AUSTIN—Chris Sacca showed up at South By Southwest (SXSW) in one of his cowboy shirts and with plenty of cowboy attitude.
The Lowercase Capital investor and “Shark Tank” regular spent an hour in a Saturday-afternoon onstage interview holding forth—bluntly and often profanely—on issues ranging from his problems with President Donald Trump to Uber’s self-inflicted PR nightmare to what’s wrong with startup culture.
Talking Trump
Interviewer Alex Konrad of “Forbes” asked Sacca what keeps him up at night. After mentioning that he has a 1-year-old, a 3-year-old and a 5-year-old, he said, “I love my kids, but, yeah, they just keep different hours than I do.” And, he added, “The Trump thing is really bad.”
“We are in an absolute unmitigated crisis right now,” Sacca said. He was among the tech figures who signed last July’s open letter to Trump denouncing him as “a disaster for innovation,” but the concerns he voiced at SXSW went well beyond tech-policy specifics.
“The idea that we have a serial sexual abuser and a pathological liar in that office, I can’t get away from it,” he said while denouncing mainstream Republicans for enabling Trump’s “kleptocracy.”
Sacca did, however, find reason for hope in the groundswell of resistance against Trump, and in particular the Women’s March the day after his inauguration. “Some women just got together and [expletive] did it, they shipped it.”
And, he added, at least the election was not bought with campaign donations: “It was one of the very first times that total ad spend was decoupled from the result.” His hope for what can come from that: “It would be a lot cheaper for me not to have to raise tens of millions of dollars to elect progressive candidates who will raise my taxes.”
Why Uber’s in a world of hurt
Sacca, who was an early Uber investor, also teed off on a man almost as unpopular as Trump among some conference attendees. That would be Uber founder Travis Kalanick, who’s been under fire since a former Uber engineer alleged in a blog post that the company condoned sexual harassment.
“Nothing about that story shocked me at all,” Sacca said of the former engineer’s allegations that she was propositioned by her manager, a supposed “high performer” whom higher-ups failed to discipline. “I couldn’t believe the HR team responded like that,” he vented. “Automatons could respond better.”
Sacca noted that he hasn’t had “a speaking relationship” with Kalanick since 2011, but pointed to issues he’d seen back then, such as Kalanick’s dismissive response to early complaints about “surge pricing” increases during times of high demand.