Lifeselfmastery's podcast I Startups I Venture Capital
00:02:54 · S3, S2
[00:02:54] S3: Yeah. I think general management... General manager role at Uber, by nature, was an entrepreneurial role because you were covering a particular market and having pretty much 360 overview of that market. Yes. You had an extensive support from the headquarters, especially in everything that relates to product, but everything locally, legal, finance wise, operations, marketing, all that was done by the team managed by general manager. So this is a great foundation to learn how to manage your own company. Yes. To a certain extent, there are limitations, but it's a very, very nice simulation of doing that. And to even kind of add on top of what I just said, I think uber cultural values were designed to foster entrepreneurial culture. Even one of them that I love the most, it was from the Travis times, Uber Cultural Values Evolved Over Time. But the one I loved from those days was make big bold bets. And effectively, this is what entrepreneurs should do because you cannot do small incremental steps and build something great and something big. And, I mean, yeah, amazing lesson from the Uber times. [00:04:17] S2: Yeah. Very very interesting. And, you know, obviously, you build out in Russia, but but what really, you know, at at Uber? And how were you able to expand from five people to thousand people in less than, you know, eighteen months?
00:04:36 · S3
[00:04:36] S3: Yeah. First of all, we... When we started kind of launching Uber back in Russia, I think the the market was developing quite significantly as a whole kind of market. We had a strong competition from a few local companies, and the kind of industry growth in a particular country was astonishing. But from my personal perspective, I think kind of growing team from five people to a southern team is not kind of a main achievement that I kind of remember from those days. Because eventually, team count is not what you are aiming for because you are aiming to grow your market share. You are aiming to grow your revenues. And we were looking at numb... At numbers rather to monitor kind of new driver acquisitions and cost per new driver, number of trips, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And at the end of the day, as a general manager, you still manage a team of a handful number of people, five to 10. And the rest of the team goes kind of on the levels below your direct reports. So long story short, it's not that a big difference of managing kind of a southern team than kind of a team of five to 10 people. And what allowed us to grow that fast and effectively that kind of transferred to the business numbers that we were achieving is our ambition, first of all. Second of all, trust of our higher management. They have noticed that the market has enormous potential. And my direct manager as well kind of had an immense trust in myself, and I'm... I cannot be more grateful than I am for that. I think that's pretty much it. Yeah. I mean, definitely, everybody at over... At Uber was working twenty four seven, but that goes without without saying anyway.
00:06:42 · S2, S3
[00:06:42] S2: Yeah. Absolutely. And would it be right to say, you know, Moscow and Saint Petersburg were the two biggest cities for for risk function? [00:06:51] S3: Yeah. Definitely. Moscow was the biggest city for us, but Uber was operating, I think, in 17 or 18 cities across Russia, and it was quite a strong presence there as well. [00:07:03] S2: Right. Right. And, yeah, you know, before the call, you also mentioned about, you know, it was later acquired by Yandex. So what... Was Yandex also competing with Uber during that time? Like like, how Lyft was doing that in in The US and Ola was doing that in Southeast Asia with them?
00:07:03 · S2, S3
[00:07:03] S2: Right. Right. And, yeah, you know, before the call, you also mentioned about, you know, it was later acquired by Yandex. So what... Was Yandex also competing with Uber during that time? Like like, how Lyft was doing that in in The US and Ola was doing that in Southeast Asia with them? [00:07:22] S3: Yes. Yandex was our main competitor, and the team was super strong and quite amazing there. I think they had two main advantages compared to us. That's why kind of competing with them was a very difficult job. But we, anyway, ended up merging the businesses with 40% going to Uber and 60% going to Yandex, which was a far better play than in China where Uber get less than 20%. But I think two main advantages of Yandex in our competition were, first, they had a local product and engineering team. So they were developing a product dedicated to our market. And our market compared to US was a fleet market instead of a peer to peer where individual drivers were partnered directly with Uber. In Russia, it was a fleet market where you partner with large taxi companies, large kind of taxi fleets. And the second second key advantage of Yandex was that they have the whole kind of product ecosystem already. It's a kind of Russian Google, in fact. They have maps. They have navigation system, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. So there there is a lot to leverage, basically. But, anyway, it was a a good fight. And then we joined forces and, yeah, build a great company going forward.
00:08:45 · S2
[00:08:45] S2: Yeah. No, absolutely. I think, you know, since I'm Indian, we hired a company called Ola, which was competing with Uber. So, you don't want to be in a situation where there's only one player in the market. You need, you know, different players who can compete. So, that's always a good thing. I just wanted to touch base a bit about what's the expansion playbook that Uber uses for new cities. Because I work with OU rooms as well as with another marketer called Hyber. And it's always question on which new cities to expand into, but what was your experience like over there?
00:09:22 · S3, S2
[00:09:22] S3: Yeah. Just just just to make kind of a caveat here, I was involved in launching cities within the same market. And definitely, the playbook for launching new international markets is a bit different because you need to develop the legal framework. You need to understand how to convert currencies and all that kind of... Sometimes you need to ensure your government relations are in a good order when launching difficult markets. But when launching a market like a new city within the same kind of country, we were prioritizing by the market size, pretty obvious. We were looking at the competition, which was kind of one of the most important areas to look at, especially when fiercely competing with Yandex. So you you need to understand how to position yourself. You need to understand pricing. You need to understand who they are working with in terms of supply. So you need to develop kind of a supply strategy. You need to understand how to market services because, back those days, we were significantly relying on marketing partnerships with different organizations, brands, etcetera, etcetera. And a lot of these are quite local kind of brands and organizations, so you need to understand that. And, yeah, that's pretty much it. [00:10:38] S2: Got it. And how much did the role of, you know, promotions and discounting play when it comes to the growth strategy at Uber?