The Role Of Uber's Early Chief Business Officer

21 Dec 2023 · 3 min

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3:08

In this interview, Uber’s early Chief Business Officer (Speaker B) recounts his experience joining Uber in 2013 when the company had about 150 employees spread across five or six major U.S. cities. He describes the grassroots, city‑by‑city approach to building the marketplace, including door‑to‑door driver recruitment, parties, and free rides as guerrilla marketing tactics. He explains how Uber’s marketplaces were fundamentally local, unlike Airbnb’s global model, and how the early team focused on matching rider expectations to city‑specific economics. Initially tasked with being the public face to the business community while Travis Kalanick handled product and engineering, his role quickly expanded to include fundraising, mergers & acquisitions, global expansion, and leadership of the China business and Uber for Enterprise. He notes that during his tenure Uber raised roughly $15 billion in equity, entered many countries, and pursued new services such as Uber Payments (later Uber Money) and an Instacart‑style grocery delivery competitor, both of which were not completed before his departure.

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That's really incredible just to, you know, hear about the early days of Uber. And at the beginning, of course, we all know the sense of scale that it's at today. So you briefly mentioned your role when you first joined, but could you maybe walk us through how that changed and evolved as Uber began to really scale?
Sure. So, so when I first joined, it was about 150 people, and that meant that we were in probably 5 or 6 of the top cities in the US. And the reason was that at that time, through that, you think about 2013, we physically needed employees in the cities because we needed to recruit drivers. And the way you would recruit drivers, like knock on windows of black car drivers, you would stand outside the taxi medallion licensing division to try to, you know, get people to sign up for, for your— to be a driver. You throw parties and invite the who's who in town, give them free Uber rides. It was like guerrilla ground-up marketing. So those 150 people are really spread around the country recruiting drivers and riders for each side of the marketplace in each city. Right. And Uber is different because each marketplace is city-based, unlike Airbnb, which has this global marketplace. Our marketplaces were city by city. You know, the amount of time you were willing to wait for a ride, the amount you were willing to pay depended on the city economics and the city supply of drivers and so on. So that's sort of the state it was. We hadn't gone global yet. We hadn't raised a lot of money. Uber Eats was not even in the picture. And so I joined with this title and the idea was that I would be the face to the business community. And Travis would sort of, he wanted to be head of product and engineering. Neither of us wanted to do the public policy politics stuff. Because that was the, you know, shaking hands and kissing babies and dealing with regulators. Probably because none of us were like, wow, that sounds like not fun. And I don't know if we'd be good at it because we're too aggro. But, but he was product engineering. I was everything business. And that evolved to me running fundraising, M&A, global expansion. I was GM of our China business. I built our Uber for Enterprise business where we sort of sold to large corporations to transport their employees around over a very, you know, quick amount of time. And, you know, I spent a lot of time in China. He spent a lot of time in China and India because those were 2 huge markets for us. And that's sort of how it evolved. In that time period, we raised $15 billion of equity. So we did round after round after round after round. We were in so many countries. We're trying to invent new services. We were close to doing something called Uber Payments because we were doing, you know, essentially our own payments, everyday payments on so many different services. We're like, why don't we have Uber Money? That's the thing I regret not finishing before we left, that and the Instacart competitor.