Big companies face a classic innovator's dilemma where existing success absorbs organizational capacity, requiring dedicated resource structures like Growth Bets to incubate new businesses.
Mac describes Uber's Growth Bets program as a response to the innovator's dilemma: the company's $225 billion core business consumes management focus, engineering talent, and marketing resources. Success requires ring-fencing 100-150 dedicated people to work on new ventures rather than having them as a side project, though the built-in distribution to 200 million consumers remains a powerful scaling advantage. ✦ AI generated
Andrew Macdonald · 20VC · 2026-08-17 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 11:16
“Do you worry that that prevents you trying new things? Do you think Google Labs, like, go on, try some, Try Gmail, Paul Buchheit, or Do you know what I mean?”
It's like a class of classic innovator's dilemma problem, right? Which is like the thing you've already built is so big that it just swallows up your organizational capacity to do anything else. And even if you're able to stand up other businesses, it's impossible for those businesses to get the resourcing, attention, distribution, marketing dollars, engineering capacity, whatever it is, it just gets swallowed up by the whole. And part of it is just even management focus, right? Like it's very hard to focus on the new thing when you've got this like $225 billion blob you've got to manage over here. So, how do you solve that? I mean, we run a program called growth bets, which is, you know, intended very much to incubate new businesses within Uber.
verbatim transcript · starts at 11:16
10:59thinking a little bit. >> that Do you worry that that prevents you trying new things? Cuz that >> Yeah, totally. Totally. >> Do you Do you think Google Labs, like, go on, try some Try Gmail, Paul Buchheit, or Do you know what I mean? >> Yeah, I mean, we do. We try to set up structures to solve this problem. Um I mean, it's like a class of classic
11:16innovator's dilemma problem, right? Which is like the thing you've already built is so big that it just swallows up your organizational capacity to do anything else. And even if you're able to stand up other businesses, it's impossible for those businesses to get the resourcing, attention, distribution, marketing dollars, engineering capacity, whatever it is, it just gets swallowed up by the whole. And And part of it is just even management focus, right? Like
11:38it's very hard to focus on the new thing when you've got this like $225 billion blob you've got to manage over here. So, how do you solve that? I mean, we we we run a program called growth bets, which is, you know, intended very much to incubate new businesses within Uber. >> How does that work? >> So, basically what we try to do is, a um create dedicated resources. So, you
12:02know, if I've got 2,000 people, you know, made up number, but 2,000 people that work on our mobility business, I want to try to have, you know, 100 to 150 of them working on the new stuff, the small stuff, the stuff that we don't have product market fit or unit economics figured out, but that could be a big future business. Um but it requires like dedicated capacity
12:25and thinking. If you try to do it like as 5% of your job, like, you know, I run the marketplace for Uber X in the US, but I'm also trying to incubate this other thing with 2% of my time, it's really hard. >> Do you know who the best in the world is at this? Nick Storonsky from Revolut. >> Oh, interesting. >> I've interviewed a thousand founders.
12:41He's the single best founder I've ever interviewed, and it's because he runs 26 product experiments at once. He gives them $2 million, tells them to run for a year. Every single week he checks in for 20 minutes with each of the leaders, and then he determines whether to fund the next round or not. >> Yeah. I love that. I mean, we have a version of that. It's not the I love the
13:00cadence of that, by the way, the 20 like operating on weeks, not months or quarters, is how a new business should run. I think also having to sing for your supper, like come back and ask for money. Like the challenge Again, the other challenge of standing up a new business within a big company with a big P&L and a big balance sheet is people just get fat on the resources,