What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture

by Ben Horowitz

From Kalanick’s perspective, he had made his priorities crystal clear and the board had signed off on them for years. Openly proud of how he ran Uber, he loved its reputation for being the most competitive company in Silicon Valley. He believed and likely still believes that he did the right thing the entire way and furthermore exercised proper corporate governance as he made his beliefs clear to the board. Nobody can point to a decision that he made to enable sexual harassment, acquire medical records of rape victims, or any of the other transgressions. That’s the nature of culture. It’s not a single decision—it’s a code that manifests itself as a vast set of actions taken over time. No one person makes or takes all these actions. Cultural design is a way to program the actions of an organization, but, like computer programs, every culture has bugs. And cultures are significantly more difficult to debug than programs. Kalanick didn’t intend to build an unethical organization, just a hypercompetitive one. But he had bugs in his code.