 "India is a super important market for Travis and Uber, says top exec")
After having lost China, Uber, the ride hailing app has stepped up focus on India, the last open market, where it is battling local rival Ola. While it has over $3.5 billion in cash to pump and grab market share over Ola, Apurva Dalal, the head of engineering for Uber India, in an interview with Alnoor Peermohamed says the key for winning the market would be in using technology.
"The focus is there and there’s a lot of attention being given to the Indian market. I’m in meetings with Uber CEO Travis Kalanick every two weeks on how the Indian market is doing and where are the issues," says Dalal. Edited Excerpts:
One of the things we hear from people is there’s no real innovation from Uber in India, just features that are picked up from the competition. What’s your take on this?
India engineering is fairly new. Think of us as a start-up that has just started hiring and ramping up. The point of setting up engineering in India was because we believe that these regions are different from what we do in the US and we need the ability to move extremely fast and address the needs of the region.
What we build for India applies to the rest of Asia. For example cash (payments) was by no means a quick fix. We had to rethink our entire experience. It’s the same with dial in Uber — it’s a single page, it assumes you are gonna take UberGO, and pay by cash. It directly connects the driver and the customer and was an India-first innovation. UberDost too was all about people referring good driver partners to Uber, helping them find employment and livelihood, that was very much an India first thing. It has now become a big hit in Peru and Jakarta too.
A lot of these innovations that are happening in India are being used worldwide and the team in India is completely responsible for the road-maps. But it only gets better from here. Uber has been in India for more than three years but engineering is barely a year old. So give us some time, we’re hiring the best, we’re looking at this as an engineering hub for Uber.
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From a hiring perspective, Uber had said it would get up to 100 engineers quickly. Have you hit that number?
Our game isn’t to hire hundreds of thousands of people and shift secondary work here. We hire the best because we aren’t building an army of foot soldiers, but we’re building a very specialised SWAT team. We are not close to 100 yet, but our plan is to get there by sometime next year. We are not going to compromise on the quality.
We are also looking aggressively in other regions such as the US for people who want to move back. Uber believes in transfer and mobility of its employees and there have been a lot of cases of Indians who are at Uber (in San Francisco) who want to come back.
Ola made an interesting announcement with its Ola Play platform and they’re clearly trying to woo developers to jump onto it. How is Uber looking to woo India’s developer ecosystem and how important is it for the company to tap the country’s growing developer base?
It is important to have a developer ecosystem. The good news is that the entire Uber stack that we have built, the technology we have is fairly advanced. If you go to Snapdeal or BookMyShow you can book an Uber from there. Even though we haven’t done a whole lot of it in India, we are still working with partners. Our goal is still first to find out what the consumers need and make sure they’re satisfied. In India we are working a lot with selective dominant partners and we believe they they already have that consumer base. In some ways our growth has been so aggressive that we’ve been working to ensure our infrastructure scales to match it.
I’d say India has thrown up one of the biggest challenges for any ride hailing company. Amazon had to adapt to a marketplace model, so they were forced to adapt. With ride hailing, surge has been banned and one of Uber’s biggest innovations has gone out the window. How are you going to solve that? Is there something you’re working on?
So we are looking at overall marketplace efficiency and the matching of demand and supply is a key area of focus for us. There’s sort of a good news, bad news scenario and the bad news is that currently the demand and supply in India, due to various factors such as how drivers take a decision to dispatch or finding the right route, there’s a big mismatch but a lot of it we can improve around our marketplace efficiency. It’s not about us wanting to charge surge pricing; our first goal is with the existing supply and demand that we have. Of course we want to grow both of them non-linearly, but in keeping up with that growth we have to ask ourselves: can we match them better and can we be more efficient.
There’s a tremendous amount of juice which we can extract right there. Uber is in some ways a data analytics company hidden behind these simple apps that you see. We have so much data on why India is such a different market and that’s why our efficiency is poor and that’s why surge comes up. A lot of what is happening in India is centred around improving estimated time of arrivals and pickup experience for riders, and similarly how do you take drivers to areas where there is more demand.
We operate in 450 cities in the world but within India also we know which cities have hotspots and when. So with that there’s a tremendous amount of data and with that pushing some of these things out there, including assisting drivers. We obviously respect government regulations, and I think we are going to work on so many innovations around making this marketplace efficient that I think not having surge is not such a big thing to worry about.
What do you think is going to happen in an Indian scenario? Localisation is going to be big, but how are you going to take some of these innovations abroad?
Something like enabling cash payments was a hotly debated topic in our company because Travis and everyone else felt that it introduced inconvenience. Our whole philosophy has been to create magic for the riders, but a rider taking out his or her wallet or purse to pay for trips was not. But we adapted to it and said that India needs cash and we did some quick experiments and saw that cash works really well and it turned out that cash payments today is in many countries.
What you are talking about is a bigger point. As in for us to be profitable in India we have to really think out of the box because the pricing and other things are already rock bottom. But if we can solve it here, then taking this to other places is a cakewalk. So it’s not just payments, but across the board where we are thinking similar to how Paytm has been fairly good, but let’s see what else we can do. As you might be aware, the National Payments Corporation of India has launched the Unified Payments Interface so we’re looking at things like that and seeing if it can be a big thing for us. We want to come up with things that are efficient for India first, they will apply to Asia and maybe to the rest of the world also.
One of the biggest assumptions everyone made when Uber exited China was that the company will turn its entire focus on winning India. How true has that been?
In some ways, Travis and team had seen this (India potential) before the China situation happened. We invested in the engineering centre in India in January or February. So India is a super important market for Travis and for Uber. It’s important from the standpoint that we can do some groundbreaking innovation from here for India that will apply to the rest of the world. I think we cannot overstate how important India is from a talent standpoint and about the kind of things we can do from here. The focus is there and there’s a lot of attention being given to the Indian market. I’m in meetings with Travis every two weeks on how the Indian market is doing and where are the issues. Here the philosophy is very different: India is an important market for us and let’s solve the problem for a billion plus people in transportation.
There are a lot of people calling for India to shut itself to foreign companies such as Uber and Amazon, similar to China. Even if this happens, do you think technology will prevail?
I always think there are viewpoints on both sides, but for me, and I say this as an Uber representative, it’s about customers. Flipkart vs Amazon or Uber vs Ola, at the end of the day competition is good for customers, it keeps us on our toes. There are good things we do, there are good things the competition does, but we can always try out better ways to do things. Technology is always at the centre of it. I don’t think it’s just about companies with deep pockets being successful. I think we can dig into this and see companies with deep pockets that weren’t successful because their technology was not up to snub. Uber is the complete opposite and we’re trying to innovate and figure out these markets, be it India or Asia. So I think the playing field is levelled enough from that standpoint. It will be tech vs tech and the competition is good in that sense, but the customers will decide in the end. So yes, I do think technology will be at the centre of this battle.