Uber stormed through an open door – now politicians must change the locks

theguardian.com:

Whenever I hear about the wild antics of a Silicon Valley startup, I think of Reid Hoffman’s 2018 book Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies. Hoffman is no armchair general. A billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn, he is an elder statesman of the tech industry. Which is why I’ve always found it troubling that Hoffman’s favoured analogy for how to run a startup is the Nazi Wehrmacht.

The armies of the Third Reich, he explains, “abandoned the traditional approach of moving at the slow pace at which they could establish secure lines of supply and retreat”. Instead, they adopted an offensive strategy that “accepted the possibility of running out of fuel, provisions and ammunition”. They did this to “maximise speed and surprise”, knowing that the price might be “potentially disastrous defeat”.

Hoffman’s book is a useful guide to the macho capitalism that took root in Silicon Valley in the 2010s. Under immense pressure from investors demanding “hockey-stick” growth, founders saw their work in Darwinian terms. Starting a business was not merely an act of creation, but an act of destruction too – or, better still, “disruption”. Moving fast was not enough: you also had to break things.

The Guardian’s reporting on the Uber files suggests that Uber heartily endorsed the blitzkrieg mentality in the mid-2010s. The company’s top executive in Asia urged managers to push for growth even when “fires start to burn”. Indeed, the burning was the point. “Know this is a normal part of Uber’s business,” he said. “Embrace the chaos. It means you’re doing something meaningful.”

Uber moved fast and it broke things. And if the Guardian’s allegations are right, some of the things it broke were laws.

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