Uber's Latest Scandal and Silicon Valley's Grown

Uber's latest scandal is a doozy: A top executive of the ride service reportedly described a Nixonian plan to dig up dirt on journalists who criticize it and sully their reputations.

But there is a bigger story here that goes far beyond Uber: With the power that comes from being a big, important company comes great responsibility. And the culture of technology start-ups sometimes has trouble recognizing that.

In other words, the very values at the core of start-up culture - the move fast, break things, us-against-the-world spirit of experimentation - are inconsistent with the kinds of responsibilities that come with being an economically important company that touches millions of customers.

The company has renounced the thuggish campaign of targeting critics that its senior vice president for business, Emil Michael, described in a dinner party attended by the BuzzFeed editor Ben Smith. But there are signs that Uber has taken an aggressive stance toward the media outlets that cover it and that it lacked internal protections against the misuse of customers' travel information.

A writer for San Francisco Magazine said this week that sources inside the company warned her that the company might monitor her rides. A Buzzfeed reporter wrote that when she attended a meeting with an Uber executive in New York, he was monitoring her arrival in one of the company's cars. Add in an account by the author Peter Sims that his personal travel information was apparently shown on a wall at an Uber launch party, and the anecdotal evidence that the company has played fast and loose with its customers' data is pretty compelling.

But the problem goes far beyond privacy issues for journalists or ordinary customers. The Uber public relations debacles of just the last few months spread across other areas: reports of Uber officials ordering cars from competitor Lyft in order to poach its drivers; a sexist promotion for its service in Lyon, France.

What all these incidents have in common is that they offer a portrait of a company without adults in charge. From the top executive ranks to individual operational units around the world, the mentality seems to be one in which sheer belief in the rightness of their cause overwhelms what to an outsider seems at best questionable and at worst immoral practices.

In a small start-up, it can be great to have a gung-ho mentality to develop esprit de corps. A flat management structure gives a wide range of executives relative autonomy. These are values exalted by the tech industry.

But the bigger and more economically important a company gets, the more those old-school corporate values of clear hierarchy, centralized control and respect for rules and procedures become important. Most tech entrepreneurs would find the corporate culture of an Exxon Mobil or a Walmart to be stultifying, but they are among the most successful companies on earth, depended on by millions of people a day, for a good reason.

A big, important company has to be thick-skinned when attacked by journalists or anyone else. When a company fails to do that, it can end badly; just ask the Hewlett-Packard leaders who faced a criminal investigation in 2006 after hiring private detectives to illegally obtain phone records of reporters talking to members of a divided board.

Compare it with a very different industry. I know many journalists who have written harshly about some of the country's biggest and most powerful banks. Yet I have never heard a story of one of them receiving suggestions that a bank might use its access to personal financial data to try to influence coverage.

The idea of a showing up to a meeting with a JPMorgan executive and hearing, 'I notice you were late on your mortgage payment last month,' is just unfathomable, so great are the protections in the financial industry between access to consumer data and the executives and public relations people who tend to deal with reporters. The same could be said for any number of other industries where big companies have access to private data. Hotel chains? Retailers? This is just not the way things work.

And the reality for Uber is that, much as it may still see itself as a start-up, its scale and ambitions mean that it is rapidly becoming an important company, operating in 48 countries with thousands of drivers. It aspires to not merely supplant inefficient taxi services, but to allow people to go carless. It has raised money from venture capitalists that valued the company at $18 billion. It is said to be in talks on a new round that would value the company at $30 billion.

It's great to have employees exhibit 'fierceness' and 'super-pumpedness,' two qualities on which Uber reportedly evaluates its workers. But the bigger you get, the more you also need qualities like discipline and wisdom.

Oh, and as a journalist who has now written about Uber several times, I will save anyone at the company hoping to look into my travel patterns a bit of time: My last ride was at 12:34 a.m. on Sunday morning, from a restaurant in Washington's Foggy Bottom neighborhood to my home in Logan Circle, and it cost $15. Tariq provided excellent service.