Worst First Day of Work Ever? Tony West Became Uber's Legal Chief the Day a Massive Breach Was Revealed
Imagine you had to call up 50 angry state attorneys general....
You've probably had at least one first day on the job that didn't go as
planned. But you've likely never had as bad a first day as Tony West did
when he became Uber's chief legal officer. The day he first arrived at
the company was the same day Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi disclosed to the
public that the company had suffered a massive data breach a year
earlier. In that breach, personal information on 57 million riders and
drivers was compromised, including the driver's license numbers of
600,000 Uber drivers.
On a normal first day, you get a tour, your boss takes you to lunch, you
get introduced to the people you'll be working with, and you take some
time to set up your office the way you like it. But as chief legal
officer, West's very first task was to call up state attorneys general
all over the country and let them know what had happened. "I learned
about the data breach about 48 hours before I was telling people about
the data breach," West said during an onstage fireside chat at last
month's GeekWire Summit in Seattle.
Why didn't Uber disclose the breach back in 2016, when it happened? Uber
was a very different company back then. Founder Travis Kalanick was
still CEO. Kalanick, who enthusiastically embraced "toe-stepping" as one
of his company's values, had a take-no-prisoners approach to running
Uber and created a culture to match. When the company, under his
leadership, learned of the giant breach, it ransomed the data by paying
the hacker a $100,000 "bug bounty." Bug bounties are normally used to
reward hackers who alert a company to a potential security issue, not to
bribe hackers to give back data they've already stolen. But that's what
Uber did, and it kept the whole incident secret.
The following year, Kalanick was forced out as CEO after revelations of a
toxic corporate culture that, among other things, routinely turned a
blind eye to sexual harassment. (He retained much of his stock and a
seat on the board.) Khosrowshahi, who had been CEO of Expedia, was
tapped by Uber's board to become its new CEO, and he brought in West.
"I knew there would be big challenges," West told the GeekWire audience.
I knew there would be days when I opened up a closet and a skeleton
would fall out. Fortunately, there are fewer now than there were when I
started."
Which raises an obvious question: Why work for Uber at all? It's not
like West was desperate for a job--he had been general counsel at
PepsiCo when Khosrowshahi hired him, and before that, associate attorney
general of the U.S.--the third highest-ranking job at the Justice
Department.
"I had the opportunity to meet Dara Khosrowshahi and he spun out this
vision that was about having a mobility platform, and how do we make the
world move, and how do we do the right thing?" West explained. "I fell
in love with this idea that you could press a button and an SUV would
show up. That idea of bringing mobility to places where it hadn't been
an easy option--that was a pretty compelling mission. It was a huge,
huge challenge."
West has been working with Khosrowshahi to instill a new, more
responsible culture at Uber. Sometimes, he said, it means doing
unpleasant things--such as calling up AGs and letting them know that
your company had a data breach and kept it secret for more than a year.
Asked why anyone should start trusting Uber again, West points to that
admission and to some of the other steps he and Uber have taken, such as
hiring the person who drafted former attorney general Eric Holder's
scathing report on Uber and settling the data breach case for $148
million to be divided among all 50 states. Uber also voluntarily ended
forced arbitration for victims of sexual harassment, something that
Google only recently did, under pressure from tens of thousands of
protesters.
Uber also reached a settlement with Waymo, which sued Uber for allegedly
stealing trade secrets to build its self-driving technology. The
settlement included giving Waymo some stock in Uber. West said the
settlement was "an opportunity to increase Google's investment in Uber
so now we're partners, not adversaries." [Google and Waymo are both part
of Alphabet Inc.]
Speaking of self-driving technology, the new Uber reacted quite
differently than the old Uber would have when a self-driving car struck
and killed a pedestrian in Arizona earlier this year. Uber announced it
was ending self-driving testing in the state. Compare that with Tesla,
which concealed the fact that one of its cars had a fatal crash in
autopilot mode for months after it happened.
"The most important thing to come out of [Uber's self-driving accident]
were lessons about safety," West said. "How do you make sure you're
acting in ways that incentivize safety throughout the product
development cycle? That's why we ordered a top-to-bottom safety review
48 hours after the accident. We hired a former National Transportation
Safety Board chair to conduct the review, and we are going to release
the results to the public."
The new Uber also interacts with the cities where it operates very
differently than the old one did. "We recognize that our success is tied
to the sustainability of cities," West said. "There are partnerships we
can build that we wouldn't have thought about in the early days, such
as with taxi companies."
Cities are starting to take notice. "When Dara joined and I joined, we
had lost our license in London," West said. "Today, we have that license
back. That's because there was a lot of personal diplomacy. We're still
on probation, so we have to fly right."
As for users, he said, "If you deleted Uber, give us another chance. And don't just look at what we say. Look at what we do."
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