Jason Droege: recommendation

Transcript context

…This is great. I'm glad you went here. This touches on the other theme I heard often about you is just how high of a bar you set for new businesses. And I think this advice is useful both for founders, as you said, and also people starting companies within companies, new business lines. So you've talked about this a bit already, but is there anything more there, just how high that bar needs to be for it to likely work out when you're starting something new? Look, if you want to give yourself the best chance, and this isn't always how it works, but if you're in my position 25 plus years in their career, if you want to give yourself the best chance, I think there's two ways that companies end up working out. And the first way, which is probably the most important, quite frankly, is that the founder is just a force of nature over a long duration of time. Because you're going to have to pivot, you have to have that energy to pivot. You have to go years and years and years with it being hard, and that's probably the most important thing. But the second most important thing is that you can easily educate yourself on what are good business models, what are bad business models, what are good markets, what are bad markets? And even if you're this force of nature, having the knowledge, if you're going to go into a bad market with all your energy, you should at least know, maybe ignorance is bliss because you just throw yourself into it and it just works out with time. But that's not how I would operate, which is marketplaces are good businesses. SaaS, at least historically, we'll see how this changes, but SaaS, historically, great businesses, recurring revenue businesses, sticky businesses, network effect businesses. And if you look at what the top VCs invest in, yes, there is a lot of portfolio building, but there are similarities in terms of the types of business models that they believe could be worth tens of billions of dollars. And they have network effects, they have lock-in. They are more valuable at scale, a big scale than low scale. So if you just take a filter on a new business, this is what I did at Uber, which is like if you just have a filtering mechanism on a new business, it doesn't take that long to eliminate the bad ideas. And then, of what's left, you can pick, oh, I'm very passionate about this, even though it might have more problems than this other thing that on paper looks better. And then, you have to have passionate about it. But I think people just miss a basic understanding of what businesses even have a chance of being worth $100 billion. So you launched Uber Eats, you figured out this is the place to go and bet. As an outsider, feels obvious, of course this is going to be a massive success. Of course, food delivery, such a good idea. I know you looked at a ton of ideas in that process. Can you just talk about what you explored and why you ended up picking Uber Eats?…

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