If your neighbor is beating his wife, and he won't stop when you talk to him privately, you have two options: You go public, or you accept that you can't fix him, and move on.
It seems like they feel some responsibility for having put money into a business where toxicity was tolerated, and also that their trust in Uber's management has been breached. Why do you think it's so important that they keep their views private rather than state them publicly?
I have a pretty bright-line rule: investors should not be publicly critical of portfolio companies or founders. This situation does test it, but in general I think investors, founders, and society are better off with that rule than without it.
(Doesn't apply to public companies, since you're appealing to potential co-investors. Doesn't apply in cases of criminal/etc. behavior when a founder or manager is replaced.)
I understand what your position is, but I'm asking why you hold it.
I have two reasons for asking this. First, criminality seems a really low bar to set before you can speak up about an ethical issue, and second, not speaking up about questionable ethical behavior often enables criminality to continue - Bernie Madoff springs to mind as a simplistic example.
I hold it because there's a huge value to being able to 100% trust your team/investors, and compromising it even for "cause" harms that, and on balance, is a bigger problem.
There are ~7b other people who can call out Uber's behavior who are NOT Uber investors. I don't think any particular value was added in this coming from Kapor vs., say, EKP. There are a lot of people who are not Uber employees or investors who have even more moral credibility here, too.
How are you quantifying this value to weigh one issue against the other? It seems like you're saying the potential profit is the defining factor for you, so I'm wondering where you consider the stakes to be valuable enough to override other considerations.
I don't see how people outside the team are supposed to call out bad behavior if they have no information about what's going on within the team because confidentiality is contractually enforced.
