Coffee with a T-bird hosted by Alex Rozenfeld
Grab a cup of coffee and join Alex Rozenfeld, Thunderbird alum and founder of Freshwater Investments, as he sits down with fellow T-bird graduates who are making an impact in business, leadership, and entrepreneurship. Each episode features open and insightful conversations that explore the pivotal moments, personal motivations, and lessons learned on their journeys.
From building companies across continents to leading global teams, these stories highlight the drive and mindset behind success. Whether you're a student, alum, or someone passionate about business and personal growth, you'll walk away with fresh ideas and real-world perspective.
This is more than a podcast—it’s a platform for connection, storytelling, and celebrating the global spirit of Thunderbird.
This podcast is sponsored by www.freshwaterinvestments.com
Coffee with a T-bird hosted by Alex Rozenfeld
The Speech, The Scale, The Shift: Eduardo Donnelly on Leading Uber LATAM—and the Transition to Executive Coaching
Eduardo Donnelly spent nearly a decade helping build Uber in Latin America—from launching Uber Eats and scaling it 7×, to leading operations across 18 markets and overseeing half of the company’s global trips. But at the height of his career, he made a surprising decision: he stepped away. In this episode, Eduardo shares the story behind that choice, the lessons he learned from a failed startup, and how a powerful commencement speech—given by his late father at Eduardo’s own Thunderbird graduation—shaped his view on leadership, growth, and purpose. Now, as an executive coach, he’s helping others navigate their own inflection points. This is a story about building, letting go, and the values that carry us forward.
https://paperbell.me/eduardo-donnelly
https://www.linkedin.com/in/eduardo-donnelly/
Read Eduardo's Dad Thunderbird Graduation speech Here!
About Eduardo in his own words:
I’m a growth-focused CEO, Executive Coach, and board advisor with over 20 years of leadership experience scaling businesses, driving operational excellence, and leading transformation in technology, mobility, and financial services. I’ve led multi-billion-dollar P&Ls, managed teams of up to 3,000 people, and delivered significant impact in fast-paced, competitive markets.
Most recently, I led Uber Mobility LatAm, Uber’s largest region, overseeing 18 markets and 50% of Uber’s global trip volume. My focus was on continuing to drive growth while delivering very high levels of profitability, and also expanding Uber Moto by 230% YoY, making it one of Uber’s fastest-growing products. I spent 4 years running Uber Eats in Latam from launching new markets, to hyper-scalling during the pandemic and turning the business profitable. During my tenure the business grew 7x. I also spearheaded the acquisition and integration of Cornershop, adding billions in annual recurring revenue to Uber’s portfolio.
Before Uber, I spent nearly a decade at American Express, where I built a $200M revenue business, doubled revenue within two years, and led an important regulatory remediation project that strengthened compliance and operational efficiency.
Key Achievements
✔ Led Uber’s largest region, overseeing 18 markets, 54M+ monthly users
✔ Delivered top and bottom line results managing a multi-billion dollar P&L growing 70% in two-years off of an already scaled business
✔ Drove 230% YoY growth for Uber Moto, making it one of Uber’s top global products
✔ Expanded Uber Eats to 11 markets, significantly surpassing sales targets and delivering 7x growth
✔ Built a $200M business at American Express, doubling revenue in just two years
✔ Served on multiple boards, including HSBC Mexico, Uber Pagos Mexico, and Cornershop
I’m passionate about building high-performing teams, unlocking business potential, and delivering measurable impact. I thrive in environments that demand both strategic vision and operational execution, and I believe in empowering people to drive sustainable, long-term success.
I always enjoy exchanging ideas with leaders who are navigating growth, transformation, and market expansion. If my experience resonates with you, I’d love to connect.
This podcast is sponsored by Freshwater Investments
Hi everyone, I'm Alex Rosenfeld, founder of Fresh4 Investments, and this is Coffee with the T-Bird Podcast. I sit down with fellow T-Birds who are making an impact in business, leadership, and entrepreneurship. Each episode features conversations that explore the pivotal moments, personal motivations, and lessons learned on their journeys. Whether you're a student, a mom, or someone passionate about business and personal growth, you'll walk away with fresh ideas. This is a bit more than a podcast. It's a platform for connections, storytelling, and celebrating the global spirit of Thunderbird. This podcast is sponsored by Freshwater Investments. At Freshwater, we make it simple for you to invest in large apartment communities across the United States so you can earn passive income, grow your capital, and benefit from real estate tax breaks without owning or managing property yourself. Hello everyone, I'm Alex Rosenfeld, founder of Freshwater Investments, and my guest today is Eduardo Danelli, a growth-focused CEO, entrepreneur, and board advisor with more than 20 years of experience leading at scale. He has built multi-billion dollar businesses, led teams of thousands, and navigated industries from financial services to technology and mobility. Eduardo spent nearly a decade at American Express before joining Uber, where he went on to run Uber Eats in Latin America, scale the business sevenfold, and later oversee Uber mobility across 18 markets, representing half of Uber's global trips. From his early beginnings to leading Uber as a VP in Latin America, Eduardo's story is spectral with lessons on growth, resilience, and what it really takes to scale. Eduardo, welcome.
SPEAKER_01:Hi Alex, how are you? Thank you for having me.
SPEAKER_00:Of course, it's uh it's a pleasure. I'm I'm excited about the uh the conversation today. Uh and let me start by asking you what where do we find you today?
SPEAKER_01:I'm in Mexico City.
SPEAKER_00:It's where I've been living the last 14 years. Excellent. Do you have a fun fact about Mexico City for us?
SPEAKER_01:I mean, there this is one of the most diverse food cities that you can find. I think uh everyone knows Mexico for the wonderful Mexican food, and you have tens of thousands of taco restaurants around the city, but the diversity that you can find now, especially after the pandemic, is fantastic. So if you are the kind of tourist that loves to come and and do gastro tourism, this is the right city for you.
SPEAKER_00:Excellent. I'm definitely coming. Okay, let's uh delighted to host you here. Thank you. Let's start our conversation with a moment in in your career when you running Uber in in Latin America, you're top executive in the company, and you make decision to um to leave the company. And as you mentioned in your LinkedIn post, you you wanted to take uh a parenting break. It must have been a very tough decision for you and your family. How did you make that decision and what what influenced that decision?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, well, thanks, Alex. It's it's certainly a question that I get asked a lot. I consider myself to have been very lucky to have been um at Uber for eight years. I got there uh right as it was as it was just very much a startup, very scrappy and and starting to build processes. In fact, I was hired to kind of really start to build processes for the company to help it to to grow, especially in in Latam, where it was very much in its in its infancy. And the question of why I left, I I really get asked that a lot. And and for me it came down to understanding the cycles of life and knowing when one chapter has been uh fully lived. And that's really how I define those eight years in in in Uber. I had the privilege of building and scaling three different uh businesses within Uber. You had you had mentioned Uber Eats and Mobility, but I was originally hired to come to uh build what was was called uh ComOps or Community Operations, which is basically the customer service infrastructure for them. Uh and really kind of building all of the support infrastructure that exists today from scratch, from BPOs and and centers of excellence to all of the knowledge bases, et cetera, et cetera, to then lead Uber Eats for close to five years, launching markets, scaling the business, leading it through the pandemic, and then uh my last two years in in Uber mobility really helping to take that already very, very big business to a different level. And so I I had the experience that I dreamed of as a Thunderbird student, right? Uh it's why I it's why I went to Thunderbird was to be able to work in a really global business. And so as a student, I said, I want to operate across multiple markets, I want to be traveling the world, I want to learn directly from each culture that I that I happened to be a part of. And so for anyone with a global mindset, that job that I had for that time was deeply, deeply fulfilling. But I also recognized that I had sort of reached the summit of that mountain. I I had already seen what high scale growth was. I had helped to turn uh you know what was a scrappy startup into uh a public company and a highly profitable company, and I had tested myself across very different contexts. Um and so that allowed me to say, okay, when I when I think of what is required for that next growth of the business and what I want to do in terms of my own personal development, my growth, it was very clear that now was a time to to to move on to explore something different. Plus the fact that I had been traveling a lot, right? So while while I was learning and doing all this career-wise, at the same time, I felt a pull in that personal life, right? I wanted to be present as a father. My kids are 16, 14, 11, and and I traveled up to three times a three weeks a month. So there was a lot of experience and moments that I missed because of that. And so I wanted to create more space for reflection, more space to be present with with my kids. And I also felt ready to start giving back, right? To take the lessons that I had learned in my own professional career, you know, both the success and the tons of mistakes that I made, and use that to help grow other leaders. Um and so I closed that chapter, you know, in in at the end of 2024. And over the last, you know, call it 10 months of this year, you know, I've been focusing on building an executive coaching practice, right? And to me, that's service. It's about helping others and specifically other leaders rise to the occasion and and unlock the potential that they have within themselves. Um, just as just as I was able to have that in my own personal experience. So to me, the closing of the Uber chapter was, you know, closing that one cycle of of of uh of life with deep gratitude, but opening another one with a lot of purpose.
SPEAKER_00:Great. Well, th thank you. So let's uh roll back the time a little bit and and uh start with your childhood. Uh if you can tell us where where did you grow up, maybe tell talk about your family a little bit and uh about your your childhood experiences that that shaped you uh later on in life.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Look, I'll tell you this the the where did you grow up question is always a hard one for me. But I think a lot of T Bird will uh resonate with that because you know, by the time I was a teenager, I had already lived in six different countries. My dad's job required us to move, you know, everywhere between three and four years. So, you know, where did I grow up or where am I from is always a hard thing for for me to answer. But uh so what are the what are those six countries? So I was born in Colombia, uh, and then I moved to Spain and then to Mexico, then I moved from Mexico to to the US to to to Connecticut and then to Brazil and then back to to Mexico, and then with Thunderbird, I also went went and spent uh part of uh year in Thunderbird in uh in Arsham. So I so I was able to mix uh and add a different country there as well. And so yeah, so so you know, it would that certainly was tough growing up and then having to kind of relocate and start over every every three, four years.
SPEAKER_00:Um change and change schools at the same time, right?
SPEAKER_01:Um, schools, you gotta make friends, you have to sometimes learn languages. Uh so all of that was difficult. But uh, but honestly, I think that's what allowed me to grow up and and kind of really feel comfortable with change, right? And and and and in part, it's also me to you know look for people that don't mix don't you know fit squarely in a box, right? That are different, that have a different perspective to how they see the world. So it's uh it was great kind of growing up with that with that bit of a background.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, and uh who who were the biggest influences in your early years, like family members or mentors?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I I mean I would say that you know, without a doubt, that that that influence, I'd say early years and and basically most of my life was my father. He was uh he was always incredibly present despite having a demanding career and having to be away a lot. Uh he kind of taught me values of listening and giving people, but especially kids, sort of grace to grow up and to do things differently and to learn and and whatnot. And and so uh, you know, he was very successful professionally, but more than anything, like when I think about the legacy that he left is one of relationships, right? Today, even he he he died uh 14 years ago, and even today people will come up and talk about how he helped them one way or another, whether it was in their professional career or as a friend. And that's that's really wonderful, is being remembered by uh how you make people feel, right? And so that certainly was a very strong mentor and and and role model for me. And then I also had a couple of really very really interesting mentors in in Amex where I spent my first 10 years after having graduated Thunderbird. You know, one was one was somebody that taught me how to lead through empathy and being comfortable saying I don't know. And especially as a 20-something year old where you're kind of full of answers and you know what's best for everything. That level of sort of leading through humility is is was a fantastic learning. Um, and I was able to get that early on in life. And I think that helps to build a lot of relationships and helps to open dialogue that may otherwise be closed. And then I had another mentor who was the one that was responsible for me coming to Mexico 14 years ago. I was off I was living in New York and I was offered a role to work in insurance in Amex in Lat in Mexico. You know, I and I I had told him, well, I would like to leave New York because my my daughter was just born, and I think we need a change. We can't all kind of live all that comfortably in this small apartment and whatnot. And so, you know, I was offered this job to lead insurance in Mexico. I didn't want insurance. I didn't know anything about insurance, and I didn't particularly want to be in that business. But he sat me down. He says, Okay, well, what do you want to what do you want to do in life? Like, what kind of a leader do you want to be? And so I said, I want to be a general manager, I want to lead PL, I want to be able to operate across multiple countries and lead people. And when I described it that way, he said, Well, everything that you just mentioned, you're gonna learn in this job. So don't follow the job title and don't don't follow the sort of kind of big scope of responsibility, follow the skill sets that are gonna make you grow and go after that. Excuse me. And I did exactly that. And ended up being one of the best jobs I've ever had. Because I was able to really kind of lean into learning and growing on those skill sets. And I ended up really liking the insurance business. So go go figure what my judgment tells me. But uh, so that was a those those those mentors early in my career were really, really fantastic.
SPEAKER_00:Great. And um, so you after your undergrad, you you went um and worked at T and you were part of leadership development program. Would you recommend this program to to recent graduates? Is it a is it a good pathway for for recent graduates?
SPEAKER_01:I think it's a fantastic pathway. When when companies have sort of formalized trainings, you should always raise your hand to be a part of that. And that's what this was, right? It was a very structured, very formal leadership training program where every year I had to change jobs, I had to change cities, and it was I was you had to do that. And the reason for that was they wanted you to be comfortable with constant change, right? And they wanted you to learn different skill sets along the way that were radically different. And embedded in all of that, they would they would teach you management, they would teach you strategy and and and decision making and and things that are fundamental for many years down the road early on. And so, yeah, very much it very much take advantage of something like that if if ever offered, because what I learned really paid back in in multiples.
SPEAKER_00:And uh, how did you hear about Thunderbird? And how did you make the decision to uh to be a student of Thunderbird?
SPEAKER_01:I mean, my connection to Thunderbird goes back to my father. So my my my my dad also attended Thunderbird. Well what uh what year he graduated? You know what I I I can't remember. I know it was in the I know it was in um in sort of the late 60s, probably like 69 to 71, something around there. Okay. But you can't hold me accountable to that date. But it was more l more or less around that time frame. And uh and he was always talking about Thunderbird. He always said how how how much it changed his life. As I had mentioned earlier, he led the typical Thunderbird kind of professional experience, living across multiple countries, working and thriving across multiple cultures. And he said how much you know Thunderbird helped to prepare him for that kind of uh for and that's the life I wanted to have as well, right? So I wanted to be working in a multiple multinational space, multicultural engagements, etc. Um, and I also wanted you know an MBA program that was more than just business training, right? I had I had I had studied international affairs in Georgetown, and so I needed to really you know build my business acumen, which I hadn't really picked up in the School of Foreign Service. So I knew I wanted that, but when I started to look at sort of traditional MBA programs, it just didn't fit as as cleanly as as what I was looking for. I was looking for something beyond just the academics to the kind of uh student mix that really would help me to get diverse perspectives and and learn from others as much as I was learning from from the professors. And so that's what I found in Thunderbird for sure.
SPEAKER_00:So what were your your favorite uh memories about Thunderbird? And what clubs were you involved in, or what what what do you remember the most about your time at Thunderbird?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I look I I um my my two years in Thunderbird were fantastic. First of all, because I was able to spread them out across Phoenix and Narchand in France, and just the ability to be able to combine those two very different experiences was was was really fantastic. I met my closest friends from just day one of orientation. In fact, with one of them with José Miguel, uh we we uh we met, I think, the first day, and he became my roommate by day three. So it was uh it was uh it was a cool experience just to just to meet so so many different people. For me, for ad the finance class was fantastic. I don't know if they still teach that in in Thunderbird, but what a what a transformative class in terms of figuring out finance and all of the sort of deep uh technical elements of finance mixed with strategy and how to optimize for resources, etc. You know, I find that to be so practical that that you know yeah, as soon as I started working, I was applying what I learned from that class almost day one. But beyond the courses, right? It's like those Thunderbird traditions, the the Thursdays at the pub, the flag ceremony, and all the culture behind that, uh, which is fantastic, and sort of that constant rhythm of cultural exchange uh between all the students. You know, I I I really I really do cherish that. Um and then I I would say that that probably the most lasting memory for me was uh for group was graduation, not just because we graduated, but because my dad actually gave the commencement speech. And to me, I had nominated him. I think my first week at Thunderbird, I sent through a nomination for him as a as a commencement speaker. Not knowing if that would work, but I just wrote a letter to to the president of Thunderbird telling him, you know, what an amazing person my father was, as I as I just told you, right? And and the kind of impact that he left for me as a leader. And he got was chosen. And fortunately for me, he was chosen the year that both you and I graduated. So it was uh it was lucky for me to have experienced that as a student and as a graduating student to have my dad come and give that speech. And I and I pick up that speech every year or so and kind of just reread it because those lessons that he left are still vibrating even today.
SPEAKER_00:That's fantastic. What did he say when he uh learned that you you wrote that letter?
SPEAKER_01:Well, I never told him I wrote the letter until after he gave the speech. Uh and I I I didn't want to. Well, what what did he say then? But uh he started to cry and and and I actually showed him the letter. Um uh because you know he and I have always had a a very special relationship, but when you actually see it on paper and and and kind of um I I guess what he told me is like it's always easy for us as parents to tell to tell the their kids how proud we are of them, but we don't necessarily hear it the other way around. Um see you're getting you're getting making me emotional now. But um having him having him say that and and and just see the the pride that I had in him was was was special.
SPEAKER_00:That's uh that's a special story, and uh thank you thank you so much for for sharing it. Um I'm almost there emotional with you. So let's keep going. So your first job after graduation, how did you how did you learn that and uh how did it go?
SPEAKER_01:Well, Thunderbird Career Services. So it was as straightforward as that. Uh I worked I went to work at Amex after graduating, but um but in fact Amex had hired me as an intern the summer the summer before. So I went and I interned them. I I was originally hired to do an internship in Phoenix, and for some reason they ended up sending me to Greensboro, North Carolina instead. So I spent the summer there. And then from that they hired me to work go work out of uh their New York office, which is was which was or is their headquarters after graduating. So I was fortunate enough to go and work in their customer success department, uh, which is kind of Amex's bread and butter. So lucky for me to have you know started in in customer service with one of the leading companies of customer service and really customer culture.
SPEAKER_00:And then you spent uh about 10 years with Amax and you you finished in in Mexico. What were your the biggest lessons from your career with Amex?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I think look, as as I as I even mentioned just now, you know, the the American Express culture is all about customer service. And that that's kind of left a deep learning uh for me. I I remember even as I started as an intern, I was I started as an intern in their in in in in as I mentioned in Greensboro, which was one of their service centers, and I would have people from the New York marketing team fly into Greensboro and spend you know a couple of days just listening to calls. That's all they would do. They would listen to calls, they would take notes, and it was all about learning from customers. What were the insights that they were giving to the agents? What were the complaints? What were the pain points? What were they use how were they using the product? What were they using it for? And how could they engage a bit more directly with customers? They would take all that back and go back and change terms and conditions or change marketing, uh value proposition, et cetera, et cetera, to make sure that the product was um the best it could be. And it was that constant iteration. I I I had mentioned that I moved to Mexico to run their insurance business. Uh, and that's another perfect example, right? I got here uh and I discovered that insurance, just like anywhere in the world, but really felt here in Mexico, people don't buy insurance products. It's a highly underpenetrated product because customers don't feed don't trust them. Don't they don't trust the insurance companies, they don't trust that they will be paid if needed. If Amex is a customer-centric brand that that values service above everything else, we couldn't be partnering with with anyone that has the connotation of lack of trust. And so I was you know allowed to create a center of excellence, basically our own servicing department, uh to do all of the claims management. So we brought it all in-house from away from the from the insurance carriers. We continued to partner with them, but all the servicing was now through Amex. And so that way, if claims weren't being paid, we knew why. We were able to abandon, reduce abandonment rate of claims. We were able to go from two weeks payment to two days and really kind of change that overall customer experience. So by the end of it, you know, our insurance products were selling themselves, not because the the product was actually fantastic, but because people were telling others, hey, these guys pay, and I got paid, and this was what happened, and this is how Amex came through. And it's all about putting customer front and center and and building around them. And that's the lesson that I that I learned from Amex my 10 years ago. That's fantastic fantastic lesson.
SPEAKER_00:So after Amex, you uh you started your insurance um startup. And you ran it for a few few uh years on uh on on Brave Commerce Podcast. You mentioned that that it eventually failed, but um uh you you were able to use kind of lessons from that experience to um to use in your Uber career. What uh what were those those uh experiences and how did you uh kind of took that failure and and converted it into a successful Uber career?
SPEAKER_01:Um Yeah, look, I I I I had the entrepreneurial bug, and so I I left Amex wanting to really dive into that. And I was able and and fortunate to partner with with uh an existing brokerage here in Mexico that had a lot of corporate brokerage insurance experience, and I wanted to build the consumer side of it through Finity Insurance. And but it didn't work. A lot of the things that I had told you around lack of customer trust and and the cumbersome processes that existed within the insurance carrier, I could fix that on the MX side, I couldn't fix it when I was on my own. And so that really didn't allow me to be able to do it. Because it tricked because it required a lot of a lot of resources and and capital or any other more than anything because because uh the the carriers are are happy enough to give up their control of their processes to somebody like American Express that has an experienced brand and recognition and and even negotiating power for it. As an entrepreneur, if you tell them we want to do things differently and and and try to make them adapt, my learning was it's it's really impossible despite regardless of the kind of relationships you may have already established and the credibility you have, trying to get a giant to change is difficult. And so while while I think I was able to find and and and and build good products and good partnerships to do that, it still didn't change the back-end process of the failure in the value chain uh around creating trust from a customer's perspective in how insurance carriers pay out. So so it it ended up not working a lot because of that, and just because there was only so much cash flow and the B2B to see uh kind of relationship, the B2B part is just slow, right? In in its in its ability to kind of launch. And so we were running out of cash uh and we weren't getting the traction, or I wasn't getting the traction that that I thought was was necessary to really make this as successful as as was required. And so, yeah, it was extremely painful at the time um to walk away from that. But you know, in hindsight, it was it was a fantastic experience. I wouldn't I wouldn't walk back those three years uh because it taught me a lot of humility, right? Of being able to say, this isn't working out, and and testing out different things and and having open conversations with your business partners about you know, you know, how things are are moving forward, being much more transparent, you know, those are all critical muscles to build. But there were a couple of others, right? Just execution discipline and just how important it is to have sound um processes that can be repeated and seen throughout time, but that you can actually measure consistently and and track that to your strategy. I think that was a big learning. And then the absolute focus on unit economics uh and understanding how each transaction builds on the next uh and how to control your costs while trying to get leverage on uh excuse me, on growth. Fundamental learnings that you know I then took to to manage sort of the early days of of thriving in the Uber chaos, which felt very much like a startup uh that that I had was just leaving behind.
SPEAKER_00:So let's let's dive in and so your Uber career. You you spend their eight years, you you you work in several businesses. Maybe we can start with uh your Uber Eats journey where you you scaled that business dramatically.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So well, so maybe maybe I'll just walk it a second back because I sort of had three phases, right? The first one, as I as I had mentioned, I came in to kind of run their their customer support infrastructure. You know, funny, and funny enough, the early days of Uber, all employees had to do customer tickets at night. It was, you know, after they did their day job, they then had to sit down and do and solve all the customer tickets or interactions that were coming through. And that was really very much by design, right? So, so you know, our our founder, Travis Klacknick, what he did was he wanted to make sure that all of the employees were feeling uh the customer pain points and using that to continuously improve the products that Uber was was launching and scaling at the time.
SPEAKER_00:And it allowed for huge and you're sorry, just to interrupt you for a second. Your customers were riders or drivers or delivery, both.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. Yeah, in those early days it was prior to EATS, but but yeah, it was both. And there might have been even a little bit of EATS at the very beginning with engagement with restaurants or couriers or eaters. Yeah, you you would manage both sides of the marketplace. And um it was great to have a lot of customer empathy, but it obviously wasn't scalable, right? As the business continued to grow, we was we went from hundreds of tickets to thousands to millions, right? And so there was just no way that uh we could have people working all hours of the night to do this. Um so I was brought in to establish all of that in Lat M. So build a BPO network to have agents resolve the sort of like high-frequent types of tickets. Then we had to build center of excellence for the very complicated types of interactions. So whether there was some kind of vehicle accident or even as bad as a fatality, right? And so all of that, how to how do how do you build and and and train agents to deal with those kinds of uh interactions? So all that support infrastructure from scratch, which was absolutely fascinating to have established it and build a team internally to go and do that. A lot of that was just going back to my to my Amex days on having established that know-how from from the beginning.
SPEAKER_00:Can you remember can you remember any uh like silly complaints that uh you you saw on a daily basis?
SPEAKER_01:Oh, I mean, I think you'd be surprised at the stuff that people leave in cars from from the basic things as you know, I left my cell phone behind to I left a baby. And how do you how do you solve for that and tell the driver you have to turn around because there's a screaming child in the back that somebody left behind? So it's uh yeah, you you have to kind of um think of all of the crazy things and and build processes to to to help agents make real-time decisions on on things as critical as that.
SPEAKER_02:Wow, thank you.
SPEAKER_01:So yeah, so so that was that was fun. And and then they asked me to to move on to um to Uber Eats. And in Eats, we we we expanded very aggressively uh across Line Adams. So I think we were we launched at our peak, we were operating in 14 markets. I think we were able to launch nine in one year. So so my first year of of being there was kind of really about continuing launching and and growing that as aggressively as well. As we could, because we knew that there was a first mover advantage and that that mattered. We had seen it in Mexico where we had that advantage. We didn't have it in a market like Brazil. And the difference between one and the other was night and day. And so we knew it was important to launch and get there quickly.
SPEAKER_00:So how how do you launch a country? Like can you just walk us through that process on a on a high level?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. So first the first thing you have to do is start building those relationships with restaurants. So think about you know, the we have enterprise uh relationships with Starbucks, McDonald's, et cetera. Having them and saying, hey, we now tell us your key markets and where you want to be operating was extremely helpful so that we could use those as an entry point into a market. But you need to build out that mix, right? You have to, in every time you open your app and you create a session, you know you need your enterprise accounts, you need those sort of big local favorites, and then you have to have the SMBs, right? The ones that are very close to you, fast delivery to the things that you know you're used to eating in your neighborhoods. So building those restaurant relationships is fundamental to be able to launch a market. Then you got to build a supply. So you have to have enough couriers that that are gonna be available to do the pickups, and you have to have a mix of couriers, right? Because you have to think about four-wheel vehicles for longer distances, cars. And we used a lot of the early supply from the mobility team to be able to launch that. But at least in Ladam, most most of the people that are driving on the mobility side do not like doing deliveries as well. So we used them at the beginning, but we we then had to build out our own dedicated supply. And you have to build it out with four-wheel vehicles for longer distance, motorcycles to be able to kind of deal with a lot of the cities that have hills or difficult uh geographies, and then and then bicycles to lower the sort of entry cost for couriers to come in and start to operate. So with those sort of three supply types, you're then ready to go out and market to to build an eater community. On the Uber Eats side, it was it was fortunate for us that we already had an established mobility business. So we were able to cross-sell as a sort of our first entry point into that. But then when the pandemic hit, then we had a huge surge in demand from people being locked up and at home and needing to teat. And so we were able to move past requiring you know, cross-selling into the mobility base to having a whole new source of customer acquisition and entrants that were coming in to uh get delivery because they needed they needed that while they were.
SPEAKER_00:How did you manage that spike in in demand during during the pandemic?
SPEAKER_01:Look, it it required us to you know fundamentally change to change how we operated. We had to be comfortable operating with a lot of unknowns, right? We had a lot of restrictions from each government, and and I don't mean it at the federal level, right? Every city had a different way of operating. And so we had to be able to accommodate very severe lockdown restrictions like we saw in Bogotá or or Lima to places that were more open with very limited types of restrictions to places like, for example, Mexico City that didn't wasn't really saying what it could or could not do. So we had to create our own sort of regulations for that, right? So we had to be able to be comfortable making decisions quickly and operating with first principles, but we also had to change a ton of processes. So before the pandemic, we would establish direct relationships with the restaurants. And what I mean by that is we would have somebody go to the restaurant, train the train the staff or the owners on how to use the device. We would give them a device, right? A tablet to be able to take orders. And we would help walk through what an optimal uh delivery experience could look like, et cetera, et cetera. Very personalized. The pandemic hit and we had to completely change our restaurant onboarding from what I just described to self-service to bring your own device. And now we had to accommodate not just, you know, the the Android tablets that we used, but iOS tablets or a cell phone, which was the very different. And so we had to completely redo our tech stack to accommodate those kinds of uh requirements. We knew we had to change the pace by which we paid restaurants. We used to pay them at the end of every week. We had to change to every day because we knew that these guys were living uh through cash flow and we couldn't be the reason why they were shutting their doors, which also meant that we had to make very fast decisions, even with imperfect information, because every delay that I had in being able to make a decision, I was impacting a small business that couldn't make payroll or couldn't pay their inventory or rent or things like that. So uh very stressful time for you and the other. You know, I was it it was, but there's good stress and there's bad stress, right? And this was good stress because while it was difficult, we knew we were making a difference, right? We knew we were making a difference to these restaurants that, you know, before we were 10% of their volume, 20% to 100%, right? You know, one week to the next. And if we could be good partners, um then that makes a huge difference, right? And and and that's what we were waking up in the mornings for. We were we also were conscious that we were asking couriers to be on the street and engaging with people that they didn't know if they were ill or not. Uh and with remember those days when we didn't know what the pandemic meant and how things were what kind of contagion risk was happening or not. And so there was a huge amount of empathy for our couriers who were really heroes, right? Being out on the street and doing these deliveries and making sure people were fed uh and that the restaurants were staying open, et cetera, et cetera. And so that was, you know, it was it was difficult, but uh those first principles that we put out there to to make sure that we were really thinking about our restaurants and our couriers first above anything else really helped us to transform the business and and thrive through through the pandemic, which was which would lead to that 7X sort of growth that you were speaking about, because we were fortunate to be a part of that. We were also um we were also pretty lucky that just before the pandemic um hit, we had made a decision to acquire um uh a Laddam, a Latin company, a Chilean company that did grocery delivery called Corner Shop. Uh I think a couple of years before we we made the decision to acquire them, we had done an analysis of do we need to be a super app? We had examples of super apps in Southeast Asia, like Grab and Laddam, like Rappi. These companies were selling multiple products. We were just selling restaurant delivery. Um and we we knew that there was a very strong use case for grocery and pharmacy and all those kinds of deliveries as well. And we as we started to build it, we discovered that in fact it's a very different use case from how our tech stack had been structured. And so we could have built it and taken the time to go and and and figure out how to scale this product. And we instead decided to buy or acquire a company that was doing this really well and knew how to do things like inventory management in real time, partnering with CPGs on promotionals, those kinds of things that was very different from how restaurants operated. So the pandemic hit and we were integrating, we were going through the MA formal regulatory acquisition process. Then we had to kind of figure out how to do the technical integration and the marketing integration of this company and brand while also dealing with this huge spike in deliveries across. So they were they were a hectic years for sure in terms of uh the amount of things that we were asked to do, but it's extremely educational, uh certainly for me. Yeah. And so the third phase in Uber was was moving to the mobility business. And that's 18 markets in Laddam. And mobility in Lat Am is is huge. It's in fact the biggest region in terms of trip volume for all of Uber. There are not that many companies that can say that Latam is the biggest region for them. Um but it tells you a lot about sort of the product market fit that was established in region where you know pricing is fundamental and and we were able to unlock a very attractive price point, but you're also solving for things around reliability, meaning access to vehicles, which is a very limiting form factor across multiple markets, as well as safety, right? Where moving around in public transportation is not the safest option. And so people will look for other ways to get from A to B. So we were able to deliver on those three things, right? Pricing, reliability, and safety. And by delivering on that, we were able to uh grow very, very successfully. And and you'll have Brazil being the biggest market in all of all of Uber at trip volume, but you have Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina in the top ten uh of the company. So it's it's important, yeah.
SPEAKER_00:So what what for for you, what what it was like leading Uber's largest global region? How many um direct reports did you have? How was your uh day day in life like yeah?
SPEAKER_01:I mean, look, uh a day in the life, uh so I had we we had broken down across four subregions. So Brazil was its own region, Mexico with its own region, and then you have Andy at the Andean and Caribbean and SouthCon had those reports. I had uh you know a planning centralized team. So all in all, I had eight uh direct reports in in total, uh and around 300 people in our in our overall operations for for the region. But it's funny that you ask about sort of a day in the life because no day, no day matches, right? Every single one is different. When you have 18 markets, variety is implicit in that. Um so for me a big philosophy was not leading through spreadsheets or tables, right? There's more to running the business than just looking at the numbers. And so that meant that I I had to live the product locally. So I would I would go and spend you know a lot of time across the different markets. I was living in Mexico, but really kind of living on a plane, going from place to place and and really understanding how our products were. The fact that you know you have different vehicle types across each market and how the drivers or earners use your product differs. And walking that through was fundamental and understanding, you know, the different restaurant relationships, et cetera. All of that was important in understanding how we work. So a big part of my role was that. And then there was another big part which was more internally focused, was taking all of those insights that I was picking up when I would do my market visits and bringing that back to our tech partners and helping them to see, you know, some of the attributes that I just spoke to you around reliability or safety, etc. How they are being interpreted. You know, what happens in Brazil is different from what's happening in New York or San Francisco, which is where most of our tech staff is. And so having having them understand the product and and making it more, making more of that information available to them was was important. So there was a lot of that sort of balance internal and external. And then the last thing externally was also managing with policy, right? Uh what I mean by that is government relations is a very big thing for Uber, especially now. We have over a million and a half earners in Latam, and a million and a half people for any government is extremely important, right? And so, you know, in in the US and Europe, we were seeing um a lot of those movements to what you know independent contractors were and how do you provide you know certain benefits to them. And all of that was starting to happen in Latam as well. So we were seeing regulation pop up in Colombia, in Brazil, in Mexico, and Chile. And so a lot of my day was also spending time with governments and talking to them about how to best structure this new regulation that had to be created for the right share business.
SPEAKER_00:What's been the most challenging market that you you worked in and why?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, well, I don't I don't think I would use the word challenging, maybe. You know, I think I think of it as where did I learn the most from? And to me for sure that was Brazil. I already mentioned to you the size of Brazil on the mobility side of the business. And I mentioned that we weren't the first entrance on the delivery side of the business. And so you had all these two challenges, uh a clear market leader on mobility and a challenger on delivery. And and figuring out how those two coexist is quite a challenge, right? Um managing a market of that scale requires not just a strong business fundamentals, but also a lot of local understanding of that local empathy. Unfortunately, I I lived in Brazil as a child and so I I understood Brazilian culture quite well, and I and I and I still speak Portuguese today. And so understanding Brazil was a was natural to me, but it's one of those places where drivers became influencers as an example, right? And it was one of the very first markets where we started to understand the power of the voice of the drivers on a social influencing kind of way. And so building, they were build building massive YouTube followings and teaching other drivers how to earn on the platform. And that taught me that, you know, you're launching, you're not just launching a product, right? You're launching an experience of how people will earn on your platform. So it's not just about making technical or financial decisions, it's understanding how that's going to be brought to real life and and and lived and felt. So, you know, why it was challenging was because we were analyzing and explaining and, you know, oftentimes being criticized by by our drivers on how we were rolling things out. And most of the time they were very correct, right? We would launch things with a lot of tech speak that didn't resonate to anyone because obviously it didn't. And so we had to redo how we communicated, we had to redo how we engaged with them, how we could use them to help us launch products, et cetera. So that was um that was extremely insightful. But it took a lot of mistakes to figure it out.
SPEAKER_00:So you you guys were managing like 54 million monthly users um in in LaTam. Um did you look at any KPIs on a daily basis? Too many, I would say.
SPEAKER_01:Look, one of the things I loved about Uber is that we had just the richest source of data available to us because we can track and measure just about anything that we wanted to. And so it allowed for us to make very strong foundational decisions. But oftentimes we we were, you know, we we we fell guilty to the sort of the analysis paralysis kind of thing, right? And we were looking at a lot of information to justify decisions that were instinctually right, right? And so I think it's the balance of understanding when do you have so much data and how much what kind of data do you want to use versus you know following your gut and doing what's right, especially because you're, as I as I told you about the earner experience, you're launching a product that that has a very strong value proposition to earners, but it also means that you know earners or restaurants, if you make the wrong call, they're not gonna be able to put a food on the table, right? And so that's that's an important thing to be able to balance. Which is also right why like sort of AI is helping so much of that right now, right? As as as we deploy more and more AI, it helps us to transform how we make decisions, how we analyze data quickly, as opposed to having so many people coming in and and cutting data differently to try to find an angle. We're able to take huge dumps of data and and and use it in a way that can process outcomes a bit quicker for us and speed up our decision latency, right? And so I think that's uh that's certainly going to change how Uber operates in the years to come, but it will also have a you know a fundamental uh change in how we design for XPs and how how we interpret it, how we interpret those quicker to be able to deploy even better.
SPEAKER_00:So speak speaking about AI, do you think we're gonna see some changes in the future of uh of the mobility and and delivery as well based on uh all that uh AI influence and changes in the um in the product?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I I I absolutely believe so. I mean one of the things I told you is is is is happening already, right? The ability to have multiple experiments going on at any given time, structuring them in such a way that one doesn't contaminate the other. But more importantly, the ability to interpret those experiments quicker will allow for products to ship faster. And that in itself is a win, right? The faster we can scale our improved products, the better it will be for customers. But then there are other things like pricing decisions or promotional decisions. Like we would have teams that would work through creating the promotional budgets for every single week, depending on how things had evolved over time. You ask the questions of what KPIs did we track. Like if we were off in trip volume or billings, etc., we would be structuring campaigns to address that every single week. With AI, you can do that on a daily basis, right? You can just even hourly basis, you can be deploying uh real-time pricing and have that change depending on market balance, whether it's running a little hot and there's not enough supply, we can immediately shift budget to the supply side of things to kind of be able to balance that better. If it's a little bit slow, we can shift that budget and try different pricing techniques, even um on an hourly basis and even on a neighborhood basis, et cetera. So you'll have the ability to deploy much quicker and really be able to balance that those marketplace needs in a much more effective way.
SPEAKER_00:Okay. Let's let's move on and uh talk about your experience serving on different boards. You you served on on the multiple boards, including Chelsea C Mexico, Uber Pagas, and uh CornerShop. What do you believe makes an effective board member?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, uh good question. I think look, um certainly it's understanding the difference between what what you are as a board member versus an executive, an operating executive. Those are two very different things, right? And and and so it probably took me a while to discern between the two. But now I would say that you know an effective board member has to live in two worlds, which which I think is governance and strategy. You know, government means ensuring discipline, things like risk management and compliance and capital allocation, those are things that a board has to be holding uh you know the CEO and the C-suite very accountable too. Because on the day-to-day basis of operating, which is why I call out the difference, you have to make trade-offs. And sometimes you're making those trade-offs real time and they might make sense or they might not. And the board has to hold that accountability consistently. So I think that's that's extremely important. But then you also have strategy, and that means being a true partner to the CEO and and the rest of the executive team because a good board should be looking around the corner and anticipate those risks that are coming and also be able to see the opportunities and help steer direction that way. Uh so I think the board has to think long term and ensure that we are preparing for that long term, while CEOs and and executive teams have to do both, but they really have to be delivering on the day-to-day, the month, et cetera, for for shareholders to be satisfied. And so that's the balance that I think uh an effective an effective board uh for sure has to has to do.
SPEAKER_00:That's that's great. That's a great advice. Thank you. And um, so let's let's look into the future a little bit. So now you're uh launching your executive coaching practice.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:What's your vision uh for for this practice if you look five five years out?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, um, you know. I I didn't mention this about my time at Uber, but one of the other great things about uh you know working at Uber was that they trained you as a coach. So, you know, the the eight years that I was there, I also coached. I just coached internally, right? And that's you know, whether it was my direct reports or other people within in the company, you know, there were there were multiple hours of the month that I had set aside to to coach. You know, those those sessions, you know, helping people think through challenges and unlock creativity were the highlight of my day. Like whenever I would see that in my calendar, I knew, you know, I would I got excited for the day. I knew that you know that was gonna be uh a fun hour for me, or multiple hours depending on. Uh, and it gave me a ton of energy. And to me, that was sort of that signal uh that coaching was was a uh a natural next step for me. Uh and so when I left Uber, you know, that to me that was the timing to kind of formalize this a bit more. I went and I got certified as well externally. Uh so I didn't I had the Uber sort of certification, then I I have one through through Brown University. And to me, you know, coaching has become the way to kind of channel those different experiences that I've had, but more importantly to help others, others, others to lead and to rise to their own challenges. So when you ask me about vision, what I'm looking to do is to provide that kind of personalized support to leaders as sort of they enter that next phase of growth. And that can be business growth, it can be professional growth, and you know, it can be scaling to that next level, like I was able to do in in Uber or navigate transition. I've had you know experience through through through multiple changes as we've just described right now, or just rethinking life. Uh and and all of those moments are extremely important for us to sit down and question and and and discuss it. And I want to be that person uh in their corner, helping them to see what might be coming, to make better decisions and to help find that clarity. Uh, and so that's that's a little bit of the vision that I have is just being able to kind of serve and pay that forward a bit more.
SPEAKER_00:I just wanted to follow up on something you you just mentioned. You you said that uh coaching uh gives you energy. What what else gives you energy these days?
SPEAKER_01:Look, I think uh, you know, I don't know how much noise the kids made as they got here, but you know, for most of my life, I never was I was never able to hear this sound, right? Of them coming back from school and and you know, when they have high energy days or low energy days and when they're coming and screaming versus when they're sad. That gives me a ton of energy, being able to understand them differently from how I did in the past. And so that's been extremely rewarding and and satisfying, and I consider myself very lucky to to have been able to say slow down and and and be here. But then I can't lie, I love playing golf, so I'll try I'll try to do that as much as I can as well to always find other areas of balance in life.
SPEAKER_00:Excellent. Excellent. It's a it's a good uh it's a good place to wrap up our conversation, but before before we do that, let me ask you a few quick questions. So having all all your knowledge, all your experience today, what advice would you give to a 20-year-old self?
SPEAKER_01:So I I mentioned a little bit of what I learned from my one of my mentors. I would say to my 20-year-old self, be comfortable saying I don't know. Care less about perception and focus more about growing internally inside.
SPEAKER_00:Okay. What uh book have you turned to most often throughout your career? Then it could be uh business book or non non non-fiction uh fiction book.
SPEAKER_01:So uh I think I don't know if it answers the most often, but one one book that I started to read a few years ago which which led to the decision around uh moving from moving away from Uber and moving to coaching was from strength to strength. I think it's a fantastic book by by Arthur Brooks about embracing transitions with intention as opposed to fear, which is so often uh a part of that. And as I I mentioned, I grew up with change, right? So transitions is not new to me, but being intentional about it is is important, and it gave language to this change that I wanted to bring to life.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, yeah, it's uh it's a great book, and I I listened to uh to his interview with Tim Ferris on Tim Ferris's podcast, amazing interview.
SPEAKER_01:Ah, it must have been. I'm gonna have to listen to that.
SPEAKER_00:All right. Uh do you have a quick message to the Thunderbird community, alumni, students?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I mean, look, I think we're all very proud to be T-Birds. I would say just don't forget how unique you are. So I think very few people are as equipped to operate globally as T-Birds are. That's a superpower. And I think especially today, we need to be able to operate successfully across borders and actually reduce that that those those borders that that today are creating such a barrier. Uh so being able to embrace and work across multiple cultures is the T-Bird superpower, and uh really it that's what makes you unique.
SPEAKER_00:That's true. And uh the last question what's your next uh dream travel destination? Where are you gonna take your family?
SPEAKER_01:Look, I've had um I've had Japan on my top uh list of places to travel, except my wife doesn't have it there. So I haven't been able to fulfill it yet. But now that I'm close to turning 50 and I have leverage as to what I choose to do for my 50th birthday, that that's certainly one of the destinations that I'm gonna be uh getting to soon. Excellent.
SPEAKER_00:Well, Eduardo, thank you so much for this uh wonderful conversation. Thank you for sharing your journey and your experiences. And uh we wish you we wish you continued success and uh thank you so much for your time.
SPEAKER_01:A pleasure, Alex, and thank you for for letting me spend some time with you. This has been a very fun conversation.
SPEAKER_00:Absolutely. Thank you.