Employee of almost three years here. Uber is not my first rodeo. I previously was one of the very first employees at another fast growing startup where I worked for about three years.

Uber was already past the days where it had the environment in that email, but I experienced an environment like the one in that email at my last startup because I was there at the beginning and lived that early growth. I'm glad Uber was past that by the time I joined because as much as I enjoyed that environment at the time, I was looking for something more mature after riding that bull once. I was also looking to engineer systems at scale instead of MVPs.

I read the comments here and I can only shake my head and think they were written by armchair quarterbacks who don't know what a hypergrowth company looks like. Comraderie and informality in the early days is par for the course. You need that informality to help make the type-A high stress environment not only tolerable but fun and motivating. People burn out without it.

This isn't an immature CEO. This is a CEO whose attitude and demeanor has changed with the company to match the kind of leader the company needed at the time. Zuckerberg was the same way. Leading a company from the early days where it's a few people in a house to 14000 employees across the globe requires a superhuman person that evolves to match what the company needs to succeed in the moment and then go to the next level. Uber turned 7 years old very recently. It is easily the fastest growing company in the world. It still is the fastest growing company in the world (as much as some people, often with conflicts of interest, media included, wish it were not).

I honestly see very little difference between Travis and Zuck and Uber 2017 and Facebook 2009. Both had similar early cultures. Both had cultures that changed as the companies matured. Both had some missteps along the way for which they were rightly criticized. Both were remarkably effective at learning from their mistake and correcting and moving forward.

If you think that Uber 2017 is the Uber of 2014, you're very wrong just like it's absurd to think Facebook of 2009 was like Facebook of 2006. Uber of 2018 is going to be a very different place just like Facebook 2010 was. Not only the organization will be different but the leaders in those years were different. Zuck evolved with the company and so has Travis. Both were the right kind of leader at the right time and they change as leaders as necessary.

In the meantime, I will wait for the peanut gallery to point at an example, any example, of a company that can grow and succeed like a Facebook or Uber in the same time frame without evolving first from the type of culture we're criticizing now, and without the kind of leader we are criticizing right now. 1 to 14000 over 7 years is superhuman leadership. And while the leader might not be perfect at 7 years, they have more than proven themselves capable of evolving over and over again if they can lead orgs with that growth. Honestly, I kind of disgusted by the ageist comments that think that because he's ~40 that he will never change and must still be the person in that email.

I don't recognize the Travis in that email myself as that was a Travis that existed before I joined. That said, I do recognize an email written by the kind of leader that was the right leader at the right time for the type of company Uber was a year before I joined (and less than a quarter of the size of when I joined).