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20Growth: Uber's Expansion Playbook for Scaling from 10 Cities to $10BN in Revenue | How Uber Acquired 1M Drivers | How Uber Solved the Chicken and The Egg Problem in New Markets and What Uber Would Be Like with Travis Still There with Scott Gorlick
Fri, 30 Aug 2024
Scott Gorlick was employee #99 at Uber. Over 6 years, Scott built Uber in Atlanta and helped the company scale from 10 cities to $10B in revenue. Scott is also a prolific angel investor having written early checks into Lime and Standard Cognition to name a few. In Today's Episode with Scott Gorlick We Discuss: 1. The Driver Acquisition Playbook: Scaling to 1M Drivers How did Uber acquire 1M drivers? What was the playbook? What worked? What did not work? How much of a role did driver-to-driver referral payments have in driver acquisition? What did Lyft do on the driver acquisition side that Uber should have done? What did the retention look like for drivers on a 30, 60 and 90 day period? 2. The City Expansion Playbook: What was the expansion playbook that Uber used for new cities? What worked in ramping demand in a new city? What did not work? How much of a role did promotions and discounting play? Lessons from them? Why did Uber often let Lyft launch in a new market first? What was the benefit of this? How did Scott see the maturation rate change with new markets opening? How fast did each subsequent market reach profitability? 3. Travis Kalanick and What Uber Could Have Been: How would Uber be different today if Travis was still in charge? What are the biggest mistakes that Dara has made with their M&A strategy? What are some of Scott's biggest leadership lessons from working with Travis? How did Travis create such strong followership and cult around him? What were the single biggest management mistakes made by Travis?
Full Episode
So at Uber, we saw almost every city as its own startup. The right team that we were hiring for three roles. One was we sent in a launcher and the launcher would be responsible for hiring a team. In a general market, we would want a general manager who acted as like the CEO of the city, overseeing both driver and rider. And then the
The second role that we hired was an operations manager that would oversee sort of the driver area of the operation and be responsible for growing that. And we'd also work on getting a marketing manager that would oversee the rider side, BD, partnerships, building out the early grassroots efforts in the community.
This is 20 Growth with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, on 20 Growth, we sit down with the best growth leaders in the world to unpack their playbooks for scaling incredible products and communities. Today, we're joined by Scott Gawlik, employee number 99 at Uber. And today, he unpacks two incredible playbooks that Uber had.
He unpacks their driver acquisition playbook that allowed them to scale to a million drivers. And then he unpacks their city expansion playbook that allowed them to scale from 10 cities to $10 billion in revenue. Scott's also a prolific angel investor, having written early checks into Lime and Standard Cognition, to name a few. And this episode is incredibly granular.
We really do go quite deep in terms of different growth playbooks. So it's time to get out the notebooks, and this is a special one. But before we dive into the show today, today I want to share a tool for all you SaaS innovators out there looking to spice up your demand generation strategy.
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