David Plouffe, (L) chats with President Barack Obama backstage at BankUnited Center at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida, on Thursday, October 11, 2012. Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post via Getty Images
Getting any startup off the ground is difficult, but things are particularly dicey when governments across the globe are working to make your app illegal.
Such is the challenge facing Uber. Each time it spreads to a new city, it faces a new front in its politically charged battle to undermine local taxi monopolies in favor of app-powered, on-demand rides. And at the middle of these myriad controversies, Uber remains a technology company racing against competitors to solve a deeply complicated engineering problem: how to bring time, space, supply, and demand into delicate alignment so that you can push a button and bring a car to your door.
It’s a bit like, say, running a campaign for President, and that’s why Uber just hired David Plouffe, who managed Barack Obama’s successful election in 2008. The logistics, economics, and politics of orchestrating a large group of people toward a common goal takes a rare expertise, and Plouffe has certainly shown he has it. As Uber’s senior vice president of policy and strategy, he is almost uniquely qualified to tackle the company’s enormously complex problems.
With $1.4 billion in financing to date, the only serious obstacle to Uber’s radical growth is the threat of regulation. To reach its goals, Uber needs a feat of political engineering that its code geniuses—including CEO Travis Kalanick—have not been able to hack. But in Plouffe—credited with spearheading the first serious application of modern analytics and e-mail outreach to presidential campaigning—Uber now has a bone fide politico that suits its data-driven culture. The hope is that he can turn out political support in the the same way its algorithms funnel drivers to the streets where they’re needed most.
“Uber has been in a campaign but hasn’t been running one,” Kalanick said in announcing Plouffe’s hiring. “That is changing now.”
The Field General Arrives
From its first days in San Francisco nearly a half-decade ago, Uber has always faced attempts to shut it down. New York, Washington, London, Paris, Berlin, Seoul. Name a world capital, and chances are, you’ll name a city where Uber has faced regulatory resistance, often underwritten by the politically connected players in the existing taxi industry.
That Uber is still operating and growing in most of those places is due mainly to Kalanick’s aggressively unapologetic willingness to defy local authorities. To date, Uber’s political strategy has mainly hinged on getting enough users to embrace the app that politicians fear alienating constituents or looking like they’re “anti-innovation.”
But consumer sentiment alone isn’t enough of a political guarantee when a billion dollars of other people’s money is on the line. As popular as Uber has become, it isn’t so much a part of the urban fabric yet that the company can depend on bottom-up citizen backlash alone to counteract the regulatory forces allied against it. By hiring Plouffe to manage what he describes as the campaign for “Uber the Candidate,” Kalanick is seeking to turn enthusiastic users of Uber’s product into a politically potent force that will rally on behalf of Uber’s existence.
“David’s background needs little introduction,” Kalanick said of Plouffe on Uber’s blog. “He is a proven field general and strategist who built the startup that elected a President.”
From Campaign to Cars
The Obama 2008 campaign is an object lesson in turning sentiment into success. Obama the candidate had a natural charisma and a compelling message that inspired excitement and optimism, two qualities in short supply in recent presidential campaigns. But Obama’s electoral success against two better-known quantities—Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary and John McCain in the general election—was only partly due to the candidate himself.
In a discussion at Harvard’s Kennedy School just a few weeks after Obama’s successful first election, Plouffe described an approach to campaigning that would make any Silicon Valley geek’s heart melt. “Obviously, a campaign’s about message delivery at the candidate level,” Ploufee said, “but at the campaign level, it is about numbers.”
Plouffe goes on to describe how the campaign on the ground would work to identify voters and collect data to game out its chances on a weekly basis. “We’d say, okay, if the election were held this week based on all our data, put it all in a blender, where are we? And obviously, with technology today, we could measure this very carefully.”
Based on that intelligence, the campaign would engage in the kinds of micro-targeting that have become the common currency of marketing in the Facebook and Google era. Replace campaign workers with drivers, and voters with riders, and Plouffe describing the way he ran the Obama campaign sounds a lot like how Uber runs its own operation. “You’ve got real-time data, and that makes you make scheduling decisions and resource-allocation decisions and where to send surrogates and you’re adjusting those by the end multiple times a day.”
Turning Out the Base
If he can use that same expertise to turn out support for Uber like he did for Obama, Plouffe can likely get Uber over the last significant hurdle to becoming the pervasive medium for transportation in the 21st century that Silicon Valley is banking it will become. The grassroots, in some sense are there: Riders who love the service but have no idea that it might be threatened by regulation. Plouffe’s resume seems perfectly geared towards bending that sentiment into, say, signing petitions and lobbying congress.
“I look forward to doing what I can right now to ensure drivers and riders are not denied their opportunity for choice in transportation due to those who want to maintain a monopoly and play the inside game to deny opportunity to those on the outside,” Plouffe said yesterday, taking a shot at the taxi industry in a statement that rode the razor’s edge between Democratic populism and Silicon Valley libertarianism.
Whatever the underlying politics, Plouffe’s arrival at Uber signals a new chapter in the company’s ground game. To survive, Uber is now about more than rides. It’s about turning out the base.
No comments:
Post a Comment