Uber's CEO delivered food on an ebike and found how hard the job is
A 30-second tap for a customer means hours of restaurant lines, double orders, and traffic for the courier.
Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy · Uber CEO on AI, Autonomous Vehicles, and the Future of TransportationDara Khosrowshahi, the chief executive of Uber, bought an electric bike and started delivering food around San Francisco.
He would roll into restaurants, figure out where a courier was supposed to pick up, check the bags, and then do it again down the street. Across Uber, he said, about 50 percent of orders are batched, meaning a single trip can include two deliveries, sometimes picked up in the same kitchen and sometimes in two different ones. He also spent a couple of years driving passengers in his Tesla in San Francisco to learn that side of the work.
The gap between tapping a phone and doing the work that tap creates is the core of his account. Khosrowshahi describes the typical customer as in and out, in what he calls a 30-second interaction once or twice a day, with a car or a meal arriving soon after. A driver, by contrast, keeps the app open for six, eight, or ten hours a day, handling restaurant lines, addresses, double orders, and traffic the whole time.
Khosrowshahi gives a software example to show why that time gap matters. What he calls a P95 bug hits a loyal customer about once a month, he said, but it will hit a driver who is on the app six hours a day every week.
He said he took on the delivery work for two reasons. In his words, he was “going freaking crazy at home,” and he wanted to learn what drivers and couriers feel. All of Uber’s employees use the ride and food apps heavily, he said, but they do not “put themselves in the shoes of” merchants and couriers. He wants more of them to drive and to stand behind a restaurant counter.
What surprised him was the load. He said there is so much for a courier to keep track of, on top of traffic, which explains why deliveries fail in everyday conditions. He said, “I think honestly we’re okay at it,” referring to gathering supply, and added, “I think we can get a lot better at it.”
He connected the lesson to an internal value he calls “building with heart.” Khosrowshahi describes himself as an engineer who looks at problems through numbers, but said delivering food showed him there is “a craft to building” and “a humanity in our service.”
Questions people ask
Was this a one-time stunt or something he did for a while?
He presents it as something he did for a stretch while living in San Francisco, both delivering food on an ebike and driving passengers in his Tesla. He talks about it in the past tense, as lessons that changed how he thinks about building for drivers and couriers.
What does a batched order mean?
Batching means one courier carries two deliveries on one trip. The two pickups may be at the same restaurant or at two different ones. It can save miles and waiting, but the courier has to keep both orders correct and on time.