Uber is facing a series of crises, and many employees have lost confidence and are looking for new ways out.

According to the online version of the Financial Times, headhunters and executives of ride-hailing companies in the San Francisco Bay Area said they had received a surge in job applications from Uber employees because they had lost trust in the company's management and began to doubt the value of their stock options.

Encountering many crises

Uber has been hit by a series of crises over the past five weeks, prompting a large number of employees to consider leaving the star startup, once considered one of Silicon Valley's most prestigious and generous employers.

“I’ve seen quite a few people leave Uber, and one of the main reasons is that they’ve lost confidence in senior management,” said one headhunter who once worked at Uber.

He said that the number of resumes sent in by Uber employees surged last week - he received more resumes from Uber in one week than in the past month. Last week, two former Uber employees wrote on their personal accounts, criticizing Uber for sexual harassment and discrimination against women.

For Uber employees, resigning from the company at this time means they will give up restricted stock or stock options worth hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars. Uber is currently the most valuable private company in Silicon Valley - valued at about $70 billion, and four-year restricted stock options for mid-level managers will be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

“It used to be extremely difficult to poach people from Uber, partly because they didn’t want to give up their stock options,” said Guillaume Champagne, president of headhunter SCGC Executive Search. “From a purely financial perspective, Uber would have to be a bad employer for people to leave.”

Still, in the past few weeks, Champagne has seen an increase of about 5% to 10% in the number of employees who are interested in leaving Uber, especially those who "have difficulty fitting into the Uber corporate culture." Champagne said: "To be honest, when people join Uber, they generally know what kind of corporate culture they will encounter. They are aware that the company advocates a male-dominated, high-energy investment banking-style corporate culture."

Public image hits rock bottom

In the past two weeks, a series of events that damaged its public image have put Uber in a completely embarrassing situation and forced it to try every means to repair its image. For example, a video of Uber CEO Travis Kalanick berating an Uber driver was exposed on social media recently. After the video was exposed, Kalanick issued a rare apology statement, saying: "I must completely change my image as a leader and mature."

Last week, two other executives resigned from Uber, further increasing employees' doubts about the company's future. Uber's vice president of product, Ed Baker, announced his resignation last Friday, saying he was more interested in working in public service. He had witnessed Uber's rapid expansion around the world in the past three years. Uber did not comment on Baker's departure. In addition, Uber's vice president of engineering, Amit Singhal, also left the company last Monday.

An Uber spokesman said the company was not seeing any higher-than-normal employee turnover.

To make matters worse for Uber, Waymo, Alphabet's self-driving car company, sued Uber last week, alleging that Uber stole its trade secrets and infringed patents related to self-driving technology. Uber responded by saying that Waymo's lawsuit was an "unfounded attempt to slow down the development of its competitors" and said it would defend its rights in court.

However, the Waymo lawsuit and the extreme shortage of technical talent in the self-driving car industry have made Uber's self-driving technology research and development department an easy target for headhunters. "There will definitely be more and more people who want to leave," said Alex Rodrigues, co-founder of the driverless truck company Embark, who co-founded the company last year. In the past month, several employees of Uber's advanced technology department have left to join competitors.

The halo gradually fades

Most importantly, Uber’s recent problems have worn away its halo — which many Silicon Valley companies once viewed as invincible — and employees who had planned to stay with the company through its initial public offering are now reconsidering their future.

Although IPOs typically bring rich returns to employees who own equity, Kalanick has publicly stated that he hopes to delay the IPO as much as possible, which means that Uber employees' shares will still not be able to be cashed out.

“Uber employees joined the company purely for the equity, but now they realize their efforts won’t be rewarded in the short term,” said the headhunter who once worked at Uber. “Uber’s senior management is particularly resistant to an IPO.”

Others say that Uber employees are beginning to grow more skeptical of the company. An executive at a Silicon Valley tech giant said, “In the past, it was difficult to poach Uber employees because of their stock options, but now they seem to be less and less confident about how much their stock options are worth.”

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.