I love Oakland.

The fact that Uber is going to be a mainstay of downtown Oakland’s tech scene, and probably one of Oakland’s biggest employers, disgusts me. I don’t want them in my city. They don’t stand for what Oakland stands for.

Companies are, in a way, expressions of who their leaders are. Uber didn’t make a solid statement against the Muslim Ban because Travis Kalanick is a piece of shit. Uber, as a company, behaves like garbage because it’s leadership is garbage. Character matters because there are so many pressures to grow in a situation like this – to put money and growth over everything. Some companies do exactly that – they scramble for every dollar without any concern for their role in a larger world.

Other companies actually stand for something. And if you look, simply, at the difference between Uber and Lyft, there’s a clear difference in character between the two companies that isn’t situationally-dependent. You can tell because those differences are consistent, and because they make the companies’ behavior predictable. I’m not a fan of the “gig economy” in its current form. I think in practice, it’s exploitative across the board, though some do it better than others. But if you look a the difference between Lyft and Uber, you can see the difference character in leadership makes. One company might figure out how to make the “gig economy” work, because fundamentally, they believe in something that isn’t garbage. The other is Uber.