Emil Michael Q&A On Learnings & Lessons From Launching Uber Eats

Hey, Danny, do you wanna jump on?

Hey, Emil, Danny here. Just wanted to deep dive a little bit into Uber Eats, and you've already kind of touched on. So would love to understand like what insights do you have around kind of what needed to change in Uber's approach, whether that's launching Sydney or anything else, and maybe things that didn't necessarily work well kind of from your approach at Uber. To Uber Eats?

Uber Eats was somewhat easier from a marketplace standpoint because of the fallback. You could go to a restaurant and say, sign up. And they didn't necessarily care that you had 1 or 10 orders that month because signing up cost them nothing, right? It's like, here's a free iPad, put it on your wall. If an order comes through, fulfill it. If it doesn't, no problem. You got an iPad that just sits there. So we could build up the supply side and then before we marketed to the demand side. So we weren't always having to balance. And because humans want to see variety, we're like, let's focus on getting variety. Then we can spend our money on marketing and people open the app and go, holy cow, there's a lot of, there's a lot of options here. So that was sort of one key difference. One key thing we were wrong about was that we thought drivers who transported people would also want to transport food. And that would be the synergy where like, remember I talked about this sort of network of nodes around the city. That thesis was wrong. Turns out people who want to deliver food are much less social. They don't want to talk to the people in the backseat. They kind of want to drive, pick up, drop off. They also, we were more tolerant of them having crappy cars because no one's sitting there. So for them, the cost was lower because they had crappy cars. They didn't have to have a fancier car. So you were accessing a different type of driver who sort of like had a lower cost basis and didn't like, you know, it's not that they didn't like people. I don't wanna make 'em seem like monsters. They just preferred to work on their own.

Right.

And so the overlap in driver base was like 10%. It was amazing to me. It was shocking to me that people who didn't want to do one did the other. And people think it was smell in the car. Like, again, it was some of that, but it was really just different type of people. The number of women who applied to be Uber Eats drivers was like 3 times the percentage of women that applied to be Uber rideshare drivers. So maybe there was a safety thing there. I don't have to have a meal in my backseat. I could just deliver. Even though you're delivering to people's houses, you're like, I don't get it, but maybe they could drop off and just leave. So those were some of the key differences between those. DoorDash is a much more formidable competitor to Uber Eats than Lyft was to Uber Rides. DoorDash is very innovative and they did some things that, well, when Travis and I left, Uber Eats was way bigger than DoorDash in the US. Now, The flip has happened. They went into the suburbs faster. They had a much more ingenious way of creating variety on their market. So they would, they would sign up a restaurant without the restaurant even knowing. They'd go on their website, download the menu, put it on DoorDash. Someone would order it. They'd have a DoorDash person call the restaurant, order the stuff, pay retail for it. And so they had variety like day one. They opened a city in like one day. And then at the end of the month, some sales guy would go to a restaurant and say, hey, we delivered you, you know, $1,000 this month. Don't you want to sign up? And they're like, yeah, I guess so. So they, we called it over the top. So they did like very ingenious things like that, that Dora and the team after me didn't do. So, you know, those are some lessons from the differences between those businesses.