Uber CEO promises to be good from now on

In a public letter to the whole of London Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi struck a conciliatory tone while vowing to appeal the recent decision not to renew its license.

Transport for London’s decision late last week sparked widespread response from petitions against the decision to applause for cutting the upstart internet company down to size. Uber’s initial response was defiant but Khosrowshahi, who let’s not forget recently replaced the founder of the company precisely because of the bad press he was generating, has tried to inject a dash of humility into his company’s public position.

You can read Khosrowshahi’s tweet and public letter below. While not explicitly detailing any measures he seems to be holding out the olive branch to TfL and asking what he can do to fix this. It’s hard to believe he hadn’t been made aware of TfL’s issues with Uber long before the decision was announced and last week’s announcement seems to have achieved what we presume was one of its desired outcomes – to get his attention.

Khosrowshahi has previously written a widely-leaked internal memo that you can also read below, in which he stressed that Uber needs to show greater humility and learn from past mistakes if it wants to move onwards and upwards.  

London Mayor Sadiq Khan recently did a radio interview in which he somewhat passive-aggressively accused Uber of being aggressive by threatening to take legal action. The interviewer quite rightly asked what’s aggressive about that but received no answer.

As we discussed in our recent podcast, the TfL move seemed to be a hard negotiating position and now Uber is quite rightly trying to take the heat out of the situation while simultaneously canvassing public support and banging on about how much it cares about London Uber drivers and passengers. Now that the posturing is out of the way hopefully that can all get together and do a deal to get Uber back in business on terms agreeable to London.