Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. Okay. Another question that I want to touch on is Uber, it feels like Uber was one of the first companies to take profitability really seriously. I remember Dara meant tweeting or sharing this insight during COVID I think of just investors and public markets are now valuing cash flow profitability. We need to change the way we operate. You guys have clearly done that. It must've been a pretty hard thing to do for a company that was used to just, famously all these companies raised a bunch of money, scaled like crazy, blitz... What is it? Blitz scaled as Reid Hoffman called it and then making a big change like that. I imagine it was very hard. What was that experience like? Just switching cultures from just raise money, go crazy to profitable cash flow business? I think it was awesome. I think it was a great, great period, because if you are taking inefficiency out of your system and you're taking the dollars you saved back into the business or back into the end user's pockets or the driver's pockets, that's just a great feeling. And as you said, doing that is not easy. It's actually very, very hard. But that's where real innovation actually kicks in. Let me give you an example. One of the ways that you would take cost out of the system in the delivery world is to batch trips together. So when a courier is delivering from point A to point B, maybe they can deliver two packages. They pick both of them up at point A and they deliver them to point B and to point C and point B and point C happened to be close together and there we just delivered a lot of efficiency with the courier's time. And now you multiply that by a thousand different ideas that we may have both in the mobility business as well as the delivery business and it's a grind, Lenny. There was a grind in terms of, how do we take inefficiency out of something like that, which is our core marketplace logic. How do we take inefficiency out of how we do promotions? How do we take inefficiencies out of support costs, payment costs, background check costs? There are many, many pockets and some of that required building new paradigms and building new software. And when you actually save that money and you're able to put that back into the business and become a profitable company so that you don't go under and your stock price goes up, that's actually feels very, very rewarding. I think that Dara has done an excellent job driving that. I think the company has done an excellent job responding to that. I feel that that still goes on today. Yes, we became profitable about two years ago and now we are driving great margin quarter over quarter, but the spirit of making sure that our core is solid in terms of efficiency, it continues to feed the system and continues to allow us to then make more bets that may be outside of the core.…

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