A Founder Exits Uber just fired its founder, Travis Kalanick. The $68 billion question is: Will this ultimately prove a good thing – or a bad thing – for Uber’s investors, drivers, and customers? Research suggests that it is likely to lead to a less innovative and thus less successful Uber. Kalanick may be a “bad person”, or maybe he’s actually a good person who needs to grow up. (I do not have any insights on whether he deserved to take the fall for the awful things that happened on his watch.) Either way, the venture capitalists and board surely agonized over the pros and cons of firing him. Perhaps they were encouraged by research that finds that replacing founder-CEO’s can be a good thin
Can New Research Help You Avoid the Same Fate? As a young boy, I was very close to my grandparents – to my grandfather especially. I really looked up to him. He had sold his business, a cotton seed oil mill, in 1960 at the age of 53. The sale netted him enough money that he figured he could retire young(ish). That gave him the freedom to spend lots of time with me. Some of my earliest memories are of playing in the tree house he built for me in the yard of their beautiful home. When I was 6 years old (1974), he and my grandmother moved from their nice home into a nice apartment. Losing my tree house was not cool. Several years later, they moved again – this time into a smaller, less
