My new adventure at Uber Freight. Disclaimer: The views in this post are…
By: Nikhil Balaraman
Tags: Startup, Uber, Freight

My new adventure at Uber Freight

Disclaimer: The views in this post are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Uber or Uber Freight.

Your Uber Freight has arrived…

This post isn’t ground breaking. It isn’t creating a new genre of posts. But it’s not going to be a self validating, the grass is actually greener post about taking a new job. Well at least I don’t think it is, but it probably will be.

I started recently at Uber, and within my first few weeks have already switched roles once from leading our product marketing team, to leading the shipper marketing team here at Uber Freight. In short, Uber is surprisingly a great place to work, and I’m excited for the opportunity ahead. But my biggest hesitation when joining Uber was what the culture of the company was going to be like. I’ve been fortunate to join a team of self selecting individuals who are willing to roll up their sleeves and dive into solving the challenges inherent with moving 80,000 pounds of freight, one truckload at a time.

Leadership

Leading Uber is a thankless job. I’ve been more attuned to it since I joined how every time Dara posts anything on Twitter, he is immediately vilified in the comments — ain’t no ratio like an official Uber tweet ratio. But from my limited experience of seeing him speak at one of our events in my first week on team, and at weekly all hands, he is the type of leader that Uber needs. He is humble, but not to the extent that he undermines the success of the team — he celebrates achievements and generously casts the spotlight on the initiatives and teams that make Uber an inspiring place to work. He is thoughtful and empathetic, and ultimately he understands that we have to win on product. Lastly, he and his leadership team believe in encouraging and enabling a workforce that is free of self-defeating cynicism.

Challenges

The brand and the business are not immune from competition. The growth rate at the company is slowing, and new forms of mobility are in early stages of explorations while these bets are formed. Brand perception is still suffering from years of aggressive, Silicon Valley bro-culture actions that have come to define the company, and unfortunately its employees.

However, I have come to see that this is a company filled with hard working, fundamentally decent and caring people who do truly believe that they are working on something that will outlive them. Painting all Uber employees with the same brush — perhaps as rabid capitalists hell bent on ignoring anything that stood between them and the next dollar (which definitely wasn’t something I ever did…) — does not reflect the diversity of experiences and backgrounds of those working here. And with regards to that diversity, it is refreshing to see leadership at all levels acknowledge that yes, we can do better, and we will do better, and here’s how.

Future

The answer to what does the future of Uber hold, I think, also answers the question: Why did I come to Uber?

In an era when companies are innovating by reconfiguring algorithms, and finding new ways to sell your data, I do believe that Uber is one of the few companies that is willing to make large bets in areas that will affect every single person on this planet — and ideally prevent us from completely destroying what’s left of our planet. You’re welcome to disagree with this, to believe only the TC articles and worst possible stories that come out from a company that has 15 million interactions with consumers every single day. And while all those stories, criticisms, and in some cases, failings, are valid representations, they do not define the culture of the company at which I currently work.

The Uber that I work at is one that is taking its mission of igniting opportunity by setting the world in motion to categories that very few traditional Silicon Valley companies would dare. Fundamentally, my job is helping create opportunities for truck drivers. Are Google, Amazon, Facebook or Apple doing that as directly as building an app with the defined purpose of helping owner-operators build sustainable, small businesses? And it’s not 100% altruistic, I get that, globally, it’s a $4 trillion industry…trillion with a T. But with that massive scale, there is an opportunity to reduce the 200 million tons of emission that the Environmental Defense Fund estimates are generated each year by underutilized trucks just in the United States.

The Uber I work at is building flying cars. No joke. Flying cars. And where everyone expects that team to deliver on their goals of building an entire infrastructure from scratch to support their goal.

Every leader at Uber believes in the mission of igniting opportunity by setting the world in motion, because our constituents aren’t shareholders, or employees, or customers. Our constituents are every single one of us — present and future — on this planet.

And if that means I just wrote a self-validating-grass-is-always-greener-I-just-drank-a-gallon-of-kool-aid™ post, then so be it.