Building Product & Ops at Uber (with Brian Tolkin)

Ben Gilbert (0:00)

David, great to see you, and Brian, wonderful to have you on the Acquired Limited Partner Show.

Brian Tolkin (0:05)

Thanks for having me.

Ben Gilbert (0:06)

This could not be better timing with Uber set to price and start trading next week to have an OG person on here telling us about how the magic all happened.

Brian Tolkin (0:18)

Yeah, it was a wild ride, so happy to be on the chat through it.

David Rosenthal (0:23)

One that continues. Brian is a good friend, and we're super excited to have him here on the LP Show. He had a front row seat at Uber through a lot of the evolution.

You were one of the first 100 or so employees. I think you joined right after the Series B, is that right?

Brian Tolkin (0:39)

That's correct, it was summer of 2012, and I think we were just at 100

David Rosenthal (0:44)

Wow, crazy, and you joined right out of undergrad.

Brian Tolkin (0:47)

Right out of undergrad.

David Rosenthal (0:48)

Right out of undergrad, and so you started in the SF Ops team, then you moved over, you started the Product Ops group at Uber, then you moved fully into Product, and you ran UberPOOL and Shared Rides for a couple of years. So we'll get into all of that, but now Brian is running a Product group at OpenDoor, which is another tech eats the real world company, which we'll also talk about, but super pumped to have you on the show. Thanks for coming on.

Brian Tolkin (1:12)

Yeah, absolutely excited to be here and talk Uber, OpenDoor, and whatever else we delve into.

Ben Gilbert (1:18)

We thought Brian would be a particularly awesome guest because on the main show, we talk about exits and sort of the, we touch in retrospect on the narrative of the stories along the way, but often the sausage is actually much more complex than I think a clean narrative would tell. And so Brian's a perfect candidate for the LP show to talk a lot about the more detail oriented intricacies of how these great companies were actually built. And I gotta say, Brian, you sure can pick them. I mean, Uber right out of college, had 100 people and now OpenDoor.

It's a pretty good track record.

Brian Tolkin (1:49)

Yeah, rather be lucky than good any day.

David Rosenthal (1:54)

Well, I gotta ask to start. So you had just graduated from Stanford undergrad.

People had heard about Uber, but how did you get a job at Uber right out of undergrad, like Series B stage?

Brian Tolkin (2:03)

Yeah, so I first actually heard about Uber in 2011, or maybe it was late 2010, when it was still called the Uber Cab. And I was actually in the, sounds pretty nerdy, but I was in the Stanford Venture Capital Club, which basically meant we did some-

Ben Gilbert (2:20)

There were people at Stanford interested in venture capital?

Brian Tolkin (2:23)

A couple, and they all joined a small, tiny club of five people.

And basically what that meant is we worked with VC firms on sort of a per project basis. And basically the deal was we did some diligence to provide our thoughts, and they provided some mentorship on how VC world works. And so we actually were doing a project on these new age taxi apps. And we're looking at-

David Rosenthal (2:50)

Taxi Magic.

Brian Tolkin (2:51)

Taxi Magic, Halo out of London, Cabulus, which became Flywheel, and UberCab. That was my first introduction. I actually recently got reminded that at the end of the project, and I didn't remember this, we actually recommended Uber as the winner. So, a fortunate guest back then too. But how I really got there was a buddy of mine who I'd worked with at Stanford had joined a year before me on the ops team and basically called me up as I was graduating and said, hey, we're looking for smart, hardworking people. Are you interested?

Went through the process, actually did my final interview on July 4th, which is maybe a little bit of a precursor to some weekends and holidays.

And then it was off to the races.

David Rosenthal (3:42)

Wow, wow, so you joined on the SF ops team. What were you doing for that first year or two when you joined?

Brian Tolkin (3:48)

So when I first joined, Uber was, well, it's still a little bit to this day, but particularly back then, Uber was highly distributed as an operating model. And so there was very little centralization, no centralized growth team, no centralized marketing team, no centralized funnel team, no centralized onboarding team, no centralized pricing team.