Invest Like The Best
Episode 300 Building Uber Eats
Invest Like The Best

Episode 300: Building Uber Eats

Invest Like The Best

Episode 300

Building Uber Eats

Jason Droege is a venture partner at Benchmark. We cover what he learned building Uber Eats, transferrable lessons for other marketplace businesses, and what it's like to work in a business that evokes strong public opinion.

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[00:02:52] - [First question] - What it was like at a high level building Uber Eats

[00:07:38] - How he would structure entrepreneurial incentives on a platform like Uber for a new leader or team attempting to build on top of it

[00:10:17] - What he learned about selecting competitive frontiers and mistakes made while building Uber Eats

[00:15:17] - Things that Uber Eats got most well that he’s proud of 

[00:18:16] - Constructive mistakes that taught him a lot from his time with Uber Eats

[00:20:36] - What made India such a competitive environment 

[00:22:50] - Building a business with an uncertain end state of unit economics 

[00:26:13] - What improved the most in his playbook for launching in a new city

[00:27:14] - Defining what best means in this competitive sector  

[00:29:01] - Dealing with suppliers in different categories and finding an ideal balance

[00:32:09] - When monogamy between the buyer and supplier matters and when it doesn’t in a marketplace 

[00:33:29] - Other attributes of a marketplace he’d pay special attention to as an investor given what he’s learned building one

[00:36:12] - Defining what founder market fit is and being “fingertippy”

[00:37:29] - His views on the relationships between leaders of businesses and their cultures

[00:40:26] - Why Uber believed in him more than he did 

[00:41:40] - What he learned about marketing to suppliers specifically 

[00:43:44] - Find new businesses by looking for areas that technology hasn’t yet affected

[00:45:18] - Differing views he has on the concept of failure  

[00:47:31] - Thoughts about ideas versus execution and the relative importance of the two

[00:49:10] - Effectively measuring opportunity cost and using it in decision making  

[00:51:14] - What it’s like being inside of a consumer business that people have so many opinions about

[00:56:30] - How he would describe the landscape and state of the market he was in from a higher viewpoint today

[00:58:56] - The most interesting things he’s learned from his time as a partner at Benchmark

[01:00:15] - The kindest thing anyone has ever done for him

Building Uber Eats

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.

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