But everyday users of Oracle’s technology weren’t going to find themselves alone in a dark car late at night with a randy relational database. If so, that would be a serious problem for employees, and one that needs to be stamped out by HR. Yes, Larry Ellison was said to be a womanizer, and that may or may not have created a hostile work environment for women at Oracle. “I don’t know how many more signals we need that the company simply doesn’t respect us or prioritize our safety,” she wrote.įar from being deterred, Lacey has been keeping up her criticism of what she calls the “asshole culture” of Silicon Valley. Lacy recently accused Uber of “sexism and misogyny.” She wrote she was that she was deleting her Uber app after BuzzFeed News reported that Uber appeared to be working with a French escort service. Michael was particularly focused on one journalist, Sarah Lacy, the editor of the Silicon Valley website PandoDaily, a sometimes combative voice inside the industry. That team could, he said, help Uber fight back against the press - they’d look into “your personal lives, your families,” and give the media a taste of its own medicine. Over dinner, he outlined the notion of spending “a million dollars” to hire four top opposition researchers and four journalists.
He nicknamed Uber’s smartphone app, which connects riders with for-hire drivers in over 225 cities worldwide, “Boober.” And last month another top executive at company, Emil Michael, unabashedly boasted a plan to target, research and publicly smear a journalist who was reporting negatively on the tech car service company.īuzzFeed News ’s Ben Smith provides more detail on Michael’s outrageous remarks. The negative Uber news narrative actually began … with sexist remarks by Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, who said his position as CEO helped him pick up women. They’ve also threatened journalists who dare to criticize it.Īs Nathan Leggs notes on Daddyhod, Uber’s execs (all men, of course - this is Silicon Valley where few women make it to the executive suite) suffer from a bad case of foot in the mouthitis. 1 and using the service to get dates - part of a remarkably cavalier attitude to safeguarding users’ information, see here and here. This includes executives boasting of “weaponizing” the facts in their bid to become No. The car-ride service has also been suffering a blizzard of bad PR, mainly self-inflected. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below.