John Mark Nickels: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah, yeah, I mean, I would say I have been fortunate to experience probably three Ubers at this point. We joke about Uber 1.0, the Travis era, and you hear a lot about in the media the kind of bad parts of that, but there were some really good parts too. I mean, I think there was a lot of... Like when I joined in 2014, there was this mission of making transportation as reliable as running water for anyone anywhere, which is bold, audacious, and maybe a little bit pretentious from a little bit of Silicon Valley edge, but you could feel the electricity in the air. There was this energy and excitement like we're doing something transformational, autonomy is coming, car ownership will change. And it just like, feel, like my vibration. And then, yeah, the good parts of that era were, Travis was a very great visionary product leader, and we started ATG and Elevate and these future-forward things and the way he would conduct product reviews, I learned a lot. It was stressful at the time, but looking back, I was like, wow, I learned a lot. But yeah, I would say it was not a very conscious leadership sort of place. You're right, it was like many organizations that run on fear because you can do that, carrots and sticks do work. But actually that's kind of how I found this work is it was in 2015 and I was a very junior product manager at that point, in over my head in a fast-growing place. And in these weekly reviews with Travis as we were building out Uber Pool, and I had a six-month-old daughter, my firstborn, and we had just moved to San Francisco from Chicago. So my whole life was in flux and it was a very stressful place, and I was like, "I think I'm going to snap. I don't think I can handle this." And that's kind of what led me to start to explore this sort of inner work and meditation and sort of finding a way out of that. And that's what got me interested in bringing it to teams too, is because I remember I was in one meeting where we were working on this future pricing thing, which is rider pricing, driver pricing, incentives, and how we bring surge pricing and all that together. And it gets very, I'll go heavy, and we have all these PhDs in the room, some of the best minds in the world. We were able to hire people like Garrett van Ryzin, who was the foremost [inaudible 00:10:04] more person from Columbia and other people. But everyone's back to lizard brain, everyone's arguing. They're like, "Well, no, I think we should do it this way. We should do it this way." And I was like, huh. As much as I enjoy the content of this, believe me, I'm an algo PM end to end, I love that stuff. But I was like, I don't think this conversation actually needs another PhD, or I'm not even PhD, but content expert. It's like what we need here is a way to shift again, back out of that fear, threat, righteousness sort of state into a more co-creative, collaborative, open-minded, curious, trusting sort of space. t. It's like what we need here is a way to shift again, back out of that fear, threat, righteousness sort of state into a more co-creative, collaborative, open-minded, curious, trusting sort of space. And that got me interested in pursuing more skills in coaching of individuals and teams. But yeah, to your Uber question, yeah, the Uber 1.0 was crazy. Uber 2.0 was kind of like, Travis is out, the board is feuding, is leaking to Mike Isaac, whatever. And then Dara comes in and the peacemaker and then tries to stabilize, but the IPO is rocky. And so now I would say we're in Uber 3.0, which it's full pirate ship to navy, in Reid Hoffman's words, a profitable company. We're printing free cashflow, we're in the S&P 500, we've established the independent contractor model in a lot of states and jurisdictions, and it's like there's less risk of that model changing. And yeah, I would say we're in an era now of Cambrian explosion of different types of transportation. The company really just built the UberX model and scaled it out to the world. That's primarily how we got here. And now it's like we're going out for all these different new sort of modalities, whether it's reserving a ride in advance or shared rides or renting a car or buses, and then different supply types too. It's not just contracted, we have a lot of fleets in the platform, we now have a lot of taxi drivers in the platform. You've seen we've signed deals with Waymo and Cruise and other autonomist players. So I feel like we're now at the beginning of another era of Uber and transportation, that the next decade or two, it's going to be super exciting. One quick tangent, UberX, a previous guest shared that the name UberX came from... it was just like the internal code name, UberX, we'll figure out a real name later, and then it stuck and no one had a better name. Is that true?…

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