and got close to this reporter and met up with her in my office one day she was running like 20 minutes late but I wanted to be there at the door when she got there I looked up I she's like I'm taking an Uber I'm ready 20 to sleep but I'm in an Uber I'll be there soon okay I can see where Ubers that are coming to where I am are going to be there and she's in one when she got there I was like great it's okay that you were late I waited upstairs until you got here and I tracked you on the system and came downstairs and met you that was a comment I made a couple months later it's like New York general manager stalking a journalist now that's some bad faith and Ben Smith at BuzzFeed is a piece of and he still is a piece of Welcome to the early podcast where we interview the best in the brightest who've built the world's most Innovative companies hosted by me Max Crowley tune in weekly for new episodes and please please please like subscribe and share and now for today's episode let's go well welcome to the podcast hello Josh thanks for joining us hello Max it's a pleasure to be here Josh where did you grow up Forest Hill Queens New York City born and raised and actually have spent the majority of my life here with with only a couple of exceptions like summer camp that's it every other time I've been in New York how did your family end up living in Queens my mom grew up in New Jersey my dad in Connecticut and New York was the average but forests Queens is a great place to grow up it's like a nice mix it's in the city proper but it has some Suburban attributes I had a subway stop but also some people had backyards and it was close enough to Manhattan to really be able to go there a lot spend a bunch of time there it was great I really liked it had they end up there I think they had friends who live there I mean how does anyone end up anywhere I don't know I the New York thing's super interesting to me of just the people that live that grow up in such close proximity to Manhattan I mean that's got a in a good way got to sort of Harden you a bit and yeah I mean I went to high school in Manhattan I've been around New York I mean I just have a probably speed about me that's kind of new yorky I walk fast I'm impatient there's certainly A vibe you get here I think it's there's a similar thing if you're from LA or you spent a lot of time out there there's a different way about you cuz you went to sent right I did and that's like a great school it was I had some friends who went there you took a test to get in it's sat style test you take in seventh grade and if you're good enough at math and English and taking that test then you get in and I did go there wearing the sweatshirt from there which is unusual I kind of am in still in my roll out of bed outfit they'll take the kids to school outfit where all the other dads are just for work and I guess I am too but it's more sweatshirt than button-down shirt and so yeah I did I went there it's a math and science focused High School there's a few like that here science Brook Tech Will your kids go there no my kids are in a school now that goes through high school I mean I would like them to but I'm not I'm not really in charge yeah I maybe I don't know I have a 10-year-old and a seven-year-old so we're not not quite there but I think it would be unusual for them to leave their school that they're in now which goes until senior year of high school so probably not I mean math and science even you know 25 years ago or whenever you were in high school um that sounds like sorry sorry came off totally no it's true but that's that's that's pretty crazy yeah I mean know I went to high school 30 years ago I started High trying to be nice 1996 yeah I'm old but but Math and Science I mean it's even more clear I guess to me the importance of math and science like how do you feel about that in retrospect um yeah I mean I've certainly always been a math guy the English side I guess I was good enough or I'm good enough at the math side to overshadow some of my deficiencies on the English side but math has always been a good one for me since I was very little it's sort of a link to my more analytical side why I'm into computers and why engineering has come kind of naturally to me why I probably did well at Uber I like math it's probably just some Nate feature of me so I leaned into it you end up at Colombia so you continue the New York New York just like not going to leave the island that's it forever not going to leave I will go to any college that will accept me that is in this 10 square mile Block it's a little bit bigger than that actually but yep stayed here so I'm in high school in the 9s uh I'm in in a computer science seminar where I get desktop of my own in that classroom and it has high-speed internet which at that time I didn't have in my in my home most people didn't and so I got into uh this new website called eBay I started selling stuff on eBay at like 16 or 17 and I did sort of a form of that through college started a website was selling on eBay and on the web really selling anything I can get my hands on offseason apparel ended up being kind of a thing that focused on Old designer genes things like this worked with another guy did that through college for a bit and then after school kind of continued on that path sort of transitioned a bit into helping companies sell online so now it's like 04056 businesses that are in the real world that also want to try out this internet thing and I was always the kid who would help with setting up your computer or your you know I just kind of had like an intuition about it I guess that led me to IAC where I started helping them sell funny shirts on their on one of their websites that they had bought but uh uh you know after I bought uh College Humor they hired some people to help run that and so I did the retail side of that for a few years and then had another kind of few random startup jobs typically in marketing and operations and eventually found my way to Uber it looked when I joined I think you were already there but I was probably employee in the 30s or 40s and when I got got there it had this a sensibility and it kind of looked like the companies I'd worked for up until then businesses in series a series B still getting still getting things going still at the point where everyone is contributing individually there are managers but you need to get your hands dirty this is still startup mode I was hired to run New York at a time there's a couple other guys already in the mix each City had three guys doing stuff in those first few cities and so it was really an all hands on deck kind of thing when I joined Uber New York we probably had 50 cars on the road doing a few dozen rides a day it certainly wasn't zero when I got there but it was pretty close to it relative to where it would end up going that was kind of my my sweet spot not there from zero to one but as soon as something got going that's where I would get in the mix you inherited it wasn't a total disaster but it wasn't necessarily working if I remember correctly because the regulatory scheme in New York is more complicated the strategies of other cities didn't resonate as easily in New York so yes you inherited something but it may not have even been the right thing I mean you really had to build it from the ground up from yeah I remember there's a bunch of myth around this and I don't even necessarily know what really happened but there was some so when they were going to launch a city they'd throw launchers in the mix who would turn up in the city with like machetes Through the Jungle you know how like traps used to say and just kind of Forge a path that way and then they would hire a team and that team would take take it from there and it seemed like New York was the first city outside of San Francisco to get that treatment to say okay we're going to go do that there in this new place at the same time as a bunch of other cities I've always explained it as it was like the the first one out and maybe they didn't quite have the Rhythm down yet and if you didn't believe if you didn't look at it and say I see a path clearly from where I'm sitting to this being ubiquitous household name if you didn't believe then working for Travis probably wouldn't feel like a great thing like have been a very good experience and so what I sort of understood is the the folks who were involved there at the middle to end of 2011 uh were not fully on board many of them went on to do awesome other things like yeah you know probably wasn't them they just were not quite feeling it they didn't have that Rhythm yet many years later in an exit interview or towards the end of my time or maybe the play I'm thinking of was moving to San Francisco to take a a role there she said to me when I interviewed with you pretty early on you drew me a picture verbally of a world covered in Ubers not in kind of like a creepy bad way but Town Cars or oota Camry's as ubiquitous in New York City as the Yellow Cab and when he said that I didn't really believe it but now it's true and you saw that it certainly seems obvious in retrospect but I just saw when I got there it was happening there was clearly only a problem on one side of the business which is on the supply side the demand every day at 400 p.m. 5:00 p.m. the service would become unusable because everyone would request they would all want their ride there were people who wanted widgets and we couldn't create enough widgets where a widget is a trip somewhere that's a really good problem to have you know what I mean selling something and you can't keep up with demand if you're running a double-sided thing and one side has a ton of volume and the other doesn't if the that doesn't have the volume is the supply side that's a very good situation to be in I just saw that okay we just need to hire Infinity drivers just get as many drivers in the mix as we can and this will work out you mentioned regulatory stuff in New York I know the myth is that nowhere is the taxi cartel stronger than in New York and the Taxi Limousine Commission are so bad and DeBlasio and the DeBlasio piece is true but in reality actually New York's regulatory situation made it much easier for Uber to scale I'll explain why so is it cool to get into this right now like I'm about to go full full kind of uber School mode all right hold on how did you actually get the job how did you even get in the mix I was at a wine director consumer startup for about a year in 2011 it's just the next one of the ones I would do e-commerce I was Employee 7 there is like $50 million from Excel or some and it was we're going to redo wine I'm not really a wine guy but I became one for a year by the end of that year I knew wasn't meant to be so on December 26th I was in the office the office is empty I mean I'm Jewish so there was you know I don't have any like attached it's such a nice I love Christmas so much because everyone else is celebrating with their families and I don't have to it's like the nicest day of the year for me I went into the office the next day I was just looking for new job so I was s my and on crunch base there was a job for New York head of uber and I had used it a couple of times so this is December when it came into New York in April that previous year of the year we were at the end of I tried it was really expensive I was like this is cool it's too expensive I'm they were going to use it then I was going to an airport once at like 5: in the morning I was like well this would be a good use for it because I'm in Manhattan but like going to the Avenue block and waiting for a Yellow Cab to show up by be I tried Uber and it didn't work there were no vehicles on the road when I did it but I got an email later in the day from the community guy at the time saying hey we saw you tried using Uber it didn't work really sorry about this this is what we would later call a zero when you open the app and there are zero cars available I got a zero and they had a thing where they would email you sorry you know there were no vehicles here's five bucks off your next ride that kind of pattern that interaction is super common now in e-commerce and and in everything at the time in 2011 for whatever reason it struck me as a really good interaction I was like that's interesting I opened the app took no action I just opened the app couldn't do the thing I wanted close the ad you knew and you reached out and you made this interaction with me that's really smart I just remembered that then when I saw that ad for the head of New York the job ad was really funny it was like get unlimited SUV rides travel around like a European Diplomat I love that I thought that was so funny so I wrote a cover letter and set my resume I've heard that when you put a job up on board you get a thousand things and they're all and now they're written by Ai and they make no sense but I do the exact opposite I apply one job in a month and I'm like I'm just GNA nail this thing and so just letter I did the cover letter I did the resume sent it to Ryan I like triangulated a bit I was like who do I want to send this to and they're like graves. ran gmail.com that is his email address I hope you that's the famous the famous tweet the it was like yeah it was like here's a tip call me it was I didn't know about that story I don't know anything I know about Travis I didn't know anything I was like this is cool that's kind of my thing is the product cool will I be like this is interesting and even wine though not a wine guy thought thought it was interesting so I thought this was interesting I wanted to do it so I send that email and I got a call back within the hour from Ryan Graves he's like you're the busted teas guy you do funny shirts for college humer and I it's like I love busted man and I was like that's so funny now that was like notable work graes so R Graves but it's funny just to fast forward we I had an arch rival nerdy shirts that was run out of LA and the head of that was William Barnes and they hired William Barnes to run La so Graves I guess either accidentally or whatever found the two funny t-shirt operator guys and but them in charge of the two Co largest cities and he's like become one of my best friends from mber I don't even think he started nerdy Shir I think he like bought it and then ran it way more legit I just got a job but I did a good job there and we grew that a lot we were selling millions of dollars of these ly shirts very topical something would happen in the world and we would make a shirt about it did you know did you know William at the time though like were you I hated them they were they were the number two and they would do all sorts of nasty like SEO on us and I was like hated them as I hate any competitor and then it ends when you know when it ends and it's all good but it was so fun when we discovered that it was so funny but anyway Ryan calls me he's like you're the bus guy I see their ads everywhere love it let's talk like okay and we shop the and then great we have a thing you'll do this analytics test and then you'll come to SF and you'll meet Travis and that went down over the next 2 or 3 weeks I was there mid January and I was there the week after for GM Summit and when I was there in mid January for my Newber thing for the like uber University is what they would eventually call it but were you at my Newber camp like they were doing them only every few months so maybe I know you started like August or September that yeah it was still pre pre-amps and all that yeah so maybe chapen was there with me he was he started before me but it was he was sort of zoned for that for that Ed Ed might have been too because Ed started Ed instead yeah those are the guys who were in New York when I got there it was the three of us for a bit so I got the job you know it felt slow motion cuz I was so excited about it but it all went down pretty fast and then they made the offer um I've always been a transportation guy in kind of the way I'm a math guy I like Maps I love the subway I have a very good Subway knowledge deeper than probably most New Yorkers from spending a lot of time on it and being interested in it it felt like a very very good fit for me um felt really good and honestly there for 5 and a half years and for many particularly the first three I'd like wake up in the morning I can't believe I have this job this is this is great this is so fun I'm having a great time part of that is cuz we were doing really well really from the beginning it started doing well right away because we fixed the supply problem that's sort of all it was I mean that's a bit of an understatement but that was a big part of it I certainly didn't have the understanding or wherewithal that you did at that time I was just a bit of awn for the ride and hey I think this is awesome certainly in retrospect the fact that there was almost unlimited demand and that you could capture the demand with more Supply is just crazy especially now working in other business or businesses or doing other things you almost always have a product Market fit SL demand problem Uber never still to this day never has that problem yeah I mean I think there are moments in time where technological waves um can really get you there and so in Uber's case it was a new Computing thing the mobile device the like mobile phone with internet everywhere and then the iPhone 3G with GPS everywhere the original iPhone 07 did not have any GPS it had Tower like approximation but you couldn't run it off that the 3G one had GPS and so that's 2008 so really Uber was invented the year that it became possible now we have these computers that know where they are that's a huge Tech shift the idea for Uber is is great but it's a product a bit of of the moment and there was a lot of companies who did it and I think we won because we were the best at it but that kind of idea like oh like Transportation can be really quickly solved in a profound way because of these things I think we're in a similar moment now with AI when we talking a bit about the thing that I do now that's part of the success of that just how what I just said was the part of the success of uber the right time the right thing is invented you can kind of ride that very very legitimately so everyone getting an iPhone is the big thing and then making Uber is like the next Dimension down I think and them having the App Store and a few other pieces of that that just didn't you know end up being totally right app store wasn't a thing right away so you needed that too that must have been like 09 or something all right so then going back to like the first 12 months of uber let's say it's a wild time maybe you can get into the sort of regulatory scheme there and the different things that you guys had to do and then you know just what was the best decision you made during that time and what was something you would have done differently at this point in Uber for my first year year and a half Uber was explicitly Uber black what it's called right now us partnering with licensed operators in each City every major city has the concept of renting a limousine or a black car for the executive level guy who's being picked up at the law firm or she's getting picked up at the bank fancy Transportation those tend to be regulated at the at the state level or within a city we would partner with those people who already had an analog version of that business with a dial a car you would call someone they would send that car the car was nice they opened the door the gu's in a suit that whole construct kind of existed we layered on to that in the early years when we exhausted those systems the demand exceeded what we could do with those systems and lift came in and side car and we're like forget those systems anyone can do it and they did that and cities were the way Uber does it which is totally legal and within the system that's bad but sidecar and lift like that's good they total confused regulators and well that's okay we'll just do it that way too and we did and did it much bigger and better that that moment that I just described didn't ever come in New York city so in New York for a couple of reasons we never really exhausted that original style of uber The Regulators there unlike those in other cities never did and never will come around to yeah anyone could just just drive the car that's never going to happen in New York part of that is just because the system is so vast there already just tens of thousands of vehicles were in that system already and we've expanded it a lot but sort of within the confines of the laws that were written in the 1980s because of that because we sort of stuck with the traditional style we never run background checks on drivers because they do that with their City because they're already professional drivers sort of operating in the government defined system that New York City has because of that the profile of the driver is very different than in ride chare cities it is in essence a full-time job it is not something you can viably do for 10 hours a week it is not a gig it has to be a profession because there are structural things in New York like drivers owning their own insurance congestion laws and things like this that it it only is sensible to do it as your full-time occupation so it's just a very different pitch that in some ways makes it harder and in some ways makes it easier I found net net it made it a little bit easier because once you got the driver because the commitment is so large we were sort of eating all that up front once we find that guy who's willing to really go all in and do this then he's going to be with you for a few years versus a guy who's just like I have a car I want to try this you pay to acquire me I do the background check I go out for one week it's not for me I give up in some ways that version is like fairer and and and better and we would like to have that in New York or we would have like to have that in New York but with the you get the regulatory regime you get not always the you want and Uber New York does it the way that I just said and in some ways it's a little bit easier to scale that way what's the best decision you made in the first 18 months we did a very large driver incentive like new new drivers get $1,000 cash we could do that because of the dynamic I just outlined like once we get a driver their you know so-called lifetime value could be measured in the thousands or tens of thousands the $1,000 fee was pretty good and it got people's attention it also got me into rooms where drivers that were working in like bases they 60 drivers that form a franchise and they operate out of a building somewhere and they and they have an operator and the operator takes the phone calls and dispatches we can convert that whole system over to Uber there were so many fundamental ways that we were better like tolls tolls were a huge pain for drivers at the time because they would take their fancy Rider home to Connecticut over a bridge easy pass the bridge then have to write up a separate receipt for the toll we're like Geo fence when you drive through it will automatically add it and PE drivers were so skeptical that that would that's not aome how will you it's magic yeah there was a lot of things where I was showing magic to people that never seen it before so going deep in the community the,000 referral bonus was a good one letting my guys on the Uber team kind of run their own thing I was pretty hands off I manage the way I like to be managed I guess so I mean hopefully they felt like they had ownership over what they were doing um you know all all good stuff um the next question is more interesting you know um there's nothing like reading an article in the news about a thing you know super well because you learn that there's a pretty wide Delta a lot of times between the way something is written about in the press and the reality most things you read about and you don't know about them so you take you know like okay that I guess that's right it was pretty amazing reading the way Uber was covered in the Press particularly locally versus the realities that I knew this is a little more than the first year this is probably for me year year three when we were getting big enough to hate I was there for five and a half years act one first couple years was like oh my God these Uber guys are geniuses they are just they are so smart they're neon tank tops and their ice cream trucks and all that stuff they are so clever fighting in a battle yeah these guys are amazing that was act one and then in my like 2 and a half years in mid 2014 I you just sort of felt it begin to change a bit we did some rate Cuts piss off some drivers piss off some government you know start to be hated and then so act to was like these guys are the worst ever right and so neither of those things are true we were neither the best ever nor the worst ever there in some ways we were the best and maybe even some ways that we were the worst but it was just so crazy and so I'd read articles and like BuzzFeed that this New York driver makes $127 per hour and it's on their website on their homepage on Twitter people talking about it the thing is everyone's pay is individual to them everyone everyone every Uber driver is is a snowflake that's a joke but doing a truly random thing they are driving around getting jobs getting a percentage of that fee each time having a certain amount of downtime I mean there's truly Randomness so you can have a drivers on the road each driver is going to have a truly random experience that Randomness is going to impact how much they make if you quantify that per hour do you is that per hour from when the moment they left their home until the moment they get home is it while they're on duty with the app is it while there's a someone in their car there's a lot of ways to cut that so since it's random surely there is a driver who goes out and he sits in his car for whatever reason he gets no jobs and his hourly rate is quite bad and then the other guy who on the other end of the thing who is so good at Uber knows exactly where to be he works exactly the right hours and he makes a lot of money and there's everyone in the middle but that's a true distribution right um it's there's a lot of Randomness there you might not like it and you might think it's not fair but it's fundamentally how taxis work also in a situation where a person is sort of on their own they get the equipment they go they make money as they work there's variables in there that impact how much they make and I really had hard time since I've been saying driver hiring was the biggest part of the whole thing having big articles in the media that sort of socialized this idea that Uber pays you know slave wages that Uber is just a uber is just a hollow app you know the drivers are working for peanuts for $147 an hour now I'm not saying drivers are are getting rich nor am I saying it's the job I want my kids to have it is a job that my father had briefly but it is what it is we offered a version of it that was better than the existing version if you were driving a taxi driving for Uber was better in a lot of ways if you were driving for a For Hire franchise thing that gets radio dispatch outside of a building in Queens this was better than that and I I was comfortable with that and so it was very hard to read things in the news that sort of implied otherwise with very selective drivers on Uber make a147 an hour it's like well perhaps that one did one time but it's certainly not regular would would we be onboarding hundreds of new drivers a week who come in through the main channel of referrals from other drivers would that be happening the proof is in the pudding a little bit can't you see that you come to meet me and the driver Sports Center is filled to the brim of people who want to get in on this can't you kind of see that maybe you don't have that right I just was not very successful in those arguments so Travis was like why are people why is the media in your city riding this horeshit that you and I know is not true get in their face that was a mistake and so I very much he let me what I loved about Travis what I love about Travis is he was always comfortable with me being me and everyone being thems I mean be yourself was one of our values it was mocked but I think it was it was real and I I did appreciate that he I felt like I could be the unedited version of myself with him and that he enjoyed those instincts and made me feel good about them for that and that's why that's why I was there for as as long as I was I've never been able to survive another place from more than a year or two because it just people just certain people just drive me crazy and he was just like you be you and it's fine and he was like hey you're going to let a reporter like that basically spread like a Lial you know like slander us say we pay people a147 an hour like we shouldn't let that stand I'm like you're goddamn right we shouldn't that's some I mean this is in that moment our life's work we're working very hard we are giving legitimate opportunities to people there are people for whom it doesn't work out but the but the vast majority particularly in New York was that it was working out there are things about the driver relationship that I would do differently if it could do it again I think rate cuts at times were highly Justified and at other times were not I think we did them in both situations in New York I think the the last one we did in the 201617 range was probably a price cut that shouldn't have happened we might have gone too deep and that's evidenced by the fact that they charge more now uh but the system gets more efficient and yields per hour how much a driver can do per hour goes up over time as Uber grows generally more drivers on the road more Riders increases the liquidity of the system it brings weight times down it keeps drivers busier it's this beautiful thing that happens but that's like a hard thing to explain to a reporter who like majored English there was a couple of dominoes that fell that I was sort of near and it blew up in my face a little bit in 2014 when I was really trying to engage with a reporter who I feel wrote things like drivers make a150 an hour in bad faith I wanted to prove to her that she had it wrong I got close to this reporter and met up with her in my office one day she was running like 20 minutes late but I wanted to be there at the door when she got there so I up my she's like I'm taking an Uber I'm R TR sleep but I'm in an Uber I'll be there soon okay I can see where Ubers that are coming to where I am are going to be there and she's in one when she got there I was like great it's okay that you were late I waited upstairs until you got here and I tracked you on the system came downstairs and met you that was a comment I made a couple months later it's like New York general manager stalking a journalist now that's some bad faith and Ben Smith at BuzzFeed is a piece of and he still is a piece of and I told him that on Twitter the other like a month ago I was like you're a piece of like that's bad faith and then he tricked Emil into saying he knew he was off the Record and he took sort of like a bad a joke and bad faith a lot of bad faith reporting and I'm not here to defend anyone even really me but I just told you a story about that he was tracking me thing and it was like I was in you were coming to meet me I told you it was not nefarious she got a ton of attention and got a job at the LA Times and all this stuff and it's just like okay that's fine but it it really oh it kind of up my my life for a bit I mean when I went later I was part of a VC fund that raised 60 million bucks and in diligence for that what was this thing with you tracking journalist am I talking about this 10 years later like that's unbelievable um I mean dude it and it resonates I mean I had that New Yorker article I don't know if you how many you remember that I never went on those trips I was like nothing good will come of these trips I'm not going to Austin I'm not going to anywhere or veg you know I mean I did go to some of them what happened you you were just a little casual you're casual Cas and cocky casual and cocky I just but like look I mean it everything resonates with you said because it was we believed so much in what we were doing I mean to have that belief in what you're doing every day is so great and then it ended up being you know a short time we didn't stop believing what we were doing it just the world celebrated it for a bit and then the world wanted to to to kill us for a bit about it and so it was this wild anomy where you still believe so much and what you're doing um and like look I just got sucked up in a moment and I got taken advantage of by somebody like look I I I bear the responsibility of that and I'm in some ways glad it happened because I learned a lot but it is wild how you're Never As Good As You Are when you're on top and you're never as bad as you are when you're when you're on the bottom yeah yeah 100% I think people don't realize the thing grew really fast in a normal situation when you have enough success to be written about in a New Yorker article there's other infrastructure in place to make sure you don't do what you did you know what I mean but like things happen fast and it's like we'll hire a Comm person or two and that'll be fine it can't be everywhere we're highly distributed highly s you know the distribution angle like we're at all these different cities each sort of operating in some some ways independently and it's a it is what it is it's a problem yeah happens yeah but I like we were like grownup business size but still startup mentality and that was the problem so kind of maybe defining moment if I'm correct or not is Mayor DeBlasio the regulatory sort of scheme there that pops up and tries to fix Supply and really mess with the core of how we did business and you ran an unbelievable campaign to really push that back I mean what what are you most proud of from from that campaign looking back on it anyone who's listening and not familiar with it you know the there is definitely a Vibe among the country that Uber goes into their into their city and they break all the rules and then they get the rules changed and then they live happily ever after this was mid that strategy if you look back now to 10 years ago or even more like 12 years ago 13 years ago when they changed the first laws in Colorado I think there is a degree to which that's true we invented a new kind of Transportation or lifted or side carded or whatever and we made it popular the culture became comfortable with getting into a car with another human without them having a taxi license which ultimately is kind of a meaningless thing as long as the person is fundamentally safe in whatever agreeable way it's fine you get where you're going we really changed change the country in that way that was not a thing now that is a thing it's not still not a thing in New York but the vibe at the time was these guys Silicon Valley Bros come in and do this thing what must have been frustrating for the New York industry taxi and limo is that that wasn't what was happening in New York in New York a bunch of guys came in and also girls of course my team was basically always half and half just by accident and laid by the rules here and just crushed everybody like just totally destroyed everybody just by you know people always say like the worst of all must have been that Taxi Limousine Commission right the truth is they were all actually very fair to us they were True Believer Regulators appointed by Bloomberg not as partisan didn't probably didn't always like us personally but they knew that we actually just filled out paperwork better than anyone else we wrote some software to fill out paperwork we always had our paperwork in order we submitted records better than anyone else we replied to any any requests better than anyone else we were a bad kid who was trying to be good and was super good and just and and that resonated with them and when I think back at the time the commission was never a problem ever it was City Hall so Bill DeBlasio in 2015 you know this was probably like July there were some there are some Footprints up until this in like May or April there was a us there was an article in some paper where taxi commissions had got a whiff of this you know the way to get Uber is talk about traffic and congestion they're making too much traffic it's bad for the environment you can't get around the speed of the city from 2008 till present has slowed down two miles per hour it's like well you started measuring during a recession that could be like traffic is bad but it's also an indicator of economic activity and growth and it's a long story but basically they lined up a whole set of rules and announced them with the the intention of just jamming us you know they announced them like June 27th or something we were fighting some other issue in Long Island and there had been an issue earlier in the year with the Administration in New York wanting to approve app updates every time you update your app they had to approve like UI changes like just gnarly you do not want we just come off that a lobbyist called me or someone I was sitting with and was like Hey this new thing is just rolled out they did a presser on it like it's baked this is happening and what it was was a oneyear moratorium like a break for one year on Uber's ability or anyone's ability to add new driver registrant new vehicles will not be welcomed onto the system for a year while we you know figure out what's happen do a study we do an environmental impact study on what's Happening Here with all these new cars coming on the road what people didn't get is so you're already so big you'll pause for a year it'll be fine it's like the other thing with rates and and how much people earn it's like it's not that simple the reality is that if if we don't keep adding drivers the system will become unusable because the Riders are coming in 25,000 New Riders a week or Tri Uber in New York for like a year like it just went on and on and on and on and on just no end in sight it's more and more and more and more and that is not going to work we really went turned it up to 11 met with every newspaper I was on CNBC like every day on other news stations we had a rally at City Hall we went and met with city council just really you know the sort of opposite of like if you can make it here you can make it anywhere it's like if you get by The Regulators here you're going to get everywhere and so we somehow beat it back they'd come back three years later and do it after my time in 2018 but in 201 5 we got it so it was like a three-week marathon fight and we got Eric Adams Then burough president of Brooklyn now the mayor we got him to stand with us he was a big chip to fall the governor got a question in an interview he's like I think that's crazy I think Uber's great that was very helpful he really hates DeBlasio and then we got a couple other people we got editorial board of New York Times Daily News New York Post all three to weigh in and all say like this is some just like you never get that like you just never get a city like all three of the especially the post agree with the other two like is very unusual and we we went spoke to all them and we did some we' spend like five million in TV ads just like political campaign hammer it was other I was like the principal but there was like alone it would have been a total loss who like Brad Tusk Matt way Alex anfang Rachel Hull Justin kins David Pluff like all these people really did and there other people that didn't even say someone on the team uh none of the people I just said thought of this idea of the like DeBlasio view where you would scroll to the option of deasio and it would say like 25 minute ETA like that cut through it's so hard to cut through the sort of mathematical scientific bit have it cut through toay people like that's hard and what she was a and what that feature did you know genius yeah pretty good deasio car type because you click on it and say the Blasio and it's like no cars available or 25 minute ETA or whatever genius yeah really really good all right so looking back what are a couple of the best learnings from being early at Uber working with Travis what what what stands out the most um well I think an appreciation for this always sounds stupid but this is what I always answer when I get ask this like an an appreciation for the scale of the world so something that really at first I had a hard time understanding was how are 25,000 people taking their first Uber ride each week in New York City where we've been live for years what were those people doing now they want Uber like four years in and there's 25,000 of them every single week and that certain things happen with it's hard for the human mind to to Fathom 8 million people in a city that's just not a natural idea of course you know the number you know what 8 million is it fills giant Stadium 100 times whatever you can like say it and you could sort of visualize it but to experience it and again I know this sounds so dumb but there is something there that's not obvious like the world is really really really big and since I only have about 10 minutes left I will use that segue to talk about what I'm doing now if that's okay do it hit me uh so I a few years ago decided I really didn't like the business side anymore wanted to become an engineer and built an app called wave and wave is an AI note-taking app because there's an expression we need one more note-taking app and so actually often it's it's the opposite that was the joke there people think that they don't need it but it was really just a learn to code exercise for me both using AI to help me make it and AI being what the app does and basically it's an audio recorder that summarizes what it hears so you go to a doctor's visit or a meeting that's in person like not on a zoom grain dump church service whatever you record it you get a summary at the end very simple it's a utility app about 20,000 paid subscribers now who record about 5,000 hours a day of audio that is always very surprising to me because I truly don't know what I'm doing and it's surprising to me that someone would want to use that app but you have to remember the world is really really big and I think there's when you spend too much time in circles like this you start to think that the only way to do something is like have an idea do a pitch deck raise a seed go do it hire 10 people try to make a billion dollars and that's legitimate and it's great if you can pull it off but the world is actually so big that you only have to find something you can you can build something the 20,000 people think is interesting which is really a drop in the bucket of the United States it doesn't have to be for everybody it could be for a tiny percentage of people who are like work in a place where they're not on zooms all day which is most people I think and they want and they use iOS and they want to like get in on that AI thing but they don't know it and they're not on Twitter all day reading about the newest models they're just like normal people understanding that the world is really big from the first thing can make it a little easier to understand that you don't have to make like a business that can be like exceed your wildest expectations can be very small uh just because the world is so big just just find those thousand fans as they say like who like the thing that you're doing and that can be enough that's why the internet is so great so the Uber experience is like must be gigantic or not useful but the truth is what it taught me is that actually it's in some ways the opposite it's like the world is so big that you can just appeal to a very very tiny sliver of it from the back office of your apartment and like do super well um and you've done this all yourself I mean to be like with a limited assistance I mean you you are really a oneman band yeah so two days ago the first version of the app released that had someone else's code in it uh so the first 16 months or so was just me I'm starting to expand you know there were some there were some issues with the app for a percentage of users that I just couldn't really fix on my own and wanted sort of a gut renovation of the house that the app sits in I guess would be a way to think about it so I am starting to get some help I've always had some help on the design like look and feel stuff but the the app itself certainly the version that people bought in the beginning and really the version until like last week was all me um a lot of AI Aid there um because you can really now learn anything with AI like that actually is the killer feature that's like I want to learn about birds you know or making apps or whatever chat gbt like it is not a joke can really teach you anything and it's amazing anyone who is willing to put in the time and effort and so like AI wrote the app so to say but I learned an an insane amount along the way such that I'll probably be doing something like this forever um but I am now in a certain mode with wave that I am starting to try to make it work without me um because it's started to kill me a little bit to the point where I'm like still in the sweatshirt I put on when I rolled out of bed at noon so it's it's it's like demanding at this point yeah I mean I do all this I do all the um customer service sort of like uber style that for many people would be the first thing that they they Outsource it'll probably be the last thing that I Outsource it's such a valuable Channel I mean Fu like when it's not too crazy it's direct connection yeah like this weird thing happened in the app are you aware like no I wasn't but I can replicate it so thank you you know um and so yeah I mean I would really like to uh be able to be not involved for a week and not have it break we're almost there only a couple minutes left so so maybe two meaty questions or is but I want to hit both of them on the AI front yeah what's the next five years look like or what's your piece of advice or like you know do is how real is this I mean I'm certainly in chat gbt every day what what does this look like from your perspective over the next five years yeah I think it gets it gets better and better but it will NE never be as dramatic as like Chachi BT didn't exist to it did exist everyone who had that first experience that's up there with Tap a button and a vehicle shows up to drive you somewhere these sort of very memorable aha moments there will be more it'll keep getting better and better but I think its primary function is as a human Aid not different than a word processor a web browser a computer in general it's going to just make life easier I don't always agree with the kind of way that you know sci-fi side kind of does like AI will do all the work for you and you will just draw pictures I don't know about that we'll see I think it's more like it's just sort going to be in everything like I don't know how AI will help you edit this podcast or write the summary or do the show notes they're just all these little moments in your day-to-day work that I think AI will start to infuse um I want to go on vacation I asked CHP about like a you know I have two kids one of them is celiac doesn't eat bread like I need to go to a place that'll be like flexible with eating and it's like it's got answers so there's all some of these knowledge positions where the knowledge can be kind of infused in a model I think there're may be at risk but like really they should just use those tools to do their job better and differently I guess that make sense yeah like if you're like a radiologist I don't think you're I don't think you're replaced by the model that can read the images but hopefully you become an operator of one and you're a lot better at your job totally all right and then last one a fun one what is an interesting piece of content that you've consumed article podcast you you even you even told me about this before and I was like oh I got to think of something and not come on be like I don't know there's a new all-in podcast competitor called this won't last and it's for analog types VC operators that are not the besties I love all and I listen every week uh and this reminds of that's called this won't last uh you can go there have been a couple of episodes of it it's like got it Zack Weinberg rabois or raboy however you sayy yeah a couple other dudes Kevin uh the Kevin Ryan yeah he's the like Kevin Ryan Godfather of like New York startup web 1.0 like yeah incubator yeah everything awesome Josh you're the best thank you so much for I appreciate it you have a good podcast for look I like the background it's good good