Scott Gorlick was employee #99 at Uber and launched Uber's market operations in Atlanta. He discusses early tactical supply acquisition methods for two-sided marketplaces.
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 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…”