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it's sort of like when we started uber x like you know we're still still love the main uber but we introduced something new because people might want to try that
i think we just made the case and we won like they pulled it back
the winning idea came from someone on the comms team who was stationed in new york and her idea was to have a de blasio view so at this point in the app you'd sort of have a little slider at the bottom that you would choose uber x uber black whatever and there was one for de blasio and you would go to the de blasio view and it would you all the cars on the map would disappear and it would say eta 15 minutes because we sort of just thought you know the eta's at that point were like two minutes an
the challenge with this is that it's actually a death sentence but it's very hard to make people out in the world understand that
at this point we're getting 25 000 new riders every week we're loading a thousand new drivers every week like we are really going for it
from the very beginning we were kind of you know at least from the regulator's standpoint we were kind of like good little kids who filled out all the forms right and were kind of more responsive to them maybe than the average car base owner that was sort of operating in that system at the time
uber new york both in the beginning and still now is that it runs actually a a fundamentally different business than what uber does now everywhere else which i would call like ride sharing ride sharing being i have excess capacity in my car a few hours a day or a few hours a week or really whenever i want and i'll turn on the app and it'll be great in new york that system doesn't actually exist it is the black car system
it was in some ways like remote before there was remote um because most of the employees at uber were not in this in the san francisco office you know the new york was like uh like a hub i mean we had a big office by the end but it but it grew more slowly than uber globally and so it always had a tight feel and so i think maintaining the startup feeling on the city level was part of it and really finding a gm in each place who can be like mini ceo is the way he would talk about it at the time an
you know what i found about travis is that you know right away i got to know him i i've probably spoken to him on the phone um you know while i was in the role there we probably had a hundred phone calls over the five years maybe a little more zero of them were scheduled this is a guy who is who is so uh dialed in on the details of everything under him you know so there was that aspect of his leadership and also that he really encouraged me to be me and be myself and kind of lean into the way i
travis expanded outside of san francisco new york was the first spot and how that would typically work when they were expanding is launchers would go to a city and sort of set up the basic uh thing there get the first few drivers get the first few riders set up some infrastructure and then hire a gm i was actually i was in there within the first year there was a team of three who were brought on right before me and it didn't really work out and all three of them left and they hired a fresh group
i just tried uber and thought it was it was really neat and uh actually the the first time i tried using it was for an airport run at like 4 4 a.m or so and it actually didn't work i tried to request a car there were no vehicles available i didn't think much of it but later that day i got a note from them saying hey we saw you tried to use uber and it didn't work you know here's 10 bucks for the next time even though that feels like a typical like interaction now um at the time it did not feel t