When Uber co-founder and former C.E.O. Travis Kalanick was visited by a grim delegation of V.C.s from Benchmark asking for his resignation, it made a weird sort of sense that one of his first calls was to Arianna Huffington. Kalanick had lost his mother, in many ways his closest confidant and most steadfast supporter, in a boating accident three weeks before. Kalanick's father had also been injured, and Huffington visited him in the hospital, a move, blending hard-nosed business with the sometimes over-the-top nurturing, that is characteristically Arianna. “She’s kind of flirty and maternal,” said a person she tried to hire at The Huffington Post. “She flew me down to Los Angeles, we had lunch at her house, and walked through her garden. It’s all very convincing.”
A large part of Huffington's brand—as well as her method—is that power can be wielded in stereotypically feminine ways. Fortuitously, that was exactly what Kalanick's $70 billion start-up, which was increasingly a hyper-masculine disaster, required.
Huffington got to know Kalanick when Uber partnered with Thrive Global, her incipient wellness company, in a campaign against drowsy driving, stopping at college campuses in Chicago, the Bay Area, Las Vegas, Nashville, and Denver. Huffington was appointed to the Uber board, its first female member,in April 2016. “From the start of our friendship it was obvious that she believes deeply in our mission: transportation as reliable as running water, everywhere for everyone,” Kalanick wrote in a note welcoming Huffington to the board. The two had met at a tech conference in Munich in 2012. “Adding Arianna looked to me like a strategic move,” one Silicon Valley investor said. “Bringing her in drew parallels to me—and I’m in no way saying Travis is Steve Jobs—between when Apple brought in John Sculley, the Pepsi-Cola C.E.O., as a way of helping the company mature.”
At Uber, Travis Kalanick introduced Huffington as someone with “emotional intelligence”—the yin to Kalanick’s brashly arrogant yang, and an avatar of, as she put it, the company's “new cultural values.” When former Uber engineer Susan Fowler wrote a blog post outlining the harassment and retaliation she experienced first-hand at Uber during the year she worked there, Huffington dove into a very public leadership role at the company to handle the consequences. Huffington became part of a three-person team that received updates about Uber’s harassment investigation. She called Kalanick a “close friend.” Months ago she said she believed Uber’s problems weren't “systemic,” and that Kalanick shouldn’t leave his executive role.
Quickly, Huffington moved into a slightly paradoxical position as the Uber co-founder’s closest confidant and also the company’s public face of change. “Last Tuesday represented a clear line of demarcation in Uber’s history,” she told Recode after Kalanick announced his leave of absence in the second week of June, just before he’d eventually resign. “We are all united in condemning what happened in the past and are taking clear steps today to ensure it doesn't happen again. As Frances Frei put it, ‘Uber now has strong and swift processes embedded in it. And with certainty, we will not shy away from accountability.’ But we can’t write Uber’s next chapter if we remain mired in the past. We are moving forward.”
Huffington is already making her very visible, highly brand-appropriate mark at Uber—renaming its notorious War Room the Peace Room, and rethinking some of the company’s 14 cultural values, which previously included combative directives like “top-stepping” and “meritocracy.” “As all of us who were involved in the listening sessions heard from so many of you, many of Uber’s 14 cultural values, while well-intended, had been allowed to be weaponized,” Huffington said in remarks to Uber employees earlier in June, on the day Kalanick announced he’d be taking an indefinite leave of absence. “That was a word we heard a lot. And that’s completely unacceptable—any cultural value or principle, however well-intended, that is used as a weapon needs to be changed, clarified, or supplemented.”
Huffington’s ascension is, of course a media strategy. “She is clearly messaging to the outside world a shift” at Uber, said a person who worked with her at Huffington Post. “She knows how reporters operate. In a way, it’s good for effect and for news coverage. But it doesn’t necessarily mean anything will change. It could be smoke and mirrors. It remains to be seen.”
Huffington’s rise, and her relationship to Kalanick, rubbed other board members the wrong way (as did a recent New York Times profile of Huffington's ascent at Uber, which was reportedly viewed as Huffington promoting herself). The two were “problematically close,” and Kalanick didn’t talk to many other board members in recent weeks, Axios editor Dan Primack reported.
It turned out that other board members were right to be concerned. Huffington figured in a stunning moment at a company all-hands meeting that happened on the same day that Kalanick announced his indefinite leave of absence. After Huffington remarked that a single woman on a corporate board could lead to others joining, fellow board member David Bonderman said, according to The New York Times, “Actually, what it shows is that it’s much more likely to be more talking.”
It was Kalanick, in one of his last acts as head of the company, who pushed for Bonderman’s resignation, which came soon thereafter. Benchmark’s Bill Gurley, a longtime board stalwart who was present at the creation of Uber but who’d fallen out with Kalanick, is gone from the board, part of the price Kalanick exacted for stepping down. In the new era, Huffington, allied with Kalanick, who owns about 10 percent of Uber’s stock, is arguably the most powerful person in Silicon Valley’s most notorious boys’ club. Whether its values are truly changing is an open question—but while Huffington is on the board, that is what will be sold.
