Uber's massive scale creates an innovator's dilemma where the core business swallows organizational capacity, making it nearly impossible for new ventures to compete for resources and attention.
Macdonald describes Uber's 'Growth Bets' program — dedicating 100-150 people to new ventures with startup-like constraints — as a response to the classic innovator's dilemma where a $225B business makes it nearly impossible for small bets to get the attention, engineering capacity, or marketing dollars they need. ✦ AI generated
Andrew Macdonald · 20VC · 2026-08-17 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 11:16
“Do you 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 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 we we run a program called growth bets, which is, you know, intended very much to incubate new businesses within Uber... basically what we try to do is, a um create dedicated resources. So, you know, 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 and thinking.
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