Travis Kalanick envisioned Uber Eats as part of an "urban logistics fabric" that could move people, food, and goods. By owning its own delivery fleet instead of relying on restaurants' drivers like Grubhub did, Uber Eats offered more variety and outgrew its 15-year-old competitor within two years.
Chapters
You know, Uber, you know, moving from just being, you know, kind of ridesharing to launching Uber Eats and, you know, taking a kind of bet on that. So could you maybe share a little bit more around, you know, what led to kind of Uber Eats and, you know, maybe some like looking back, some learnings from that?
Yes. Uber. So one of the original visions that Travis and I had was we were going to be what we called an urban logistics fabric. And that fabric, meaning we had points, if you think about a caching network, we were gonna have points of entry all over the city. And that point of entry maybe was a car or a vehicle of some sort, and it was gonna transport people, things, food, groceries, and so on. And that was going to be the fungible element that moved things around. So the next biggest market after transporting people is, was transporting food, we thought, because if you remember, It was Grubhub and I forget the other one. Really tiny, right? As a, as a business. Why? Because Grubhub relied on the restaurant to provide their own driver. So you're a great small pizza shop and, you know, you have order volume that goes up and down. You know, you're kind of a little bit on tight string. You're like, I'm not going to hire a delivery guy to sit there because in busy times he can't deliver enough and in slow times I'm paying him. They're not doing that. So our innovation was, we're going to bring the delivery. You just have to provide the food. Because we have these nodes all over the city, we're going to use our network to take the food that you have from your restaurant and deliver it to somebody. So that was an innovation which was not obvious at the time. And it turns out that that allowed us to build a huge menu. And it also turns out that what do people want when they open a food delivery app? They want variety. They just, they want it. They was like, do I want Chinese? Do I want Indian? Do I want Italian? That is the number one thing they want is variety. And that allowed us to provide variety for them. And it was an incredible innovation because within 2 years we got bigger than Grubhub that had been around for, you know, 15 years. And then, that should have been extended to grocery. Travis and I got booted out of the company by then, and Instacart sort of had the mantle. But, uh, but that was the natural extension of bringing delivery to commerce, as opposed to waiting for the commerce companies to develop their own delivery networks.
