Emil Michael explains how Uber decided which cities to enter, weighing factors like local regulations, economic conditions, and existing taxi markets. He discusses specific examples from Japan, Azerbaijan, and Egypt to show how market conditions shaped the company's expansion strategy.
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My question is, uh, regarding to going into market. Um, so what were the kind of the key factors that influenced Uber's, uh, decision-making when going into a new market?
I'll go deeper on what I said before, is we did a lot of research, and for us it went down to the local level because there are local transportation levels, sometimes county, sometimes state, sometimes national, depending on the country. And we'd sort of do a deep dive into what we thought that meant for our deployment in that country. Was it going to be easy, hard? What would the— how big the opportunity was, how small. The economics of that country mattered too. Like, who was spending money in that country? You know, was it something that where there was disposable income where they could trade off from a train ride or a subway ride to an Uber ride. So it was a really pretty detailed analysis there about what we did. And as a counterexample, Japan has great taxis. They run on time, they're clean. Japanese people and Japanese businesses are rule followers. So going in there, breaking the rules, or, you know, or taking license with the rules, with a population that doesn't like it, with a system that kind of works, put that last on the list. It was the third-tier, you know, part of the list. Um, Azerbaijan, some of these other countries where GDP per capita was low, they had gypsy cabs already, they had sort of like unofficial Uber already, uh, was also low on the list. Egypt was higher on the list because they kind of had this gypsy cab phenomenon, but it was such a big city and people hated negotiating for every ride. So we put a non-negotiation thing on every ride and that made it a good market. So it was pretty— it was a pretty detailed analysis and it was way more inexpensive to do that research upfront and critical thinking and tiering of your opportunities for deployment among countries than it was to go and fail just because you didn't do the work. That was our philosophy.
