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The Summer Of Uber: Aggressive Expansion

“Now, our operation is small, but…there’s a lot of potential for….aggressive expansion.” -The Joker, The Dark Knight [video clip]

Every once in a while, a truly world-class technology company emerges. There’s the scale of Apple, building integrated devices and changing the game each time; there’s Amazon, selling books online as a wedge to selling everything we can imagine; there’s Google, leveraging big data to build the world’s premier information company; and, most recently, Facebook, which is on a long march to bring every human on the Internet and connect them to the people, places, and things that matter to them. Each of these companies operate at massive scale, touch all four corners of the earth.

In a place like Silicon Valley, the only natural question to ask is: What’s the next startup most likely to join the pantheon above? After the past few weeks, the answer is easy: Uber.

After all the chatter around Uber’s most recent fundraising, which valued the company at over $18 billion, the company has demonstrated tremendous dexterity and range in launching a number of high-profile initiatives and moves. Specifically, consider the following timeline:

  • June 2014: Uber raises over $1 billion, valuing the company at over $18 billion.
  • August 5, 2014: Uber announces UberPool, empowering riders to share rides based on proximity and destination similarity. (Worth noting many observers feel Uber scooped Lyft’s plans to launch Lyft Line, but now it’s moot as both are up and running.)
  • August 19, 2014: Uber announces the appointment of David Plouffe to run the company’s public policy and strategy. You may have heard of Plouffe, who in the past simply engineered one of the most famous and successful political campaigns of all time with Barack Obama in 2008.
  • August 20, 2014: Uber announces a “test” for Corner Store in Washington, DC, a service within the Uber app which allows consumers to order basic sundry items, putting the company on a path to be squarely in competition with initiatives from the likes of Amazon and Google, and many startups like Postmates, Instacart, DoorDash, and others.
  • August 20, 2014: Uber, on the same day as Corner Store, opens its API and announces 11 partner integrations with companies like United Airlines and OpenTable, among others. These moves take advantage of Uber’s scale (as my friend Rohittweeted, in mobile, Uber offers Google-like scale).

Consider, for a moment, the complexity of executing on all of these initiatives within a short period of time. Sure, many of these may have been in the works for months and now ready to showcase in a storm of activity, but the bottom line is Uber is not messing around: It is launching new products quickly and taking an experimental approach to continue to iterate and find product-market fit; it is not going to go into regulatory battles unarmed anymore; and they have a killer BD story to sell to hundreds of consumer mobile apps at scale. Launching with 11 API integrations was likely “taking it easy for Uber,” where 11 partnerships for most well-funded startups may be around that total after years of grinding it out.

A final thought. If hiring is a leading indicator of private company momentum, click here and take a gander at the breadth of jobs Uber is hiring for across the world. I’ll repeat that: Across the world! This is where we start talking about real physical scale. Over the summer holidays, a family member on the east coast earnestly asked me if I thought factors X, Y, or Z could hurt Uber. I thought about them, but ultimately answered with the following: “What will stop it?” Right now, I can’t think of anything.