Interesting to see the _very_ strong parallels to Japanese culture here.
For everyone arguing about whether this is true of all Chinese culture, of course there is innovative thinking in China, Wu is simply pointing out that in places where people aren't getting paid to innovate but rather are there to do a 9-5 job, there is little (and, in many cases, negative) incentive culturally to think outside the box and push the envelope. Don't expect that your contractor is going to go the extra mile for you. Getting specifications right and driving the production process are on you.
They should start a credit card business. Rakuten did this to great effect in Japan. Use the credit card, get points you can use for Uber. Customer acquisition is as cheap as putting a signup form in the back of each car and incentivizing drivers to mention it.
Why does funding a company have to mean that you are forever beholden to the CEO's bad decisions? Extreme this is not, and founders should take this as a signal that Benchmark will bring reason to the board.
Until an exit, he hasn't made them anything except paper billionaires. If anywhere on the road to an exit Travis or any other CEO does anything unbecoming of a steward of the capital of the investors, he should be questioned and potentially removed. That is why laws that protect investor rights such as fiduciary duty requirements exist.
The reality is that when it comes to fraud or other potentially criminal activity, you've got to bat 1000 as a CEO. For even lesser offenses you don't get too many freebies. Welcome to the game.
And wtf are you arguing anyways? Because I invested in Enron and they made me money, in 1999 I should have been happy even while alarm bells were starting to be rung? Your argument would've lost conscientious investors a great deal of money in the end game. You've got to think longer than just right now.
Unless you have proof that the claims by Benchmark are literally fictitious, you're on the losing side of how this one'll play out.
The ones that are good at building something (or at least focused on it) won't be wasting their time trying to "give back" (read: find other opportunities). Zuckerberg did some very minimal "giving back" while building Facebook IIRC (the biggest being an actually useful course he visited at Harvard called CS50, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFFs9UgOAlE)
For everyone arguing about whether this is true of all Chinese culture, of course there is innovative thinking in China, Wu is simply pointing out that in places where people aren't getting paid to innovate but rather are there to do a 9-5 job, there is little (and, in many cases, negative) incentive culturally to think outside the box and push the envelope. Don't expect that your contractor is going to go the extra mile for you. Getting specifications right and driving the production process are on you.