Sachin and Adam
00:19:29 · Mina Radhakrishnan, Sachin
[00:19:29] S0: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, because the the thing is, like, it's about being successful onwards. Right? And and whatever that definition of success is, whether it's money, whether it's building a company, what... Whatever those things are, the question is how you achieve it. And I think you don't have to necessarily follow the same traditional path of, go to university, get this degree, go to this place, go to this job. You can you can do it in many other ways. And and and that's been enabled by tech, frankly. It's a reason we can do those things. [00:19:57] S1: Yeah. And going into your time at Uber now, I think something we've really enjoyed about talking to former people from Uber, people like Emil Michael and Casey Flint, said they always have unique learnings from Uber, something that's distinctive from other companies that have genuinely influenced them for maybe the next ten years of their career. Maybe it was about speed, maybe it was about how to work in teams, maybe it was about fundraising. Do you have a particular or a set of unique learnings from Uber that have always influenced you?
00:20:24 · Mina Radhakrishnan, Adam Miller
[00:20:24] S0: I'll tell you the biggest one that stands out for me, and this is, you know, just very directly working with Travis for so long. And it's about... You don't ask the question, can you do it? You ask the question, how can you do it? And when you start that way and you start with that mindset, you come into things where... And I think it's been a really powerful thing for me from entrepreneurship perspective. It doesn't mean you should do it, but it does mean that you don't say no first. You say yes first. And I think that is a huge thing where I was just like... I mean, random cars off the street, surge pricing, all this stuff. Like, it wasn't about, oh, we can't do that. It was... No. No. What could we do to try and do that? How how would we make it happen? Like, let let... We might not. At the end of it, it's like, actually, that's a lot of work. It's not the right way to put out resources. It's not the right way to do those things. That's okay. But we we went through the exercise of actually doing it first, and that is the thing that always stands out for me is Uber. It was like a yes first kinda policy. [00:21:19] S2: And I think there's been a lot written about Travis's intensity and and charisma. I actually spoke to, you know, a secondhand conversation about someone, one of the leading growth investors, and he's worked with almost all the generational founders. And he says Travis stands out as the most intense and the most charismatic out of that whole lot. What was it like directly working with him?
00:21:40 · Mina Radhakrishnan
[00:21:40] S0: Intense? Yeah. Was definitely... I remember, like, I was doing... I was running some experiment. I'll I'll tell you two things, like, which are, I think, both, you know, the good and the bad. I was running some experiment, and it thoroughly baked. Frankly, it was partly my fault too. So I just hadn't really thought it through. I hadn't pulled this stuff, and I was trying... I was presenting... And it was very early days, and I was presenting the numbers at our all hands. And it it... Like, in the middle of the meeting, I was like, this is dumb. Like, you don't know how to do math, you gotta go figure out, like, what it is. And it was like, god, that was very unpleasant, and that wasn't fun to do. But he was right. He was right. Could he have done it in a better way, a more tactful way? Sure. But, like, I also should have been, like, more on my game about that stuff. So that was one thing. Then the second thing I, you know, was... I'd I'd I'd written some blog posts about some special thing that we were doing and, you know, pulled pulled an experiment together for for something else. It's like it was the golden ticket. It was like a special kind of... Like, it was a... It was trying to understand how discounts should work with Uber and how much of a discount you should get. And so I... I'd run this golden thing and I... This golden ticket thing, written a blog post, built the whole thing around the concept of, like, the golden ticket. And I remember, like, walking into the office, and, like, Travis is like, he has this thing, paces the office. Right? He has this thing that he does. And he was like, who did this golden ticket thing? And I was like, oh, shit. I'm gonna get fired. I put my hand on. Was like, hey, Travis. That's Mike. He's like, I love it. This is so great. You know? And so it was one of those things where it's like you go all this way or all that way, but, like, he's really smart. Like, that's just the biggest thing. He's so smart, he's so thoughtful. And doesn't mean he's easy to work with, but, like, it was just like it pushed you. It it made me better. Like, it made me tougher, harder, better. And, you know, I I just... It was... Wow. Like, I I think it's one of those things where it's like, you kind of have to experience that to, like, to know what it feels like.
00:23:28 · Mina Radhakrishnan, Adam Miller
And sometimes in the moment, it can be a lot, but it's you learn you learn from it. [00:23:32] S2: How do you think that someone like Travis kind of blurs that line between intensity and then, like, burning people out? Like, it's something that we think about a lot is, like, how do you run a culture of speed, but also maintain the humanness of a culture and maintain something that can scale and turn into something that, you know, if you step back, there's still something kinda beautiful in its place.
00:23:53 · Mina Radhakrishnan
[00:23:53] S0: Yeah. I I think it's it's really hard. I don't think that there's an easy answer to it, and especially in the earlier days of a company. It's not like Uber was successful from day one. Yeah, we were making money. We were doing good things every week. I remember it all heads. It was like, Best week ever. There was a lot of that for sure, but it wasn't easy. It was certainly no resting on laurels, being like, yeah. This is all good. Like, you gotta keep on pushing. You gotta keep moving forward. You gotta keep doing those things. And that can be really hard. Like, frankly, it it does burn people out. And there's no there's no there's no easy end. It's not like you can maintain this beautiful place of just everybody's working really hard, but also everybody's really happy all the time. There's gonna be, like, ebbs and flows. And and I think you can't think of it as, like, a single moment in time. So you have to think of it as, like, a a larger kind of set of things. You aren't pushing at 100% intensity all the time. But if you are, then that's a negative thing. Right? But you... I think if you go into a company, especially a company that's growing and trying to move fast, you should expect that at times, there's going to be really hard pushes and you've got to do it, and then there's also recovery time afterwards. And I think it's that that's how you maintain the balance is you know when you need to push hard and you know when you need to recover.
00:25:05 · Adam Miller, Sachin, Mina Radhakrishnan
[00:25:05] S2: Emil told us that he, like, prolonged having a family for, like, an extra ten or fifteen years so he could build over, like, with [00:25:12] S1: that intensity. Yeah. I I think, Uber's had such a ridiculous legacy on the tech world. Lenny released a chart about the percentage of PMs at tech companies that go on to become founders. And Uber was in the top five, but then this was just percentage. So in terms of the raw numbers, I think Uber would have the most founders it's gone on to create. And when you combine that along with all the distinct lessons people are learning, like, it's probably had, like, you know, one of the biggest influences on takeout of any company. It's quite incredible. [00:25:38] S0: Yeah. Mean, it it was an amazing place to work, and I learned so much from being there. Like, I'm very grateful for my time at Uber because I I... It it really was, for me, a huge shift in my, yeah, I wanna be a founder. Like, this is where I wanna go. Because, you know, I sort of worked my way down. Like, I started Goldman, like, 50,000 people. I went to Google. It was it was so small ish, but it was 20,000 people. Then I went to, like, a 200 person company, and then I went to a 20 person company. And then I was like, that's it. Now I gotta go. [00:26:04] S2: How did your... When did your parents' perception change of Uber that you had this rant?