Uber
includes Uber Eats, Uber Black, Uber Reserve, Uber Rider, Uber Comfort, Uber Elevate, Uber Teens, Uber Wallet, Uber App, Uber Grocery, Uber Rides, Uber SUV and 3 more
78 statements across 24 episodes · 25 bullish · 7 bearish · 23 people on the record · first statement Aug 7, 2022 by Ryan Hoover · said 528 times in 76 episodes since 2022 · across every show →
Mentions by year, the whole family
brought up most by Lenny Rachitsky (231), Sachin Kansal (38), Ebi Atawodi (32), Brian Tolkin (32), Peter Deng (22), JM Nickels (15), Yuhki Yamashita (12), Gergely Orosz (12)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2025 147 mentions in 10 episodes 15 per episode
- Why Uber’s CPO delivers food on weekends | Sachin Kansal
- From ChatGPT to Instagram to Uber: The quiet architect behind the world’s most popular products
- Mental models for building products people love ft. Stewart Butterfield
- Why experts writing AI evals is creating the fastest-growing companies in history | Brendan Foody
- Mercado Libre: 18k engineers, 30k deploys a day, & their own fleet of planes | Sebastian Barrios
- How Intercom rose from the ashes by betting everything on AI | Eoghan McCabe (founder and CEO)
- Brian Chesky's secret mentor who scaled Airbnb (after dying 9 times & building a hotel empire)
- Building a magical AI code editor used by over 1m developers in 4 months: Inside Windsurf
- 2 more episodes that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 124 mentions in 10 episodes 12 per episode
- Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber)
- Conscious leadership: Unlocking vision, strategy and purpose | JM Nickels (Uber, Waymo, DoorDash)
- How marketplaces win: Liquidity, growth levers, quality, more | Benjamin Lauzier (Lyft, Thumbtack)
- Identify your bullseye customer in one day | Michael Margolis (UX Research Partner at GV)
- How To Do The Product Review Right (By Doing It Wrong) | Lenny & Friends Summit 2024
- Building Wiz: the fastest-growing startup in history | Raaz Herzberg (CMO and VP Product Strategy)
- Becoming a super IC: Lessons from 12 years as a PM individual contributor | Tal Raviv (Riverside)
- Unorthodox PM tips: Automating user insights, unselling candidates, decision logs, more | Kevin Yien
- 2 more episodes that year, every mention in 2024 →
2023 155 mentions in 33 episodes 5 per episode
- Crafting a compelling product vision | Ebi Atawodi (YouTube, Netflix, Uber)
- An inside look at how Figma builds product | Yuhki Yamashita (CPO of Figma)
- Marketplace lessons from Uber, Airbnb, Bumble, and more | Ramesh Johari (Stanford professor)
- Mastering paid growth | Jonathan Becker (Thrive Digital)
- Thinking beyond frameworks | Casey Winters (Pinterest, Eventbrite, Airbnb, Tinder, Reddit, Grubhub)
- Lessons on product sense, AI, the first mile experience, and the messy middle | Scott Belsky (Adobe)
- Leading with empathy | Keith Yandell (DoorDash, Uber)
- Jason Fried challenges your thinking on fundraising, goals, growth, and more
- 25 more episodes that year, every mention in 2023 →
2022 100 mentions in 21 episodes 5 per episode
- Leaving big tech to build the #1 technology newsletter | Gergely Orosz (The Pragmatic Engineer)
- Developing a growth model + marketplace growth strategy | Dan Hockenmaier
- The art and science of pricing | Madhavan Ramanujam (Monetizing Innovation, Simon-Kucher)
- When to invest in new acquisition channels | Adam Grenier (Uber, MasterClass)
- What it takes to become a top 1% PM | Ian McAllister (Uber, Amazon, Airbnb)
- How to build a high-performing growth team | Adam Fishman (Patreon, Lyft, Imperfect Foods)
- Countdown of the top 10 episodes of the year
- How to hit revenue targets in a recession | Sahil Mansuri (Bravado)
- 13 more episodes that year, every mention in 2022 →
Everything said about Uber, oldest first
Aug 7, 2022 neutral
Hoover: Product Hunt might not have needed venture capital if personally funded
“Product isn't the type of company that needs to raise a ton of money. It's also one which is not doesn't have like direct competitors in the sense of like an Uber and Lyft situation where raising is actually like kind of mandatory and you sort of have to build…”
Sep 15, 2022 neutral
Oct 13, 2022 negative
Super Pumped accurately portrayed Uber's aggressive tactics against Lyft
“So much of that story was stuff that I had experienced pretty regularly while I was at Lyft battling against Uber. So one part of me was like, oof, I remember that. God, that was hard. Another part of me was happy that to see that all of the things were out in…”
Nov 17, 2022 bullish
Orosz: In 2016, candidates routinely rejected Google and Facebook for Uber
“When I went to Uber in 2016, it was one of the highest regarded places back in 2016 and 20 17. It was the other way around, but back in 2016, people were turning out Facebook and Google offers to go at Uber, which we all thought would change the world.”
Nov 17, 2022 neutral
Orosz: Uber's overinvestment in custom internal tools birthed alumni startups
“Uber has invested silly amounts of money to build everything custom internally, like everything that you can think of. Our build system is custom, our experimentation system, our container, you know, the way we kind of automatically set that up a lot of the en…”
Nov 17, 2022 bullish
Nov 17, 2022 negative
Orosz: Uber engineering middle managers lacked authority and team budgets
“What no one told me is, yes, I was a manager, but I was a middle manager. I didn't have too much authority. I didn't even have a budget for my team. Like, you know, someone was underpaid and I couldn't do anything except complain for HR for six months and hope…”
Nov 17, 2022 positive
Nov 17, 2022 negative
Nov 17, 2022 neutral
Jan 8, 2023 positive
Yamashita: Great PMs fast-forward experimental outcomes to decide what not to build
“The kind of PMs that have the ability to kind of imagine those outcomes, I think, like, it helps us be much more efficient, too, because we're like, well, if we all think that's going to Go there. And that's not going to compel us to take any action. Why do it…”
Jan 8, 2023 positive
Yamashita: PMs Succeed When Executives Organically Quote Their Insights
“There are certain insights, data insights, research insights that were memified to the point where, like, someone like Travis or Dara would just cite this insight in the middle of a meeting, and you know that you've really done your job as maybe a researcher o…”
Feb 9, 2023 neutral
Feb 9, 2023
Feb 9, 2023 positive
Yandell: Kalanick and Xu mastered the law to challenge conservative lawyers
“I've had the pleasure of working with two founders who are very product driven, product first folks in Travis and Tony. And I found that the way they engage on the legal side is with a curiosity I referenced earlier, which is they're both hyper curious and the…”
Mar 26, 2023 bullish
Aluwi: Gojek's volume rivals Uber globally and exceeds Lyft
“In terms of, you know, volume, I would say that we're up there with Uber globally and definitely larger than Lyft. I don't remember how many drivers are in the US, but it's definitely, we definitely have more drivers in the region than all of the, all of Ameri…”
May 7, 2023
Thrive Digital manages $500M in annual ad spend with 130 staff members
“What started off as this freelancer consultancy that I started running in a walk-in closet in my old apartment became A 130 people, and we manage about five hundred million dollars a year in ad spend for small and large companies, including Uber, Asana, Tempur…”
May 7, 2023
Becker siphoned tens of thousands from Uber's referral loop via paid search
“Essentially I was using paid search to camp out on their branded keywords. And as people would sign up with my confusingly similar snippet to Uber's organic snippet, I was essentially siphoning off, you know referral credits. So I would get 20 dollars every si…”
Nov 9, 2023
Johari: Marketplaces sell friction reduction, making both supply and demand their customers
“So those are frictions and what the marketplaces are selling you is taking the friction away. That's what you're paying them for. And it's an important observation because what that means is the marketplace's customers aren't just the people buying the rides o…”
Nov 9, 2023 neutral
Johari: Early Uber subsidized drivers and distributed event coupons to bootstrap demand
“To take Uber as an example, right? They would walk into New City. And one thing that, that, you know, Uber was Kind of commonly known for doing this was back in the days when really Uber black was the only service is they just hand out coupons for free rides a…”
Nov 16, 2023 neutral
Dec 3, 2023 neutral
Atawodi: Uber's global cash top-up product took four years to build
“And we built that product. It did not exactly in that way, but we built that product. Sorry for another day, but like, or maybe later, but that's the story. It took four years to build it, but that image got people so excited about, oh, it's possible.”
Dec 3, 2023 positive
Dec 3, 2023 positive
Atawodi: Travis Kalanick opposed cash on Uber but allowed it after testing
“And I talk all the time about the story of cash, where Travis Kalanick was like, against cash. By the way, I think up until he left Uber, he was against cash. But he was, he believed in data, and he believed in principle confrontation. He was like, go test it …”
Dec 3, 2023
Atawodi: A good product vision is evergreen and lasts at least three years
“I think if you have to repeat the vision every year, you have not created a good, you haven't done the work. So, you know, I'll give you an example of the one at Uber. What we kept doing was we would bring more fidelity to actually parts of the vision. Right? …”
Dec 17, 2023 neutral
Jan 7, 2024 neutral
Jan 7, 2024
Apr 18, 2024 neutral
Caldwell: Rigorous TAM calculations at the earliest stages are misleading
“The earlier you go, the less it matters. And some of the most phenomenally good startups, if you were really pedantic about it, the TAM would be like tiny. Like the TAM of Uber would be like nothing, right? Like how the TAM of Airbnb would have been nothing.”
May 5, 2024
May 5, 2024 bearish
Aug 4, 2024 neutral
Aug 4, 2024
UberX was named after a temporary placeholder in early financial models
“Uber, Uber X this product in the early days was going to be all hybrid and had a bunch of different potential names. I was not personally driving this. This was someone else on the operations team, but they dealt the model for What this product could be, and t…”
Aug 4, 2024 neutral
Tolkin: Early Uber ignored support efficiency to focus entirely on core matching
“If you think about the early Uber network from the simplest form, you've got A rider and a driver, and you need to connect them, price the transaction, and issue some receipts, probably, you know, and collect payment. So it's like, okay, do we do that really w…”
Aug 4, 2024 positive
Aug 4, 2024 positive
Infrequent user behaviors require rigid product frameworks to build empathy
“This on average in the U S is, is something people do once in seven years. You know, I'm sure the average had opened doors, something similar. And so it's a little bit harder to like be a customer. I took Uber every day, probably used Airbnb a number of times …”
Aug 4, 2024
Uber's surge pricing was manually managed by city GMs until 2013
“Surge pricing for actually quite some times, probably all of 2012, certainly, 2013, probably, I don't know when we necessarily switched was very much a human in the loop system or a very manual system where GMs in every city would control basically the paramet…”
Aug 4, 2024 positive
Uber's viral stunts like puppies on-demand originated from decentralized city teams
“That was, by the way a example of like fully distributed. The benefit of having those early petri dishes someone a local marketing manager is like, Hey, this would be fun. It would be really fun and the platform can support it. And those promotions were fantas…”
Aug 4, 2024 neutral
Early UberBlack drivers had two-hour, individual, in-person onboarding sessions
“In the early days is at small scale actually back when it was the Uber black drivers, every driver was individually onboarded in like a 90 minute to a two hour in person in the office onboarding with deep setting of expectations.”
Aug 4, 2024 neutral
UberPool's company corridor matching failed because marketplace liquidity is everything
“We very quickly realized that back to sort of like what the kernel truth is here is like liquidity is the only thing that matters. And there just wasn't enough. There was never going to be enough to sort of do this, like company-based thing. That wasn't the st…”
Aug 4, 2024 positive
Tolkin: Starting in operations is a strong foundation for product leaders
“Starting on the operation side gave a really deep understanding of like how the business actually works, right? You are truly operating it day in and day out. And the success of the city is, you know, in large part driven by The inputs that you are putting int…”
Sep 29, 2024
Lyft rider booking conversions plateaued when driver ETAs reached three minutes
“What will predict you deciding to book a ride for Lyft and for Uber, it was ETAs. So we knew that if we had if the closest driver was at least three minutes away from you or closer, then we had hit a ceiling. You were more than like X percent likely to, you kn…”
Sep 29, 2024 positive
Sep 29, 2024 negative
Sidecar's granular user filtering fragmented supply and drastically hurt service levels
“I think one real interesting direction that they took pretty early on to differentiate themselves was in my mind, Perhaps very naively a mistake. They decided to give complete control to the user where as a user, you had a whole bunch of filters. You could dec…”
Sep 29, 2024
Oct 6, 2024 negative
Nickels: Focusing on optics and decks stalled his promotions at Uber
“The more I focused on yeah, the, how I show up and optics and having a good deck and all this, the less I got promoted. And then the more I dropped focusing all that. Cause like for my first few years of Uber, I was like hanging out as a senior PM. And then I …”
Oct 6, 2024 positive
Oct 6, 2024 neutral
Nickels: Uber's autonomous strategy is aggregating AV fleets onto its platform
“And right now, you know, our kind of stated you know, strategy is to be an aggregator, right? So it's like, we are partnering with Waymo, with Cruise, Motional, others in China, et cetera. And then, you know, the idea is to have every vehicle on the platform r…”
Oct 6, 2024 neutral
Oct 6, 2024 neutral
Nickels: Scaling AV fleets requires operational and marketplace skills beyond autonomy
“Building a self-driving car on a test track is a very different problem statement than scaling a fleet of thousands of cars. And how do you operate them, clean them, charge them, maintain them. And then how do you build a rideshare network? It's like, okay, we…”
Oct 6, 2024
Nickels: Travis Kalanick closed Uber blinds fearing Lyft drone surveillance
“Reliably every time he'd come in, he would close the blinds of the windows. They're like, crap, what are we doing? Like, it's not because there was glare, like they were orthogonal to the screen. And then one time I was like, why are you doing that? He's like,…”
Nov 20, 2024 positive
Yamashita: Asking PMs to imagine future experiment results speeds alignment
“He'd tell us to fast forward to that day when the experiment is over, when that sprint is done. And he asked what we thought we'd see at that point. And I like that framing a lot because it kind of lowers the stakes. We all know we're guessing, and it created …”
Jan 18, 2025
Jun 1, 2025 neutral
Jun 1, 2025
Product teams have a non-reciprocal relationship with end users
“I don't think our relationship with our end users is reciprocal. And which means when I wake up in the morning, all I'm thinking about is how can we make our products better for our end users? When end users wake up in the morning, all they're thinking about i…”
Jun 1, 2025
Jun 1, 2025 positive
Jun 1, 2025
Driver experience centers on passenger interactions, not the Uber app itself
“The thing that surprised me the most is we obsess about our app, and our app is the center of our universe. But when a passenger gets in the car, the center of the driver's universe is that interaction with the passenger. That human touch between the driver an…”
Jun 1, 2025
Uber CPO Sachin Kansal drives and delivers once or twice a month
“So I actually go out either once or twice a month. I will set aside half a day or a day. And then I'll go out and I'll drive and deliver here in the Bay Area. So I've been doing that for many, many years now. I will say that's probably one of the best parts of…”
Jun 1, 2025 neutral
Jun 1, 2025 positive
Jun 1, 2025 bullish
Jun 1, 2025 positive
The best software engineers do not need a PRD to start building
“I also think that the best engineers are the ones who actually don't need to start with a PRD. They can have a whiteboarding session with a PM, with a designer. They should have just an equal seat at the table in terms of what we are going to build. And then t…”
Jun 1, 2025
Kansal: Live product demos enforce launch rigor and build team pride
“While it is a lot of work, I think it creates a certain level of rigor ahead of time before the product is ready to launch, because if it is going up on stage, it has to work. And two, what, you know, you may ask the same person who asked you this, it creates …”
Jun 1, 2025 neutral
Jun 1, 2025 neutral
Jun 1, 2025 positive
Uber mandates teams fix 300 dogfooding issues every six months
“We have set an OKR that we're going to fix. 300 of these issues. Every team, actually, the driver team will fix 300 of those issues. The rider team will fix 300 of these issues and same for the Uber Eats team. Now, I don't really care whether it's 300 or 200 o…”
Jun 1, 2025 positive
Jun 1, 2025
Kansal: Uber turned its on-campus barista into an Uber Eats merchant
“So we have a cafe here at Uber on campus. We also have a barista. So we enable the barista to be an Uber Eats restaurant. And they have an Uber Eats tablet, and I can actually order from that barista. So now you're dogfooding being an eater, you're dogfooding …”
Jun 1, 2025
Jun 1, 2025
Jun 22, 2025 positive
Jun 22, 2025
Deng tests exclusively for growth mindset in final-round hiring interviews
“Whenever I go to, it seems like chat GBT or Uber, when I'm always the final interview for someone in my org,
And I partner with recruiting and developing that the rubric.
I always insist on doing the last interview and I do not product sense.
I don't do design…”
Jun 22, 2025 positive
Deng: Platform PMs are overlooked despite building systems that accelerate teams
“I call the platform PM, which is someone who's like really deeply wired to kind of build tools for other people. And at Uber, we had like internal platforms for like messaging or for, you know, building internal tools. And oftentimes these folks are overlooked…”
Jun 22, 2025 neutral
Jun 22, 2025 positive
Deng: Teams stay aligned by stating plans, progress, and completion
“So let me take a step back. So one, say what you're going to do. And then in that. Exercise. You're going to be able to calibrate with your manager, again, with anyone, right? What is it that we're going to do? And it's, I think the words are really important …”
Aug 21, 2025 neutral
Oct 9, 2025 negative