It was the middle of winter of 2017, and Jeff Jones, the man responsible for Uber’s public perception, was trying to shake everyone in the top ranks of the company awake. Uber didn’t have an image problem. Uber had a Travis problem.

As president of ride-sharing and the only person on the executive leadership team with a history of marketing experience, Jones took it upon himself to study the root of the hatred of Uber’s brand, something he hadn’t anticipated before he joined. Jones knew people who thought Travis was an asshole, but he wasn’t prepared for this.

Former engineer Susan Fowler’s blog post describing a toxic work environment at Uber had made things exponentially more complicated. Four days later, a lawsuit filed by Waymo created an enormous new problem: Uber’s new self-driving leader appeared to be a literal thief and potential criminal. And that wasn’t even the worst of it. Three days later, one of Uber’s marquee hires, Amit Singhal—the man responsible for perfecting Google’s search algorithms—was forced to resign from Uber before he could even begin his new job. Kalanick had announced his hire just a month previously, thrilling Uber’s employees. Instead, just days after Waymo’s lawsuit dropped, the press uncovered the fact that Singhal was pushed out of Google for claims of sexual harassment, something that Google executives were silent about during his departure. (Singhal has consistently denied the allegations.) Kalanick didn’t know about the claim when he hired him. For Uber, the timing could not have been worse.

But Jones wanted more data. When he first started at Uber, Jones told Kalanick he wanted to commission surveys into how people viewed Uber, and how those same people viewed Kalanick, separately, as well. The company didn’t really have any data on such questions, and Jones wanted to see what they said.

Months later, the data came back. Jones called most of the executive leadership team to join him on a two-day leadership off-site retreat away from the office. He asked Kalanick not to attend—he wanted to go over the data with the executive leadership team alone, not in front of the big boss, and hoped Kalanick could respect that. Kalanick bristled at the request, but Jones was adamant, and ultimately Kalanick stood down.

In late February, the group—roughly a dozen executives from all of Uber’s different divisions—gathered in downtown San Francisco’s Le Méridien, a hotel off Battery Street in the financial district, to go over the results of the survey, among other things. Jones had booked a meeting room for the discussion; he had a PowerPoint presentation prepared so that the rest of the executive leadership team could understand the data.

The results were clear: People enjoyed using Uber as a service. But when you brought up Travis Kalanick, customers recoiled. Kalanick’s negative profile was actively making Uber’s brand worse.

Later that day, Jones got a text from Kalanick. The CEO was coming over to join the meeting. Kalanick didn’t like feeling left out while all his top lieutenants were discussing the future of his company. As Kalanick walked into the hotel meeting room filled with his executives, he saw charts, surveys, and studies taped to the walls. In the center of a room was a giant piece of paper with a sentence written on it. The group came up with what it believed Uber’s image was to outsiders, written in bold, black ink: A bunch of young bro bullies that have achieved ridiculous success. It was a hard point to argue.

Nonetheless, Kalanick began to push back on Jones’s findings immediately, rebutting the data he saw on the wall. “Nuh-uh,” Kalanick said. “I don’t believe it, man. I don’t see it.” His lieutenants were flabbergasted. Even in the midst of the most sustained set of crises in Uber’s history, Kalanick couldn’t see the literal writing on the wall. Aaron Schildkrout, who led Uber’s driver product development, leapt to defend Jones and the data. Daniel Graf and Rachel Holt— two other well-respected leaders—joined him. Kalanick didn’t love Jones at that point, but he respected Graf and Schildkrout, and Holt had been with him since the early days of Uber. And all three were supportive of the surveys. If anyone could get him to listen, it would be them.