Full transcript: Jo Bertram on London Real
0:00 In London, technology is the silicone roundabout. Introducing a new talk show dedicated to the people of the London technology startup scene. Silicon Real. Each week, interviewing entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, financial technology, accelerators and incubators in an exciting three-person format. Learn about the people behind the innovation.
0:31 Locally filmed, locally sourced. Silicon Reel. It’s about the people. This is Silicon Reel, the weekly talk show dedicated to the people of the London technology startup scene. I am Brian Rose. I also host London Real.
0:48 It’s the same studio, but it’s not just a bunch of tech nerds. It’s also rock stars, politicians, authors, whistle blowers, filmmakers. I didn’t mean nerds. You name it, so. That was pretty harsh.
0:59 That was harsh, right? I try to change up the intro a little bit, so people don’t know it’s taped. But it’s a bit more non-just tech over there, like I said. So check that out at LondonReal.tv. But today we’re here to talk tech.
1:12 My co-host is Colin Pyle. You’re really moving markets. We just saw your new coffee with the films on it. It looks great. You’re in Soho House.
1:20 You’re in Harrods. Pretty soon you’re not even gonna come by here anymore, I think. Stepping up the game. Yeah, I know things are good, crazy busy. But yeah, Harrods just this week, so haven’t seen figures yet, a little nervous.
1:33 But yeah, exciting time, very long process, but very rewarding that we’re in there, so. Excellent, okay, so if you go to Soho House and drink the coffee, go to Harrods and buy your coffee, go to crewcafe.com and sign up. There we go. Okay, fantastic, let’s get on with the show. I’m so excited about this.
1:51 Our guest today is Joe Bertram, who is the general manager for Uber in London. If you haven’t heard of them, Uber is a ride-sharing app which connects drivers of private, higher vehicles with passengers directly. Uber operates in, I believe, 208 cities in maybe 45 countries. You launched in the UK two years ago. And in May, you raised $1.2 billion from big VC firms and Google Ventures, valuing you at $17 billion pre-money.
2:19 Your CEO, Travis Kalanick, is bold and outspoken. They say in business he’s a brawler, which is a compliment, of course. Joe, you worked as a management consultant for McKinsey and Accenture for eight years. You have a physics degree from the University of Cambridge. Welcome to Silicon Real.
2:35 Thank you. Thanks for being here. Let me just rattle off a few facts. They say London is set to become Uber’s quickest growing market ahead of LA, with more than 7,000 drivers transporting half a million people. Travis was here recently, and he said, quote, London is the Champions League of Transportation.
2:54 It has got a more dynamic, more competitive transportation system than any other city in the world. So I wondered, what is it like now when you wake up in the morning to go do that job of making Uber a reality in London? It’s great. I mean, I think we’ve seen huge change over the last year. As you mentioned, we only launched two years ago.
3:12 I joined the team a year ago, and we were just a team of three people. And now we’ve got about 35 people, as you mentioned, and 7,000 drivers driving around London, you look around and you see the Toyota Prius outside, it’s great to see the impact that we’re having. Yeah, no, it’s fantastic in that sense. It’s interesting because there’s been, you get so much publicity, I think, from all the people that protest you sometimes, I mean, the black cabs lined up six months ago, and did they stop traffic in London?
3:40 It’s almost like a negative impact, I don’t think they realize, because I thought I read some stat on just after the protests, your registrations went through the roof. Yeah, we announced, I think it was an 850% increase in sign-ups on that morning of the protests themselves. There were a lot of people who’d never heard of Uber before that day. Yeah. So thank you very much.
4:01 Yeah, I know. Seriously. So when you started, was it a year and a half ago or two years? Just over a year ago. What was the task you had to do?
4:09 I mean, I guess you started kind of from scratch here in London. What did you have to do? What was the biggest obstacle? and if you could just tell us the story of what the last 18 months of your life has been like. Absolutely, so Uber launched in London two years ago, initially with our Lux product, so you may be aware we’ve got four products here in London.
4:26 The first one we launched was Uber Lux, which is, we like to think of the best chauffeur service in London, long wheelbase, S-class Mercedes, the driver turns up in a suit and tie, you’ve got water, some of them have iPads, magazines, things like that. Only a little bit more expensive than a black cab or many of our other competitors. And so we’d been operating for about a year. I joined with the remit to grow the business. Essentially, the general manager’s responsible for everything about running the business in that city, in that market.
4:54 We just launched UberX, which is our cheapest best value for money product, Toyota Prius or equivalent. What you showed up in today. Exactly. She uses her own. Economical, as always.
5:05 What’s that called? Eating the dog food is what Google calls that, when you use your own product, right? We all travel Uber, actually, all the time. You do? Make sure we’re trying out the service so we launched that in in August last year And I think that was really the turning point is it 30 to 50 percent cheaper than almost every other form of private hire or taxi transportation So it opened the sector up to people who’d otherwise not be able to afford to use that kind of transport And we saw it saw huge growth and we also launched uber exec somewhere in the middle We know some of those banking types can’t nowadays show up in the really swanky s class So it’s a e-class Mercedes a bit more discreet aimed for the for the business traveler We’ve basically been growing the business ever since and then so I deal with everything from managing the supply and the demand managing the team managing this overall strategy Recruiting any legal and regulatory questions media the the public face of the of the company as well And then during this year and we’ve seen incredible growth We did a give 20 get 20 campaign. You may be aware at the moment we have a referral campaign so if you give if you refer your friend you give them £10 credit when they ride you get £10 credit and earlier this year we actually doubled that to £20 and as you can imagine that’s that’s a lot of free money and a lot of people wrote a lot and so we saw huge growth then and then with the
6:30 Protests and publicity through the course of this year we’ve also been been growing very very quickly. We opened up the app actually to black taxis as well in June. Wanted to make sure that they also had the option and we love black taxis they’re a key part of London. I’m a Londoner we wanted to make sure that they also had the opportunity to earn some extra money on the on the uber platform. Most of them don’t don’t use it use it full-time but it means if things are quiet or they’re sitting at the back of a taxi rank they can just pick up and an extra job or two and if they do that every day that’s It’s another 10,000 pounds a year, so everything, every little bit helps.
7:04 You know, when we had Halo here six months ago, I said that the quintessential, you’re from London, the quintessential British London experience, especially as a foreigner, is riding in that black cab, especially 10, 15 years ago before Uber came along, when there was not much of a choice, and the black cab is almost like a limousine, you know, compared to America. And so it’s like, and it’s an institution, it’s a British institution, so when you go head to head with that, you must be fighting a lot of things. You’re fighting that union, you’re fighting the public who kind of has that as a beloved icon.
7:35 How do you deal with that? I wouldn’t say we were fighting that, essentially. We see Uber as another option to get around the city. Sometimes you want to take an Uber, sometimes you want to take a black cab and they can go in the bus lanes, they have the intimate knowledge of the city. Sometimes you want to take the tube, the bus, the forest bike.
7:51 It’s just another option in getting around the city. As I mentioned, we’ve now opened up the app also to black taxis and we’ve got hundreds them on the platform. So we very much feel part of that part of that industry. What’s the biggest bottleneck you have as far as doing your job? You’ve been in the press in America looking for drivers and fighting for drivers with Lyft etc. Is that the main issue in London is signing up the driver side as opposed to getting the consumer base? Well there’s 10 million people in London and we believe that we’ve got an absolutely fantastic product and service so of course the supply side is always going to be a bit more difficult.
8:26 Here in the UK, we only use private hire licensed drivers. There’s about 60,000 of them in London, 20,000 black cabs. So obviously, the pool is a bit smaller. We also go through quite extensive betting process to bring on board the drivers. So it’s a little bit easier to persuade you to refer your friend to ride than to persuade a driver to come in, go through the onboarding process, and risk his livelihood, essentially, because this is his primary source of income to join the platform.
9:00 But we’ve got hundreds of drivers very keen to join, and it’s just a matter of going through that process. How do you find a driver? A lot of them actually refer their friends. It’s a very small industry, and I think one of the things that’s great about Uber is how passionate the drivers are about what they do. It’s a really different model for the private hire drivers.
9:20 Typically, it’s an industry where they’re salaried employees who work very inflexible shifts and don’t have much freedom or sort of transparency. Now they work with us as independent business owners. They can work as much or as little as they want. They can log on when they want and log off when they want to do something else. It’s non-exclusive, so they can combine it with other work.
9:40 Many of them have either their own business or they’re doing contract work. For example, some might drive around celebrities, some of our lux drivers. And then when they have spare time, they can get more money out of the car. So it’s been a very attractive option. they then refer their friends and bring them to Uber.
9:58 So often, we’ve had almost more drivers wanting to join them. We’ve been able to process and check. Interesting marketplace. What do you see? And when you hear Uber and watch what they’re doing from an entrepreneurial perspective, what do you see?
10:11 I think you look at Uber, and the valuation that you guys got on your last raise was just mind-blowing, that it’s worth that much money. But you start to really look at Uber and what it’s doing and how it’s changing, it’s logistics. Right now it’s moving people, but where does it go in the future? And I think Uber is really interesting in London because you’re almost competing with TFL in a way too. The UberX I think is incredible.
10:36 If I’m going somewhere with my wife, if it’s not that far, it’s pretty close to the same price as us taking the two, which is just, it’d be interesting to see what TFL, I’d love to see those numbers since UberX sort of started in London, what the TFL numbers have gone. actually think it helps because I mean one of the issues especially when they open up the tube 24 hours is this last mile problem so now and next year whenever it is that they do that they’re going to have tubes spitting people out in in zone three or four with with no way to get that extra 10-15 minutes home and that’s where Uber is able to provide some of the extra capacity provide to some of those underserved areas we actually found something like 40% of uber requests are coming from areas outside central London where transportation can be a bit more difficult. Do you have a matrix of information? I know, you know, Travis, when he started this a long time ago, you know, it was kind of the private hire service in San Francisco and then at one point he was looking at all of the drivers and where they were located and I don’t know had an aha moment and wanted to scale it, but do you, is that something you watch as a general manager there of all the motion that’s going on in London and do you try to run those numbers and pick up trends and think of different things you should do? Absolutely, so Uber’s a very… Are you a data freak? Are you all over that data?
11:48 Well, I was a physicist originally, but it was a very data-driven company and we hire a lot of people for their analytical ability. We have a huge amount of data on how the system as a whole is working, like how efficient the drivers are being, where you expect to see demand, when you expect to see it. We try to provide a lot of that information for the drivers themselves as well. That’s part of empowering them to run their own business. A lot of them know it intuitively, but we give them information each week.
12:17 This is when we can expect it to be busy. This is when you worked last week. If you worked these times, this is how you could earn more money. You don’t have to, but this is when the peak periods are and things like that. And then we’re always running different analyses to try and figure out how to optimize the system or how to improve things for the drivers or for the customers.
12:36 Is it true that at any moment you can see all of the smartphones that are logged into the Uber app and all of the drivers and then all of the cars that are active? I mean, can you see all that information? We can see all of the cars that are logged on and where they’re at and whether they’re on a trip or whether they’re available. And we can see when someone’s requesting. But not all the smart phones with it on their app.
12:58 That would be scary. Only after you take the blue pill. No, it seems like a fascinating. It sounds like the transportation has just been this massively inefficient piece for the whole world. I mean, massively inefficient.
13:12 Because if you can really provide all this value and provide drivers that wouldn’t normally be doing this, or they could work these hours and do this. I mean, it sounds like this has been running at like 4% efficiency when it could be in the 90s. Is it that much that we need to improve transport? I think technology’s brought a lot of efficiency. I mean, I would argue, I mean, like Travis said, that London is and always has been the Champions League of Transportation.
13:34 So it’s a very interesting market. And for us as the local team here, it’s a very different market to try and grow Uber in. because there are very good alternative options. And so some of the challenges here is to make sure that we’re bringing a product that’s different but has its own value proposition. You can get home on the tube.
13:54 So bringing a very high-end expensive service here may get much less traction. What we think we’ve done is actually packing in the most value at each price point. So we have a range of services, whether you want the cheapest possible option or whether you want all the bells and whistles, but at each price point, we think that’s the best option that you can get. Okay, let’s talk about Uber Pool. Travis was here recently and he said it’s gonna potentially take a million cars off the street in London.
14:19 I don’t know, maybe I was misquoting. But what is Uber Pool, what’s the whole idea of that? So Uber Pool’s an experiment we’re running in San Francisco and it refers back to your data point, I guess. What we wanted to see is how do we make transportation even cheaper for users and even more efficient. We all know the congestion that we see on the roads both here and in almost every other major city.
14:41 Uber on its own is already in many cities, cheaper than owning a car, depending on how often you travel. It’s often much cheaper just to travel by Uber. But we were thinking, what if you could actually share your ride? So say I’m leaving here and I’m going across to Paddington. If there was a way for me to see who else is leaving from somewhere near here around the same time and wants to go in that direction and find a way to match us up so that we can split the cost of the journey.
15:10 Obviously, the algorithms and the data behind that is hugely complex, but that’s an experiment that they’re running in San Francisco, and we hope has huge potential elsewhere in the world. Yeah, it seems like you have to just get it right and get the tech right. It hurts my brain just trying to figure out who’s here, who’s going there. Yeah, I heard there was a company that launched something similar with black cabs, and they’re trying to do that with a black cab, which just to me seemed like a really hard sell to just try to get someone who doesn’t know someone to share this black cab, which they’re not used to, but obviously if you get it right.
15:40 And the discounts are big. I mean, I think it’s up to 40% or 50% discount if you’re very closely matched, but obviously you’d need quite a lot of liquidity. And if there’s only 10 people in London using this service, the likelihood of getting a match is very low. So it’s figuring out how do you make it work at each scale. Why is London the Champions League?
15:58 I mean, why isn’t it New York City or Tokyo? I mean, those are very big cities, you know, big populations, but why is London? For Uber or in general? Yeah, for Uber. Yeah, for Uber.
16:08 I think Travis’s comment was referring in general like we have some of the best transportation infrastructure here in the world with the tube the buses taxis some of the best taxis in the world private hire industry has co-existed here for decades as well so it is a very competitive environment I think why Uber’s been so successful here is that the products we offer are very different and distinct from from those other options in the market so it’s really another choice instead of trying to compete directly with something that’s exactly the same as someone else’s offering. Now, you’ve just been named head of the Nordic and head of Ireland as well. So you look at a bunch of different cities and regions.
16:46 You can, the Nordics. Congratulations, by the way. Every time you read about Uber, we talked about it earlier. It’s the Parisian cab drivers freaking out. It’s the German court saying, you can’t use this.
16:56 And then they reversed the decision. Obviously, the black cabs did a protest. Now they can join. But is that something that you guys as a company kind of enjoy? Do you have to get used to it?
17:06 Do you hire people saying that, look, we are pioneers. We’re going to have to get used to this? I mean, how do you deal with that? You must be thinking about that in Ireland or the Nordic markets. How much does press play into this?
17:16 It’s obviously an important part of the business. I mean, essentially, we’re disrupting an industry that in most cities hasn’t been disrupted for decades. We’re bringing competition also to those industries, and that can be uncomfortable. Technology has also brought new things for regulators to think about. I mean, even here in London, the latest private hire legislation was written, I think, in 1998.
17:39 So prior to smartphones or Google Maps or any of this ever being invented. So there’s always going to be challenges. I think one of the interesting things for Uber is we operate in so many cities. And typically, transport legislation is something that’s done at a local level, at a city level, not even nationally. So for example, here in the UK, there’s an overarching framework from the Department of Transport.
18:02 But it’s up to Manchester City Council Transport for London, Birmingham City Council, how they operate in each city. And obviously, the same through Europe. So it’s figuring out what are the different products and services that we offer that’s right for that market and right for the people who live in that city. Big job. Talk to me about kittens and Christmas trees and Valentines.
18:24 These have been great publicity stunts where you could have a kitten transported you and play with them or have a Christmas tree really quick. Have you done some of these in London, and what is this all about? Yeah, I mean, we do it for two things, for two reasons, I guess. One is, we really want to just delight our riders and provide them another experience. But the other thing is, it’s an experiment.
18:46 It’s actually very easy for us to open up the app to bring you something else at the touch of a button. At the moment, it’s a car, and we’ve done a few experiments like that to bring you something at the touch of a button. You mentioned, I mean, in the US, they did Uber Kittens, So on National Cat Day, you could order to your office some kittens from the cat shelter, completely humane, to be delivered to your office. When was National Cat Day? I think it was in autumn last year.
19:10 I can’t remember the exact day. Yeah, it was National Everything Day. There we go, yeah. We did Christmas trees on demand at Christmas. I think they’ve done air conditioners in New York.
19:19 Here in London, we’ve done a few things. We’ve done, we did a partnership with Bacardi. So on Cuban Independence Day, we brought you Cuba Libres, or Uber Libres, as we called them, for free, thanks to Bacardi, anywhere in London for one day. You delivered a drink to people? Yeah.
19:38 So you would book in your app the Uber Libre icon, and a wrapped car would turn up with your cocktail master, come into your office or your home, whip out his little box, make you a nice cocktail, leave it with you and your friends, and then go on to the next one. We did globally ice cream, Uber ice cream on demand on July the 18th, where in something like 150 cities, however many we were in at the time, we delivered ice cream for one day only. And that was an amazing example of a global logistics delivery system that we were able to set up in a matter of weeks.
20:13 And each city could deliver the ice cream however they wanted. So here in London, we had 54 ice cream trucks on demand through the app. In Paris, they had those little old Citroen cars. I think in Italy, they had Vespers. in Bangkok they had tuk-tuk, each city could just interpret it how they wanted, but globally we delivered hundreds of thousands of pieces of ice cream on that day.
20:35 How was that from your standpoint, I mean how hard was that week for you? I was great, I mean the actual day itself there’s quite a lot of moving parts including corralling the 54 ice cream trucks, but no it went really well and it’s great to see the support from the users when you do something like that. So is that a huge opportunity for you guys in terms of the last mile of shipping and logistics that Amazon now is, you know, trying to master the same day delivery and they’re even talking about like, you know, delivery trucks that ride around and anticipate what people are going to order.
21:06 So does that put you guys in like a really good position to either compete against Amazon or maybe even partner with them? Well, I mean, we’re definitely thinking about different logistics experiments and there’s a few in the US. I mean, they do Uber rush, so it’s a bicycle courier. If you want to get keys or documents across town, you can order a bicycle courier. They’ve got Corner Store in Washington, DC, where you can order just general items you’d order from your Corner Store, again, through the app.
21:34 On the West Coast, we’re doing Uber Fresh, so deliver salads from some of the favorite restaurants within five or 10 minutes. But I think the way we’re thinking about it is, what can I bring to someone within five or 10 minutes? We’re not as interested in just generally doing logistics, but what can we actually have in the car such that we can get it to you in a few minutes, and that’s where very few other people sort of play in that space. And I think Travis talks about the one-legged trips where you’ve got the inventory in the car.
22:02 For example, Uber Fresh, you’ve got a car that’s stocked up with the salads, which means it’s incredibly efficient because you book and then he comes to you and then the next person books and he goes to them instead of having to go back to the depot each time. And they tell stories of people who are waiting in line for their favorite restaurant and they actually open up the app, call the Uber Fresh, and they get it delivered before they’ve got to the front of the line in the restaurant. I mean, part of the reason you have such a big valuation, and everyone’s talking about Uber, is because of this transition to this potential logistical behemoth, where you’re almost challenging, like you said, the Amazons or the Walmarts and all these kinds of things.
22:37 So for you and your job, it’s not like it’s an Addison Lee hat, where you’re like, we are a driver company. We send them here, and that’s all we’re ever going to do, I think. No offense to Addison Lee. But for you, are you always thinking like, okay, I might be delivering salads in six months, or we might be delivering, I don’t know, construction material, or I don’t know, are you always trying to think a bunch of steps ahead as to what your company might be in a year?
22:58 Yeah, I guess so. I mean, I think the interesting thing about Uber is things move so quickly as well. So we do operate on a fairly short time horizon. I mean, there’s so many developments happening from the engineering team that they’re bringing new products, making things work better. So we’re always adapting to that and looking for different ways to grow the business.
23:17 And at the moment, we still see huge potential in London, in private hire and taxi. We’re hoping to launch several other UK cities coming soon. We think there’s huge potential there as well. So there’s a huge amount of opportunities. And I guess one of the challenges is just figuring out which are the ones we should go after right now, because you obviously can’t do all of them at once.
23:37 Is it expensive setting up your business? And does it help having this kind of big war chest of, you know, whatever, at least in America, they’ve got the billion dollars. I mean, is it something that makes your job easier or harder? I think we operate very much like a startup in each city that we operate in. I mean, we’re in so many cities that we still have to operate in a very lean way with a lot of financial discipline.
23:59 And we typically start in a city with three people. And those three people literally run their own startup in that city and grow it up. I think one of the biggest challenges is actually building that marketplace. As you mentioned, we’re not like a traditional operator where you might build up capacity of trucks and then you just need to sell that capacity or cars or whatever it might be. Ours is a marketplace.
24:22 We all know that if a potential customer logs into the app and they can’t see any cars one or two times, they probably won’t travel with us again. But it’s also important on the driver’s side. If they come and we’ve got too many drivers compared to the passengers and they keep logging in every day and they don’t get enough work, they’ll also leave and go and do something else. they’re completely free to work with us as much or as little as they want. So one of the challenges is making sure that we grow that business at the right pace and keeping those two pieces aligned.
24:51 Tough job, huh? What’s your biggest challenge for the next year? I mean, if you can tell us. Or what are some of them that you’re just thinking, okay, I wanna do this, I wanna do this, I wanna do this? I think one of them is probably just how you grow that quickly to grow your team.
25:04 As I mentioned, we were three people a year ago, And now we’re 35 or so, 50 in the region. And growing and building a team that quickly in what is quite a complex industry and quite a complex company can be quite challenging. And when you, there’s not that many organizations that have had to go through that growth curve so quickly and figuring out what’s the best way to do that is often challenging. Company culture, does that come under your responsibilities and how do you, what is your culture like and how do you promote it?
25:35 So we have a culture sort of across Uber around, I mean, Travis is very keen on best idea wins, so you shouldn’t be worried about stepping on people’s toes, whoever it is, if you think you’ve got a better idea, then you should have put it forward. So it’s a very flat culture, very entrepreneurial, very decentralized, so that each general manager is really, I mean, Travis talked to them as the CEO of their city or their market, so very, very decentralized. And as we grow, I guess some of the challenges will be, how do you make sure you still allow that autonomy and entrepreneurialism, but you still keep some consistency, make sure the company as a whole still keeps that same culture.
26:17 And then we’re going into a lot of developing markets, and obviously the technical challenges as you go into Asia, into Africa, we’re in Bogota, Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, India, China, and all of these countries alone sort of provide their own challenges technically as well. I was on Google now the other day, and checking a map, and it was like giving me the tube and the bus. And the tube in London, you’re like, oh, do I go there, or there, or there? And then at the bottom, it was said, or take an Uber.
26:42 And I was just wondering how important it’s been to have Google Ventures as one of your investors. And I guess they’re not just an investor, because they do help with marketing and maps and things like that. Has that been a big help or a medium help? I think the two parts are quite separate, actually. The sort of investment from Google Ventures, and then any commercial partnerships with Google.
27:01 So we’re very happy that we’ve managed to build that commercial relationship around the Uber option in Google. But it’s quite separate from the investment. And we’ve actually now. But I never see an Addison Lee option there. We’ve actually opened up our API now.
27:19 So any apps, or any developers, can integrate Uber into the app and show where the nearest cars are, the ETAs, the prices, do price estimates, and things like that. So it’s going to be quite exciting to see what they do and how people use it. Our launch partners included TripAdvisor. Here in London, our launch partner was Timeout. So when you go to the Timeout app, you open up the page.
27:41 On the details page, you can also see the option to get an Uber and see where the cars are. So obviously, the natural partners for this are travel or events and going out. But it’s going to be really interesting to see what other companies do with that option. Peter Thiel recently said in the class, he’s teaching at Stanford how to start a startup. He had a lecture called Competition is for Losers, and that any good startup should just try to be a monopoly, and they should just go in trying to own a market.
28:08 Is that something you think about? Because you’re not like, you said you were not competing with Halo, they can sign up. It doesn’t sound like you look at this market as you have competition. It sounds like you’re just building your own infrastructure and people can join or not. Is that kind of the mentality?
28:21 Well, we think it’s another option. I mean, I think competition’s actually good, and it’s good for us, it keeps us on our toes, and it’s good for the industry. I mean, from a customer side, it means you get better value, better quality, better service. But importantly, from the driver side, it makes sure that all the companies are giving the best economic opportunities to the drivers, giving them the flexibility or perks that they want. So I think it’s a positive thing, but I mean, it’s a very competitive industry and you’re competing not only with taxi and private hire, but with tube, bus, every other form of transport as well.
28:55 Is it easy for you to hire people? Recently it’s been much easier with all the publicity. And luckily here in London, there’s a huge pool of talent. So we haven’t struggled here. We are still looking for a general manager in Dublin.
29:09 So if you know of anyone there, that would be fantastic. And we’ve got a ton of opportunities on our website. So always looking for more people. And when you go into Dublin and Stockholm and these kind of places, do you feel like you’re going in with a lot of knowledge that you picked up here and you know a lot of things about what to do right and what not to do, right? Yeah, there’s certainly a lot of experience that you gain and sort of knowledge from having done it once before.
29:33 I think the difference is getting started in a new city is a very different challenge from taking a business and scaling it up. And those first six months or however long it is, and really no one’s maybe heard of Uber. The drivers are skeptical. They haven’t yet heard from their friends how it works and things like that. It can be much harder.
29:52 And then there’s a lot of going out, talking to people, telling them why we believe it’s such a fantastic opportunity, talking to potential partners, things like that, getting them to want to partner with us. And then recently, I mean, in London, it gets easier on that side because suddenly we get a lot of people asking us. So we’ve managed to recently get to the point where a lot of people want to partner with us. We get a lot of incoming requests, but in those other cities, they still have to build that profile.
30:17 You think you’re gonna have the same troubles in the Nordics with protests and stuff like that, or are they much more open to it? I don’t know. We’ll have to see. I mean, even the protests in London were a bit unexpected, I guess. It’s not something anyone sort of saw coming. It’s really interesting to see what happens in the industry, I guess, and how people react.
30:36 And Jessica, the sort of, the protests, is it the same in every city? Are they sort of complaining about the same thing? Or is it different? Is it different in, sorry, I guess Paris was the big one, and then in London, too, I guess. Berlin, or I don’t know, with a protest there?
30:53 I think it varies in all the cities. I think the one thing that’s very different about London versus many of the other cities is black cab drivers are independent operators who essentially already run their own business. In comparison, in the US, the actual drivers are usually renting their vehicle from someone who owns the taxi medallion and is making a huge amount of money about it out of it. But the drivers themselves tend to be fairly poorly paid and not always very good.
31:20 I know across Europe, there’s often bigger unions that have more entrenched political interests. So I think it’s quite a different situation here in London. You have a famous battle going on with Lyft in America. Are Lyft in London? I don’t even know.
31:33 No. OK, all right. And I know it’s like they still are drivers. No use to are drivers. You book phony trips.
31:39 No, you book phony trips. I mean, is this healthy, or is it too much? Do you think? I mean, I know you don’t work there. So I guess I’m just asking for your comment.
31:47 But what do you make of all that? I mean, here in London, we’re just focused on sharing the opportunity that we have for drivers to work on the platform. I think telling people about what opportunities are available to them, I mean, it happens to all of us all the time. I mean, you probably get messages on LinkedIn suggesting other opportunities for you guys as well, I certainly do. And so to the extent that you’re sharing what the opportunities are with Uber, I don’t think it’s a bad thing.
32:15 We’re lucky here that we still have hundreds of drivers who are keen to join with us. There was like a battle in New York recently, I think, between Lyft and Uber, I’m not sure, but it was like saying the amount of money they could earn and Lyft was like, look, you can earn $110,000. And then Uber was like, look, you can earn $5,000 a month. And I was like, man, what a great time to be a driver. I mean, it is kind of empowering for drivers, right?
32:37 You must see a lot of happy drivers. Yeah, and that’s one of the things I’m most passionate about in the job is hearing the stories from the drivers. And some of them have just been working in the industry for years and they’re enjoying the flexibility and freedom. But others of them have really inspiring stories. For example, there’s one guy who’s starting his own business.
32:56 And we all know how tough it can be to keep a business afloat financially. And so he uses Uber to earn money while he’s building his business. But it gives him that flexibility that if he needs to meet with someone or spend nine to five working on his business, he can. There’s others who want to see their kids more. Typically, in the old days, working in a minicab in London means you have to work nights.
33:20 And it’s still one of the busiest periods. But now Uber’s reached a scale that if you want to work days, you also can, and you’ll still be busy, and you’ll still earn a good living. And that gives some of the drivers the freedom to spend time with their families, or do other work, or study for another degree, or anything like that. Yeah, whenever I get into Uber, I always ask, what do you think? And I had some amazing stories from when in San Francisco I took one to the airport, and the guy, he was from Africa.
33:46 He was an immigrant. And during the night, he was a nighttime valet parking for a hotel. But in the daytime, he got a loan from the bank to buy a car to be an Uber driver. And so here he was working really long hours to make his way. Then I met a guy in London I took.
34:04 And he had his car, but he would be Uber in the evening to save up for a vacation for him and his wife. So it was people just as secondary incomes even as an option. And we’ve even had drivers who use Uber to build their business around Uber. So maybe they start on UberX and earn enough money to buy another car, and then their friend or their brother drives that car, and there’s a couple of drivers who’ve now got four or five cars, and their family and friends are using them to work on Uber.
34:32 And obviously, if you can get a couple of drivers sharing the same car, that enables you to use that asset around the clock, and it’s economics will work out even more. Let’s talk about you for a bit. You were your management consultant for eight years, which means, I think, and maybe I’m generalizing, that you go in and you tell companies like how they can make their company better, but you don’t actually own the company or own the business. And now for the last two years, you’re responsible for a huge part of Uber’s new business.
34:59 Do you like the operating experience where everything’s on the line and it’s your fault? I mean, it’s your success or your failure, or am I generalizing the management consultant industry? No, that’s probably a fair comparison, And both are enjoyable and requires different skills. I think what you realize is actually making the decision versus telling someone they should make that decision is obviously a lot harder. Sometimes you may know what the right thing is to do, but actually to go and do it and be the one who’s sort of accountable for that is sometimes a bit harder.
35:31 But personally, I enjoy it a lot more because the results are very tangible. If you’re on consulting, maybe you’re delivering a project to the client who may or may not deliver it. and hopefully you’ll see them through that journey. But here in Uber, especially because it’s such an operational and tangible business, you see the impacts the next day, the next week. So decisions I’ve made today or yesterday we’ll already see coming through in those numbers and those metrics day by day and week by week.
35:57 And we’re literally monitoring those all the time. So you can really see the impact. And were you, did you get recruited out of being a consultant or how do you make the jump from probably a nice paying salary at you, working long hours at a consulting firm to working for this take over the world startup. Working longer hours now. Yeah, longer hours now.
36:20 I’d actually already decided to leave and let them know I was leaving. I was looking for something else. I came across them through contacts who were entrepreneurs themselves in South Africa. I was actually living in South Africa. And we were looking to launch in Joburg and got in touch with the recruiters there, but was super excited about the opportunity here in London, given that I’m from here.
36:44 You’re a Londoner. What do you make of the tech scene in London over the last three years, four years? I know you’re seeing it from the Uber side, but if you just took a step back, what do you think of everything that’s going on? How does it feel to you? I mean, I’ve been overseas for a few years until I got back about a year ago, but it feels completely different than it was when I left seven or eight years ago.
37:04 And it’s so exciting to see so many startups and entrepreneurs. And one of the great things about this role is I get to interact with them. We go to quite a lot of speaking event panels and things like that, where we’re able to hear about the great businesses people are setting up and the challenges they face. I want to know what it’s like working for an American company. I mean, when I heard about the big raise you guys did, and I was like, OK, what’s the difference between Uber and another one of these companies?
37:30 And they were like, it’s the audaciousness. It’s the vision of this huge, huge thing that you guys want to be someday. And I mean, obviously you get that feeling from that kind of, you know, Silicon Valley, let’s think big perspective. And do you think as London, we lack that a little bit? Do you really feel that as being kind of an American company more so than you think if we were a British company?
37:51 That’s interesting. I haven’t worked with a British startup. I think maybe externally, that comes across more from an American company. I mean, I think there are quite a lot of British startups as well who have that ambition. And maybe there’s just been less of a track record ahead of them to prove that.
38:07 But you hear Boris Johnson talking about wanting London to be the tech capital of the world or of Europe. And I’m sure that’ll happen one day. What’s it like when all the Uber people get together? Do you guys meet up in San Francisco and do you exchange ideas with each other? Are you constantly in contact?
38:22 Can you learn anything from Chicago logistics that applies here? Yeah, a huge amount. I think one of the reasons that the Uber model has been successful internally is the fact that we set up all those city teams in a very similar way. So when we launch a new city, there’s three people who go there. One of them focuses on supply, so finding drivers, onboarding them, managing capacity, pricing, all of the sort of quite analytical operations part.
38:48 One is on the marketing side, so a community manager who deals with everything demand facing, so social media, customer complaints and inquiries, marketing, events and partnerships, everything like that. And then you have a general manager who’s responsible for keeping the two in balance, as I mentioned, that can be tough at the beginning. Recruiting, building the business, legal, regulatory, strategy. And because of that consistent setup, as the team grows, you actually add more on each side.
39:17 Because of that consistency, that means that you can talk to your counterparts in all those other cities around the world, and some of them at least will be facing the same challenges. So Uber has done a great job of actually playbooking what we do, what’s worked, sharing those ideas. So I’m in regular contact with my counterparts in Europe and in the US. The US cities have been around a bit longer than we have. So they’ve often been through some of the things that we’re facing now and can share how that’s worked for them.
39:46 And then part of the role of the general manager is to interpret that. How do you use that in our market? Which of those things will work here in London? And which things do we need to do in a different way, given the local market. But yeah, we get together quite often.
40:00 And your partnership with Google, when are we going to see driverless cars that you can hire on Uber? People often ask that. I mean, I don’t think anyone thinks it’s going to happen in less than a decade. To get a car that’s purely driverless, literally no driver in there, is probably a decade away. There’s already cars that are a little bit driverless.
40:23 I was very impressed. friend showed me a car that automatically reverses into a into a car parking space but but I think it’s a long time away and who knows what what Uber will look like in I mean if you look over the last four years five years since we’ve been launched the amount of change is phenomenal so who knows what the company will even look like in in five ten years. Good question, I almost forgot the point. It gets me excited to think about where ten years from now just call a call apparently they have a problem with snow and rain apparently that’s like a a big sticking point for the driverless cars.
40:55 But don’t you want to chat to your driver? I could get over that, though. I used to. When I first got to London, I was chatting with the bike cabbies all the time. It was fantastic, and we talk about this and that.
41:07 But once I’ve been here long enough, then I didn’t want to chat anymore. But did you travel with Uber? Did you chat to your Uber drivers? Actually, the one time I traveled with Uber, I was with someone, and I was just enjoying the experience. You only traveled with Uber once?
41:19 Jesus, Jesus. Yeah, I do. Even today, he was another. I thought she was going to say, you travel with Uber. I used, so today, so one of my investors came by my office.
41:30 We were just catching up, 83 years old. And so after the meeting, I was like, oh, I’ll grab you a car. And he’s like, what do you mean you grab me a car? And I said, I got him an Uber exec. Mercedes comes three minutes later.
41:42 He gets into the Mercedes, he goes, how much is this costing you? Don’t run this through the company as an old school investor. And I was like, don’t worry, it’s on my personal account. But it’s not very expensive. you should look into it.
41:52 And he pulls out his old school flip phone and just wants to know what’s going to happen. But it was really interesting to see it from, you know, I think it blows me away how Uber works, let alone someone who’s born in, what, the 20s or 30s. And we have this feature in the app called Share My ETA. So while you’re on the trip, you can share a live map of your progress with family or friends back home. And I showed this to my mom, and she was blown away.
42:19 My brother was coming to see us. I’m like, look, this is where he is, and I couldn’t get her attention for the next 10 minutes. She’s like, is he there? Oh, where is he, where is he? It’s a nice feature.
42:29 How do you hire, and what do you look at when it comes to a candidate, not a driver? I mean, someone to work in your offices and that you have to be creative with and all that stuff. So we, I mean, it depends on the role what we’re actually looking for, but we have quite an extensive interview process. As someone said to me when I was being hired, we move fast on everything except hiring, and it’s so important to find the right people, and it’s worth waiting to get that right person rather than getting the wrong person sooner.
42:54 It depends on the role, but for example, the driver operations role that’s very analytical. And we’ll probably do a phone screen or something like that. And then we’ll set them an analytics test. And that test is very indicative of the type of work you do day to day. So it’ll be using Excel, you need to run some data about driver efficiency or how to allocate drivers when they’re on hourly shifts or something like that, to see if they can both take data, manipulate it, interpret it, and then turn it into interaction at the end.
43:26 And then they’d have some interviews with people on the team who are doing that role and the team lead, and eventually with myself. For the general managers, it’s a really interesting process because you need to do both the analytical side, so you do the same test of the operations guy, and then you do the test of the marketing team. So we set them a creative challenge, tell us about some exciting, innovative marketing partnerships that you could do, have a few interviews, and then you actually put together a city plan for your city.
43:57 So you say, what would you do, in my case, for London? What would your plan for London be over the next six months? Where do you think we could get it to? What would you do on the demand side? What would you do on the supply side?
44:09 How would you manage the team? And the whole process is very, very similar to exactly what you do on a day-to-day basis. So for the candidate, it’s great, because you get a feel for what you do. And if you don’t enjoy the process, it’s time consuming. But if you don’t enjoy the process, it’s probably not the right job.
44:24 But you also get the ability to interact with the members of the team and see, we can both see mutually, do we like working together? Is this a good fit? Is this someone I can work with? So that by the time we get to the end of the process, then we’re very confident we found the right person. Wow, that’s an exhaustive process.
44:40 Why did they hire you? I’m curious. Why do you think they hired you? What was it, do you think? Was it your analytic background, or that you’d work in many places in the world, or what do you think?
44:50 I don’t know. I mean, what they look for in a GM is both its analytical ability, the creative ability on the marketing side, but then also the ability to run the city. And I think, in hindsight, I’m very glad that I came in at the stage that London was, because I think my skill set’s better suited to taking a business that already exists and growing it fast, versus that challenge when you go somewhere where the city hasn’t even launched yet. It’s really tough and it’s a different skill set, but you need to be able to hit the streets, talk to people, persuade them to join, persuade them to partner with Uber.
45:23 And that’s quite tough. And I think my skills are more relevant in the kind of scaling side. And how do you market now? Well, so you may have seen we do almost no above the line advertising. And what we believe in terms of marketing is that if we can get you in a car for the first time, you’ll have a great experience and you’ll ride again.
45:42 So almost all of our marketing is around that. So we partner with an event or a venue, for example, Soho House or a festival or something like that, and it adds value for that partner because they need people to get to and from their venue. And it means for us, we get to reach their audience, so we’ll send out a promotion code, get them riding to or from the event, and then they’re very often ride again. We actually see really interesting rider behavior.
46:10 One of the data things we look at is how often people ride with Uber and you see that they ride the first time and then there might be a few weeks gap and they ride again and then again a couple of weeks later and it gets more and more often and you see that sort of hockey stick approach after that first experience. And then we do quite a bit on social media, so trying to do a lot of viral marketing and the referral campaigns that I talked about. So using, if you hear about a service or a product from your friend, you’re much more likely to try it than if you read a random advert somewhere.
46:43 But you have all this money you could spend on marketing. It must be, I mean, that’s a conscious decision because, you know, you could spend a lot of money, couldn’t you? Well, the, I mean, giving a free ride also costs money, right? Because we still have to pay the driver, but we believe in really focusing the marketing on those very direct efforts where you can trace it back and you can make sure you’re making efficient investments. investments. It’d be very easy with 200 cities to waste a lot of money on generic marketing, so we make very sure everything’s very metrics driven and sort of results oriented. Joe, we always ask everyone that comes here a couple questions at the end about you and so I’m gonna hit you with them. If you could make a phone call to the 20 year old Joe Bertram and give that young lady a bit of advice, what would you tell her to do or not do? That’s an interesting question. I think I’d say just relax and don’t worry about it. It’ll come right. I think you were probably very serious. I was very very serious and very very very very passionate about what I was doing. I think I still am but realizing that you know those bumps in the road are inevitable and you’ll get over it.
47:55 Good advice. What’s the best advice you’ve ever received in your business career, whether it’s been at Uber or when you were consulting? Trying to think about that. I’ve received a huge amount of advice. Actually, I think one of the most valuable ones, and I don’t take it as seriously as I should, but is the importance of taking some time every day just to really think about what the most important priorities are.
48:20 I think one of the challenges at Uber is there’s so much stuff going on, there’s so many cool things, there’s lots of operational issues or challenges, like it’s a very day-to-day basis, you can find yourself keeping busy without necessarily achieving those important priorities to move the business forward. So actually taking the time just to think, hang on, 50 people asking for my time on things, but what are the two or three things that I really need to get done today to make the most impact instead of just keeping busy? How do you do that?
48:49 I think it’s just trying to find that space and time. For me, it needs to be outside the office because I just need a quiet environment away. no email, no, you know, no messenger or anything like that. But it’s really challenging, and especially in these days you have so many different channels of information coming in, you’re getting emails, you’re getting phone calls, you’re getting messages through 10 different channels and making sure you take the time just to say, okay, no, pause that for a minute and let’s just really think where the business needs to go.
49:17 That is really good advice, actually. What is your typical week like? I mean, how many hours are you in the office? How many hours are you thinking about the office? Like, what is it typical for you?
49:26 It varies a lot and there’s a lot of flexibility. I typically spend probably most of the time between nine and six with the team and with different elements of the team working on problems, finding out where we’re at. At the beginning of the week, we review the metrics from the previous week, see how we’re doing, what do we need to adapt. It’s a very day by day, week by week business. But then also spending time with them figuring out what’s the next marketing campaign, how do we get more drivers, whatever it might be.
49:56 Plus quite a lot these days of external things, so speaking events or media or things like that. We might also do, I do a lot of recruiting, especially when we’re growing. So to grow that quickly, I mean, if you imagine we’ve hired, what, 30 people, think of the number of people you have to interview to get 30 good people in the door. 20% of your time for recruiting? Yeah, probably, that’s probably fair.
50:19 It comes and goes, so we’ll do a big push and then it might be a bit less for a while. But yeah, a lot of time on recruiting. spend a lot of time talking to my counterparts in other cities to see what we can learn from them. And then some of the time, actually, on the operational stuff of the business. So for example, almost all of my team here in London deal with driver emails and customer emails.
50:42 And I think it’s really important that you still do a bit of that just to keep in touch with the business and know what’s going on. So I still dig in and do some of the more challenging ones there. And so writing back to a driver, might be upset or to a customer and things like that. That’s coming up a lot in the Stanford class is getting you to tech people to answer the customer service and getting everyone to answer because then everyone sees the problems and fixes them.
51:04 And we’ve even, at the moment, we’ve even got a lot of our marketing team also working on the driver side. So instead of keeping it like very separate, we’re thinking how do we use their skills to figure out how we improve the experience for drivers, both to attract new drivers but to make sure we’re giving the drivers we have the best support possible. operations guys are typically very analytical but the marketing guys can bring this just softer side how you know how do we make it all more fun and and and more you know easier to attract more drivers. Right because it is a marketplace and you’re marketing to both sides. Yeah exactly. And do you when when do you have downtime and do you take your downtime seriously do you shut off your email and all that stuff? I do tend to be very connected in this business and in my former life I did try to shut off email and things like that, but it is a 24 by 7 business. I mean, people are moving around the city 24 by 7, so I am usually pretty connected, but it’s typically the weekends. But it’s funny, it’s such an interesting job that if I sit down at my computer to try and do something else, I’ll often get distracted into doing something related to work anyway.
52:07 You get taken over to look at analytics on a Sunday afternoon just to experience it. Yeah, exactly. It’s more fun than paying my bills. I wonder what’s going on. What do we do last night?
52:18 Last part of the advice question is, to the 20-year-old that’s listening around the world in any country, in any capacity, what advice do you give to them if they want to get involved in a company like Uber or in some of these exciting growth startups? I think one of the most important things is to understand as much as possible about the model at Uber, especially now as we’re recruiting. I think some of the candidates we have sometimes focus mostly on selling themselves, but we get so much interest.
52:48 We really wanna see people who thought about our model that are coming with new ideas, interesting thoughts on it, and we’re not, I mean, if someone comes to an interview and they’ve never traveled with Uber, you’re like, well, yeah. Or only once. Yeah, well, I’m not interviewing you, so it’s all right. But usually the great candidates have spoken to drivers, they’ve driven a lot, they’ve asked their stories, they’ve spoken to their friends, what they like about it, and things like that.
53:11 So really figure out how the company works and why you think it’s exciting. And then I guess the other thing is just making sure you figure out what’s the right fit for you. I mean, an operational role is very hands-on. We all do very menial tasks a lot of the time because that’s the nature of a high-growth industry. So not trying to be, you know, being humble and just being totally willing to pitch in with whatever task it is just to get the business where it needs to be.
53:39 I had a London Real guest on recently and he was just talking about how to make money And he said, a lot of people come in and they’re like, I wanna make all this money. And he’s like, you need to really provide the value. And if you actually provide value, then all that other stuff will come. But if you just had this mentality is I’m gonna get all this stuff, you don’t get it. And so this is a perfect example.
53:57 Like come in being like, I mean, if you provide the value, then it will come. And that’s what great companies like this do. That’s why they have these valuations because they’re providing all of this value. But the other thing is, I mean, I think the team is really passionate about what Uber does for customers and drivers. and I think we’re very careful in the hiring process, but I think what’s great working there is that my team, they really believe that we’re changing drivers’ lives, we’re helping people to get around London, and I don’t think you could put in the dedication and the hard work if it was just, you know, I wanna work at Uber because it’s a cool company.
54:30 So it’s finding that thing where you really believe in the product and the service, especially if it’s disruptive, you will get challenged and you really need to believe in what you’re doing. That’s it, I think I’ve asked everything. Did I miss anything? I think it was good, yeah. I love it.
54:44 It was good, right? Joe, you’re very impressive in all ways. I can see why they hired you, or would’ve hired you too. It’s just interesting to really see how your mind works and all the different things going on over there. Like you said, from operations mixed with the marketing and it’s really fascinating to see that.
54:58 Thank you so much for coming on. I know a lot of people might not want this format because they don’t know what’s gonna happen and it’s live and all that stuff. So I compliment these companies that come in and answer these hard questions because you guys are in the press all the time. So thanks so much for being here. on that note if you’re listening to us on iTunes give us a great rating come see us on YouTube channel yeah silicone real and that’s it there’s anything else going on it’s all good buy some coffee from Colin buy some coffee Joe how do people contact you you are hiring right now is there email website how do they do that yeah go to uber.com slash jobs and you’ll see all the available jobs but you can also find me on on LinkedIn or on Twitter and we’ll direct your inquiry in the right way exciting stuff I can’t I can’t you know imagine what’s going to be like in a couple of years, right?
55:42 There you go. I’m going to wrap this up as we say on Silicon Real. It’s about the people. You’re one of them, Joe. Thanks so much for being here and I wish you guys all the success.
55:49 And I’m going to ride in the Uber again. There we go. All right? Okay, take care. Thanks.
56:01 Bye.
