterproductive “game-of-thrones political war” and “organizational chaos” as managers tried to one-up each other. Kalanick tweeted that the behavior she described was “abhorrent” and promised an investigation. The next day the company retained Holder’s law firm to look into claims of harassment, discrimination and retaliation as well as “diversity and inclusion at Uber more broadly.”

As Holder’s firm launched into its work–interviewing hundreds of current and former employees, reviewing millions of documents, holding anonymous focus groups–the bad news kept coming. Kalanick was caught dressing down an Uber driver on a dash-cam video. The company became embroiled in a lawsuit about the theft of self-driving technology from rival Google. The widow of an employee tied her husband’s suicide to the company’s aggressive work environment.

Bernard Coleman, Uber’s head of diversity who joined the company in January after doing the same job for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, jokes that the chaos made him feel like he was back on the trail: “The only difference between Uber and a campaign is campaigns end.”

During the drumroll that preceded Holder’s recommendations, a separate investigation by another law firm led to the firing of more than 20 Uber employees. That probe looked into more than 200 claims of infractions like sexual harassment, discrimination and retaliation. It also made it possible to read between the tightly spaced lines of Holder’s 13-page report, offering a point-by-point blueprint for dismantling the culture that made a juggernaut. Its recommendations ranged from increasing the board’s oversight to changing the time of staff meals to accommodate employees with families.

When asked for comment on the report, Uber directed TIME to an email the company’s HR chief, Liane Hornsey, had sent to workers. “There’s lot of incredibly hard work ahead, but I have never felt more confident in a company’s ability to change,” it read in part. “Together, I want us to show the world what a truly incredible redemption story looks like.”

Silicon Valley’s heroes have always been rule breakers: Bill Gates’ willingness to “borrow” a good idea, Jeff Bezos’ disregard for epic losses, Elon Musk’s flouting of the status quo. Being a founder means having the moral flexibility to promote (and raise money for) things that don’t quite exist yet. When Steve Jobs first showed the iPhone in 2007, his demo was mostly artifice; the device barely worked. Which didn’t mean it wouldn’t change the world when it came out.

On their way to epic success, companies like Google and Facebook broke the rules and made their own. Most of us went along with it so long as we were getting better stuff, smarter search, faster phones. Occasionally mistakes are made, such as when it was revealed Facebook data scientists had run social-psychology experiments on unsuspecting users or when a local paper reported that instead of providing air-conditioning at one of its fulfillment centers, Amazon simply stationed ambulances outside to resuscitate downed workers. But so long as proper contrition is made, forgiveness comes easily.

The tech industry subsists on a virtuous cycle of consumer trust in exchange for continually improving and mostly free services. It’s the price of living in a permanent future tense. Plus, who really wants to read a 50-page terms-of-service agreement or wait more than two days for a package?

That bargain may be fraying, though. Lately it seems that Silicon Valley has started to reach the limits of its old maxims. Uber, with its adherence to a Cro-Magnon corporate culture and obsession for breaking rules, is just the case of the moment. Recently, once high-flying firms like Theranos, Hampton Creek and Magic Leap have been brought low by being shown to have perverted the old rules–over-promising or underdisclosing. The more tech companies dressed in Valley values–grand ambitions to innovate and revolutionize–turn out to disappoint, the faster the compact unravels.

It’s not just a matter of mission statements. The Valley’s money culture has changed drastically in the last decade. For one, there’s more cash in the system: some $73 billion in venture capital was injected into U.S. startups in 2016, compared with $45 billion at the peak of the dotcom boom, according to researcher PitchBook. For another, there’s considerably less transparency as more companies stay private longer to avoid pesky old-economy stuff like oversight and governance–174 private companies are each worth at least $1 billion.

“There’s a general sense in Silicon Valley, and there has been for five to 10 years, that it’s all about growth,” says Dan Lyons, a longtime journalist who has written for two seasons of HBO sitcom Silicon Valley. “Not just reasonable growth, but hypergrowth. Do anything you can to get that growth. That in itself causes a lot of problems.”

Then there’s the Valley’s self-image. It has always seen itself as the outlier where engineers can improve the world. Its promises have been commensurate: Facebook isn’t just a place to post your vacation photos, it’s working “to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” Apple isn’t just churning out gadgets, it’s on a quest “to change the world for the better,” as CEO Tim Cook likes to say. And Uber is not just a car service for millennials when they’re too sauced to drive home. It’s on a mission, as Kalanick said in a 2016 TED talk, to have such an impact on U.S. infrastructure that Americans can “reclaim our cities.”

So far, Valley companies have mostly delivered on promises to change our lives and make them better in ways that other industries generally can’t. But if these promises start falling through–if a company like Uber begins to look like a naked grab at monopoly rather than an earnest attempt to make life easier to navigate–the Valley will appear out of touch.

There’s another reason these questions are likely to matter more in the coming years rather than less. The reality is that, somewhere between Xerox Parc and Uber, Silicon Valley achieved escape velocity. Technology is advancing so rapidly that, at this point, it is always going to outpace the law, the government or the public’s capacity to fully understand its ramifications. The genie is never going back into its flip phone. How else could history’s most valuable startup, however troubled, emerge from nothing in eight years? Future startups are going to make decisions that will impact the lives of millions, defining the world the way religions and empires used to. iPhones and tweets and more convenient taxis were one thing. But the wave on the horizon now–artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, nanotechnology–will be something else entirely.

If Uber’s stunning stumble proves anything, it’s that in the absence of any rule makers that can keep up with them, the architects of the new economy–which may be another way of saying, the new world–must hold themselves accountable. And consumers need to be able to trust them to do that well. It’s possible the Valley has never had a trust-testing moment quite like this one.

It’s also possible that what we’re witnessing is the birth of a new Silicon Valley value, the concept of responsible disruption–one that incorporates inclusion and diversity, unsexy and difficult as they may seem, alongside thinking differently.

All of which Uber seems to have at least begun to grasp. The company’s board unanimously voted to accept every recommendation of the Holder report. Kalanick will go on leave. As the executives who remain work to implement the changes, other businesses will be watching to see what happens, how easy it is or isn’t for Kalanick’s “Uber 2.0” to come into being. “The key here is to recognize that we all unequivocally condemn the past,” Huffington told employees in the all-hands meeting, “but we need to judge ourselves going forward from today on what we are doing right now.”

Right now turned out to mean immediately. During the meeting, board member David Bonderman, a partner at private equity firm TPG, interjected with a sexist quip which quickly made the rounds on social media. Within hours, he resigned.

–With reporting by LISA EADICICCO

This appears in the June 26, 2017 issue of TIME. from DIYS http://ift.tt/2sDn1iN

[rtscrndr53704]

Uber Fail: Upheaval at the World’s Most Valuable Startup is a Wake-Up Call For Silicon Valley

On the morning of June 13, Uber employees shuffled into an all-hands meeting at the company’s San Francisco headquarters. They came to hear the results of an investigation that, like many in Silicon Valley, they had been anxiously awaiting for months. In February, a former female engineer at the company wrote an exposé describing a workplace plagued by sexism and mismanagement; the explosive allegations led Uber to hire former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s law firm to find out how far harassment and retaliation had gone at the world’s fastest-growing startup. “The process, as you all know, was longer than we thought and more painful than we thought, but it comes to an end today,” board member Arianna Huffington told employees during a presentation in which executives’ voices at times sounded brittle with emotion.

Over the past eight years, the hard-charging ride-hailing company has grown into a global powerhouse worth nearly $70 billion, disrupting the taxi industry in 76 countries and creating an app relied on by millions both for rides and for income. The wildly successful company has also been plagued by scandal from the start. Class-action lawsuits, driver revolts, cringeworthy faux pas by its brash CEO, you name it. But the past few months were something else: the February exposé was followed by a string of revelations so relentless, many started to wonder if Uber was in the midst of an existential crisis. In the end, the Holder report didn’t recommend reform so much as exorcism. The biggest change: CEO Travis Kalanick announced he would be taking a leave of absence, of undetermined length, and would eventually return to a diminished role. He described it as a time to grieve for his mother, who recently died, as well as a time to grow as a CEO. It was an acutely humbling turn for a founder who had cultivated an aura as a brawler. “If we are going to work on Uber 2.0,” Kalanick wrote in a message to the firm’s 14,000 workers, “I also need to work on Travis 2.0 to become the leader that this company needs and that you deserve.”

More is at stake in Uber’s crisis than one company’s future, no matter how much venture capital it has raised. Because Uber is the defining technology success story of this era, its woes–and how it weathers them–are a wake-up call for all of Silicon Valley. This place, having made itself the hope for the future of the U.S. economy, is also producing a fair amount of anxiety. Even before the Holder report, Uber’s unraveling had undermined some of the Valley’s credos: the cult of the founder, the rabid pursuit of growth, the virtue of disruption. Nor was Uber’s failure to address issues of workplace inclusiveness unusual; it was simply spectacular.

In the end, what makes Uber a cautionary tale is not that it’s the only tech company with a winner-take-all worldview or toxins in its culture. It’s that it happens to be one of the most valuable.

If there has been one constant for Uber, it has been extraordinary timing. With shocks of gray on either side of his spiked hair, Kalanick is, at 40, considerably older than many ambitious founders in the Valley. He was born in Los Angeles and studied engineering at UCLA before dropping out in 1998 help to found his first company. His Napster-like file-sharing service ended when some of the world’s biggest media companies sued the startup, forcing Kalanick to take the firm into Chapter 11 bankruptcy. He called his next company a “revenge business” because it provided technology to some of the very companies that had targeted him. It sold for $18.7 million in 2007.

By 2009, Kalanick had moved to the hills of San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood. His townhouse there became an entrepreneurial salon and techie hangout he once described on Twitter as a “church of creative capitalism.” A friend, Garrett Camp, had become enamored with the idea for an app to hail private luxury cars after he was unable to catch cabs in the city. UberCab, as it was then known, started its service in San Francisco in May 2010. By the end of the year, Kalanick had taken over as chief, and the company had changed its name to Uber in order to dodge legal complaints that it was advertising itself as a taxi firm, the first of many squabbles with regulators.

The firm was aggressive. Because taxi companies held monopolies in many cities, Kalanick cast them as the villains in a big-guys-vs.-good-guy drama. The big guys–which he once referred to as a collective “asshole”–were heavily regulated, with laws varying greatly from city to city. And the good guy, Uber, ignored these rules in order to bring consumers a better service–like rides that actually showed up when it was raining or that showed up at all. Ignoring the rules also allowed almost anyone to make money by ferrying around people as Uber drivers. That was attractive to many workers, but caused several cities to ban or suspend the service.

Even amid turmoil–strikes by angry taxi drivers, unresolved questions of legal liability–Uber expanded fast. Smartphones had become common, and consumers, especially the urbanites with disposable income that Uber catered to, were waking up to the new world of apps. Using it had that magic “it just works” element common to revolutionary technology: open the app, press a button, and in a few minutes a chauffeur appears. Customers were also getting familiar with the so-called peer-to-peer economy, renting out people’s private homes on sites like Airbnb. The idea of getting in a car with an unprofessional stranger didn’t sound as crazy as it once would have.

The year 2010 also turned out to be a fine time to start a company. After the financial crisis and the subsequent dearth of exciting tech firms to invest in, Uber came onto the scene promising the kind of world-changing big payday investors craved. The company continually rolled out flashy new services from helicopter rides to puppies on demand. Executives made plans not only to expand worldwide, including China, but also to remake everything from food delivery to driverless cars.

Kalanick’s approach was brazen and nakedly capitalistic. Unlike Google or Facebook, which famously brought in “adults” Eric Schmidt and Sheryl Sandberg to help manage a growing enterprise, Kalanick remained the face of the firm, which he referred to as “Boob-er” in a 2014 interview with GQ because it had made him more popular with women. Traits often ascribed to Steve Jobs–pique, occasional churlishness–were in Kalanick married to the missionary zeal of an engineer who would make the world more efficient if only obstructionists would let him. “He’s a fighter. He is against institutional structures,” Schmidt told TIME in 2015. “He can be disagreeable in that sense that, well, he disagrees.”

Kalanick’s readiness to fight–with lawmakers, competitors, reporters–was at first an asset. Compared to firms like Google, which flew under the radar for years before rubbing up against regulators, Uber was born into conflict. “Everything this company has almost ever done has been a battle,” says Avi Savar, CEO of Dreamit, a startup accelerator and venture-capital firm. That made Uber successful going up against comparatively sclerotic municipal governments in cities like New York, but also encouraged what some employees have described as a bunker-like paranoia among executives.

“When you have a value system that is in some ways a benefit to you in the early days when you’re charging really hard, it can turn into a tragic flaw,” says Stephen Beck, founder of consulting firm cg42. “‘Run fast, break things, and we can pick up the pieces later’ is O.K. until it’s not O.K.”

Even as his penchant for public arrogance increasingly made Kalanick a bête noire to some, it worked for Uber. Between 2009 and today, the company raised more than $15 billion, eventually becoming the most valuable venture-backed company in history. In an era of “unicorns”–startups valued at $1 billion–Uber was the decacorn. Until it looked liked it was on the way to becoming the first hectocorn, valued at $100 billion.

Some of Uber’s problems were on public display. Drivers sued over their legal classification, saying Uber should treat them as employees–with the attendant benefits–if it was going to do things like set the price they could earn per mile. Some complained they weren’t even making minimum wage. Among its millions of riders, horror stories of being assaulted or kidnapped made news, and legal battles ensued over who bore responsibility when people got hurt or mistreated. Competitor Lyft accused Uber of underhanded tactics like calling for and canceling rides to jam up the smaller rival.

Inside Uber, gender and diversity problems festered as they have at other tech firms. Silicon Valley, for all its ingenuity and economic clout, maintains a reputation for inhospitability to women, people of color, anyone who didn’t go to an Ivy League school or is older than a graduate TA. There are the accounts of misbehavior at startups like Tinder and Snapchat. But there are also plenty of studies: one found that women leave tech jobs at twice the rate men do. In another, half or more reported being asked to do menial tasks men aren’t expected to, dealing with unwanted sexual advances and feeling they don’t have the opportunities of male counterparts.

“Tech has a culture that is worse than many other industries. And that culture in the past has been promoted and been a badge of honor,” says Ellen Pao, a venture capitalist at Kapor Capital who sued her previous VC firm for gender discrimination and lost. She would know, having previously tried to rein in machismo-fueled culture as CEO of Reddit.

After her experience working at Uber, where the cultural pillars included “Always Be Hustlin'” and “Principled Confrontation,” software engineer Susan Fowler decided to write the February blog post that became the epicenter of Uber’s shake-up. In a 2,900-word essay, she described a workplace that was not only Darwinian but profoundly sexist. Her experiences ranged from being sexually propositioned by a male manager–who was allegedly never disciplined because he was a “high performer”–to enduring a counterproductive “game-of-thrones political war” and “organizational chaos” as managers tried to one-up each other. Kalanick tweeted that the behavior she described was “abhorrent” and promised an investigation. The next day the company retained Holder’s law firm to look into claims of harassment, discrimination and retaliation as well as “diversity and inclusion at Uber more broadly.”

As Holder’s firm launched into its work–interviewing hundreds of current and former employees, reviewing millions of documents, holding anonymous focus groups–the bad news kept coming. Kalanick was caught dressing down an Uber driver on a dash-cam video. The company became embroiled in a lawsuit about the theft of self-driving technology from rival Google. The widow of an employee tied her husband’s suicide to the company’s aggressive work environment.

Bernard Coleman, Uber’s head of diversity who joined the company in January after doing the same job for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, jokes that the chaos made him feel like he was back on the trail: “The only difference between Uber and a campaign is campaigns end.”

During the drumroll that preceded Holder’s recommendations, a separate investigation by another law firm led to the firing of more than 20 Uber employees. That probe looked into more than 200 claims of infractions like sexual harassment, discrimination and retaliation. It also made it possible to read between the tightly spaced lines of Holder’s 13-page report, offering a point-by-point blueprint for dismantling the culture that made a juggernaut. Its recommendations ranged from increasing the board’s oversight to changing the time of staff meals to accommodate employees with families.

When asked for comment on the report, Uber directed TIME to an email the company’s HR chief, Liane Hornsey, had sent to workers. “There’s lot of incredibly hard work ahead, but I have never felt more confident in a company’s ability to change,” it read in part. “Together, I want us to show the world what a truly incredible redemption story looks like.”

Silicon Valley’s heroes have always been rule breakers: Bill Gates’ willingness to “borrow” a good idea, Jeff Bezos’ disregard for epic losses, Elon Musk’s flouting of the status quo. Being a founder means having the moral flexibility to promote (and raise money for) things that don’t quite exist yet. When Steve Jobs first showed the iPhone in 2007, his demo was mostly artifice; the device barely worked. Which didn’t mean it wouldn’t change the world when it came out.

On their way to epic success, companies like Google and Facebook broke the rules and made their own. Most of us went along with it so long as we were getting better stuff, smarter search, faster phones. Occasionally mistakes are made, such as when it was revealed Facebook data scientists had run social-psychology experiments on unsuspecting users or when a local paper reported that instead of providing air-conditioning at one of its fulfillment centers, Amazon simply stationed ambulances outside to resuscitate downed workers. But so long as proper contrition is made, forgiveness comes easily.

The tech industry subsists on a virtuous cycle of consumer trust in exchange for continually improving and mostly free services. It’s the price of living in a permanent future tense. Plus, who really wants to read a 50-page terms-of-service agreement or wait more than two days for a package?

That bargain may be fraying, though. Lately it seems that Silicon Valley has started to reach the limits of its old maxims. Uber, with its adherence to a Cro-Magnon corporate culture and obsession for breaking rules, is just the case of the moment. Recently, once high-flying firms like Theranos, Hampton Creek and Magic Leap have been brought low by being shown to have perverted the old rules–over-promising or underdisclosing. The more tech companies dressed in Valley values–grand ambitions to innovate and revolutionize–turn out to disappoint, the faster the compact unravels.

It’s not just a matter of mission statements. The Valley’s money culture has changed drastically in the last decade. For one, there’s more cash in the system: some $73 billion in venture capital was injected into U.S. startups in 2016, compared with $45 billion at the peak of the dotcom boom, according to researcher PitchBook. For another, there’s considerably less transparency as more companies stay private longer to avoid pesky old-economy stuff like oversight and governance–174 private companies are each worth at least $1 billion.

“There’s a general sense in Silicon Valley, and there has been for five to 10 years, that it’s all about growth,” says Dan Lyons, a longtime journalist who has written for two seasons of HBO sitcom Silicon Valley. “Not just reasonable growth, but hypergrowth. Do anything you can to get that growth. That in itself causes a lot of problems.”

Then there’s the Valley’s self-image. It has always seen itself as the outlier where engineers can improve the world. Its promises have been commensurate: Facebook isn’t just a place to post your vacation photos, it’s working “to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” Apple isn’t just churning out gadgets, it’s on a quest “to change the world for the better,” as CEO Tim Cook likes to say. And Uber is not just a car service for millennials when they’re too sauced to drive home. It’s on a mission, as Kalanick said in a 2016 TED talk, to have such an impact on U.S. infrastructure that Americans can “reclaim our cities.”

So far, Valley companies have mostly delivered on promises to change our lives and make them better in ways that other industries generally can’t. But if these promises start falling through–if a company like Uber begins to look like a naked grab at monopoly rather than an earnest attempt to make life easier to navigate–the Valley will appear out of touch.

There’s another reason these questions are likely to matter more in the coming years rather than less. The reality is that, somewhere between Xerox Parc and Uber, Silicon Valley achieved escape velocity. Technology is advancing so rapidly that, at this point, it is always going to outpace the law, the government or the public’s capacity to fully understand its ramifications. The genie is never going back into its flip phone. How else could history’s most valuable startup, however troubled, emerge from nothing in eight years? Future startups are going to make decisions that will impact the lives of millions, defining the world the way religions and empires used to. iPhones and tweets and more convenient taxis were one thing. But the wave on the horizon now–artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, nanotechnology–will be something else entirely.

If Uber’s stunning stumble proves anything, it’s that in the absence of any rule makers that can keep up with them, the architects of the new economy–which may be another way of saying, the new world–must hold themselves accountable. And consumers need to be able to trust them to do that well. It’s possible the Valley has never had a trust-testing moment quite like this one.

It’s also possible that what we’re witnessing is the birth of a new Silicon Valley value, the concept of responsible disruption–one that incorporates inclusion and diversity, unsexy and difficult as they may seem, alongside thinking differently.

All of which Uber seems to have at least begun to grasp. The company’s board unanimously voted to accept every recommendation of the Holder report. Kalanick will go on leave. As the executives who remain work to implement the changes, other businesses will be watching to see what happens, how easy it is or isn’t for Kalanick’s “Uber 2.0” to come into being. “The key here is to recognize that we all unequivocally condemn the past,” Huffington told employees in the all-hands meeting, “but we need to judge ourselves going forward from today on what we are doing right now.”

Right now turned out to mean immediately. During the meeting, board member David Bonderman, a partner at private equity firm TPG, interjected with a sexist quip which quickly made the rounds on social media. Within hours, he resigned.

–With reporting by LISA EADICICCO

This appears in the June 26, 2017 issue of TIME. from DIYS http://ift.tt/2sDn1iN

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Uber Fail: Upheaval at the World’s Most Valuable Startup is a Wake-Up Call For Silicon Valley

On the morning of June 13, Uber employees shuffled into an all-hands meeting at the company’s San Francisco headquarters. They came to hear the results of an investigation that, like many in Silicon Valley, they had been anxiously awaiting for months. In February, a former female engineer at the company wrote an exposé describing a workplace plagued by sexism and mismanagement; the explosive allegations led Uber to hire former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s law firm to find out how far harassment and retaliation had gone at the world’s fastest-growing startup. “The process, as you all know, was longer than we thought and more painful than we thought, but it comes to an end today,” board member Arianna Huffington told employees during a presentation in which executives’ voices at times sounded brittle with emotion.

Over the past eight years, the hard-charging ride-hailing company has grown into a global powerhouse worth nearly $70 billion, disrupting the taxi industry in 76 countries and creating an app relied on by millions both for rides and for income. The wildly successful company has also been plagued by scandal from the start. Class-action lawsuits, driver revolts, cringeworthy faux pas by its brash CEO, you name it. But the past few months were something else: the February exposé was followed by a string of revelations so relentless, many started to wonder if Uber was in the midst of an existential crisis. In the end, the Holder report didn’t recommend reform so much as exorcism. The biggest change: CEO Travis Kalanick announced he would be taking a leave of absence, of undetermined length, and would eventually return to a diminished role. He described it as a time to grieve for his mother, who recently died, as well as a time to grow as a CEO. It was an acutely humbling turn for a founder who had cultivated an aura as a brawler. “If we are going to work on Uber 2.0,” Kalanick wrote in a message to the firm’s 14,000 workers, “I also need to work on Travis 2.0 to become the leader that this company needs and that you deserve.”

More is at stake in Uber’s crisis than one company’s future, no matter how much venture capital it has raised. Because Uber is the defining technology success story of this era, its woes–and how it weathers them–are a wake-up call for all of Silicon Valley. This place, having made itself the hope for the future of the U.S. economy, is also producing a fair amount of anxiety. Even before the Holder report, Uber’s unraveling had undermined some of the Valley’s credos: the cult of the founder, the rabid pursuit of growth, the virtue of disruption. Nor was Uber’s failure to address issues of workplace inclusiveness unusual; it was simply spectacular.

In the end, what makes Uber a cautionary tale is not that it’s the only tech company with a winner-take-all worldview or toxins in its culture. It’s that it happens to be one of the most valuable.

If there has been one constant for Uber, it has been extraordinary timing. With shocks of gray on either side of his spiked hair, Kalanick is, at 40, considerably older than many ambitious founders in the Valley. He was born in Los Angeles and studied engineering at UCLA before dropping out in 1998 help to found his first company. His Napster-like file-sharing service ended when some of the world’s biggest media companies sued the startup, forcing Kalanick to take the firm into Chapter 11 bankruptcy. He called his next company a “revenge business” because it provided technology to some of the very companies that had targeted him. It sold for $18.7 million in 2007.

By 2009, Kalanick had moved to the hills of San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood. His townhouse there became an entrepreneurial salon and techie hangout he once described on Twitter as a “church of creative capitalism.” A friend, Garrett Camp, had become enamored with the idea for an app to hail private luxury cars after he was unable to catch cabs in the city. UberCab, as it was then known, started its service in San Francisco in May 2010. By the end of the year, Kalanick had taken over as chief, and the company had changed its name to Uber in order to dodge legal complaints that it was advertising itself as a taxi firm, the first of many squabbles with regulators.

The firm was aggressive. Because taxi companies held monopolies in many cities, Kalanick cast them as the villains in a big-guys-vs.-good-guy drama. The big guys–which he once referred to as a collective “asshole”–were heavily regulated, with laws varying greatly from city to city. And the good guy, Uber, ignored these rules in order to bring consumers a better service–like rides that actually showed up when it was raining or that showed up at all. Ignoring the rules also allowed almost anyone to make money by ferrying around people as Uber drivers. That was attractive to many workers, but caused several cities to ban or suspend the service.

Even amid turmoil–strikes by angry taxi drivers, unresolved questions of legal liability–Uber expanded fast. Smartphones had become common, and consumers, especially the urbanites with disposable income that Uber catered to, were waking up to the new world of apps. Using it had that magic “it just works” element common to revolutionary technology: open the app, press a button, and in a few minutes a chauffeur appears. Customers were also getting familiar with the so-called peer-to-peer economy, renting out people’s private homes on sites like Airbnb. The idea of getting in a car with an unprofessional stranger didn’t sound as crazy as it once would have.

The year 2010 also turned out to be a fine time to start a company. After the financial crisis and the subsequent dearth of exciting tech firms to invest in, Uber came onto the scene promising the kind of world-changing big payday investors craved. The company continually rolled out flashy new services from helicopter rides to puppies on demand. Executives made plans not only to expand worldwide, including China, but also to remake everything from food delivery to driverless cars.

Kalanick’s approach was brazen and nakedly capitalistic. Unlike Google or Facebook, which famously brought in “adults” Eric Schmidt and Sheryl Sandberg to help manage a growing enterprise, Kalanick remained the face of the firm, which he referred to as “Boob-er” in a 2014 interview with GQ because it had made him more popular with women. Traits often ascribed to Steve Jobs–pique, occasional churlishness–were in Kalanick married to the missionary zeal of an engineer who would make the world more efficient if only obstructionists would let him. “He’s a fighter. He is against institutional structures,” Schmidt told TIME in 2015. “He can be disagreeable in that sense that, well, he disagrees.”

Kalanick’s readiness to fight–with lawmakers, competitors, reporters–was at first an asset. Compared to firms like Google, which flew under the radar for years before rubbing up against regulators, Uber was born into conflict. “Everything this company has almost ever done has been a battle,” says Avi Savar, CEO of Dreamit, a startup accelerator and venture-capital firm. That made Uber successful going up against comparatively sclerotic municipal governments in cities like New York, but also encouraged what some employees have described as a bunker-like paranoia among executives.

“When you have a value system that is in some ways a benefit to you in the early days when you’re charging really hard, it can turn into a tragic flaw,” says Stephen Beck, founder of consulting firm cg42. “‘Run fast, break things, and we can pick up the pieces later’ is O.K. until it’s not O.K.”

Even as his penchant for public arrogance increasingly made Kalanick a bête noire to some, it worked for Uber. Between 2009 and today, the company raised more than $15 billion, eventually becoming the most valuable venture-backed company in history. In an era of “unicorns”–startups valued at $1 billion–Uber was the decacorn. Until it looked liked it was on the way to becoming the first hectocorn, valued at $100 billion.

Some of Uber’s problems were on public display. Drivers sued over their legal classification, saying Uber should treat them as employees–with the attendant benefits–if it was going to do things like set the price they could earn per mile. Some complained they weren’t even making minimum wage. Among its millions of riders, horror stories of being assaulted or kidnapped made news, and legal battles ensued over who bore responsibility when people got hurt or mistreated. Competitor Lyft accused Uber of underhanded tactics like calling for and canceling rides to jam up the smaller rival.

Inside Uber, gender and diversity problems festered as they have at other tech firms. Silicon Valley, for all its ingenuity and economic clout, maintains a reputation for inhospitability to women, people of color, anyone who didn’t go to an Ivy League school or is older than a graduate TA. There are the accounts of misbehavior at startups like Tinder and Snapchat. But there are also plenty of studies: one found that women leave tech jobs at twice the rate men do. In another, half or more reported being asked to do menial tasks men aren’t expected to, dealing with unwanted sexual advances and feeling they don’t have the opportunities of male counterparts.

“Tech has a culture that is worse than many other industries. And that culture in the past has been promoted and been a badge of honor,” says Ellen Pao, a venture capitalist at Kapor Capital who sued her previous VC firm for gender discrimination and lost. She would know, having previously tried to rein in machismo-fueled culture as CEO of Reddit.

After her experience working at Uber, where the cultural pillars included “Always Be Hustlin'” and “Principled Confrontation,” software engineer Susan Fowler decided to write the February blog post that became the epicenter of Uber’s shake-up. In a 2,900-word essay, she described a workplace that was not only Darwinian but profoundly sexist. Her experiences ranged from being sexually propositioned by a male manager–who was allegedly never disciplined because he was a “high performer”–to enduring a counterproductive “game-of-thrones political war” and “organizational chaos” as managers tried to one-up each other. Kalanick tweeted that the behavior she described was “abhorrent” and promised an investigation. The next day the company retained Holder’s law firm to look into claims of harassment, discrimination and retaliation as well as “diversity and inclusion at Uber more broadly.”

As Holder’s firm launched into its work–interviewing hundreds of current and former employees, reviewing millions of documents, holding anonymous focus groups–the bad news kept coming. Kalanick was caught dressing down an Uber driver on a dash-cam video. The company became embroiled in a lawsuit about the theft of self-driving technology from rival Google. The widow of an employee tied her husband’s suicide to the company’s aggressive work environment.

Bernard Coleman, Uber’s head of diversity who joined the company in January after doing the same job for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, jokes that the chaos made him feel like he was back on the trail: “The only difference between Uber and a campaign is campaigns end.”

During the drumroll that preceded Holder’s recommendations, a separate investigation by another law firm led to the firing of more than 20 Uber employees. That probe looked into more than 200 claims of infractions like sexual harassment, discrimination and retaliation. It also made it possible to read between the tightly spaced lines of Holder’s 13-page report, offering a point-by-point blueprint for dismantling the culture that made a juggernaut. Its recommendations ranged from increasing the board’s oversight to changing the time of staff meals to accommodate employees with families.

When asked for comment on the report, Uber directed TIME to an email the company’s HR chief, Liane Hornsey, had sent to workers. “There’s lot of incredibly hard work ahead, but I have never felt more confident in a company’s ability to change,” it read in part. “Together, I want us to show the world what a truly incredible redemption story looks like.”

Silicon Valley’s heroes have always been rule breakers: Bill Gates’ willingness to “borrow” a good idea, Jeff Bezos’ disregard for epic losses, Elon Musk’s flouting of the status quo. Being a founder means having the moral flexibility to promote (and raise money for) things that don’t quite exist yet. When Steve Jobs first showed the iPhone in 2007, his demo was mostly artifice; the device barely worked. Which didn’t mean it wouldn’t change the world when it came out.

On their way to epic success, companies like Google and Facebook broke the rules and made their own. Most of us went along with it so long as we were getting better stuff, smarter search, faster phones. Occasionally mistakes are made, such as when it was revealed Facebook data scientists had run social-psychology experiments on unsuspecting users or when a local paper reported that instead of providing air-conditioning at one of its fulfillment centers, Amazon simply stationed ambulances outside to resuscitate downed workers. But so long as proper contrition is made, forgiveness comes easily.

The tech industry subsists on a virtuous cycle of consumer trust in exchange for continually improving and mostly free services. It’s the price of living in a permanent future tense. Plus, who really wants to read a 50-page terms-of-service agreement or wait more than two days for a package?

That bargain may be fraying, though. Lately it seems that Silicon Valley has started to reach the limits of its old maxims. Uber, with its adherence to a Cro-Magnon corporate culture and obsession for breaking rules, is just the case of the moment. Recently, once high-flying firms like Theranos, Hampton Creek and Magic Leap have been brought low by being shown to have perverted the old rules–over-promising or underdisclosing. The more tech companies dressed in Valley values–grand ambitions to innovate and revolutionize–turn out to disappoint, the faster the compact unravels.

It’s not just a matter of mission statements. The Valley’s money culture has changed drastically in the last decade. For one, there’s more cash in the system: some $73 billion in venture capital was injected into U.S. startups in 2016, compared with $45 billion at the peak of the dotcom boom, according to researcher PitchBook. For another, there’s considerably less transparency as more companies stay private longer to avoid pesky old-economy stuff like oversight and governance–174 private companies are each worth at least $1 billion.

“There’s a general sense in Silicon Valley, and there has been for five to 10 years, that it’s all about growth,” says Dan Lyons, a longtime journalist who has written for two seasons of HBO sitcom Silicon Valley. “Not just reasonable growth, but hypergrowth. Do anything you can to get that growth. That in itself causes a lot of problems.”

Then there’s the Valley’s self-image. It has always seen itself as the outlier where engineers can improve the world. Its promises have been commensurate: Facebook isn’t just a place to post your vacation photos, it’s working “to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” Apple isn’t just churning out gadgets, it’s on a quest “to change the world for the better,” as CEO Tim Cook likes to say. And Uber is not just a car service for millennials when they’re too sauced to drive home. It’s on a mission, as Kalanick said in a 2016 TED talk, to have such an impact on U.S. infrastructure that Americans can “reclaim our cities.”

So far, Valley companies have mostly delivered on promises to change our lives and make them better in ways that other industries generally can’t. But if these promises start falling through–if a company like Uber begins to look like a naked grab at monopoly rather than an earnest attempt to make life easier to navigate–the Valley will appear out of touch.

There’s another reason these questions are likely to matter more in the coming years rather than less. The reality is that, somewhere between Xerox Parc and Uber, Silicon Valley achieved escape velocity. Technology is advancing so rapidly that, at this point, it is always going to outpace the law, the government or the public’s capacity to fully understand its ramifications. The genie is never going back into its flip phone. How else could history’s most valuable startup, however troubled, emerge from nothing in eight years? Future startups are going to make decisions that will impact the lives of millions, defining the world the way religions and empires used to. iPhones and tweets and more convenient taxis were one thing. But the wave on the horizon now–artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, nanotechnology–will be something else entirely.

If Uber’s stunning stumble proves anything, it’s that in the absence of any rule makers that can keep up with them, the architects of the new economy–which may be another way of saying, the new world–must hold themselves accountable. And consumers need to be able to trust them to do that well. It’s possible the Valley has never had a trust-testing moment quite like this one.

It’s also possible that what we’re witnessing is the birth of a new Silicon Valley value, the concept of responsible disruption–one that incorporates inclusion and diversity, unsexy and difficult as they may seem, alongside thinking differently.

All of which Uber seems to have at least begun to grasp. The company’s board unanimously voted to accept every recommendation of the Holder report. Kalanick will go on leave. As the executives who remain work to implement the changes, other businesses will be watching to see what happens, how easy it is or isn’t for Kalanick’s “Uber 2.0” to come into being. “The key here is to recognize that we all unequivocally condemn the past,” Huffington told employees in the all-hands meeting, “but we need to judge ourselves going forward from today on what we are doing right now.”

Right now turned out to mean immediately. During the meeting, board member David Bonderman, a partner at private equity firm TPG, interjected with a sexist quip which quickly made the rounds on social media. Within hours, he resigned.

–With reporting by LISA EADICICCO

This appears in the June 26, 2017 issue of TIME. from DIYS http://ift.tt/2sDn1iN