Lenny Rachitsky: preference

Transcript context

…Yeah, I mean, maybe a very easy good example to pick just one part of the Uber process in the early days is at small scale, actually back when it was Uber black drivers, every driver was individually onboarded in a 90 minute to a two-hour in-person in the office onboarding with deep setting of expectations. The next version of that... So that's obviously very ops driven. The next version of that is a small classroom type setting of three or five or six drivers at a given time. Also, very ops driven. And then as we got into more mass market products like Uber Taxi or UberX, it was like, okay, maybe 20 or 30 at a time. So now it's a little bit bigger classroom setting. And we said, okay, let's make a video. Instead of giving verbally the same presentation, let's just make an onboarding video and that was the next set of scale, but now suddenly we have a different problem, which is okay, you have to validate all of these credentials. So most driver's license who they are, all that stuff at one person, easy at three to four at a time, easy, 10 at a time, a little more challenging but fine. At 20 at a time, okay, you're starting to run up onto it now you fast-forward six months and you're doing a thousand a week or whatever, suddenly your system breaks and it's like, okay, we have reached the point where operational system improvements is no longer viable. So, you say, okay, we have gone from the iteration stage to the scale stage and technology is uniquely good at scaling. So now we say, okay, instead of having a bunch of folks around the world taking pictures of driver's licenses and validating and doing all that stuff, how do we integrate with some type of OCR technology or auto recognition of driver's licenses that feeds to a system that knows what a driver's license is or can do automatic validation and suddenly you've done two things. One, you've scaled your system, and two, you've just created a ton of time for what at the time was probably dozens if not hundreds of people running these onboarding sessions all over the country, the world at the time to do other stuff. And so now you can level that up and say, okay, do we do more analytics? Do we do more figure out the next process that needs optimization or whatever the case may be in that virtuous cycle just continues. The way I like to think about this is do things that don't scale and then scale the things that you're doing. That's the phrase I always come back to. Exactly.…

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