For this exercise, I looked at the Uber 2008 pitch deck. The slides effectively show the problem by highlighting several issues with the cab service at the time, including long wait times and no pickup guarantee due to a lack of GPS coordination, a lack of two-way communication between drivers and riders, and low salaries for taxi drivers. To prove this problem is real, the deck presented long wait times for cabs and car services, a graph displaying the increasing cost of medallions over time and the low salary of drivers, and a comparison of miles per gallon efficiency between common cab cars and the types of cars that would be used in the UberCab fleet. The size of the market is listed as professionals in American cities, with an initial launch in San Francisco. The increasing taxi and limousine market in the United States is also shown for the past ten years, with the most recent annual figure listed as $4.2 billion. Additionally, I appreciated how the deck listed less obvious potential use cases, such as trips to and from bars and airports, working while commuting, and transporting kids and elderly individuals. One question an investor might still have after looking at this deck is how potential users would be vetted to become members, especially given that membership restricted to respectable clientele was listed as a beneficial differentiator. Explaining this process could help investors better understand how UberCab would approach trust and safety, an important factor with the new addition of location sharing. One thing that I will steal for my Sanity Pitch next week is the “Key Differentiators” slide that explicitly lists how the UberCab concept differs from yellow cabs, effectively showing the value of the new service compared to competitors.
