FailCon 2011 - Uber Case Study
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters recommend it for insight into Kalanick's background and how his past failures shaped his mindset at Uber.
What it is
Travis Kalanick's talk at FailCon 2011 about his earlier failed startups, given as a case study before Uber's rise. It describes lessons from those ventures.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 3 different months, 2012 to 2017.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec gojomo · 2012-10 · on “Startup School And Survivor Bias”
This is a valid criticism, but is mitigated a little by the fact that some of these success stories include within them wisdom from preceding (or competitive-contemporaneous) failures. This is even the case, indirectly, where the Startup School presentation can't fit the speaker's whole story. For example, I think the Travis Kalanick presentation about Uber at Startup School was great. (I'd love to see the time-unconstrained 'two-hour' version of the same talk.) But, it was just about Uber: a current big success. Kalanick also did a shorter -- and perhaps even better -- talk about his previous ventures at the 2011 FailCon: [this video] Combined with the SS12 Uber presentation -- indeed, perhaps b
Strong rec sbuccini · 2017-06 · on “Uber CEO Kalanick likely to take leave”
I would really recommend watching this talk[1] TK gave at Failcon back in 2011. It's a great insight into Travis's background and the mindset that he imbued into Uber in the early days. [1] [this video]
Recommends flunhat · 2017-08 · on “Travis Kalanick reportedly sought to reassert control at Uber after ouster”
I've found this video from 2011 to be kind of interesting in terms of illuminating how his history as an entrepreneur has shaped his attitude running Uber today (TL;DR - he failed and got screwed over a lot). [this video]