Brian Tolkin: evaluation

Transcript context

…Did none of that. Sounds like you basically helped make it a thing. I know you're being very modest, I think. Coming back to your point about decentralized operations teams, something I've read is that search pricing came out of one GM and a market just testing, emailing all the drivers, hey, we're going to give you extra if you drive on Saturday night. Is that true? That would've been probably a little bit before my time, but that being said, one thing that is true is that surge pricing for actually quite sometimes all of 2012, certainly 2013 probably, I don't know when we necessarily switched, was very much a human in the loop system or a very manual system where GMs in every city would control basically the parameters in which surge would operate and so much of the time that would need, for example, Monday through Friday, there would be no search, it couldn't flip on, and then Friday nights and Saturday nights it would flip on from whatever you set, 7:00 PM to 3:00 AM and the cap was X, whatever the cap was. And then within those parameters the algorithm would optimize for what the price was. But yeah, GMs controlled whether it was on or off and what geographies were surging. Wow, I didn't know that. Was that out of we believe we are better than the algorithms or we just don't have time to make them amazing yet, so we're just going to help them along?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.