John Mark Nickels: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah. And it always ends up being like, oh, that was cool. And that's where shower ideas come from and all these things. Maybe just to see if there's something here, in this meeting that you have, this ideation brainstorming meeting, is there anything that came out of that that was really surprising or new from a recent experience? Is there anything there of just like, oh wow, we really uncovered this potential wrinkle of the future that we really need to think about differently? Well, it wasn't maybe a specific wrinkle, but one of the things that we're thinking a lot about, like I'm fortunate to be involved in trying to help develop and articulate a multi-year three-year product or even overall tech strategy for the mobility business at Uber. And one of the, I guess big ahas for us is as we move away from the, in some ways simpler world of UberX being the predominant product, which is it used to be pretty simple. It's kind of like a taxi meter on the driver's side. There's a time and distance rate that everybody gets, and then on the rider's side it's like, sure, there's some surge pricing based on supply and demand, but it's one product, it's pretty straightforward. And so this future of multi-modality and on the both demand side and the supply side is what makes the marketplace even more complex and challenging to build. And so it was kind of all this around, okay, well now that we have taxis in the platform and we have fleet providers and we're starting to add Waymos and Cruise and other things, we have to have a marketplace that's aware of those different types of supply and which one might be available for what trips and how to think about cost and quality and allocation of trips and all that. And then on the demand side, it's like, yeah, we've got all these different products like shared rides and reserved rides and comfort and X and priority, and it's like how do we think about how to price those relative to each other? How do we think about which one's to show which user? How do you think about the ranking and so forth? And then that all has feedback loops into the pricing and matching itself as well. So the dynamics of the thing, when I think about the future of marketplace, Uber, is like, whoa. And I don't think anyone's ever built that. That's the super cool thing about it. I think we have the best logistics marketplace tech on the planet and we built something that no one else has ever built, relative to digital marketplaces, for example, just different physical world requirements. And then this next arc of what I described of thinking about different types of supply and different kind of demand channels just adds even more complexity to that. But the aha was like, I guess, yeah, we got to think about all that stuff and think about how the supply and demand relate to each other and yeah, it's going to be cool. It's just an infinitely cited marketplace now. That's wild. One last nugget I wanted to just reinforce that you shared about how to become better at strategy and vision, developing great and interesting and innovative strategy, and vision is going really deep on a topic. So you've been in the space for a long time. There's this idea that Paul Graham talks about, I think, called your top idea or something like that, that when you have... Whatever your top ideas, the more you can just think about that and keep that top of mind as you go about your day and just have one core focus, the more likely it is you're going to come up with new interesting ideas because your brain's going to keep working on it when you're driving around listening to Lenny's podcast. Just kidding, or going on hike. So I think that's a really important point is if you're finding you're not coming up with a great strategy or vision and just having struggles, part of it might just be you're not spending enough time in that space, you're not going deep enough in the problem area. One approach is just spend a decade in that space. Is there anything else just comes up as I say that of just how to do that?…

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