The Early Podcast

This week's guest: Nick Mathews, an early Marketing Manager and launcher of Uber in Boston.

What does it take to build a global giant, one city at a time? Nick was on the ground fighting taxi cartels, throwing ice cream stunts, and building Uber’s Boston launch playbook from scratch. In this episode, he shares raw stories about Uber’s early street fights, local marketing hustle, and what he learned starti...

🚗 Inside the Rideshare Wars: The Untold Story of Lyft vs. Uber 🚗

What really happened when two of the scrappiest startups of our generation collided on the streets, fighting for drivers, riders, and the future of transportation?

In episode # 20!!! of The Early Podcast, we go INSIDE the Rideshare WARS with Nick Greenfield, Lyft’s #4 employee, and the first non-engineer at Zimride (Lyft’s original name) and...

Before Uber was a global juggernaut, it was local, it was gritty, and it was hard.

This week we interviewed Scott Gorlick, who joined Uber in 2012. He cold-emailed Travis to get the job, and helped launch Uber Atlanta from a coworking space—until they got kicked out. Then it got worse: a gun pulled in the office, driver onboarding from his apartment, and scaling so fast they accidentally became one of Apple’s...

Before the tens of billions raised, the almost $50B!! valuation... the Summer Camps... the flameout....& the Hulu doc… there was one scrappy floor in SoHo, New York — and Jesse Middleton was there at a desk. Now he tells all.

As a founding team member and co-creator of WeWork Labs, Jesse helped build WeWork from a Craigslist ad to a global phenomenon. In this episode, he breaks down how it all happened — ...

Marshall Osborne was a college kid from Indiana who landed in San Francisco with no job, no apartment, and no promise of a role—just hustle.

Within weeks, he talked his way into an internship at Uber, eventually dropping out of school and becoming the intern who took Beyoncé to Vegas and helped turn Uber into a cultural verb.

What followed was a GREAT early employee journey that will inspire everyone wh...

Frederique helped build the tools that made Uber scale, before there were dashboards, systems, or even GPS driving directions in the app.

In this episode of The Early Podcast, Max sits down with Frederique Dame, an early product leader at Uber and now a General Partner at GV (Google Ventures). They dive deep into the early chaos, the culture that made Uber magic, and how Frederique architected the driver onboa...

What do you do when you're handed a $0 marketing budget… and you're launching a credit-card-based app in a country where only 2% of people have credit cards?

Oh — and no one trusts your company?

If you're Akshay BD, you figure it out.

Follow Akshay on X: https://x.com/akshaybd

This week, I’m joined by Akshay — one of Uber India’s earliest employees — who shares the chaos of lau...

What would you do if someone offered you $1.8 million to sabotage Uber?

That’s exactly what happened to Eric Wimer, one of the early operators at Uber, who helped launch and scale the Philly and Vegas markets from scratch. In this episode of The Early Pod, Eric reveals the untold story of the bribe, the chaos of the early days, and the wild tactics Uber used to win — including creating a fake limo company to outsmart corru...

My most important guest on The Early Podcast: MY MOM :).

In honor of Mother's Day... and happy Mother's Day to all the moms out there!!

Meet Jay Crowley — she left home at 17, got spotted by CBS Records without a college degree, lost nearly everything on a Quiznos franchise, then reinvented herself in her 40s and built a thriving real estate business from scratch.

This episode is about resilienc...

Early Pod's first non-Uber interview — and it’s a good one! Introducing TWITTER's 30th employee: Ryan Sarver.

Ryan joined Twitter as employee #30 and helped scale it from a chaotic startup to a global platform. He led the API and developer platform, lived through the explosive growth, and saw the company up close as it missed major moments like Instagram, DMs, and video.

We get into:

Welcome to Episode 11! With this one… we’re diving into one of the most controversial features in Uber history: SURGE PRICING.

Meet Kevin Novak — a physicist turned data scientist who was asked to solve the impossible: how do you get enough drivers on the road… exactly when you need them?

After joining in 2011 as Uber employee # 21... and armed with no team and no time, Kevin built what became known as surge pricing — and then wat...

With this episode... we’re going deep into the trenches — a little dog pee, thousands of drivers protesting in Asia, and a $30-a-night Airbnb in Detroit… plus all the shenanigans that came with it.

Chan Park joined Uber in 2012 with a limited playbook for expansion and one goal: launch cities as FAST AS POSSIBLE. On day one, he was told, “Why aren’t you in Sacramento?”—and things only got wilder from there.

For this episode, we’re going EARLY EARLY… Uber employee #3!

Ryan McKillen helped build Uber from the ground up — literally. He walked in on day one to find a stack of pristine coding books… and one beat-up Spanish dictionary.

“Why?”

“All the code’s in Spanish. Welcome to Uber.”

Ryan went from CPA to self-taught engineer, joined Uber pre-hypergrowth, helped launch Paris in 5 weeks, and was there for the infamous cease & desist mome...

Uber Eats would NOT be the business it is today without Alyssa Pollack.

Diagnosed with stage 4 cancer as a teenager, Alyssa’s mom told her: “Today we cry. Tomorrow, we fight.” That mentality shaped everything — from surviving the unthinkable to scaling Uber's driver operations, helping launch Uber Eats, and now leading her own startup as CEO of Fellow.

In this episode, we dive into:

• A...

How Rachel Holt Helped Fight for Ridesharing in DC and beyond | Early Podcast Ep. 7

Recorded in person, in New York City!

In this episode of Early, Max Crowley sits down with Rachel Holt — one of the earliest and most impactful operators at Uber and one of the company's first General Managers. Rachel shares never-before-heard stories from the company’s early days, including regulatory showdowns in ...

💥 It doesn’t get grittier than Jesse Lucas. From hustling his way into Napster, waiting tables at Olive Garden to stay afloat, and nearly getting fired at Uber before he even had the job... he ultimately helped scale one of the most iconic startups ever. Jesse’s story is one of resilience, persistence, and sheer determination.

In this episode of The Early Podcast, Jesse sits down with Max Crowley to talk abou...

New York City is notoriously challenging for upstarts when battling with incumbents and even City Hall. It wasn't an easy journey, but in part thanks to Josh Mohrer, you can now use Uber throughout New York. As one of Uber's early employees, Josh transformed Uber from just 50 cars into a transportation giant, overcoming regulatory hurdles, intense media scrutiny, and political battles.

🚀 From Early Em...

Missed a Huge Opportunity? Here’s How to Bounce Back.

Imagine turning down a role as one of Facebook’s first employees... Sam Gellman did. He knew it was a mistake the moment he made it. But instead of letting that define him, he went on to help launch Uber across the world—building cities from scratch, battling regulators, and even getting arrested for doing his job.

🚀 From Almost Facebook to...

🚀 Inside Uber’s China Expansion & the Wild Early Days of Asia – with Candice Lo 🚀

In this episode of The Early Podcast, I sit down with Candice Lo, one of Uber’s earliest international expansion leaders, who played a key role in scaling Uber across Asia and launching the company in China—one of the most ambitious and chaotic expansions in startup history.

Candice started at Uber as a laun...