Uber announces global advisory board with members including Neelie Kroes and former prime minister of Peru; compensation will be equity
Uber Names Former EU Vice President Kroes to New Advisory Board — Uber Technologies Inc. announced an eight-member public policy advisory board Wednesday …
Context & Ripple Effects
Days after Arianna Huffington joined Uber's board of directors, the company is adding a second, looser tier of heavyweight names: an eight-member global public policy advisory board chaired around former EU Commission vice president Neelie Kroes and a former prime minister of Peru. Paying these advisors in equity rather than cash ties their upside directly to Uber's private valuation.
The move reads as pre-positioning for regulatory fights in Europe and Latin America, where ride-hailing rules were being contested city by city. The advisory bench also foreshadows how central governance theater would become at Uber — within a year the company was adding independent directors like Wan Ling Martello after the Holder probe recommended them, and later hiring a former NTSB chairman to advise on safety culture.
First-order effects
- Uber gains direct access to two influential political operators — Kroes in Brussels, the former Peruvian prime minister in Latin America — exactly the jurisdictions where its market-entry battles are fought.
- Equity compensation converts the advisors into shareholders whose payouts scale with Uber's valuation, aligning their advocacy with the company's fundraising narrative.
Second-order effects
- Rival ride-hailing operators competing in the same cities now face a regulator-relations gap and must staff comparable political benches or concede the argument in licensing disputes.
- The advisory-board layer gives Uber a credibility reserve it can draw on when scandals hit — a pattern the related coverage confirms with the later safety-culture advisor hire after the fatal March accident.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, platform companies will systematically convert retired regulators and former heads of government into equity-aligned advisors, institutionalizing a revolving door that antitrust and lobbying rules have not yet caught up to.
- Governance itself becomes a competitive asset: the same instinct behind this advisory board reappears in the 2017 board fights over independent directors and Kalanick's clout-bolstering appointments, showing that who surrounds the founders is now a market-moving question.
The trend: Platform companies facing regulatory resistance are recruiting former politicians and regulators onto equity-paid advisory boards, turning political capital into a balance-sheet asset.