Uber disrupted a corrupt taxi medallion system, which made it the public villain unlike OpenTable. Once consumers demanded its reliable rides and cashless payments, the company could have repositioned itself like Airbnb did, maintaining a friendlier image while still fighting regulations.
Chapters
And of course, Uber is probably one of the most notable brands when it comes to marketplaces. So are there any, you know, I would say like specific learnings around brand building and maybe even kind of like managing, you know, I would say like the public kind of perception of your brand with Uber from your experience?
Well, I'll tell you this, we weren't very good at PR, obviously, and it was partly an artifact of the business we were in. We were running up against one of the most corrupt areas of any economy, not just the US economy— transportation, taxi medallions. Um, that segment of any city's industry is, for whatever reason, highly corrupt and highly rent-seeking. In Japan, in Joburg, and in Jamaica, Queens, it just is. And the regulations were set up to, uh, to repel competitors. So over time, the taxi medallion lobby had worked with the local politicians to create an incredibly protective set of regulations to keep competitors out, to keep prices high, to pay drivers really low, and so on. So we were breaking that. And when you're breaking that kind of system, You know, you don't do it with, you know, nice conversations and persuasion. You have to sort of, you know, you have to really go at it really hard. And that makes you sort of the bad guy, right? And I think that's not necessarily the case in other marketplace businesses. Like OpenTable's a marketplace business. You don't have to be a bad guy to be OpenTable because restaurant, you know, you wanna go there to find all the restaurants in the city. Restaurants are happy to take the reservations. Maybe they don't like the price they paid, but it's a nice business. It's not sort of disrupting sort of a corrupt sort of element of the economic architecture. We were. So if I could do it all over again, I probably would have realized that there was a point where we won. And by winning, I meant consumers all over the world were like, I want Uber or Uber-like services. I deserve that. I don't deserve calling a taxi, having it never show up. I don't deserve getting in the taxi and not having a credit card machine. I don't deserve being Black and not being able to go to Harlem because a cab driver won't take me. I don't deserve that. And we knew then that we were on the winning side of history and the politicians would all fall. We probably should have turned into a more nice corporate brand at that point. But I will say, like, the one guy and company I admire who's sort of worked at both sides is Airbnb. Yeah, I keep talking about them because think about Airbnb. Like, there's way worse stuff that happens inside Airbnbs than in Ubers, right? People rent them for parties, like all kinds of camera, very weird stuff. And in Airbnbs, your neighbors hate you and they live in that city, right? So they had a lot of opposition, but they're like the nicest company in the world. You would never know from their branding that they fight incredibly hard regulatory battles, have really gnarly situations. So maybe there's a way to do it that we just couldn't, but it was hard in this business.
