Meet the power players who really run Uber
Travis Kalanick may be the public face of Uber, but he hasn't built the company by himself.
Like any chief executive, Kalanick leans heavily on his team and direct reports to manage all parts of the business, from people operations internally to putting out regulatory fires externally.
As Uber faces challenges on all fronts in 2017, here's who is leading the charge internally to make transportation "as reliable as running water."
Jeff Jones is Uber's president of ridesharing.
UberWhen Travis Kalanick asked Jeff Jones how well he did on his TED talk, the then-Target CMO gave him a B-minus and told him he needed to fix his talking points.
That's harsh feedback for Kalanick, but also a valuable insight. As Uber has tried to rein in its free-wheeling city offices, it's needed to fix its global branding problems.
In August, Uber announced that it had poached Jones from Target to become its president of ridesharing, overseeing all of its operations, marketing, and customer support.
Amit Singhal oversees all of engineering and is a special advisor to Travis Kalanick.
UberGoogle's former search chief, Amit Singhal, came back out of retirement in January to join Uber as its new SVP of engineering.
In the role, Singhal, who spent 15 years at Google leading its search teams, will be directly advising Uber CEO Travis Kalanick and Anthony Levandowski, the head of Uber's self-driving divisions. He's in charge of overseeing engineering on Uber's marketplace and maps teams — two key departments that touch the core of Uber's business.
Anthony Levandowski is in charge of building the self-driving cars of the future.
OttoAnthony Levandowski's self-driving car work was famous before he got to Uber. His self-driving motorcycle, Ghostrider, is already in the Smithsonian. He'd been researching autonomous vehicles before he got to Google then built the company's first prototypes. Then Levandowski left Google to start Otto, a self-driving truck startup. In August Uber purchased Otto and all of its employees.
Now, Levandowski is the leader of Uber's autonomous vehicle efforts, reporting directly to Kalanick. He's in charge not only of Pittsburgh, where Uber's Advanced Transportation Center is located, but also the offices in Palo Alto and San Francisco. And Uber isn't only thinking about self-driving cars, it's going to continue Levandowski's work with Otto and go into the trucking industry as well as delivery.
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