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Dara Khosrowshahi stands Behind the scenes of a modern and spacious event space in the Chelsea area of Manhattan. This is the first anniversary of his takeover by the CEO of the iconic carpool company, and he is celebrating it as a suit of Silicon Valley – with a series of product announcements. Men dressed in black serve avocado toastettes, tiny balls of salmon tartare and caramelized onion and cheese biscuits to a crowd of reporters filling a dozen blond oak chairs. At exactly 10:30, the sound of the base softens and it rises to the stage, resembling the most boring part of the room. Jeans. Black wing tips. A suit jacket on a buttoned white shirt, no tie. "I'm officially no longer a leader of the new recruit," he says, "and there is no place I prefer to be!"
Khosrowshahi perfected his brand for 365 days and, by joining the brand, he uses this anniversary to promote a new set of safety features. It's a bit like serving spinach and broccoli at a children's birthday party. On my right is a museum of exhibitions dedicated to them. There's the Ride Check feature, which will be deployed in the pilots later this year, which provides tools for Uber to check riders and drivers when it detects and bumps, and then makes a phone call, among other things. There is a hands-free feature that allows drivers to accept routes and communicate with passengers through voice mail. Uber also added a two-step audit for the accounts and extended its 911 integration to several new cities. And it is taking steps to better protect the safety of passengers by concealing specific pick-up and drop-off addresses and providing location approximations to drivers.
They are smart and necessary changes – changes, an Uber employee points out to me, "that Lyft did not do" – but none seems exceptional. These are the kinds of features that can be expected from a $ 72 billion carpool company, which aims to get into the unconscious of all as a definitive application for organize all types of transport.
The event, like most corporate product launches, lasts just over 30 minutes. No one mentions #BoycottDidi, the social media hashtag that took off in China last week as people removed the carpool application in China after one of its drivers raped and murdered a young female passenger. (Uber owns 17.7% of Didi Chuxing.) Nobody worries women's safety in general. Instead, they keep the conversation upbeat, focusing on both the responsibility and confidentiality of runners and drivers.
Khosrowshahi participated in a media tour of the first anniversary this week, and after the event, we take a few minutes to discuss. Khosrowshahi implicitly understands that he is the best face of Uber's future – reliable and reliable, he is a guy who makes jokes about dads and tends to stay on the message. But even though Khosrowshahi has cleaned up the company's culture and handled some of its emergencies, Uber is far from being the market leader two years ago. For Khosrowshahi to make Uber a company worthy of its value and keep its promise to be a de facto transportation app for bicycles, buses, scooters and any other alternative. it will face significant challenges in the coming year:
Khosrowshahi has cleaned up the company's culture and responded to some of its emergencies, but Uber is far from being the market leader two years ago.
Self-driving technology: After a fatal accident in March, Uber suspended its autonomous driving program and closed its Phoenix test site, before resuming manual driving (with human drivers) on Pittsburgh's public streets in mid-July. . At the end of August, Toyota invested $ 500 million in Uber for a partnership that will combine Toyota's expertise in car manufacturing with Uber's autonomous driving and driving platform. The two companies announced plans to develop stand-alone Toyota Sienna minivans and deploy them to Uber's network starting in 2021. The company will also continue to partner with other companies, he said.
But the question – very expensive – remains: what is the end of Uber game with an autonomous technology? The more she limits her tests, the more her peers, Google Waymo, are lagging behind.
Khosrowshahi wants to make it clear that it is committed to continuing to develop technology, rather than partnering with other companies. "There are very few companies – you can count them on the one hand – that have the operational technological capabilities that we do," he adds. "We also have the advantage of building our own driving under the same roof. We know what it takes in terms of the skills of a human pilot to operate our network and we can translate it into a stand-alone pilot or robot, so to speak, on our network. "
The replacement of Liane Hornsey: Uber's chief of human resources resigned in July after concerns were expressed that she had systematically rejected complaints of racial discrimination. "We are actively looking for a CEO," says Khosrowshahi. "We make sure we look at a varied list, but you know, people play an important role in what we do and we need leadership there."
drivers: Regardless of the application level of the Uber application, and security features are part of this breakthrough, many drivers are still balancing many applications to maximize revenue. There is a limited number of pilots. And they have to make a living. In early August, during Uber's first lobbying defeat, New York City Council approved several bills that, in addition to several others, limit the number of carpool vehicles. New York to set a minimum wage rate, which would further reduce the use of Uber and could set a precedent for other cities.
Uber has beaten energetically against the measure, and a spokesman said at the the Wall Street newspaper after the fact that the company "will do whatever it takes to meet the growing demand".
Lyft: Not so long ago, Lyft did not consider Uber's radar. In the middle of 2106, the New York Times Lyft was looking for a buyer. But Uber's big deception became Lyft's luck. As Analyst Ben Thompson has analyzed in Stratechery, "As long as the drivers are independent contractors, Uber can do nothing to prevent them from becoming multihost, that is to say, being available simultaneously on the Internet. Uber and Lyft. and will go where the runners go and, as the tumult of last year has unfolded, the runners went to Lyft. Thompson writes, "Lyft was ready to absorb Uber's unfortunate runners because they were using the Uber pilots to welcome them."
Uber is slowly starting to pose as a toxic business run by a belligerent impulsive brother – but now he has unrelated problems with the image and the branding. He tries to compete in a saturated market before the first public offer. Any misstep or failure to anticipate market developments could be catastrophic. In this context, security improvements are important for Uber. They are able to further differentiate Uber's service from those of its competitors and possibly retain those who are afraid of getting into a car with someone they have not met. And they signal cities that Uber is a responsible service, able to contribute to public safety, perhaps by softening relationships with regulators over time.
It is clear that Khosrowshahi has a vision of what Uber can be and a strategy to hope for it. But if the first year involved solving the dramatic problems of Uber's past, his second year must be devoted to pioneering his future.
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