Scott Gorlick* was employee #99 at Uber, where he spent six years building and scaling operations from the ground up. He launched Uber's thirteenth market in Atlanta — growing it from zero to a $50M annual business — before moving to San Francisco to lead business operations across new markets globally. After leaving Uber in 2018, Scott turned his focus to angel investing and advising early-stage startups, drawing on the lessons of hypergrowth to help the next generation of founders.*
How did you end up at Uber?
I graduated from Duke in 2011 knowing I wanted to be at the intersection of business and public policy. I started at Deloitte in Atlanta doing strategy and operations, but after eleven months I knew it wasn't for me long-term and started talking to startups. What was serendipitous about Uber was that it was exactly that intersection I'd been looking for without realizing it.
One night on a project in Chicago, we couldn't find a cab anywhere. I'd just read about Uber, downloaded the app, and had a ride in two minutes. That night I started looking at positions and sent a cold email. I heard back, went through the interview process, and ultimately got on a FaceTime with the CEO at the time, Ryan Graves. They flew me out to San Francisco to meet the team. Because the company was so small, nobody really knew my background — I think they were surprised by how young I was. They asked how old I was. I said "old enough." One thing led to another, and I was asked to start the thirteenth market: Uber Atlanta.
What prepared you for the role?
Honestly, nothing could have fully prepared me — we just dove in. But Deloitte made me organized. You learn project management, structured thinking, how to break a complex thing into steps. We were essentially reassembling a shattered business piece by piece, and that framework helped.
The other thing Deloitte gave me, strangely, was comfort with ambiguity. I was on the road for most of the year — booking hotels last minute, not knowing where I'd be week to week. In a weird way, that trained me to roll with the punches at a company growing at hypergrowth speed.
How did your role evolve over time?
I started in Atlanta focused on getting drivers on the platform and building the local team. We started with zero trips and built it to a $50M annual business. After about two years, the focus shifted to applying what I'd learned in Atlanta to new markets globally. I moved to San Francisco in 2014 to join business operations. What we found was that 95% of cities were the same — but that last 5% was highly localized, and having a presence on the ground early was a real competitive advantage.
From there I worked on special projects — pricing, competition, strategy, expansion — always running ten things at once, which I loved. One of the more memorable ones: up until 2014, Uber sent a phone to every driver who registered. By that point it was costing us millions, so we built an app for drivers to use their own devices, then had to recover all the old phones and liquidate the assets. A lot of fun.
When did you know you'd joined a rocket ship?
I believed in the business when I joined — I had faith in the team and had seen how much customers loved it early on. But did I know it would be a $72 billion company? Absolutely not. It was the right place at the right time, and we were very lucky.
Which parts of the growth were most painful?
Two phases stand out. The first was the early days — everything was scrappy. A hundred people in the company, systems going down, no streamlined processes. We were answering support tickets from riders and drivers twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
The second was 2017. It's no secret we had a rough year. We had built Uber incredibly fast — we were an eight-year-old company in a six-year-old body. What happened was tragic and we're genuinely sorry for it. But what I saw come out of that process was real change. The team is resilient, and I'm a big believer in Dara — I think he and the team are well-positioned to take Uber to the next level.
Was there a point where the growing pains stabilized?
There was no single milestone. It was more like: we just raised money from Google, these five problems are fixed — but by the time we fixed those five, there were ten more. At a high-growth startup, you don't really solve problems; you whack them down. Something else always pops up.
If you were starting over at a similar company, what would you tackle first?
Figure out which side of the marketplace is harder and exclusively work on that. For Uber, it was drivers. In Atlanta we had maybe 1,000 limo drivers — we were going to get far more riders than that, so we had to be creative about supply. That applies to most marketplace businesses.
Second, make time to step back and look at the data. At a startup with a high-growth mindset, you're drawn to the outliers and the fires rather than trends in aggregate. The data was consistently more useful to us than any individual situation.
What advice do you have for someone trying to break into operations?
Read widely and know which companies excite you. If you find one you really admire, the founder's email is probably firstname@company.com — reach out. These people are building brands and spending hundreds of hours on it; they genuinely want to hear from people who care.
Also: the role you want may not exist yet. Find a way to be helpful anyway. We had people drive for Uber just to give us feedback on the experience, and it turned into something. What it comes down to is hustle and the willingness to create your own opening.
Why angel investing?
A few reasons. I like solving interesting problems, and I think a lot of the progress the world makes over the next fifteen years will be driven by the founders building companies right now. I also think the lessons from scaling Uber are genuinely applicable to earlier-stage companies, and I want to be useful in that way.
But honestly, it comes down to this: working at Uber was a life-changing experience, and all it took was a few people betting on me. That's what angel investing is. There are a lot of founders out there — all it takes is for someone to believe in them.
Originally published in 2018