“I personally have a lot of challenges with Travis. And I think there are a lot of examples of where he could have been a much better manager,” Sacca says, prefacing an unexpected defense of the Uber co-founder. “But I also think him being tarred and feathered for life is ridiculous. He didn’t commit any biblical crimes. The guy was just guilty of being a bro-y asshole,” Sacca says.
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“If you go all the way back to that first New Year’s where they turned on surge pricing. Everyone is bitching and moaning about it on Twitter, right? Twitter blew up. And the next day, we had a call,” Sacca remembers.
“And Travis had been out giving press interviews basically — the theme was ‘users need to suck it up.’ You know, ‘get over it.’ He’d say, ‘It’s a feature that’s here to stay.’”
“We knew it was here to stay. It made sense,” Sacca says. “That was one of the core innovations of Uber: It was a fluid market for driver supply and rider demand.”
“Well, what happened was, we were like, Travis, you can’t talk like that. You can’t say that,” Sacca says. “And then he would show us the data.”
After the surge pricing announcement, Sacca remembers Kalanick telling him, “Look at this Twitter user who’s yelling about it and saying they’re done. The next day, they use Uber again. Fuck them.”
