I asked 5 early Uber employees how they launch new cities

We are launching in Poland, Bulgaria and Romania and I'm researching how different companies launch new geographies.

Their framework blew my mind.

1. There is a city launcher that moves from city to city every few months. Their task is to hire people and launch operations.

2. In most cities, they hire a general manager, a marketing manager to drive demand, and an operations manager for supply acquisition.

3. Every team acts independently from the core team. They optimize for speed, use their own resources and make their own decisions.

4. Every city has its own metrics, and there is no excuse not to deliver.

5. Even though they were scaling fast, operation managers spent enormous time with drivers, held events, and onboarded them manually (sometimes in person)

It gave them a ton of insights, helped to build trust, and bring even more drivers through referrals.

6. Uber has a well-written manual on how to launch cities. It is so good, even a newbie can do it.

7. Yes, there were mistakes and problems, but if optimize for speed and grow so fast, those mistakes become irrelevant.

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I'll be adopting this framework to launch new countries.

I'll be a bit different, as Uber has both local supply and demand. In our case, the supply is local build demand is global.