Uber’s CEO and one of its co-founders, Travis Kalanick stepped down earlier this month. Kalanick has been accused of fostering a “bro culture” at the ride sharing company, and there has also been countless sexual harassment claims at the company during his tenure. But a close friend of Kalanick, Yahoo and HP’s former CEO, Marissa Mayer, doesn’t believe that the issues at Uber are Kalanick’s fault. Mayer stated that Kalanick may not have known any better, and added that Uber grew very quickly, faster than just about any other company in history, and scaling at that rate is definitely hard to do.
Mayer is said to be in the list of names to replace Kalanick as CEO of Uber. Kalanick only stepped down earlier this month after more than 50 recommendations calling for him to resign, that was when the company’s board swung into action and had Kalanick step down, although he is still on the board for Uber. At first, Kalanick had stated he would be taking some time off from Uber, but that later turned into him leaving the CEO position at the company. Mayer is on the shortlist for the new Uber CEO, as well as Sheryl Sandberg from Facebook and CVS executive Helena Foulkes.
Mayer recently left Yahoo as its CEO, after successfully selling it to Verizon. When leaving Yahoo, Mayer got a pretty big bonus, of about $260 million. Marissa Mayer is not a newbie in the tech scene, she actually worked for Google and was the CEO at HP before taking the reigns at Yahoo a few years ago. Yahoo fell into turmoil and ultimately sold for much less than it was originally supposed to, because of two major data hacks that came to light recently. These hacks were done before Mayer was CEO of Yahoo, but it did cost the company quite a bit of money in its Verizon deal, and it also lost a big number of users, and for good reason. Mayer appears to be a good fit for the Uber CEO role, but then again, so does Facebook and CVS execs Sandberg and Foulkes.