Opinion
Replacing Travis Kalanick with Dara Khosrowshahi was a mistake for Uber
“I don't think so. I'm a big fan of founder led businesses, and I think Travis is an incredible founder who, you know, should have been given the opportunity to lead Uber into the next generation. It's really unfortunate how things happened and played out. And …”
Opinion
Uber Elevate distracted from the core mission and hindered company growth
“We tried to do too much. Simply put specifically, you know, we were looking at like doing like a vertical takeoff and landing type, like helicopter play. We were doing Uber elevate. There were just a lot of things that became distractions from the core mission…”
Opinion
Uber partnering with Waymo and Cruise is the right long-term strategy
“I think the decision to partner with You know, the leading AV players in the space, doing things with, like, the Waymos and the Cruises of the world, and trying to bring their fleets onto Uber is the right long-term strategy.”
Assertion Supported
Uber built its initial Atlanta driver supply by cold-calling Yelp listings
“When we went into the initial market, we got a Yelp list of all the drivers in the city and sort of like called through and trying to get them to sign up with Uber and, you know, got our initial list of drivers that way and launched a few weeks later with some…”
Assertion Supported
Uber manually onboarded its first million drivers without major digital ad spend
“For probably the first million drivers that we onboarded, a lot of our processes were manual, right? So we weren't doing a lot of like paid spend on Facebook. We were doing a little bit on Craigslist. We weren't doing a ton on Google, but it was really the ope…”
Assertion Partly supported
Good annual driver retention for early Uber was 25% to 30%
“I would say, if you started the year with a hundred drivers, I think you would probably have 25 or 30 of them left at the end of the year. That would be good, right?”
Assertion Partly supported
Uber initially let Lyft launch first to absorb local regulatory risk
“And what a lot of people don't know about Lyft is when we started launching UberX, we let Lyft go first, and we had a policy that said, hey, if Lyft launches in a city, we are going to wait 30 days to see if the law enforcement comes after them, and then we're…”
Insight
Ride-hailing market share swings were driven by pure price, not product
“On early demand, not really much, right? We were in a market and we had wild product market fit. Once competition came in, you could start to see market share swings based on the specific rider promo that Uber was offering in a city In a given week, and then w…”
Opinion
Uber's 2021 acquisition of Drizly made little strategic sense
“There were some deals we did in 20, 20, 21 that didn't make a lot of sense. I know Emil talked about Postmates. I think the Drizzly acquisition probably didn't make much sense either.”
Insight
The best startup founders operate like cult leaders
“The best founders build cults, and they're cult leaders, and I think Travis, what he was really good at was inspiring the team.”
Assertion Partly supported
Uber is the top global food platform but lost US to DoorDash
“Uber's the number one food delivery platform in the world, but I think we really fumbled the bag in the US with DoorDash. I think we missed out on a huge opportunity.”
Assertion Supported
Uber's advertising business has reached a $1 billion run rate
“I think the ads business is a monster. I think ads is really interesting because it's, I think, in a billion dollar run rate now, and what's really interesting is if you think about Uber as a platform, It's the app where you go from, like, point A to point B. …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Early Uber cold calls converted roughly 75% of targeted drivers
“Probably like 75.”
Assertion Supported
Uber paid early city drivers $20-$30 per hour in guaranteed subsidies
“In the early days, we paid a driver 20 or 30 dollars an hour to sit there, right? And you know, this lasted probably 60 or 90 days into a market launch, and then after, you know, it became clear that the driver was making 20, more than 20 or 30 dollars an hour…”
Assertion Supported
Uber's unit economics worsened in 2014 due to intense market competition
“Even though we were in 2014 and the business was five years along, like, the unit economics as we launched Hooper X and had more competitors actually got worse over time because you started spending so much money to acquire drivers, to acquire riders”
Assertion Supported
Uber deployed permanent local teams while Lyft used central launch teams
“I think the big differentiation in Uber versus Lyft is that we had on the ground teams in every market. And, you know, we had an Atlanta city team, we had a Philadelphia team, we had a Chicago team and Lyft operated completely out of San Francisco. So while th…”
Insight
Early rideshare growth was driven by driver acquisition, not rider marketing
“It wasn't really about like growth marketing in terms of like growing the rider side. It was just how many drivers can you get? And that sort of drove the network effect and helped you get bigger.”
Assertion Supported
Austin regulations enforced a $55 minimum fare and 30-minute wait time
“If you ordered a black car in Austin, The minimum fare, whether you're going a block or a mile, was 55 dollars, and if you ordered a car and it showed up in one minute, you had to legally stare at it for another 29 minutes before being allowed to get in.”
Disclosure
Uber offered free UberX rides throughout South by Southwest 2014
“So, what we decided to do Was we decided to do free UberX for all of South by Southwest.”
Insight
Founders make a deadly mistake by tracking too many dashboard metrics
“I think the biggest mistake that I see founders making day to day is not having a handle on their metrics, right? I think everybody measures metrics in like a different way. And I think we've kind of entered an era of death by a thousand dashboards. And I woul…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Uber Atlanta driver utilization surged from 20% to 100% in 10 minutes
“And within like 10 minutes span, we went from like two out of 10 cars utilized To, like, all 10 cars utilized, and like hundred people in the app.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Uber was evicted from early coworking spaces due to driver traffic
“We probably got kicked out of every office that we joined early because, you know, we were renting like space and like coworking spaces. And a lot of these coworking spaces weren't too happy with drivers coming by like all hours of the day and sort of disrupti…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Scott Gorlick managed 1,500 Uber drivers in Atlanta during year one
“For the first year in Atlanta, I was the only person handling the driver side. We had Keith overseeing the city as a general manager, and he was incredible, and we had a marketing manager. But, you know, I probably had, like, a thousand or 1500 drivers that we…”
Assertion Partly supported
90% of early Uber drivers worked under 10 hours weekly
“For like, 90% of drivers, it's very part-time, right? Less than like, 10 hours a week.”
