Chitchat Serial Rapist Amit Singhal kicked out by Uber. Guess The Race

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An honorable member of the Coffee Shop Has Just Posted the Following:

Will Singapore recruit this guy under the name of Foreign Talent Policy?

Uber Executive, Linked to an Old Harassment Claim, Resigns

SAN FRANCISCO — A little more than a week after Uber faced stinging accusations that it had ignored female employees’ complaints of sexual harassment, the company dismissed the head of its engineering efforts for failing to disclose a sexual harassment claim from his previous job.

The executive, Amit Singhal, joined Uber last month after overseeing Google’s search efforts in a 15-year career at that company. He was asked to resign on Monday by Travis Kalanick, Uber’s chief executive.

The move came after Uber learned that Mr. Singhal did not disclose the circumstances of his departure from Google, according to a person familiar with the matter who was not allowed to speak on private personnel issues and asked for anonymity.

The swift dismissal of Mr. Singhal, a high-profile hire who signaled Uber’s ability to attract the technology industry’s most sought-after executives, comes at a particularly inopportune time for Uber, which is struggling with complaints that a rough-and-tumble culture has allowed sexual harassment to go unpunished. And it may be an indication of how the company is shifting to deal with future problems.

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The former Uber engineer Susan Fowler and other current and former employees have claimed that the company’s human resources officials repeatedly ignored harassment claims about employees who were “top performers.”

Uber asked Eric H. Holder Jr., who served as attorney general under President Obama, to investigate those claims. He is joined by the media mogul Arianna Huffington, a member of Uber’s board of directors, and Tammy Albarran, a partner at Mr. Holder’s law firm, Covington and Burling.

Last week, the Uber investors Mitch Kapor and Freada Kapor Klein wrote in an open letter to the company that they were frustrated with how Uber had handled its culture issues and that they had “hit a dead end in trying to influence the company quietly from the inside.”

The issue involving Mr. Singhal dates to 2015, when he was still at Google. The search giant deemed an employee’s claim of sexual harassment against Mr. Singhal “credible” in an internal investigation, according to two people familiar with the matter who declined to be identified because they were not allowed to speak on the matter.

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Mr. Singhal’s resignation from Uber was first reported by the technology news website Recode.

Google was prepared to dismiss Mr. Singhal because of the claim, Recode said, but ultimately he resigned on his own in February 2016. In his goodbye note to the company, there was no mention of a sexual harassment claim against him, or any other signs of problems. In fact, the company held a goodbye party for Mr. Singhal, according to two people who attended the party, one a current Google employee and another a former employee. At the time, Mr. Singhal said he wanted to devote time to philanthropy; he joined Uber less than a year later.

“Harassment is unacceptable in any setting,” Mr. Singhal said in a statement Monday. “I certainly want everyone to know that I do not condone and have not committed such behavior. In my 20-year career, I’ve never been accused of anything like this before, and the decision to leave Google was my own.”

Uber and Google declined to comment on Mr. Singhal.

Mr. Singhal was hired to oversee Uber’s mapping division as well as a unit that runs the dispatching, marketing and pricing of Uber cars. He reported directly to Travis Kalanick, Uber’s chief executive, and advised Anthony Levandowski, who runs the company’s self-driving automobile efforts.

Mr. Singhal’s dismissal is another example of both the talent pipeline and the competition between Google and Uber. Last week, Waymo, the self-driving car company spun off from Google, filed a lawsuit against Uber accusing it of colluding with Mr. Levandowski, a former Google employee, to steal its autonomous vehicle technology. Uber called the suit “baseless.”

Uber, now privately valued at nearly $70 billion, has raised a dizzying amount of money from venture capitalists around Silicon Valley. One of its early investors was GV, the venture capital arm of Google’s parent company, Alphabet. In August, David Drummond, a longtime Alphabet executive who was instrumental in GV’s $250 million investment in Uber in 2013, stepped down from Uber’s board of directors as it became increasingly clear the two companies were on a collision course.

Mr. Singhal, hired by Google in 2000, was that company’s 176th employee, and he rewrote many of the original search algorithms created by the company’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Mr. Singhal is credited as one of the engineers who built the smarter and faster search engine that gave Google what has proved to be an insurmountable advantage in web search.

Upon joining Uber, Mr. Singhal wrote on his blog that he felt like Uber was a “geek’s candy store” because it was trying to solve “one of the most challenging computer science problems I’ve encountered in my thirty-year career.”


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