Jason Droege - Building Uber Eats

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
This episode is brought to you by Tegus.
Over the years of our partnership with Tegus, they have evolved from a pure expert network into a full company intelligence platform. I've been so impressed by the platform that my firm, PositiveSum, recently made an investment in Tegus. We did so because we feel that Tegus will be the gold standard platform for investing research for decades to come. Tegus streamlines the investment research process so you can get up to speed and find answers to critical questions on companies faster and more efficiently. The Tegus platform surfaces the hard to get qualitative insights, gives instant access to critical public financial data through BamSEC and helps you set up customized expert calls. It's all done on a single modern SaaS platform that offers 360-degree insight into any public or private company. As a listener, you can take Tegus for a free test drive by visiting tegus.co.uk-patrick. Until 2023, every Tegus license comes with complimentary access to BamSEC by Tegus, which makes it easy to search and analyze public company filings and transcripts. Today's episode is sponsored by Brex, the integrated financial platform trusted by the world's most innovative entrepreneurs and fastest growing companies. With Brex, you can move money fast for instant impact with high limit corporate cards, payments, venture debt and spend management software all in one place. Ready to accelerate your business? Learn more at brex.com/best. That's brex.com/best.
Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money.
Invest Like the Best is part of the Colossus family of podcasts and you can access all our podcasts, including edited transcripts, show notes and other resources to keep learning at joincolossus.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:52)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO and CEO of Invest Like the Best. He is the founding partner of PositiveSum and the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of PositiveSum or O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of PositiveSum or O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:24)
My guest today is Jason Droege, a venture partner at Benchmark. Jason's had a long entrepreneurial career, which most recently culminated in building and leading Uber Eats. He joined Uber in 2014 with a blank piece of paper to grow the business beyond ride sharing. Within six years, he found product market fit with food delivery, refined the service and scaled Uber Eats to a global $20 billion GMV run rate. Our conversation pulls out the most important lessons learned during that period and how Jason now employs them in his role at Benchmark. Please enjoy this great conversation with Jason Droege.
Jason, you've been such a builder your whole career and obviously some things people will be really familiar with probably Uber Eats being a recent one that you spent a lot of time building and leading. And I thought we could start there because it's such an interesting episode of a new product inside of a big existing company that takes advantage of some of the preexisting rails of that company and has worked to some extent. We can talk about Uber Eats versus DoorDash. I use Uber Eats every day. Like it's a thing people know and use and it was born out of something else.
I think most big companies hope for second acts or subsequent products or expansions like Uber Eats.
Never really talked to someone that's been the leader of one of those successful things before. I've tried to do this with AWS and a few others. They're kind of rare. So maybe you could just describe what that was like at a high level to be the leader of a thing which was clearly distinct, but which was born out of a pre-existing platform. Cause it just seems like a really interesting type of innovation that everyone says they want, but very few people get.

**Jason Droege** (4:01)
This was my second one. So I had some lessons from the first one, which we can talk about too, which was Axon. Maybe it'd be useful to start with how I ended up in the position in the first place, and that could be instructive as to like how you structure these things if you're looking to do so.
I have known Travis for a long time. I've been an entrepreneur most of my life. Travis and the management team at the time believed that there's going to be more happening at the local logistics level than just rides. This was in maybe late 2013 when I really started the conversation with them. The idea was, okay, we don't know what that is. Ride-sharing is going through the roof right now. We know we're going to need some lead time to figure that out, and Uber is known to be an ambitious company, and this is an example of that.