David Rosenthal: belief

Transcript context

…I do want to say like that actually, according to Tony it is not true like that. Dashers are actually different from rideshare drivers. That all sounds great until I was doing the research I was like, how did Uber not win here? They already had all the drivers. All I had to do was tell them to deliver food instead of people. But according to Tony, at least the average Dasher is in their mid 20s and the average rideshare driver is in their early 40s, and women are willing to be Dashers, 40% of are female, whereas only 15% of rideshare drivers are women. Largely because of the safety concern. This has been this common belief. I totally agree. I think about what would have happened otherwise, I think it would have been interesting. I think Uber got lazy and relied on this idea. I think it would have been interesting if they weren't going through everything that they went through to see how well they would have done with less having their eye taken off the ball here? Because I totally agree with Tony on this one, that the nature of the supply for food delivery is quite different across many dimensions versus rideshare. In particular, there's all the demographics that you mentioned. I think perhaps especially in cities, the more important one is vehicle type. If you're going to do rideshare in a city, you need to have a nice late model car or access to one. That immediately segments out a huge portion of your addressable gig labor economy, your labor force there. There are a whole lot more people who either don't have a car at all or have a car that doesn't meet the standards of Uber and Lyft. DoorDash came along and said, this is why I think bicycles were so brilliant in the early days and in Boston, and then that grew into ebikes, then that grew into scooters of all different types but the powered motorcycle like scooters and so birdlike scooters. I think that opened up a lot more addressable supply for them that Uber was never going to be able to multihome across their two products. It's a really great point. It's a larger potential supply base than Uber has. The way Uber solves that problem is like oh, well, that person can lease a car from us or at least a car from one of our partners. I actually think this gets to the fact that the way that people plug in to DoorDash is pretty different than the way that people plug into ridesharing. I think Uber would like to continue the narrative that it's largely the sharing economy, but I think the professionalization of supply is pretty clear at this point. The majority of Uber drivers, their full time job is to drive Uber. I actually don't know if that's true with DoorDash. I think it is much more like a younger crowd with a different job that is using this to make a little bit of money on the side in order to do something else. It feels to me much more like an actual realization of the sharing economy as opposed to what Uber turned into.…

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