What makes Uber great?
I am saying Uber just as an example here. Uber is an app that lets you order food/call taxi. For tech, not exactly sure how it is much more difficult than TripAdvisor or Expedia. Same goes with Airbnb. What makes places like Uber and Airbnb better βtechβ companies than others?
More cash flow
Engineering excellence π
π€£π€£π€£π€£
they do βone thingβ very well
TC and faster growth, thatβs all.
The best way to thing about Uber (or Airbnb - or Instacart) is to think of their competitors and what a 20% improvement in efficiency is going to give you. Having come to an understanding that a 20% improvement in efficiency (or conversion - or any other metric) compared to the competition will be huge, it leads one to very obvious investments a company can make - each with a 2% lift on the competition. These are *relative* lifts - not absolute. The real headroom in these companies is higher - and is largely responsible for making these products different from a highschool project. If it helps, just multiply the revenue of these companies by 20% and think of that as the R&D (or ops expenses) 1) Payment efficiencies 2) Customer support efficiencies 3) Marketplace efficiencies 4) Fraud efficiencies 5) User experience efficiencies 6) (since I am from uber) Localization and mapping efficiencies 7) infrastructure efficiencies (thing AWS, compute, storage) 8) Operations efficiencies 9) Legal and corporate structure efficiencies (and the support for them) 10) Insurance and Payment efficiencies If each of these pillars (and I am sure that there are at least 10 more) realized a 2% relative lift compared to plain vanilla competition, this hypothetical company would leave the competition in the dust - and they often do. It requires significant investment to see the first penny of the 2% efficiency - you are after all competing with the second best (who has their services to sell) and they are not stupid (think AWS, Google, Stripe etc).
You are assuming Uber is great. It's not.
****TC****
Better tech stack which makes engineers happy in comparison to the legacy tech stack of large tech companies. There are outliers everywhere
Doubtful - or maybe their SWEs are just bad developers.