20Growth: Uber's Expansion Playbook for Scaling from 10 Cities to $10BN in Revenue | How Uber Acquired 1M Drivers | How Uber Solved the Chicken and The Egg Problem in New Markets and What Uber Would Be Like with Travis Still There with Scott Gorlick

**Scott Gorlick** (0:00)
So at Uber, we saw almost every city as its own startup. The right team that we were hiring for three roles. One was we sent in a launcher, and the launcher would be responsible for hiring a team. In a general market, we would want a general manager who acted as the CEO of the city, overseeing both driver and rider. And then the second role that we hired was an operations manager that would oversee the driver area of the operation and be responsible for growing that.
And we'd also work on getting a marketing manager that would oversee the rider side, BD, partnerships, building out the early grassroots efforts in the community.

**Harry Stebbings** (0:35)
This is 20 Growth with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, on 20 Growth, we sit down with the best growth leaders in the world to unpack their playbooks for scaling incredible products and communities. Today, we're joined by Scott Gorlick, employee number 99 at Uber. And today, he unpacks two incredible playbooks that Uber had. He unpacks their driver acquisition playbook that allowed them to scale to a million drivers. And then, he unpacks their city expansion playbook that allowed them to scale from 10 cities to 10 billion dollars in revenue. Scott's also a prolific angel investor, having written early checks into Lyme and Standard Cognition, to name a few. And this episode is incredibly granular. We really do go quite deep in terms of different growth playbooks. So, it's time to get out the notebooks. And this is a special one. But before we dive into the show today, today, I want to share a tool for all you SaaS innovators out there. Looking to spice up your demand generation strategy. It's time to ditch the sales jog and start engaging your audience with something they'll actually want to use. Picture this. You're a trusted guide, helping your audience assess their strengths and weaknesses with a fun and interactive maturity assessment. Maybe it's a sales efficiency assessment or a growth readiness grader. These tools don't just draw people in. They offer real insights and solutions tailored to their needs. With Outgrow's powerful no code builder, you can create these engaging maturity assessments. The magic here is in showing your audience how you can help them level up in specific areas. If you sell analytics software, you can show users where they excel and where they're lagging. If your software can help them where the user is lagging, then you can clearly add value. By offering the detailed results in the maturity assessment, you're not just generating leads, you're educating users. So if you want to turbocharge your demand generation and build assessments like assess your AWS setup or evaluate your integration capabilities, head over to outgrow.co/20growth.
That's O-U-T-G-R-O-W-D-O-T-C-E-O slash 20growth to get 20% off annual plans and a free trial. Now that your leads are sorted, let's get your team in sync with Canva. When I spoke to Canva co-founder Cliff Obrecht on the podcast last year, he touched on how visual content is fast becoming the fuel that's driving the modern workplace. Your team needs to create an engaging visual pitch deck to sell in an idea, a product launch needs an inspiring video to excite investors and customers. Projects gather steam with visual whiteboards. That's where Canva can help. It's a game changer for visual communication at work. Canva turns your team into master visual communicators so they can get their point across with visual impact inside and outside your business, with no design experience needed. With Canva, any team member and any company, whether you're a startup or a global organization, can design compelling on-brand visual content quickly and easily. That's why 90% of the Fortune 500 use Canva. Start designing today at canva.com, designed for work. You have now arrived at your destination. Scott, man, I am so excited for this. I said to you before, I'm a fanboy of your Twitter threads. I think they are fantastic. So first, thank you so much for joining me today, man.

**Scott Gorlick** (3:42)
Thanks, Harry. Excited to be here.

**Harry Stebbings** (3:44)
Now, I would love to start just with a little bit of context before we dive into the incredible stories that are coming. Tell me, how did you make your way into the world of growth? Join Uber, I believe, as employee number 99

**Scott Gorlick** (3:55)
Harry, it's a crazy story. So I finished up school in 2011 And when I finished up school, there were really only two things that people did. They either went to investment banking or they went to consulting. I chose consulting. And very early on, I realized that it wasn't for me, probably on like week three. But the silver lining of the experience was on the weekends, I could go out and fly to San Francisco, as long as I was back at the client site on Monday morning. So this was 2011, 2012 And I was going out and meeting companies like Airbnb, Square, Fairly Early, along with like 50 other companies. But nothing really clicked until I was in Chicago one night. I was trying to get to a work dinner, and I was trying to find a taxi, it was raining. And I had heard about this app where if you press the button, you get a ride. So I downloaded the app, and two minutes later, my first Uber showed up. It was an Escalade, and I was immediately in love. Absolutely magical experience. So that night was working on a deck pretty late at night, probably wrapped around midnight or 1am, and had this Jerry Maguire moment where I was like, huh, I need to be a part of this Uber thing. What's the most like simple thing to do? So I decided to email Travis at uber.com, not thinking that I would hear anything.