Jason Droege: preference

Transcript context

…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? I am definitely not the smartest person in the room when it comes to figuring these things out. And so, I keep a very, very wide aperture on ideas for as long as I can until I'm like, okay, everything is coalescing. And I think there's a bunch of reasons why you have to keep an open aperture on considering ideas that might seem bad at the start, but you just keep digging and see if you're right that they're bad or you're wrong. So just as a general philosophical principle, I'll start there. We looked at, we did some crazy stuff. I went walking around San Francisco one day and I looked down Market Street and there was a CVS, a 7-Eleven, a CVS, a Walgreens, a 7-Eleven, and I'm like, "How many SKUs could possibly be inside one of these things that people want and couldn't you just put that into a van and you hit the button on the van and the van comes around and you get whatever convenience items you have, and they're convenience items, so why would that be a problem?" And we launched that in DC. We put 10 of these trucks on the road, we put 250 SKUs in them. And I mean, crickets is an understatement of how bad it was. I mean, we couldn't get an order to save our lives. And what we realized was that we hadn't really done the research on what convenience stores really were. It was if you didn't have cigarettes, you didn't have beer, you didn't have Slurpees, you didn't have these things, for example, you didn't bring people in to sell all the other things. So we didn't know anything about retail. We were clueless. So that's one idea. We looked at grocery, but honestly the unit economics just terrified me of all the pick packing and everything like that. I think Instacart did a remarkably good job at getting the unit economics to a good spot and probably the hardest operational problem you could tackle. We did generalized delivery, point to point delivery, what's now, I forget what Uber's product is called, but Uber Direct I think it's called, where you have something that needs to go point to point in a city. That was a flop from the beginning because the truth is is how consumers don't really have this need, business sort of have this need, and in 2014 when we were doing this, no one had this need. But we tried 15 versions of all these things before we eventually just said, "Okay, the food delivery thing is just popping off on all signals and we can make the unit economics work. People seem to want it. It's a super cool problem because we can enable independent restaurants with all these tools and allow them to compete with the big guys. We can take the real estate out of the equation. So you can have a real estate location that's non-prime, but if you have prime food, then you get to compete." So we're like, "Oh, this is a very interesting problem and we can really help local economies." And this ended up being, if I remember correctly, this basically saved Uber during COVID. Lyft didn't have something like this. And how big is this business at this point? Anything you share about just how important this turned out to be for Uber?…

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