UberX was named after a temporary placeholder in early financial models
Brian Tolkin · Lessons from scaling Uber and Opendoor | Brian Tolkin (Head of Product at Opendoor, ex-Uber) · Aug 4, 2024 · at 12:32
Brian Tolkin, early Uber employee and current Head of Product at Opendoor, shares product naming lore from Uber's early days.
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“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 there's no name for it yet. So it was going to be a placeholder. So What do you put in some placeholder X? So Uber X, and then the company was moving quickly enough. The product got green light and launched. And here we are, I don't know, 12 years later, 11 years later, whatever it is. And Uber X is the name that stuck.”
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