TPG partner David Bonderman resigns from Uber board after making disparaging remark about women at Uber meeting following Holder report
SAN FRANCISCO — David Bonderman, an Uber board member and partner at private equity firm TPG, is resigning from the board of the ride-hailing company …
Context & Ripple Effects
The resignation lands mid-crisis: two days earlier, Uber's board had met to weigh a possible leave of absence for Travis Kalanick and the personnel recommendations in the Holder report, which also called for stripping Kalanick of some duties and appointing an independent chair. Bonderman's remark about women came at the very meeting convened to address Uber's culture problem — making his exit less a scandal than an immediate test of whether the report's recommendations had teeth.
For TPG, the seat was firm infrastructure, not personal vanity: within eight days the firm had its partner David Trujillo installed on the board, preserving its position while Uber absorbed the optics.
First-order effects
- Bonderman exits the Uber board immediately, and TPG's representation is preserved days later when fellow partner David Trujillo is confirmed as his replacement — the firm loses no governance footprint.
- The incident hands the Holder report's reformers a concrete demonstration: conduct that would previously have drawn no consequence now ends a board tenure within hours.
Second-order effects
- Benchmark's parallel move — Bill Gurley leaving the board with Matt Cohler taking the seat the same week — turns a single resignation into a broader investor-led board reset, with both major VCs swapping principals rather than ceding seats.
- The episode raises the reputational cost of association for every director tied to the crisis, pressure that resurfaces a year later when top dealmaker Cameron Poetzscher resigns over sexual-misconduct allegations.
Third-order effects
- If the churn holds — Huffington and Cohler are gone by 2019, first employee Ryan Graves before them — Uber's board becomes a revolving institution where founder influence is diluted by successive independent-chair and membership changes rather than any single reform.
- The precedent normalizes instant accountability for investor-directors' personal conduct, a standard private-equity firms like TPG must now price into whom they seat on portfolio boards.
The trend: Uber's 2017 governance crisis is converting its investor-controlled board from a stable founder-allied bloc into a continuously reconstituted body, with each resignation resetting the terms of VC and PE influence over portfolio companies.