Uber CEO Travis Kalanick urged attendees at a 2013 company party to make sure sex was consensual and discouraged anyone from throwing kegs off a building, according to an internal memo obtained by tech news site Recode.
"Do not have sex with another employee UNLESS a) you have asked that person for that privilege and they have responded with an emphatic 'YES! I will have sex with you' AND b) the two (or more) of you do not work in the same chain of command," Kalanick wrote, according to the memo. "Yes, that means that Travis will be celibate on this trip. #CEOLife #FML."
#FML is a crude euphemism for lamenting one's situation in life.
The email to employees was obtained Thursday by Recode, which added that the document was part of an investigation into 215 incidents of sexual harassment, bullying and other workplace transgressions being reviewed by law firm Perkins Coie.
A spokesperson for Uber did not respond to a request for comment on the memo. Perkins Coie referred inquiries to Uber.
While the email addressed a number of party-related questions, the pointed counseling on hook-ups has particular resonance given former engineer Susan Fowler's February blog post in which she detailed sexual harassment by her boss.
When she reported the incident, she was told her boss was too valuable to the company to punish, and that she herself might receive a negative review for surfacing the matter. She later encountered other women at Uber who had encountered similar instances of sexual harassment by the same manager.
