94: Manik Gupta, Former Chief Product Officer of Uber

One of the most transformational companies of the last 20 years has undoubtedly been Uber - in a sense it’s incredible to think in 15 short years we’ve come from the launch of the iPhone to now powering a global transport system with the click of a button on that same phone.

This week I caught up with someone that was largely responsible for making that transformation a reality - Manik Gupta, Former Chief Product Officer of Uber.

Manik and I spent time chatting about Uber, but also extended the conversation to leadership lessons and how he thinks about evaluating startups - we talked about how to think about resource allocation in hyperscale, the tradeoffs when developing product and the learning curve of leadership (he had over 1,000 people report to him in the span of 2 years).

We rounded out the latter part of the discussion diving into an ecosystem both he and I have been actively investing in lately and are excited about - India.