Launching & Scaling Uber In Atlanta With Scott Gorlick | EM Group Chat #170

Welcome back to Everything Marketplaces, where we talk with founders and leaders from some of today's top marketplaces. So this is episode 170, which is really a great group chat that we just had with Scott Gorlick, who was previously early at Uber as employee 99. Scott launched Uber in Atlanta and helped them scale from 10 cities to over $10 billion in revenue while he was there. So this is a great chat with Scott where we start off by learning more about what led him to initially joining Uber as employee 99, walk through his experience launching Uber in Atlanta, He shared what some of the biggest challenges were, the playbook Uber used to launch new markets, how they recruited and scaled their first million drivers, what some of his biggest learnings were now looking back, how he advises early-stage marketplace founders and teams to think about expansion and growth today. We also had a great group Q&A. I really enjoyed this conversation. Now you're going to find it a great watch to the end. So, Scott, as I mentioned to you right before we started recording, you know, your name has come up with lots of past group chat guests recently. And of course, with the founders here in the community, So it's great to have you join us here today and wanted to start off by saying huge thanks for taking the time to do so in advance. So we have a lot that we're going to chat about with all of your incredible experience early at Uber. But before we do, I think it might be great if you can start off by briefly sharing your background for those that might not know you.

Yeah, thanks for having me, Mike. Big fan of what you've built and everything marketplaces over the years and excited to have the chance to chat with the community and get to know everybody a little bit better. So as Mike said, I'm Scott. Joined Uber back in 2012 as employee number 99. When I joined, joined, we had less than 100 employees, only black cars, and we're in about 10 cities and spent 6 years building that business. When I joined, we, you know, were in 10 cities. And when I left, we were doing $10 billion in revenue. First role was building the Atlanta office and sort of building that function heavily on the driver side, building that market from scratch and, you know, getting all the drivers. In 18 months, we built that to about an 8-figure business and then moved out to San Francisco to help lead business operations and strategy for the next 4 years where my team tackle whatever the hot problems were of the day. Since leaving Uber in 2018, I've been mostly focused on investing, which has been great, but really focused on helping founders scale up their startups with a focus on operations. So that's a little bit about where I am and sort of where I come from, but excited to spend some time with all of you.

Yeah, that's a really incredible background. So thanks for sharing with us. So I guess, you know, going back to the very beginning though, what, what led to you initially joining Uber? And you briefly mentioned about, you know, 10 cities that it was in, but can you give us a sense of a scale that it was at at the time you joined? Totally.

So when I came out of school in 2011, there were only really 2 choices. You could do banking or consulting. I chose consulting, and the reality was that I realized very quickly that it wasn't for me. But on the weekends, if, you know, I was traveling for work, I could fly out to San Francisco as long as I was back at the client site on Monday. So back in 2011, 2012, I was flying out to San Francisco every weekend and meeting with startups. I got to see Airbnb, I got to see Square pretty early and a bunch of other startups. Nothing really hit for me until I was in Chicago one night and I was trying to get to a client dinner. So I was running around the building, it was raining, trying to find a taxi. And I had heard about this app where if you press the button, you could get a ride. So 2 minutes later, my first Uber showed up and I said this was absolutely magical and I needed to be a part of it. So That night, worked on a deck for the client, wrapped at like 12 or 1 a.m., and decided to do what any 23-year-old kid that wanted to join a company would do. So I shot travis@uber.com a cold email. Didn't think I would hear anything back, and I got an email in my inbox. One thing led to another. Took an analytics test, took a creative test, and then a couple of weeks later I ended up flying out to meet the team. And when I had gotten in the room, you know, because I had come in through Travis's inbox, I don't think anybody really knew how old I was. So I said, don't worry, guys, I'm old enough. They seemed to think that was really funny and sent me back to launch Atlanta, which was Uber's 10th-ish city at the time. You know, we were only black cars, 10 cities, and it was really focused on sort of, you know, going into those next markets. So we were, we were really small when I joined, and then we kind of had this, this like startup hypergrowth story that, you know, everybody talks about.

So you mentioned launching Uber in Atlanta. So could you walk us through, you know, what went into launching Atlanta as a new market?

So when we decided to launch a market, we had a 180-step playbook, and I'll talk about that in a little while if that's interesting to folks. But when we touched down in Atlanta, it was about a couple of things. First, we needed to build the team. Every team had 3 roles on it, a general manager who is like the CEO of a city, The operations manager that focused on the driver side—that was me—typically came from a banking or consulting background, and then a and then a marketing manager that focused on the rider side. And when we went into a market, we had a lot of things that we needed to do. But because we were a very supply-constrained marketplace, as soon as we put cars on the road, those would fill up and we need more. We focused very heavily on the driver side in the early days. So in order to sign up the early drivers, it was a lot of hey, let's make a list of. Every single limo company in a city, and then let's call through them methodically and try to set up meetings, go down to the airport when we know the drivers are going to be picking up or dropping off riders and try to get in front of them and pitch Uber as, hey, we know you have rides on Monday morning to the airport and Thursday morning or Thursday afternoon back from the airport. We know you do proms and nights out, but we'd love to fill your downtime. This is something that you might be interested in. And, you know, fortunately our pitch resonated and we were able to get a lot of drivers to try it out. So for us in the early days of any market, it was really about supply and sort of if we had enough cars on the road, the demand would follow.

That's great to learn more about. So you also mentioned, you know, doing the things that kind of don't scale, right? So actually kind of like calling some of those limo services. So what were the, some of maybe the strategies or tactics that actually ended up working for, you know, scaling the driver side?

For us to scale the driver side, there were a couple tactics that we used and Honestly, what's hard about marketplaces is there's no silver bullet. But I think Ben Horowitz says there are lots of lead bullets. And, you know, for us it was exceptionally true. There was not one tactic that really solved everything for us, but there were a few that worked really well. Number one was referrals. If we had a driver that was part of a community or knew other drivers, especially in the taxi community, and they were doing well and making money on Uber's platform, it was really easy for us to get that them to tell their friends, um, and to have the friends show up and start driving with Uber. And it was a really good predictor that if somebody was a good driver on Uber, they also knew, you know, other drivers that would fit the profile of what we were looking for. I think 2 was the cold calling that I mentioned in terms of like going through, you know, logging it in like a Google Sheet or HubSpot or whatever we were using back in the day and just being like really relentless and trying to touch every driver and talk to them, um, and understand like what their temperature was. 3 was going down to places where they were, right? So making it really accessible, renting hotel rooms near the airport so that, you know, drivers would come in and grab snacks, coffee, etc. Or we did a lot of like onboarding sessions where, you know, we would say come by our office anytime and, you know, we'll try to fit you in regardless of your schedule. And it didn't necessarily scale. But, you know, in the early days we weren't doing a lot of paid marketing. There wasn't a lot of Craigslist There wasn't a lot of Facebook, there wasn't a lot of Google spend until we launched UberX about 2 years later.

And then as far as, you know, with, with UberX, I can imagine that, you know, had its own kind of unique challenges when it came to, I would say, you know, recruiting, kind of onboarding drivers. So maybe what were some of those kind of specific strategies that worked? And also, too, you know, what are some that didn't work?

Yeah. So on the UberX side, what was really interesting is we went from having drivers that were already driving professionally and they were either switching in from taxi or from limo. And then, you know, they were just driving black car. But with UberX, you know, anybody could drive their own car, whether it be a Prius, a Camry. So we radically expanded sort of the market size in every— any given market. But we also, you know, needed more drivers because we were bringing Uber down in terms of price point. So within the UberX product, there were a couple of different categories of drivers. First were the drivers that were driving taxi, you know, or limo for a company but didn't have their own car. And, you know, we found that those drivers were very captive audience and they would come on the system and they would do 50, 70 hours a week and be very reliable in terms of supply hours. And, you know, if we were to look at the cohort in terms of the retention, they retained at a higher rate and probably produced, you know, 60, 70% of our revenue Pareto style. And then the, the sort of group of drivers that was like more, like more in terms of number, but probably less in terms of actual supply. were the people that were coming from other industries, whether it be restaurants, hotel, hospitality, leisure. And these were people that were looking for like a side hustle and they wanted to drive 5 or 10 hours a week. And, you know, we needed to target them in different ways. So it was Craigslist, it was referral channels, it was probably some Facebook spend. We were doing some incentive bonuses to join that were particularly helpful. But one of the things that was interesting about that is it took longer to onboard them. because they were more hesitant and not used to driving people around, and they churned at higher rates. So like when we opened the market for UberX, we, we changed the, the type of driver that we were looking for, and it was a really interesting mix.

So that's on the supply side, which you mentioned is kind of the hard side to solve for when you're kind of opening a market. But, you know, switching over to demand, so what were some of the ways that, you know, you were able to kind of attract initial demand and kind of scale that up in a market?

So what was really interesting with demand and Uber had a wild product market fit on the demand side, and I think that's pretty rare for a marketplace. But some of the things that we did in the early days on demand when we're setting up a new market is there was— I remember in Atlanta, the first 2 weeks were really slow, and I was thinking, are we going to be the first city not to make it here? And you would look at sort of our monitors and see, okay, there's 1 of 10 cars full, 0 out of 10 cars full. Like, when is this going to happen? And people in other cities would say, this is going to happen. You just have to wait. And then I was on like a work thing with other operations managers in a different city. It was Friday night. I looked down at my phone. There were like 0 out of 20 cars filled. And then I looked up and all of a sudden we had like all the cars full and like 100 people looking for rides. So it, it flipped very quick. But some of the tactics we used on the demand side were we wanted to position cars close to places that we thought were going to be popular. So Atlanta, Mike, I know you're from Atlanta, like you want to have cars in Buckhead, you want to have cars in Midtown, you want to be around like the hot restaurants and bars. The other thing that we did that I think worked very well on the demand side is our product had incredibly strong word of mouth. So if you were in a car with somebody else that hadn't used Uber before, We made it easy for you to refer your friend by the time you got out of the car so that, you know, you would both get $10 or $20 off your next ride. And then that person would request later in the night. And that was pretty helpful. So I would think like early on, those were like the 2 things, car positioning and referrals. But we, we had a lot of word of mouth. And then the, the last thing that I'll throw in is that, you know, Uber was controversial in terms of regulators with taxi lobby. And we had a product that people really loved. So when regulators came After us, we were able to mobilize a rider base, get earned media, get on the news, get clicks, and sort of like people asking about our product. And you know, whenever we had a regulatory flare-up, it led to more signups on the demand side too.

Yeah, no, I definitely remember the you know the early referrals that you had. Yeah, were those kind of key to scaling the demand?

Yeah, I mean, referrals were big as we continued to grow. We would flex up and flex down referrals. We would say, okay, you can give five dollars, you can get five dollars off your next ride.

We can G test.

G10, where you give $10, get $10. And then at a certain point, we did give $20, get $20 and sort of experimented with the elasticity of the referrals. I'm not sure, I can't recall exactly like where we landed on it. But, you know, as you would imagine, the $20 referrals definitely attracted like more new users, but it probably also attracted more fraud.

So, you know, after you kind of solve for the initial kind of cold start problem in the market and, you know, begin to kind of, you know, scale up, I mean, what were some of the metrics as far as like that you used to kind of balance out marketplace liquidity on our side?

I think the hardest thing to do once we had initial demand in the city was just keeping up on the supply side. So we were constantly looking to onboard more drivers. We'd go from onboarding 5 drivers in a week to 10 to 25 to 100 to needing like 200 or 1,000 drivers, you know, a week. And we had to figure out like how to scale that up. And that was really hard in and of itself. In terms of the metrics that we look for week over week, we were looking at gross bookings, which, you know, was kind of a key metric. We wanted to look at, you know, completed to request, how many out of 100 trips that were requested, how many were completed. We wanted to look at ETAs to make sure that our marketplace was healthy and drivers were able to get to riders in less than 5 minutes. We wanted to understand like the quality ratings both on the rider side and the driver side. We wanted to understand marketplace health in terms of surge on a weekly basis. What percentage of trips are being surged? If it's like, you know, more than 10%, you've got— you need more supply. If it's more than like 25%, you need a lot of supply. And, you know, we wanted to drive that down over time. And I think one of the things that made Uber so special is we were able to measure every part of our business and we held, you know, teams accountable and we all kind of like rallied and were a little bit competitive with each other to see like which city could grow faster. And I think That really helped the flywheel turn for us. I think we had a good handle on metrics.

Yeah. So you mentioned as far as the note is competition, right? So it's probably worth noting, you know, I would say the point in time with, you know, Uber and Lyft. So I guess, you know, what were some of the learnings around, you know, the nature of kind of competition and especially when it could be like winner takes all in markets?

On the competition side of the house, we had the rideshare wars in the US, Uber versus Lyft versus Sidecar versus Halo. But, you know, we also had wars in every single region around the world with SoftBank, with Didi, with the Rocket Internet guys. And I think my main lesson for that is you have to play the game on the field. We did it in the time of SERP where money was falling from the sky. Teams were raising bigger and bigger rounds, and there was a thesis that Uber wasn't going to be the one platform globally that, you know, Uber was going to falter in certain regions and that if Uber couldn't do it, a more local homegrown competitor that was more regionalized would do well. And I think that led to us raising a lot of money. And when SoftBank put in a lot of money to competitors, it jacked up the incentives on the rider side, it jacked up the incentives on the driver side, and you really had to play the game in the field. So I think what happened over time is Uber wanted to be the number one or number two player in every market. I think in China, we pulled off an amazing deal with Didi in terms of a merger that was a joint venture. In Singapore and like Southeast Asia, we did something similar with Grab. In Russia, we did something similar with Yandex. In Africa, we did something with Careem. And, you know, over time, the spend came down as companies like went public and Didi and Uber and Lyft. And then at the same time, COVID kind of happened and rationalized the market a little bit more. So if you look at the business today, it's very healthy. But I think my biggest learning is you have to play the game on the field, even if it's a game you don't want to play, because marketplaces are winner-take-all.

Certainly. So we actually had Emil as a past group chat guest. So we got some insights on that as well when it comes to the nature of competition. So, and some of the deals that took place. We've covered, you know, the initial kind of overcoming the cold start problem and kind of how you scaled up, you know, Atlanta as a market. But as far as, you know, if we just think about like what the Uber new market launch and expansion playbook looked like, like what did that end up being?

On the market expansion playbook, we went into a city and we had a 180-step playbook. I think we had it in Asana and a lot of people have been asking about it. I'm going to see if we can dig it up at some point. But I think what it boiled down to was a couple of things. One, hire the team, and the team being the GM, the operations manager, and the marketing manager. 2, get the initial supply. So partner up with limo companies so that you can, you know, secure initial supply and have people on 24/7 for when people get rides. And then 3, start to build up the demand side so that, you know, you're forming relationships in the community, you're tying into like local influential business. to, you know, teams, to event venues, etc., so that you can be top of mind. And then 4, I think just be prepared for a 24/7, 365 business. We had people in cars all the time and things were going to happen every hour of the day and you need to set up the systems to be really responsive to that. So those are the things that we kind of looked for and, you know, were probably a little bit maniacal for. In terms of how we set it up. But I would say like every city was probably like 95% the same and 5% different. And the local teams really helped us sort of optimize that 5%.

That's going to be really helpful. So you mentioned that as far as the note, you know, with like ops and kind of support, right? Since it is like a 24/7 operation. So what are maybe, what are some of the kind of like learnings looking back on, you know, how you were able to kind of scale up ops and support to kind of keep up with the growth in a market?

It was crazy. It was the most fun you'd probably never want to have again. But drivers would call, email, text 24/7, 365. And one of the biggest mistakes I made on day 1, and probably the first week, is I didn't set up a Google Voice. So I had drivers emailing, calling me, texting me on my phone. And to this day, I probably still get 5 calls a day from taxi drivers in Atlanta asking for Uber. But, you know, for the first year it was really just me on the driver side and it was do whatever you had to. So on weekends, if I was going out, which was very rare because, you know, Friday and Saturday night were the busy times, I would bring 5 or 10 iPhones in a backpack with me so that if a driver's iPhone broke, you know, I could do a hot swap with them or, you know, if I was you know, winding down at the end of the night and wanted to get a feel for sort of like how things were going, you know, I would call a car and, you know, I'd ride with the driver. I'd ride with a couple of drivers to just kind of get the pulse of the city to see like what was happening, how things were looking, etc. And I think, you know, with everything being so, so regimented in terms of having people in cars, you had to be really quick to respond to issues. And, you know, Saturday morning you woke up at like 6 or 7 AM and you looked at everything that came in the night before and you're like, okay, this is what I can do now. This is what I can triage for later. But it felt like a 5-alarm fire all the time. And I think the urgency that we treated everything with led to us being successful, but drove us a little bit nuts.

So you're getting a lot of head nods here. So it's definitely relatable for a lot of early-stage kind of founders and teams. So, so, you know, so this is some pretty incredible experience that you had, you know, early at Uber. So I guess, you know, like looking back now, what were some of your biggest learnings?

I think my biggest learnings are, one is market selection. So I believe that the right people working on the right thing at the right time can change the world. And we were fortunate in that our timing was good with the iPhone. We were fortunate in that the GPS was sort of accurate. And, you know, we were also fortunate that we weren't creating like a new market, right? Until UberX, we were taking existing demand of people calling taxis in like a really negative way and finding a way to amplify that and make it better, faster, easier for people to do that. And I think, you know, there was right timing, but I think like we intercepted demand and gave people like a better way to do things. I think the second learning was on talent density. I, you know, went to Uber and thought that talent density, when you look to your left and you look at your right and you see like you're the dumbest person in the room, I thought that was normal. It turns out that talent density is incredibly rare. And I think when you have a team that's really talented, you want to do everything that you can to keep them better and keep raising the bar. And, you know, startups with incredible teams and talent density are cheat code. And then, you know, I think the last learning is really about grit and sort of determination. I think I was talking with you, Mike, for a minute, like before, marketplaces are the hardest businesses to build in the world. But if you get them right, they are some of the most valuable companies in the world. There's a reason why, you know, Uber is a $150 billion company, Airbnb sitting around like $75 billion or $100 billion. And a lot of the companies that are big have gotten that way because of marketplaces and network effects. And, you know, that doesn't mean that it's going to be great. But, you know, the reality is you're going to have to go through a lot of pain in order to get the network effects to kick in. But once they do, they're incredible businesses.

So I guess, you know, with all of your experience, I'm sure you get lots of, you know, messages from, from founders today kind of building earlier stage marketplaces. And looking for advice, you know, as far as managing kind of growth and expansion. So, you know, just generally speaking, you know, how do you advise early-stage founders to think through that today?

I'm really passionate about helping startups scale up with better operations. And for me, it means that I want people, teams doing like the right thing at the right time. And a lot of companies talk about wanting to have incredible operations, but nobody really knows what it means. or like how to do it. So that's kind of like what I'm focusing on right now. And I think what it boils down is a couple of things. One, focus, figure out like what is the atomic unit for your marketplace in that like, you know, we could do all of these different side quests, but what is the thing that your users want the most and sort of how do you give it to them in the easiest, simplest way possible? You don't need to overengineer things. You don't need to do you know, side quests of like products that don't necessarily make sense. You're gonna find something that works and then you're just gonna go really hard on it. And then I think that, you know, overhiring is sort of one that continuously comes up. I think in the early days it's gotta be a lot of like founder-led sales and a lot of like founder-led market dynamics. And, you know, I've seen that the closer the founders are to the individual transactions, the better the business goes. I think the classic example is the Collison brothers with Stripe when they would personally go over and actually install Stripe on like customers' computers. And, you know, I think the closer you can be to that for as long as possible is important. And then I think, you know, where I was probably unpopular at Uber is like I really— and now this is in vogue— is unit economics, right? It's not growth at all costs. Growth at all costs was never a thing until, you know, It was a thing and now it's not. But, you know, I think understanding the metrics in terms of CAC, in terms of LTV, in terms of payback period, in terms of understanding your week-over-week growth and having like a really firm grip on your metrics, I think that really helps. So that's a lot of the stuff that I'm working with founders on now.

Yeah, no, I'm glad you mentioned as far as, you know, not being growth at all costs because that was definitely a topic that I wanted to chat about and I'm sure we'll get to in the group Q&A here. But right before we do though, so do you have, you know, a few tips maybe for early stage kind of marketplace founders and teams that you'd like to share?

Yeah, I think it depends on where you are in the cycle, right? If you are thinking about like what marketplace to build, I think there are a lot of things that you want to look for in the qualities of what would make a good marketplace. So you want to look at like frequency of demand. You know, you don't— it's really hard to, you know, start a marketplace for moving if somebody is moving like once every 3 or 4 years. I think that you want to think about like the average order value, like what's the transaction size, you know, bigger is better unless you're like very frequent like Uber. I think you want to think a lot about, you know, the unit economics, as I said before, you want to think about sort of like take rates, whether you want them on the buy side, on the sell side, both. You want to understand like, you know, are there additional sort of like products that you can tack on later? You know, if you're selling a $1,000 service and, you know, you're taking a 20% rate, can you add payment processing later? Can you add insurance? Can you add like transportation? Like figuring out like how you kind of like grow that. And that's what VCs are like and investors are really interested over the long term is like what is the second and third act? And it's really hard, like as a seed stage founder, as an idea stage founder to be like, hey, like this is what we're going to be when we grow up 5 to 7 years from now if everything goes right. So I think that's really hard. And then for like Series A, Series B founders, it's, you know, figuring out like what are the unit economics that make sense? Like how do you keep up your growth? And, you know, how do you really scale into the business that, you know, you want to become? And, you know, I think this is a hard topic to talk about with your investors, but, you know, you've got to optimize for, for you and your team in a lot of ways. And, you know, if you end up raising $5 or $10 million, you know, you have optionality later on if you decide to sell. But, you know, if you raise $50 or $100 million, the number of buyers that can buy you are, are a lot smaller. And you've got to think about dilution. So, you know, I mean, I think the famous example is like you can sell a billion-dollar company and own 3% of it, or you could sell, you know, a $100 million company and own 30% of it. Your outcome is the same. Maybe you're like, more famous if that like matters to you, but you probably went through a lot more pain to get there. So, you know, I think, think about like what's right for you and your team and think about dilution and sort of growth and unit economics too.

We're gonna get into the group Q&A here. Hey, Dimitri, do you want to come on?

Thanks, Mike. So my question is about whether you see any potential for intermediaries or for marketplaces that aggregate demand or supply either within or across the marketplace. So kind of some examples like Uber Pool, an example of a marketplace aggregating internal demand, right? Or another example of aggregating external demand would be Otter, which allows a restaurant to kind of multi-home across Caviar and all the other kind of delivery and takeout providers. Do you see challenges with that business model or do you see opportunities or, and where do those kind of come up? I think with Uber Pool, I think it's like a, a little bit of a weird product in that it has like social dynamics of like, hey, you're getting in a car with a ride somebody Is this something I want? Like, am I saving time? Am I saving money? Do I want to be in the car with this person? I think it's much more interesting across other examples. So like in the wedding example, I think HoneyBook has done like a great job of sort of like building that product where you're like an end-sided marketplace. And, you know, if you use HoneyBook and it's been a while since I've kind of like looked at HoneyBook as a business, but what's interesting is like, you know, if you're the planner, you onboard all the other vendors. Because you need it to get paid. And if you use it to get paid, then like everybody else is onboarded. So the photographer's onboarded, the photographer likes it, and then they bring it to other weddings. So I think that that's really interesting if you can aggregate demand and allow it to like kind of spread and have like a K-factor greater than 1. I think like if you're like trying to run sort of a marketplace where like if you look at Bird, right, and there were people that were probably like grouping up and being like, hey, we're going to start a business that's like Bird chargers. And I think I think that's very like has a lot of platform risk and that the platform doesn't succeed or, you know, they crack down on you and say like, hey, you can't do this. But I like inside of marketplaces provided that you can control the flow, if that makes sense.

Cool. Hey, Scott, I actually had a question for you that I want to ask for a founder that mentioned it in the community advance, which is around growth and kind of making your first growth hire. So how do you, I guess, like, how do you advise, you know, founders thinking about, you know, making that first growth hire, you know, when the time is right? And then do you have any tips for doing so?

On the growth hire piece, I think understanding where you are in the lifecycle of a business is important. If you are Uber and a lot of your growth is coming from referrals and word of mouth, you need a very different type of growth hire. than if you were a B2B marketplace selling steel and, you know, you're doing a lot of outbound, you need somebody that has heavy experience in the steel industry and is comfortable being on a plane in a lot of places and traveling. So I think when it comes down to what you need generally is that you really need somebody who's an athlete that can roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty. You probably don't want somebody who's worked at Fang or Google for a long time, it's, you know, probably not the right profile of folks that you wanna work with. I think that if you're looking for a head of growth that has, you know, 15+ years experience and you're like a seed stage startup, like that might not be the right fit for you depending on the person, right? They might want something like more later stage or they might want something that's more evolved or they might wanna build a team. I think when you're making that first growth hire, like I would hire, I'd be much more comfortable hiring somebody like 5 to 8 years experience that is just a rock star and going to grind and is kind of not— they're known and that they're talented, but they might be a little bit more undiscovered than somebody that's further out.

Looks like I actually got another question here for someone they wanted me to ask. It's around expansion and not just, you know, expansion into new markets here in the US, but like when you're kind of going international and international markets, Are there any kind of like specific challenges, you know, from that or maybe learnings that might be helpful for, you know, maybe I would say teams here that are looking to expand internationally?

Lots of challenges around international. I think that the first one that comes to mind is VAT in terms of getting the value, the tax, right? That was complicated as we went into different markets. I think translation was important. So if we were going into a French-speaking market, making sure that all of our translations, your Uber is arriving now, the pickup point, etc., in the app or in French or in any other language that we went to a place. I think that, you know, in India, for example, there are lots of different sort of like languages. So being able to communicate with drivers in like one of 16 languages and knowing like which languages they speak is kind of difficult and something we struggled a lot with until we kind of like surveyed and tried to customize around that. And then I think understanding like economics more, right? So, you know, in the US, the average ride might be $15 or $20. In another country that's, you know, in Africa or India, like rides might be $2 or $3. So understanding, you know, the gravity of sort of the market and how many rides you need to do and like if the, like what your business is going to look like if you're successful, I think that's, that's important. But for us, like those markets were really important because they were some of the fastest growing markets, especially if you look at LATAM, the Middle East and Africa.

Ajith, do you want to come on? I saw you raise your hand. So I wanted to ask, how do you keep the supply happy while the demand is building up?

So I've heard stories that Uber used to pay, you know, you know, for the hours. How do you think about that and how do you balance that with your burn as well? It's a great question. And we talked a little bit about how we solve the chicken and egg problem on the demand side with referrals and positioning cars. But when it came to drivers, we did have a window of a couple of months where things were slower. So what you said is actually totally right. When we went into a market and we called these drivers up, we tried to work with some of the big limo companies that had 20, 40, 50 cars and we'd say, hey, we need cars on during this time. Those cars aren't moving for you. Is it okay if we pay you $20 or $30 an hour for those cars to sit there? And, you know, that was kind of an hourly guarantee that we would have cars on the road and the limo company had a floor for what that was worth. Right. And, you know, as opposed to like sitting in the garage and making $0. So it was incremental to them. And, you know, for them, if they were just sitting around, they were still getting paid. What happened is as we built demand, you know, what happened was the drivers started earning more money than the $30 per hour or $20 per hour, whatever we were like doing in that market. And then we were able to kind of like pull away the hourly guarantee. And, you know, we let the marketplace float, as I like to call it, as we found sort of like liquidity and things balanced out a little bit.

Hey, Jack, do you want to come on? And then, Namrata, we'll try to get to you right after.

Yeah, sure. Hey, Scott. Jack Spangler here, ex-Uber as well. Was on the New York City ops team and partnerships team in SF. Joined in '14. One of my favorite Uberversity sessions was your pro team session. Wanted to kind of pick your brain on what necessitated the build out of the pro team, where you see something like that type of function fitting in for a startup and when like a pro team needs to be built out, when you kind of wind it down. We'd love to get your take on that. Yeah. So on at Uber, as we scaled up, we needed to centralize a little bit more. So we still had city teams in hundreds of cities around the world, But what happened around like 2014 is we had hundreds of cities. We needed to manage the portfolio. We needed to understand, hey, like which driver or which teams are where, who's doing what? Like how can we take these hundreds of startups running in different cities and help centralize and give tool teams like the cities to succeed? And what happened with that is, you know, we ended up forming sort of a crack team where we worked on sort of like high priority projects and split that across different groups and teams. And so we built it in 2014. And, you know, as we kind of grew, it was really important for us to be able to help Travis and team with whatever it is and be the liaison between like city teams and product and operations. And the easiest way to think about it is sort of we were a business operations team for like the entire business. And I think, you know, it makes sense to a certain point, like while the business is sort of going through hypergrowth. But over time, the city teams, regional and the regional teams become more mature and sort of self-functioning. So I think if you do your job right, like we did on the pro side of things, you eventually become less necessary. And, you know, you dissolve yourself as a business operations team and fold into different places. But I'm very pro Biz Ops teams. But I think like the goal of a Biz Ops team in general is to kind of eliminate yourself over time.

Hey, Nimrata, do you want to come on?

Hi, Scott. So my question was, For the really early stages when you're trying to bootstrap the initial set on the supply side. On the onboarding side, how did you think about the legal and the trust and safety implications? Like, would you be vetting them for work authorization or doing background checks? And did you come across any resistance to agreements and contracts and things like that? And this is like when they're just starting out in a new place. How, how did you go about that? Totally. And I think it's a great question, Radha. I think that when we thought about trust and safety, it was really about making sure that we had the right drivers on board and that every ride at Uber could be safe. So, you know, when we were doing Black Car, the things that we looked for were we were making sure everybody had a driver's license, had the chauffeur permit, was carrying the proper insurance, had all the documents for their vehicle. And that, you know, they were licensed to operate as a limo company in a given state. And then sort of as we launched UberX, we expanded those requirements and, you know, added background checks. I think Uber is probably the, the standard for safety in a lot of ways. You know, at first we worked with a small background check provider in the US and we scaled them up and then we moved over to Checkr. I'm not sure sort of what the current state of the business is now. And then as we were collecting payments, payment info from drivers, we also ran like an OFAC check on those drivers to make sure that, you know, we weren't doing anything, that they were able to be paid in the US and didn't pose a significant risk. But I would say like early on it was check the docs and then sort of like as we go sort of tighten that up.

Well, cool. We're almost out of time here, Scott, but, you know, I want to be conscious of that. But, you know, really appreciate taking the time to join us and, you know, going back and sharing sharing, you know, all of your incredible experience at Uber and some of the learnings and tips here, you know, as well for earlier stage kind of founders and teams. And, you know, I actually had one last question for you before we wrap things up. And that's if you could go right back to before you joined Uber, you know, what would you tell yourself about marketplaces?

It's a great question. I've never been asked that before. I think if I could go back to 2012, the day before I joined Uber, what I wish I knew about marketplaces, is that it's, it's hard, it's dirty. You have to fight, scratch and claw for everything that you get, but it's the most fun type of business to build if you figure out how to optimize supply and demand.

No, we, we can all relate with that. So that's a great way to kind of wrap things up here. And then last but not least, time for a quick plug. Where can we keep up with you at?

Yeah, so I'm on Twitter @sgorlick and then also posting a little bit about what I'm building at Gorlick I work with founders seed through Series B right now and kind of help them scale up their startup. So if that's interesting for you, feel free to get in touch.

Awesome. I'll include links in the recording and you'll probably have lots of, you know, founders coming your way and teams. So thanks again for the awesome group chat today, Scott, and thanks everyone for joining in.