In 2011, when Uber first took its car service app abroad, the company made its Paris debut an all-consuming event. From headquarters in San Francisco, Chief Executive Officer Travis Kalanick personally hired and oversaw the three people running local operations ahead of the service’s tense first day online in France. Every one of Uber’s then-20 employees studied Parisian cab rates, or neighborhood traffic density, or French transportation laws. These days, things are less frantic. A few hours before Uber’s Nov. 12 launch in Budapest, Austin Geidt , the company’s head of global expansion, made time to talk through the process at a San Francisco cafe. A $17 billion valuation will do a lot to soothe jangled nerves.
Geidt, a 29-year-old with one employer on her résumé, helped Uber roll out in a dozen cities two years ago. Now it’s adding one every other day. Budapest marked the 100th foreign city on six continents where Uber rides are available and made Hungary the 46th country where it operates. (Uber is in about 140 cities in the U.S.) While Geidt’s team used to agonize over data on competition and demand in different cities to decide where to expand next, “At this point we go so quickly, I wouldn’t say that it particularly matters,” she says. “If we’re not there now, we’ll be there in a week.”
Geidt oversees what Uber calls its “launch playbook,” a list of business strategies and operating guidelines that have been compiled by an internal team of about 40 employees. It doesn’t cover everything: During a Nov. 14 dinner with New York journalists on the guest list, Uber’s senior vice president for business, Emil Michael, suggested the company spend $1 million to hire a team of researchers that would target critical reporters. And Uber said on Nov. 18 that it was investigating Josh Mohrer, the head of its New York office, for tracking rides taken by a BuzzFeed reporter. The playbook includes a blueprint for expansion that begins with three people, mostly locals, in each new city: a marketer, someone to recruit drivers, and a general manager who deals with area authorities and competitors and reports to Geidt. Despite the consistent regimen, she says she tries to view each city operation as its own startup.
That has to change when one of Uber’s foreign teams screws up. A brief international public-relations crisis ensued in October, when the Lyon (France) office ran a promotion offering customers a ride with an “incredibly hot chick.” The trouble blew over after executives from San Francisco stepped in to stop the ad campaign. In India, Uber’s biggest market outside the U.S., the central bank threatened to shut it down for skirting cybersecurity regulations by routing payments through a foreign subsidiary. The company announced in a Nov. 12 blog post that it would comply with Indian laws by hiring Paytm, a local mobile payments business, to set up virtual wallets for Indian users.
It’s been tougher for Uber to deal with local regulators and labor groups complaining that the company operates as an unlicensed taxi service and drains money from their transportation markets. Taxi drivers organized anti-Uber protests this summer that blocked streets in London and Western European cities. In the past six months, governments in Australia, Belgium, Germany, and the Philippines have instituted short-lived bans on the service or levied stiff fines on its drivers. Cabbies barricaded the door at the party celebrating Uber’s Milan debut. Geidt says governments “are very hesitant to see us come, often. We’re a big enough brand now that they catch on to us being there quicker than they used to.”
Geidt noticed Uber’s smartphone app shortly after its launch in 2010, when it was a black-car service confined to San Francisco. “I loved the idea,” she says, even though “I was probably too poor to be an actual customer.” Having just earned a B.A. in English from the University of California at Berkeley, she e-mailed then-CEO Ryan Graves and scored an internship in the marketing department. Later she helped set up and eventually run Uber’s first satellite operation, in New York. “She bounced around quickly enough that, all of a sudden, she was doing all parts of the operations in the city,” says Graves, now head of global operations. Soon, Geidt was opening Uber offices across the U.S. She invited Boston cabbies to the Harvard Business School library, where she held recruitment meetings while posing as a student to get a free desk and Wi-Fi. She spent the night at a tow yard in Austin, Texas, paying fines for drivers to retrieve cars impounded in a police sting that targeted unlicensed taxis.
Since taking on international expansion in 2012, Geidt has focused much of her attention on Asia. Last year, CEO Kalanick summoned her and his other lieutenants to Beijing, where they worked for two weeks to hone their plan for China, from business structure and licenses to map data and the most popular forms of payment. “Everyone we talked to said, ‘You should take four years to really research China,’ ” recalls Geidt. “And we said, ‘No, let’s just go.’ ” Uber drivers have begun to roam seven cities on the mainland this year and will add several more soon, says regional manager Candice Lo.
Uber couldn’t afford to wait. China already has two dominant taxi-booking apps, each backed by one of the country’s two biggest Internet companies, Tencent (700:HK) and Alibaba (BABA). It also faces fresh competition in the U.S., where Lyft has been slashing its prices to undercut the company. “We plan to expand internationally, but the U.S. is the biggest opportunity right now,” says Lyft CEO Logan Green.
To fuel expansion abroad, Uber is in talks to raise $1 billion on top of the $1.2 billion it announced in June, according to two people familiar with the fundraising who weren’t authorized to discuss it publicly. “Pretty soon we’re going to have more cities outside of the U.S. than inside, and we want to make big bets going forward to make sure that we’re able to continue to roll out and invest in these global cities,” says Kalanick, who won’t confirm the new round of fundraising. Local opposition notwithstanding, the ultimate aim is even grander, says Geidt: “We really do intend to be everywhere.”
