Full Name: Lucas Groeneveld
Current Role: Regional General Manager (RGM)
Current Organisation: Uber Retail, ANZ and APAC
Last Role at PwC: Senior Manager, The Experience Centre
Time at PwC: 2007 - 2014
What’s the one career achievement you’re most proud of?
It’s difficult to choose just one. However, as a lifelong Melburnian, leading Uber’s efforts to regulate ridesharing in Victoria has been one of the highlights of my career. Back in 2016 I was the General Manager of our Rides business in Victoria, and worked closely with parliamentarians and policy makers to formally regulate ridesharing here.
As many will remember, the point-to-point (P2P) transportation landscape was broken and unreliable, with a limited supply of taxi plates that served more as an asset class than a public utility. Conversely, it was clear from our uptake and growth at the time that Uber (or similar services) were a win/win for consumers, drivers and cities. Fast forward to today, and it’s pretty unimaginable that you couldn’t just open an app and get a ride in <5 minutes.
What’s been your biggest career challenge and how have you overcome it?
There have been no shortage of challenges, but most recently launching and growing Uber’s Retail business has felt like another “deep end” moment - I had some experience in retail from consulting to that sector at PwC, but it required me to get up to speed quickly on the industry. It was also quite different to our Mobility and Restaurant delivery businesses, so there was a lot I had to learn and relearn while helping Uber develop this new muscle. Ultimately, being uncomfortable with ambiguity and uplevelling quickly (a common experience at PwC when on a new case) saw me through this.
What’s the most valuable lesson you learnt during your career at PwC and how has that helped you get to where you are today?
When I reflect on my time at PwC, there are two key areas that I think have helped me on my career to-date:
- Breadth of competency, diversity of experience: My journey at PwC saw me start in Risk, move to Operations, and then finish up at the Experience Centre. I also worked across sectors and segments during this time. My career at Uber has also spanned various roles and business units, and I’ve been able to draw on all of these foundational experiences as I’ve encountered analogous problems.
- Getting up to speed quickly, structured problem solving and communicating with impact are key to consulting, and just as applicable to running a fast-moving company like Uber. As an RGM that covers teams and geos, there’s a huge breadth of content I need to be across and constant context switching – my time in consulting definitely helped condition my brain to work this way.
What was your dream job ‘growing up’ and why?
I’m not sure how much conviction I had in it, but I do remember wanting to be a pilot. It’s perhaps why I’ve taken to airline and travel loyalty programmes so well, and ironically I type this while on a plane to our HQ in San Francisco.
What is Uber doing to ensure its customers are at the heart of its operations?
Uber is extremely customer driven. But of course, being a Marketplace-based business (2 sides on Mobility, 3 sides on Delivery) we don’t just consider the end-consumer to be our customer – how we serve delivery and driver partners and merchants is just as important.
Ultimately it starts with our company values but it’s really our operating model that enables us to succeed. Unlike other technology companies we’re moving real people and things, so we have large teams in every country we operate in to ensure that we’re fully understanding the local context/nuance and have our finger on the pulse.
We’re then able to combine that local knowledge with Uber’s global technology and infrastructure investments to optimise the millions of trips that are happening around the world each day. It also helps that we’re data driven, so behind every trip is someone looking at the p50 (the average experience) and p99 (and outlier experience) of every input that went into making that a perfect (or not so perfect) experience.
Uber has committed to becoming a fully electric, zero-emission platform by 2040. Can you share some of the key innovations we can expect to see in the future?
An all-electric future is within reach, but getting there demands more urgency from both the public and private sectors. We’re accelerating electrification and sustainability, while making it easier than ever for riders, drivers, and merchants to choose greener rides and deliveries.
For drivers we’re introducing a new AI assistant and real-life mentors to help drivers navigate all their questions about going electric. We’re making great progress in Australia with more than 5,400 electric vehicles (EVs) on platform and 2.3 million EV trips completed (25,000+ trips/day on average). While more than 5% of kms driven are in EVs, we’ve got a lot of work to do to close that gap.
For consumers we’re making Uber Green an EV-only product in 40+ cities globally, introducing a new feature to allow riders to get matched with an EV anytime one is nearby, and launching the Climate Collection to make it easier than ever to browse, buy, and get climate-conscious products on-demand with Uber.
For merchants we’re launching a global marketplace to make sustainable packaging available and affordable, and in Australia we recently unveiled a $13m three year partnership with Planet Ark to help restaurant merchants transition to reusable, recyclable, or compostable packaging options by 2030.
Tell me about Uber’s entry into consumer Retail?
Uber’s vision is to empower people to go anywhere and get anything.
During the pandemic, it became clear that consumers wanted more than just restaurant food delivered, so in November of 2020 we made a global decision to carve out retail as a standalone business unit. And while COVID accelerated it, we’re definitely seeing a continued consumer trend towards convenience, whether that be in the form of immediacy (delivered in <60 minutes) or certainty (delivered at a very specific time).
Our global retail business is now at an >$10 Billion ARR and growing at 40%+ YoY. We enable this through our marketplace (e.g. ordering your top-up shop or favourite bottle of pinot on the Uber Eats app) or through powering the 1P (first party) channels of our retail partners (e.g. ordering your groceries from Woolworths or Coles and having them fulfilled through Uber Direct).
We’re also seeing a lot of value in how we bring the rest of Uber (mobility, ads, membership, etc.) to our retail partners. But really, we’re just getting started on our ambition to help consumers get anything.
What are you reading, watching or listening to right now that excites you?
With a job that spans multiple time zones and two young children at home, my book reading days are numbered for the moment. However I enjoy listening to the ‘Acquired’ podcast when commuting or travelling.
I’ve been an ‘Acquired’ fan since they launched and it’s been great to see their efforts go mainstream - it goes behind the scenes of the biggest tech IPOs and acquisitions of all time, and the degree of research that goes into each podcast is impressive, the learnings/insights valuable, and it’s hard to find 3-4 hour podcasts that keep you engaged the whole time!
