YouSaid · the spoken record

Scott Gorlick

lines on the record: 51
first: 2024-08-30
most recent: 2024-08-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“A huge perplexity user. I think it's an amazing product. Huge fan boy to use your language. I think one of the things they've done recently that's really interesting is they're offering a free pro membership to anybody with a LinkedIn premium account or an Uber one membership. So instead of spending $20 a month or $250 a year, you plug in your info and they'll give you the free usage. So they basically kind of locked in people for a year. And if you believe that perplexity could be like the next Google search, you know, you're happy to pay that CAC or sort of that free membership and sort of the GPUs over the year to acquire those uses and generate stickiness when a lot of tools are facing high insurance.”
2024-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Uber's Expansion Playbook for Scaling from 10 Cities to $10BN in Revenue | How Uber Acquired 1M Drivers | How Uber Solved the Chicken and The Egg Problem in New Markets and What Uber Would Be Like with Travis Still There with Scott Gorlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Alignment on metrics. I think across companies, we have very different definitions of what revenue meets, right? Is it annual run rate? Is it annual recurring revenue? Is it gross bookings? Is it net revenue? Is it total payment volume? And I think like we all started speaking the same language, the world would be a lot better place. It would make it easier for growth investors.”
2024-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Uber's Expansion Playbook for Scaling from 10 Cities to $10BN in Revenue | How Uber Acquired 1M Drivers | How Uber Solved the Chicken and The Egg Problem in New Markets and What Uber Would Be Like with Travis Still There with Scott Gorlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The ads business is a monster because it's, I think, a billion dollar run right 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, it knows where you're going, it knows like what shops you're visiting, like what restaurants you like, et cetera. And if you have that knowledge, you can then push ads to somebody in the app and whether it's like video or text or like a promotion for a movie or the US Open, like there are a lot of things that you can do with that data. And I think they're just barely starting to scratch the surface.”
2024-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Uber's Expansion Playbook for Scaling from 10 Cities to $10BN in Revenue | How Uber Acquired 1M Drivers | How Uber Solved the Chicken and The Egg Problem in New Markets and What Uber Would Be Like with Travis Still There with Scott Gorlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it comes back to really being close and in the cities where we operated, when we could be with drivers one-on-one, 24 hours a day, seven days a week versus being in San Francisco and flying in like a couple times a month, being close to your customers is such a big edge.”
2024-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Uber's Expansion Playbook for Scaling from 10 Cities to $10BN in Revenue | How Uber Acquired 1M Drivers | How Uber Solved the Chicken and The Egg Problem in New Markets and What Uber Would Be Like with Travis Still There with Scott Gorlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the notion that Uber was a hardware company and building cars is probably hard for a software company. So I think the decision to partner with 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 out to Uber is the right long-term strategy. I guess, you know, my questions around like, hey, like how far out is AVs? What does it look like? you know, what does the business look like?”
2024-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Uber's Expansion Playbook for Scaling from 10 Cities to $10BN in Revenue | How Uber Acquired 1M Drivers | How Uber Solved the Chicken and The Egg Problem in New Markets and What Uber Would Be Like with Travis Still There with Scott Gorlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Area I had the most questions about today is on autonomous vehicles and sort of like what the strategy is there. What should the strategy?”
2024-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Uber's Expansion Playbook for Scaling from 10 Cities to $10BN in Revenue | How Uber Acquired 1M Drivers | How Uber Solved the Chicken and The Egg Problem in New Markets and What Uber Would Be Like with Travis Still There with Scott Gorlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the biggest mistake that I see founders making day to day is not having handle longer metrics, right? 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 would love if everybody sort of said, hey, here are the three or four most important metrics for a business and aligned around that.”
2024-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Uber's Expansion Playbook for Scaling from 10 Cities to $10BN in Revenue | How Uber Acquired 1M Drivers | How Uber Solved the Chicken and The Egg Problem in New Markets and What Uber Would Be Like with Travis Still There with Scott Gorlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Best founders built cults and their cult leaders. Travis, what he was really good at was inspiring the team. We would look left. We would look right. We would all have like a lot of like work on our plate, but we knew that if we put our heads down and did it, there would be an incredible journey on sort of the other side. And Travis was really good of explaining what and the why behind everything. And I think like Travis was always willing to roll up the sleeves, dive in, and figure out the answers, the messiest problems. The best idea, always one with Travis. And we were all kind of like going to war together every day on this mission together. And that felt really good. And that's what built the lifelong bonds.”
2024-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Uber's Expansion Playbook for Scaling from 10 Cities to $10BN in Revenue | How Uber Acquired 1M Drivers | How Uber Solved the Chicken and The Egg Problem in New Markets and What Uber Would Be Like with Travis Still There with Scott Gorlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A little bit. I think when a company loses its founder, it's a very different situation. We had a deep bench of people that had been at the company for a very long time. We trusted them to kind of like run the business. But when you have a committee or like a team of 12 people sort of running a business that had gone through a really challenging year, it's going to feel the effects of that.”
2024-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Uber's Expansion Playbook for Scaling from 10 Cities to $10BN in Revenue | How Uber Acquired 1M Drivers | How Uber Solved the Chicken and The Egg Problem in New Markets and What Uber Would Be Like with Travis Still There with Scott Gorlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“DoorDash focused on the suburbs and like Uber focused on the cities. And I think part of that is true. But I also think we were probably going through a really hard time. And it was hard to grow that business at a fast rate when all this shakes around us was happening.”
2024-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Uber's Expansion Playbook for Scaling from 10 Cities to $10BN in Revenue | How Uber Acquired 1M Drivers | How Uber Solved the Chicken and The Egg Problem in New Markets and What Uber Would Be Like with Travis Still There with Scott Gorlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think things probably would have been different had Travis stayed. I think specific things would have been on the M&A side. There were some deals we did in 2020, 2021 that didn't make a lot of sense. I know Emil talked about Coast Spain. I think the Drizzly acquisition probably didn't make much sense either. And some of the tie-ups that we did strategically in different regions probably weren't the right bet. And then I think that on the ETS side of the business, things would have been different. When we launched ETS, it was growing really fast. But if you look at DoorDash versus ETS in the US, the market share is pretty pronounced. I think DoorDash has something in the 60s. Uber has something in the 20s. What Uber Eats is still like the top food delivery brand worldwide. I think we missed a big opportunity and we're distracted by everything that was going on when Travis left to really execute. And like I think the narrative is really around the”
2024-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Uber's Expansion Playbook for Scaling from 10 Cities to $10BN in Revenue | How Uber Acquired 1M Drivers | How Uber Solved the Chicken and The Egg Problem in New Markets and What Uber Would Be Like with Travis Still There with Scott Gorlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A big fan of founder-led businesses, and I think Travis is an incredible founder who should have been given the opportunity to lead Uber into the next generation. It's really unfortunate how things happen to play out. And I think that while Dara has done, Dara and the team have done a good job kind of building the business. And it's $150 billion company today. I think that founder-led businesses do better over the long term. I'm really encouraged by what I've seen from Dara and the team. But I do think, you know, you lose some of that founder's edge without Travis and some of that magic. And I think the speed slows down.”
2024-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Uber's Expansion Playbook for Scaling from 10 Cities to $10BN in Revenue | How Uber Acquired 1M Drivers | How Uber Solved the Chicken and The Egg Problem in New Markets and What Uber Would Be Like with Travis Still There with Scott Gorlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think what Travis is really good at is speed. Here's a quote that's fear is the disease, hustle is the antidote. What he did better than anybody else and does better than anybody else is he sees something and he moves quickly. It's, hey, like let's try this out. If it works, amazing. We're going to pour more gasoline on it. And if it doesn't, we're going to keep trying until we figure it out. And I think what's really unique about Travis as a CEO is just level of understanding across like product and operations is very unmatched. Like he could dive into the weeds with engineering, but then he could nerd out with you on sort of like positioning cars in different cities and like talking to drivers like 30 seconds later. The context switching and just the ability to create things at speed and empower his teams to think that they can run through walls was unmatched.”
2024-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Uber's Expansion Playbook for Scaling from 10 Cities to $10BN in Revenue | How Uber Acquired 1M Drivers | How Uber Solved the Chicken and The Egg Problem in New Markets and What Uber Would Be Like with Travis Still There with Scott Gorlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You look at where Uber got to, it never would have become what it was without Travis. Travis is such an incredible operator, one of the best CEOs of the generation. Uber would not have become the $150 billion company that it is today without him. I think over time, what would have happened is, you know, when a company goes public,”
2024-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Uber's Expansion Playbook for Scaling from 10 Cities to $10BN in Revenue | How Uber Acquired 1M Drivers | How Uber Solved the Chicken and The Egg Problem in New Markets and What Uber Would Be Like with Travis Still There with Scott Gorlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think our aggressive stance with riders and politicians clearly worked because we were able to create a lot of fans of Uber. But if I could go back or we could go back and do it all over again, I think we would have found a way to present our image in a way that was less combative, especially with media. I wish that we could have built like a better story. We had a lot of bravado. We had a lot of swagger. I think when you come out like that, everybody wants to build you up on the way up. And then they want to tear you down on the way down. And I think, you know, I probably would have been combative in the areas that we were with riders and politicians, but a little bit more humble and gentle with sort of media.”
2024-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Uber's Expansion Playbook for Scaling from 10 Cities to $10BN in Revenue | How Uber Acquired 1M Drivers | How Uber Solved the Chicken and The Egg Problem in New Markets and What Uber Would Be Like with Travis Still There with Scott Gorlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tried to do too much simply put, specifically, we were looking at doing 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 of moving people around cities and delivering food that were problematic and sort of like hindered Uber's growth. But at the time, we thought they were actually really smart and we wanted to go all in.”
2024-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Uber's Expansion Playbook for Scaling from 10 Cities to $10BN in Revenue | How Uber Acquired 1M Drivers | How Uber Solved the Chicken and The Egg Problem in New Markets and What Uber Would Be Like with Travis Still There with Scott Gorlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not really much 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 we measure it and understand or what Lyft was doing. Or like if we made a pricing move, they would make a pricing move. Like there was a lot of back and forth and we would see those effects in market share. It wasn't anything to do with the product. It was just pure price.”
2024-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Uber's Expansion Playbook for Scaling from 10 Cities to $10BN in Revenue | How Uber Acquired 1M Drivers | How Uber Solved the Chicken and The Egg Problem in New Markets and What Uber Would Be Like with Travis Still There with Scott Gorlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the things that we probably messed up, we were probably a little bit transactional at times with drivers in terms of scale. And, you know, if I could go back in time, that's something I would have like reinvested in. But I think that's something that Lyft got right early on.”
2024-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Uber's Expansion Playbook for Scaling from 10 Cities to $10BN in Revenue | How Uber Acquired 1M Drivers | How Uber Solved the Chicken and The Egg Problem in New Markets and What Uber Would Be Like with Travis Still There with Scott Gorlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think Lyft was an incredible competitor. They did a lot of things right early on. I think they did a great job on the driver side building and probably did a better job leaning in there from us.”
2024-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Uber's Expansion Playbook for Scaling from 10 Cities to $10BN in Revenue | How Uber Acquired 1M Drivers | How Uber Solved the Chicken and The Egg Problem in New Markets and What Uber Would Be Like with Travis Still There with Scott Gorlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Experience with regulators among laws that just didn't make sense. We scrambled our whole team back at the house, we worked with council, and we were able to make sure that like everything worked out okay. But Harry, these laws are absolutely insane. And I'm a much bigger fan of smaller government.”
2024-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Uber's Expansion Playbook for Scaling from 10 Cities to $10BN in Revenue | How Uber Acquired 1M Drivers | How Uber Solved the Chicken and The Egg Problem in New Markets and What Uber Would Be Like with Travis Still There with Scott Gorlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get a car and then it shows up 29 minutes later, et cetera. But what we did on Uber X really inflamed them. So what we decided to do was we decided to do free Uber X for all itself by Southwest. But what ended up happening was that we paid the drivers a set dollar amount per hour so the drivers were paid. And then we basically said, okay, cool, we're going to let the riders ride for free. So what ended up happening was the regulators ended up targeting some of the cars and requesting specific cars to come to specific places. And on the way out of the car, the ride would proceed as normal. And on the way out of the car, the rider that was their plant actually left a $20 bill in the car just in the back seat. And then after the driver let the rider out of the car, the cops would come up and sight the driver. So that was an incredibly frustrating.”
2024-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Uber's Expansion Playbook for Scaling from 10 Cities to $10BN in Revenue | How Uber Acquired 1M Drivers | How Uber Solved the Chicken and The Egg Problem in New Markets and What Uber Would Be Like with Travis Still There with Scott Gorlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“South by southwest Austin 2014, the mecca for all things tech. In Austin, we were not allowed to operate because there were two rules in Austin that prevented us from doing so. If you ordered a black car in Austin, the minimum fare, whether you're going a block or a mile, was $55. 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. It made absolutely no sense, Harry. So what we did in 2014 was we decided that we were going to do south by southwest if we'd done the previous years. And this year we decided to do black cars and we actually did the $55 minimum fare, which was a bomanza. A lot of drivers did very well. And we brought in drivers from Austin, from Dallas, from Houston, from San Antonio, and it was incredible. Authorities weren't super concerned about like the pre-reservation.”
2024-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Uber's Expansion Playbook for Scaling from 10 Cities to $10BN in Revenue | How Uber Acquired 1M Drivers | How Uber Solved the Chicken and The Egg Problem in New Markets and What Uber Would Be Like with Travis Still There with Scott Gorlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There were definitely cities that fell behind, but in a lot of cases, like the teams were just incredible. It was more a function of the regs. So a lot of times, you know, if a city was struggling, it would be due to the regulations and the laws. So they would make it really difficult to operate. They would take drivers. They would try to shut us down. And over time, that regulatory situation cleared up where we were able to operate more freely. Or we ended up moving the teams to other cities or sort of working on other projects. But I would say it wasn't like certain markets were underperforming because of sort of like underperformance. It was more like external factors that people couldn't control.”
2024-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Uber's Expansion Playbook for Scaling from 10 Cities to $10BN in Revenue | How Uber Acquired 1M Drivers | How Uber Solved the Chicken and The Egg Problem in New Markets and What Uber Would Be Like with Travis Still There with Scott Gorlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so everything was pretty autonomous, right? In the early days, every city had like the freedom to experiment and try things. And I think we had a pretty flat work structure in the early days. Everybody reported into Graves, who was your first CEO and later became the CEO. And what's really interesting sort of about that is we all kept each other accountable, right? We're all doing really hard things. And every week we would get on like a city call where an all-hands call and every city would go down a list and say, how much gross bookings you did it last week? How many trips you completed? How many drivers you onboarded and sort of general highlights from the city. And we had everything in a dashboard, everybody at the company could see exactly what city was doing what, who was growing fastest. And it became like a really competitive dynamic that all just kind of like pushed each other forward, which was a really interesting approach.”
2024-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Uber's Expansion Playbook for Scaling from 10 Cities to $10BN in Revenue | How Uber Acquired 1M Drivers | How Uber Solved the Chicken and The Egg Problem in New Markets and What Uber Would Be Like with Travis Still There with Scott Gorlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Background to the launcher, banking, private equity, consulting, MBA, Stanford class of 2012 with very good to us. And then the second role that we hired was an operations manager. And that was more like banker consultant types, like being who would oversee sort of the driver area of the operation and be responsible for growing that. And then we'd also work on getting a marketing manager that would oversee the rider side, BD partnerships, building out the early grassroots efforts in the community.”
2024-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Uber's Expansion Playbook for Scaling from 10 Cities to $10BN in Revenue | How Uber Acquired 1M Drivers | How Uber Solved the Chicken and The Egg Problem in New Markets and What Uber Would Be Like with Travis Still There with Scott Gorlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so at Uber, we saw almost every city as its own startup. That was an incredible leaf freeing thing for people that were young in their 20s and 30s to kind of go into a market and create it from scratch. And the playbook was probably 180 steps. We should probably open source it at some point. It's on an Asana checklist somewhere. How we thought about it was we wanted the right team. You know, for us, the right team meant we were hiring for three roles. One was we send in a launcher that would kind of pop around from city to city. We had launchers that started out in LA, that did Philadelphia, then did Atlanta. And sort of the profile of the launcher was MBA type private equity banking. The launcher would be responsible for hiring teams. So in a general market, we would want a general manager who acted as like the CEO of the city overseeing both driver and rider. And that person was very similar.”
2024-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Uber's Expansion Playbook for Scaling from 10 Cities to $10BN in Revenue | How Uber Acquired 1M Drivers | How Uber Solved the Chicken and The Egg Problem in New Markets and What Uber Would Be Like with Travis Still There with Scott Gorlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In every market. 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 they would fly in launchers to a city who would stay for a couple weeks or a month or kind of like pop in and popped out, we were the drivers every single day and sort of working closely with them. So I think our speed and proximity to them gave us the edge because Harriet 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.”
2024-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Uber's Expansion Playbook for Scaling from 10 Cities to $10BN in Revenue | How Uber Acquired 1M Drivers | How Uber Solved the Chicken and The Egg Problem in New Markets and What Uber Would Be Like with Travis Still There with Scott Gorlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think what was interesting about like the Uberlift dynamic is when we went into a market, like Atlanta, we had been operating for 18 months before we launched Uber X or 12 or 18 months. And Lyft was kind of new on the scene. So they didn't necessarily have the brand that we did. So for us, it was a brand extension of saying, hey, now it's the same Uber, but better, faster, and cheaper. And Lyft had to come in and sort of build that brand equity. So I think that was challenging in Atlanta for them. And some of the markets where Uber was more established. But if you go to a place like the center of the country where both services are launching at the same time, like in Oklahoma City, it was morphed dogfight in the early days. And, you know, we certainly cranked up our spend to make sure that we were winning early market share and sort of getting the drivers quicker. I think the big differentiation in Uber versus Lyft is that we had on the ground team.”
2024-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Uber's Expansion Playbook for Scaling from 10 Cities to $10BN in Revenue | How Uber Acquired 1M Drivers | How Uber Solved the Chicken and The Egg Problem in New Markets and What Uber Would Be Like with Travis Still There with Scott Gorlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For like three or four or five cities, and then we just start launching at the same time. So when we launch UberX, it was about market share and it was about getting as many drivers as possible as quickly as possible so that we could win that market and carve out a position that we felt really confident in going forward.”
2024-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Uber's Expansion Playbook for Scaling from 10 Cities to $10BN in Revenue | How Uber Acquired 1M Drivers | How Uber Solved the Chicken and The Egg Problem in New Markets and What Uber Would Be Like with Travis Still There with Scott Gorlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it would have worked no matter what. I think, like, we had strong product market fit, but I think what was particularly interesting about FreeUGRX week, looking back on it 10 years later in hindsight, was the competitive dynamics, right? So in a lot of ways, when we launched Uber X, the main competitor was Lyft. And Lyft's flagship product was Uber X. And what a lot of people don't know about Lyft is when we started launching Uber X, 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 going to launch after that. So as you probably know from Uber, that was a very abrupt, it was a very different tack that we had taken on other launches, and it didn't last very long, right? We probably did that.”
2024-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Uber's Expansion Playbook for Scaling from 10 Cities to $10BN in Revenue | How Uber Acquired 1M Drivers | How Uber Solved the Chicken and The Egg Problem in New Markets and What Uber Would Be Like with Travis Still There with Scott Gorlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the idea in terms of like ROI on Free Uber X Suite was previously Uber was just a black car product. And by launching Uber X, we could do better, faster, cheaper than a taxi. And we kind of wanted to come out with a bang, right? And to be able to do that, we were comfortable saying, hey, this free Uber X week is going to cost us X trips in a week times X dollars. And we were comfortable with that spend because if we look forward six months, business was going to be a lot bigger.”
2024-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Uber's Expansion Playbook for Scaling from 10 Cities to $10BN in Revenue | How Uber Acquired 1M Drivers | How Uber Solved the Chicken and The Egg Problem in New Markets and What Uber Would Be Like with Travis Still There with Scott Gorlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was immediate product market fit on UberX. And what was really interesting about UberX is when we launched UberX, and this was an operational nightmare, and a lot of cities, we actually did free Uberax week. So for an entire week, we would get free UberX. It was a marketing expense, right? And we were basically running at probably 80, 90, 100% utilization all the time. And we knew that when we did it, that it would be hard to kind of fill that demand, but people were really excited about Uber X and like a better, faster, cheaper option to use Uber. Over time, we were able to build more supply, right?”
2024-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Uber's Expansion Playbook for Scaling from 10 Cities to $10BN in Revenue | How Uber Acquired 1M Drivers | How Uber Solved the Chicken and The Egg Problem in New Markets and What Uber Would Be Like with Travis Still There with Scott Gorlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so when I started at Uber, we were only black cars. And what was challenging about that is there were only a certain number of black cars in a given city, right? Like in Atlanta, there might have been a thousand black cars. And while you can create more and get more on board, you're never going to build like the massive TAM business unless you open it up for Barack. So we started launching Guberx more probably in late 2012, early 2013. And then sort of as we started rolling out Uber X in more markets, that was probably 2013 and 2014. That's when the business really started to explode.”
2024-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Uber's Expansion Playbook for Scaling from 10 Cities to $10BN in Revenue | How Uber Acquired 1M Drivers | How Uber Solved the Chicken and The Egg Problem in New Markets and What Uber Would Be Like with Travis Still There with Scott Gorlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would say if you started the year with 100 drivers, I think you would probably have 25 or 30 that left at the end of the year. That would be good.”
2024-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Uber's Expansion Playbook for Scaling from 10 Cities to $10BN in Revenue | How Uber Acquired 1M Drivers | How Uber Solved the Chicken and The Egg Problem in New Markets and What Uber Would Be Like with Travis Still There with Scott Gorlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You really focus on? I would say rides per month is probably the most important and understanding rides per week and sort of how it maps to people's routine. Because some days, like you said, you might have like a long airport trip and that might distort the cohort numbers over time. And then on the driver's side for retention, what we were looking at is like, hey, how far are they retaining it? Like 28 days, you know, 56 days, 96 days, and just understanding like if a driver stays with us for three months, they're likely to stay with us longer and sort of looking at the underlying trip metrics, how many trips they're doing per week, how many, like what their ratings are, and then also like how many hours they're putting in, right? Some people this is a full-time thing. And for like 90% of drivers, it's very part-time, right? Less than like 10 hours a week.”
2024-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Uber's Expansion Playbook for Scaling from 10 Cities to $10BN in Revenue | How Uber Acquired 1M Drivers | How Uber Solved the Chicken and The Egg Problem in New Markets and What Uber Would Be Like with Travis Still There with Scott Gorlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I think on the writer side, we were looking at like total spend, right? Like what's the monthly spend and sort of how?”
2024-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Uber's Expansion Playbook for Scaling from 10 Cities to $10BN in Revenue | How Uber Acquired 1M Drivers | How Uber Solved the Chicken and The Egg Problem in New Markets and What Uber Would Be Like with Travis Still There with Scott Gorlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there was a point in San Francisco and don't quote me on this number, right? Like we were paying $25 or $50 for referrals in Atlanta. And then we started paying like $250 to each side. The driver that referred and the driver that signed up. And then we escalated to 500, 500. And I think there was a point in time where in San Francisco and a couple of other very competitive cities, we were paying $1,000 to each side. So $2,000 for driver acquisition. And we would put some sort of thresholds around that, right? The new driver would have to do X amount of trips and maintain this quality rating and do this sort of acceptance rate. But the USIT period of time, probably like 2014, 2015, 2016, where things got very gnarly.”
2024-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Uber's Expansion Playbook for Scaling from 10 Cities to $10BN in Revenue | How Uber Acquired 1M Drivers | How Uber Solved the Chicken and The Egg Problem in New Markets and What Uber Would Be Like with Travis Still There with Scott Gorlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I would say the biggest difference on the unit economics over time was we had to play the game on the field. There were a lot of competitors in different markets. And at the same time as we were raising money, SoftBank was pouring money into all the different competitors, right? So even though we were in 2014 and the business was five years along, like the unit economics, as we launched UberX, it had more competitors actually got worse over time because you started spending so much money to acquire drivers, to acquire riders. And until the competitive market rationalized, right? And softbanks sort of like pulled back a little bit or decided or Guber decided exactly like where we wanted to play. It was very challenging to basically be like, hey, Harry, we're going to cut all driver incentives tomorrow. We're going to cut all rider incentives because we would have seen that market share reflected and that would have stumped our room.”
2024-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Uber's Expansion Playbook for Scaling from 10 Cities to $10BN in Revenue | How Uber Acquired 1M Drivers | How Uber Solved the Chicken and The Egg Problem in New Markets and What Uber Would Be Like with Travis Still There with Scott Gorlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When we talk about unit economics, I think at scale, we always kind of knew that the margins would correct themselves at scale if we could kind of rationalize the competitive playing environment, right?”
2024-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Uber's Expansion Playbook for Scaling from 10 Cities to $10BN in Revenue | How Uber Acquired 1M Drivers | How Uber Solved the Chicken and The Egg Problem in New Markets and What Uber Would Be Like with Travis Still There with Scott Gorlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I probably had like a thousand or fifteen hundred drivers that were just me. And like, you know, we didn't have any of the AI tools that we did today. It was just like all on a Google Voice and sort of back and forth texting Zendesk. We let a lot of things slip through the cracks. But the business on the foundation was working.”
2024-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Uber's Expansion Playbook for Scaling from 10 Cities to $10BN in Revenue | How Uber Acquired 1M Drivers | How Uber Solved the Chicken and The Egg Problem in New Markets and What Uber Would Be Like with Travis Still There with Scott Gorlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so we made a lot of mistakes, right? So I would say the number one mistake we made in a lot of cities is we probably got kicked out of every office that we joined early because, you know, we were renting space in like co-working spaces. And a lot of these co-working spaces weren't too happy with drivers coming by all hours of the day and sort of disrupting the flow. So I think that was sort of a major error that we made early on. I think other things that we did that were kind of a little bit challenging in markets is I think that where we messed up was it was a very like 24-7 365 operation. There were people in cars every single hour of the day. And we probably understaffed a little in the early days, right? So, you know, 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.”
2024-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Uber's Expansion Playbook for Scaling from 10 Cities to $10BN in Revenue | How Uber Acquired 1M Drivers | How Uber Solved the Chicken and The Egg Problem in New Markets and What Uber Would Be Like with Travis Still There with Scott Gorlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Honestly, people underestimate how effective cold calling was. Cold calling was an incredible mechanism to get people through the door. And then the other thing, Harry, that worked super well is referrals. When we started doing referrals of drivers, we would pay like a $25 or $50 bonus for a driver to bring their friend. And then when they completed like their first 10 trips, we pay out the bonus on both sides. Obviously, as the business scaled up, the referral bal piece got quite a bit bigger. But we found that when we tapped into a specific driver community, they all kind of knew each other and were very happy to refer each other because Uber allowed them to buy more cars and expand their business. And it really just helped them grow as sort of a business at large.”
2024-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Uber's Expansion Playbook for Scaling from 10 Cities to $10BN in Revenue | How Uber Acquired 1M Drivers | How Uber Solved the Chicken and The Egg Problem in New Markets and What Uber Would Be Like with Travis Still There with Scott Gorlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, every city at Uber was kind of like running a playbook, but if we found something that worked in one city, we'd bring it everywhere else too.”
2024-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Uber's Expansion Playbook for Scaling from 10 Cities to $10BN in Revenue | How Uber Acquired 1M Drivers | How Uber Solved the Chicken and The Egg Problem in New Markets and What Uber Would Be Like with Travis Still There with Scott Gorlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so for probably the first million drivers that we onboarded, a lot of our processes were manual. 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 operational teams going out and finding drivers. It was that cold calling. It was getting drivers to show up the office and batching onboardings first with like one driver at a time, then five, then 10. Then you would basically get a conference room at a hotel to onboard 25 drivers at a time or a hundred drivers at a time. And it just kind of like scaled up. Other things that we did that I think were like super effective were we go where the drivers were, right? Like we knew that we had a captive audience on Monday mornings and Thursday afternoons when drivers picked up and dropped off people from the airport. And we knew that if we went there with snacks or coffee or rented or conference room where they could chill out between rides, we could pitch them on driving Uber. And we saw it as like very incremental to what they were building.”
2024-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Uber's Expansion Playbook for Scaling from 10 Cities to $10BN in Revenue | How Uber Acquired 1M Drivers | How Uber Solved the Chicken and The Egg Problem in New Markets and What Uber Would Be Like with Travis Still There with Scott Gorlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so we solved what I guess people call the chicken and egg problem or that cold start problem in marketplaces by doing a couple things. In the early days, we wanted to make sure that drivers, when they were sitting around were kind of like paid for that time. So in the early days, we paid a driver $20 or $30 an hour to sit there. And, you know, this lasted probably 60 or 90 days into a market launch. And then after it became clear that the driver was making more than $20 or $30 an hour, we removed that guarantee and sort of let the marketplace float naturally. Right. We also did things like we put drivers near places where we knew we'd have high demand in cities. And then we made it really easy on the demand side to work for your friends. So if you were riding in a car with somebody and they hadn't used Uber yet, by the time you got out of the car, you would have referred them and you each would have gotten like $10 off your next ride.”
2024-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Uber's Expansion Playbook for Scaling from 10 Cities to $10BN in Revenue | How Uber Acquired 1M Drivers | How Uber Solved the Chicken and The Egg Problem in New Markets and What Uber Would Be Like with Travis Still There with Scott Gorlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so we onboarded the drivers. They'd show up at the office. We do like a 60 minute onboarding. We check out their cars. We tell them a little bit about the company. And then we would kind of take them through the training on how to use the app. And then we put them out there, right? And for the first two or three weeks of the city, dude, I was nervous. It was zero out of 10 cars utilized, one out of 10, two out of 10. And then one Friday night I was out. And I think I was actually out of town at like an Uber related summit. And I'm sitting next to some other guys that are at different cities. And they're like, it's going to happen.”
2024-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Uber's Expansion Playbook for Scaling from 10 Cities to $10BN in Revenue | How Uber Acquired 1M Drivers | How Uber Solved the Chicken and The Egg Problem in New Markets and What Uber Would Be Like with Travis Still There with Scott Gorlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I'd be like, Hey, this is Scott. I work at Uber in Atlanta. We're starting a new ride sharing service where you can pick up riders between your trips to the airport. And we help you fill your downtime. Is this something you might be interested in? And while most drivers hadn't heard of Uber and were a little bit skeptical, they were willing to give us a shot because it didn't cost them anything to join, right? They would come to our office and we give them an iPhone, which is the story at some point. When we give them the iPhone, they'd be able to pick up a ride for 20 minutes later. right so we'd say hey if you don't like this bring it back and no skin off our back”
2024-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Uber's Expansion Playbook for Scaling from 10 Cities to $10BN in Revenue | How Uber Acquired 1M Drivers | How Uber Solved the Chicken and The Egg Problem in New Markets and What Uber Would Be Like with Travis Still There with Scott Gorlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so it was an incredible experience. I was living in Atlanta at the same time, so I didn't really have to move. But when I got back to Atlanta to launch Uber, it was really about building the operation from scratch. When you're starting a marketplace, you really need to do two things. You need to get supply and you need to get demand. So for Uber, the hardest thing was the driver side. And we need to get a lot of drivers very quickly. So 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 tried to get them to sign up with Uber. And got our initial list of drivers that way and launched a few weeks later with something we call a rider zero.”
2024-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Uber's Expansion Playbook for Scaling from 10 Cities to $10BN in Revenue | How Uber Acquired 1M Drivers | How Uber Solved the Chicken and The Egg Problem in New Markets and What Uber Would Be Like with Travis Still There with Scott Gorlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely magical experience. So that night was working on a deck pretty late at night, probably wrapped around midnight or 1 a.m. and had this Jerry McGuire moment where I was like, huh, I need to be a part of this Uber thing. What's the most like simple thing to do? So I decided to email travis at uber.com, not thinking that I would hear anything. And I got an email back. And over the next few weeks, I got to know the team. Eventually took an analytics test, took creative test, and then flew out to meet the team probably a couple of weeks later. And because I was so young when I got in the room, I said, don't worry guys, I'm old enough. They seem to think that was really funny. I was 23 and didn't know anything. But they sent me back to Atlanta to launch Uber's roughly 10th city as employee number 9.”
2024-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Uber's Expansion Playbook for Scaling from 10 Cities to $10BN in Revenue | How Uber Acquired 1M Drivers | How Uber Solved the Chicken and The Egg Problem in New Markets and What Uber Would Be Like with Travis Still There with Scott Gorlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Harry, it's a crazy story. So I finished up school in 2011. And when I finished up school, there were really only two things that people did. They either went to investment banking or they went to consulting. I chose consulting and very early on, I realized that it wasn't for me, probably on like week three. But the silver lining of the experience was on the weekends, I could go out and fly to San Francisco. As long as I was back at the client site on Monday morning. So this was 2011, 2012, and I was going out and meeting companies like Airbnb, Square fairly early, along with like 50 other companies, but nothing really clicked until I was in Chicago one night. I was trying to get to a work dinner and I was trying to find a taxi. It was raining. And I had heard about this app where if you press the button, you get a ride. So I downloaded the app and two minutes later, my first Uber showed up. It was an escalade and I was immediately in love.”
2024-08-30 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20Growth: Uber's Expansion Playbook for Scaling from 10 Cities to $10BN in Revenue | How Uber Acquired 1M Drivers | How Uber Solved the Chicken and The Egg Problem in New Markets and What Uber Would Be Like with Travis Still There with Scott Gorlick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source