Sachin Kansal: preference

Transcript context

…What's an example of something that's super outraged you that you experienced as a driver especially and/or something that maybe is the most surprising that you learned as a driver? Let me start with the surprising and then I think we'll get to the outrage part of it and there may be things that you may not expect. The surprising thing as I mentioned before was how the app just feels different when it's actually in a moving car at 40 to 60 to 70 miles per hour. That was a surprise for me. The positive surprise is there's a dopamine hit you get when you get an offer. I get an offer, it's 20 bucks. I'm picking someone up from point A, I'm dropping them off at point B. There's a bit of an excitement angle and I don't want to overplay it. Earners, drivers work really, really hard to do their job, but I think that part of our product, there's a bit of an excitement to it. That was a surprise to me. I will go into a few individual features, but even at a more meta level, the thing that surprised me the most is we obsess about our app and our app is the center of our universe, but when a passenger gets in the car, the center of the driver's universe is that interaction with the passenger. That human touch between the driver and the passenger is something that we don't talk about in the office enough. And if you talk to the driver and when I'm a driver, if the passenger is friendly, it lifts my mood. If the passenger is grumpy, then I'm unsure what to do. If the passenger is rude, which has also happened, that can really be demotivating. I want to share one anecdote with you. This was way back almost eight years ago when I started driving. This was probably my fifth or sixth trip, so I was very, very early in my journey of dogfooding. So it was early morning, I think it was a Saturday morning maybe about 7:00 a.m. I was picking someone up, it was a lady, I stopped my car on the curbside. She got in, she was going to the airport, she was going to San Jose airport and she had a suitcase, but she left on the curb and she's inside the car and I'm like, "What's going on?" And it suddenly dawned on me that she's expecting me to get out of my car, grab her suitcase, open the trunk, and put the suitcase in the car, but she didn't say anything. And then I suddenly realized that there is an expectation of me as the driver doing that part of the job as well. And since I was very early in my journey, I had not internalized that and the kind of emotions that ran through me at that time just explained to me, "Hey, what does a driver actually go through?" That was a somber ride for me. That was a somber day for me. And since that day, I have not forgotten what it feels like to be a driver and I carry that emotion with me and that has built a level of empathy in my mind for drivers. And I want to make sure that my team understands that's their life and everything we build for them has to have that level of empathy. And I would say that was a big surprise for me. It's not just about the app. to make sure that my team understands that's their life and everything we build for them has to have that level of empathy. And I would say that was a big surprise for me. It's not just about the app. Yes, there are many features in the app that we can talk about which are also surprising, but what does a driver feel day in and day out as they interact with other human beings was a big one.…

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