Sachin Kansal: evaluation

Transcript context

…I imagine a lot of companies are going through this same experience now, trying to cut costs, try to be efficient, the government, the US government's going through this, it's very difficult to do well without cutting things that are really dear to people, especially at a product company, big bets that are going to maybe pay off in the future. Big innovations, things people are really excited about. For people trying to do this at their company, do you have any tips? I don't know, one or two tips to do this well to keep morale up, to not lose sight of big opportunities in the future? Anything there? Yeah, I think we divested out of two big businesses, which were our self-driving unit as well as what we call Uber Elevate and we divested out of both of them during COVID. COVID was a very special time for us, if I could use that term. Our mobility business dropped by 80% overnight and I think that Dara and the leadership team actually showed tremendous leadership during that time. And one of those was to make those calls to divest out of those businesses. Now, I think an important part to remember is you could be on the quest to just drive profitability and you may lose your sight on new growth bets as we call them here and how do you do that. So I have my framework on this, which is I think of our portfolio as concentric circles. The center of that concentric, the core is our core product. We do 33 million trips every single day. And if you think of a typical Uber trip or an Uber delivery, there is a multi-point failure possibility all the way from you opening the app to a driver, accepting or you doing the pickup, doing the drop-off and you getting a receipt. And then similarly, there are a number of steps on the Eat side. And we obsess over making sure that that core is as flawless as possible. And also to our point about profitability is as efficient as possible as well. So imagine taking even 1 cent of efficiency out of 33 million trips every day, the numbers just really start to add up. So you have to make sure that you're paying a lot of attention to that. As I go out and dogfood, I'm dogfooding the core mostly and making sure that it is flawless in my own little way. And if you're spending enough attention on that, then you get the license to expand out of that core and start to think about other growth bets. By the way, this is where Uber Eats came from back in the day. This is where Uber Groceries come from, which is now a very large business for us. And on the right side, Uber Reserve, Uber for Teens, which is something I launched a couple of years ago, our focus on taxis and there are many other growth bets that are now in the billions of dollars in total. That's where it came from because we are making sure that the core is being paid attention to and it's giving us the license to go out off that in that concentric circle. There's another area of Uber that it feels like is shifting a bit. So historically, I know a lot of people that have worked at Uber over the years, Uber has this reputation of being very data-driven, very ruthless with prioritization. A lot of what you've been talking about feels like the opposite of just anecdotes and experiences, empathy. So let me ask you this question. What's something that you as a company, as a leadership team chose to do that was not what the data was telling you to do? Could be a feature, it could be a whole big bet that ended up being successful.…

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