Transcript
Introduction
Patrick
My guest today is Jason Droege, a venture partner at Benchmark. Jason's had a long entrepreneurial career, which most recently culminated in building and leading Uber Eats. He joined Uber in 2014 with a blank piece of paper to grow the business beyond ridesharing. Within 6 years, he found product market fit with food delivery, refined the service and scaled Uber Eats to a global $20 billion GMV run rate. Our conversation pulls out the most important lessons learned during that period and how Jason now employs them in his role at Benchmark. Please enjoy this great conversation with Jason Droege.
Building Uber's Second Act
Patrick
Jason, you've been such a builder your whole career and obviously, some things people would be really familiar with, probably Uber Eats being a recent one that you spent a lot of time building and leading. And I thought we could start there because it's such an interesting episode of a new product inside of a big existing company that takes advantage of some of the preexisting rails of that company and has worked, to some extent. We can talk about Uber Eats versus DoorDash. I use Uber Eats every day, like it's the thing people know and use, and it was born out of something else. I think most big companies hope for second acts or subsequent products or expansions like Uber Eats. I never really talked to someone that's been the leader of one of those successful things before. I've tried to do this with AWS and a few others. They're kind of rare. So maybe you could just describe what that was like, at a high level, to be the leader of a thing which was clearly distinct, but which was born out of a preexisting platform, because it just seems like a really interesting type of innovation that everyone says they want but very few people get.