The end of my Uber ride

and the plan from here...

Welcome to my new Substack!

Inspired by fellow Uber APMs Andy Zhang, Matt Yao, and Jason Cui, I’m planning to use this Substack to chronicle my time off, startup pursuits, musings.

Selfishly, though, this newsletter was inspired by a dream of more regularly reflecting on what I’m reading and living through, so it may veer off into unpredictable directions as I play with the format.

Ending my Uber Ride

My last day with Uber is Friday, September 22nd. 

It’s been a nostalgia-filled week in London, biking past the dorm rooms where I took my Uber interviews and the embarrassing site of my ‘I’m working at Uber’ Instagram post (included below for historical reference). 

If you were a friend of mine during that period I apologize wholeheartedly for the unending Uber fanboying. But even then — if you told me in Fall 2018 that I’d spend four years at Uber (fully vesting my initial grant), I’d have laughed. 

Looking back now, there’s nowhere I would’ve rather spent the last four years. I’m so thankful for the years of learnings I’ve had here, and more than anything for the people I’ve been able to learn from. 

Some of the highlights included (full picture gallery below)…

• Joining the APM Family and making lifelong friends (+ annual ski weekend)

• Writing my first-ever PRD (!) tackling driver fraud

• Taking UberCopter as I moved to a NYC team for exactly 1 week before COVID moved me back to SF

• Launching Vouchers for Uber Eats in the pandemic in just 10 weeks

  • + freaking out when Dara used them for a virtual investor dinner a few weeks after launch (only 1 bug found!)

• Going on-site with customers like Dallas Transit, JetBlue, and Porsche

• Learning from the world’s best mentors including Ronak Shah, Eric Berdinis, Mads Johnsen, Angie Healy and many many more

• Visiting nearly 25 Uber offices from Amsterdam to Cairo to Bangalore to Taipei

• Working with the absolute best team ever on Uber for Business

While I was at Uber we went through countless re-orgs, a handful of seemingly existential regulatory threats, a pandemic, and 3 rounds of layoffs.

But with each disaster or disappointment, the people around me looked at each other, brushed each other off, then turned back to work. What I appreciated most from Uber was that attitude that whatever happens, we’d figure out a way and I resolve to carry this with me for decades to come.

What’s next?

Ok so if I’m quitting, what will I be doing next? The short answer is ‘nothing’, but the long answer is a bit more complicated.

If you’ve tried GPT4 and aren’t astounded (if a little bit scared) then I cannot relate. In college my emphasis was in Machine Learning and am rekindling that interest while spending this year diving into the world of LLM’s, from watching youtube breakdowns of some of the seminal LLM papers to trying out many of the new startup products.

I’ve started playing some new ideas for applying LLM’s, focussing in on how to use LLM’s to improve lifecycle marketing. Specifically one idea I’m most excited about is automating copy optimization for CRM (I.e. What if every email subject-line you wrote was automatically copy-tested, similar to what Pinterest built in 2021?).

I plan to go full-time tinkering with some new product ideas in this space, but first, I’ll be taking rest of the year off of professional pursuits to experience some of the weirdness the world has to offer.

I’m currently in Copenhagen, reading and writing and going on runs, but aim to start traveling further East in the next few weeks.

Some aspirational plans include…

• Driving through Eastern Europe from Warsaw to Tallinn 

• Doing a one-week ‘dopamine fast’ in to abstain from social media, music, alcohol, etc

• Visiting the Stan’s (Kazakh-, Kyrgy-, Uzbek-)

• Working my way through a marathonic reading list (+ writing more)

• Doing a 10-day silent retreat 

• Organizing my Spotify playlists 

• Hiking to Everest Basecamp in Nepal

• … other to be decided adventures

I’d absolutely love recommendations for blogs, books, and videos that have changed your life, as well as off-the-beaten-path adventures (both physical and intellectual) that you’d recommend. 

Thank you all for reading this far, but also your support in helping me come this far. There are way too many people to name individually, but so appreciative of each of you for your friendship and camaraderie along the last few years. #UberOn

P.S. — What I’m loving right now

I’ll aim to end each post with an appendix of some photos and things I’ve loved recently, here’s some recent ones from September

• [Podcast] Ezra Klein’s Podcast on the Debt Ceiling

• [Book] A promised Land by Barack Obama

• [Book] On China by Henry Kissinger

• [Song] 865 by Cece Coakley

• [Song] Chulo pt 2 by Bad Gyal, Tokischa, Young Miko

• [Song] Think Fast by Dominic Fike and Weezer

• [Song] Stream of Consciousness by Lola Young

• [Essay] Good Conversations have lots of Doorknobs by Adam Mastrioanni 

Uber Memory Gallery

Uber (Office) Eats that I’ll miss forever