The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 78 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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…”
Deng: Uber's actual product was price and ETA, not app pixels
“Really like the price and the ETA at Uber was the product.”
Demand for human Uber drivers will continue to increase despite autonomous vehicles
“The need for human drivers on our platform or human earners, I would say, is just going to continue to increase because we're going to have multiple earning opportunities for them over time.”
Helmer: Uber and Lyft lack true network economies
“You asked me earlier, or in the material you sent me about Uber and Lyft, I'd say that, you know, they probably have network effects involved, but not network economies.”
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.”
Fried: Pure software products only need venture capital for marketing
“Airbnb is a physical product. Uber is a physical product. Basecamp, Monday, Asana, they're available everywhere instantly anyway. I don't know what you need the money for other than marketing.”
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…”
McCabe: Uber added female driver options because women feel safer in Waymo
“And I guarantee the reason they're doing that is because women love Waymo because they feel safer.”
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…”
Product leaders miss visceral user reactions without firsthand product use
“Until I get behind the wheel, or I'm a passenger, or I'm using Uber Eats, what I miss is the visceral reaction that you get when something happens.”
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 …”
Nickels: Travis Kalanick was a great visionary product leader
“Travis was a very great visionary product leader and we started ATG and elevate and sort of these sort of future forward things.”
Nickels: Uber is to Amazon as DoorDash is to Shopify
“So the analogy I use is like Uber is to Amazon as DoorDash is to Shopify, if that makes sense, right? Amazon has been more consumer focused. Shopify is obviously very merchant focused.”
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,…”
Peer mentoring let Lyft match Uber's footprint with a fraction of resources
“This allowed us to match most of Uber's footprint with like, you know, a 10th or a 20th of the resources that you know, I, incredible speed, I guess.”
Larson: Uber prioritized local team speed over cross-team coordination
“Uber didn't have this as a written value, but implicitly Uber's, Uber's value was do what's good for your team and ignore everyone else because that will slow us down.”
Atawodi: Uber scaled ride-sharing uniquely by combining core culture with regional adaptation
“No other company has been able to create ride sharing at that kind of scale. It's very region by region. And I think it's because of that.”
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 …”
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…”
Orosz earns more from his newsletter than his $330,000 Uber peak
“Now I am making more in compensation that I made at Uber and The difference is that now my compensation, well, my earnings are keep going up as long as the newsletter is growing.”
Orosz: Having big tech employer pedigree drives audience attention for writers
“So there's, especially these days, like a lot, people would not pay nearly as much attention to me if I worked at, you know, small parts limited.”
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…”
Deng: Uber Reserve is a $5 billion high-margin annual business
“And last I heard from folks internally, this is like a five billion dollar a year business now. And we're the highest margin ones.”
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…”
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…”
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…”
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…”
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 …”
Uber signed approximately 15 autonomous vehicle partners over the past year
“Over the last year, we have signed about 15 partners.”
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 …”
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…”
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…”
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…”
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…”
Tolkin: Local operations teams iterate faster and gather better qualitative insights than PMs
“The reality is operations teams, local teams can iterate faster, can
scale talking to customers really much more efficiently have great qualitative insights.”
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…”
Helmer: A war of attrition only works with underlying scale economies
“It only works because they, there are modest scale economies. If there weren't any, then If they did all this stuff, they'd still have equivalency.”
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? …”
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…”
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…”
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…”
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…”
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.”
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…”
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…”
Orosz: Uber laid off my team members without informing me beforehand
“Uber did layoffs in April and it was really stressful. So it was the first time I didn't lay anyone off, but people on my team were laid off. I wasn't told who's going to be laid up.”
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…”