우버가 단순한 차량 호출 및 배달 앱을 넘어 호텔 예약, 보트 대여, '대신 쇼핑하기' 등 여행 및 금융 서비스로 사업을 확장하고 있습니다. 특히 신설된 AV Labs를 통해 자율주행 데이터를 확보하며 웨이모 등 파트너 겸 경쟁사에 대한 영향력을 강화하고 있으며, 모든 것을 직접 하기보다는 전문가와의 파트너십을 통해 '모두를 위한 모든 것'을 지향하지 않는 전략을 취하고 있습니다.
번역된 본문
우버는 지난 1년 동안 대중들이 보통 떠올리는 두 가지 핵심 사업을 넘어 조용히 영역을 확장해 왔습니다. 물론 차량 호출과 배달 서비스가 여전히 중심이지만, 이제 앱을 살펴보면 익스피디어(Expedia)와 연동된 호텔 예약, '대신 쇼핑하기(shop for me)' 컨시어지 기능, 유럽에서의 보트 대여 서비스 등을 찾을 수 있습니다. 내부적으로도 많은 변화가 일어나고 있습니다. 운전자를 위한 직불카드, 추가 수익을 원하는 이들을 위한 데이터 라벨링 사이드 허슬(부업), 그리고 일반 운전자 네트워크와 분리되어 방대한 주행 데이터를 수집하도록 설계된 센서 장착 차량을 개발 중인 6개월 된 사업부인 'AV Labs' 등을 생각해 볼 수 있습니다. 우버는 이를 자율주행 파트너(우버가 지분을 보유한 곳도 포함)와의 관계를 강화하는 방안으로 설명하지만, 분명 일종의 방어 기재(hedge) 역할도 하는 것으로 보입니다. 우버는 웨이모를 필두로 이러한 파트너들과 직접 경쟁하고 있으며, 데이터 계층을 소유함으로써 우버는 레버리지와 선택지를 모두 얻을 수 있습니다. 우버가 그랩(Grab)과 같은 아시아의 슈퍼앱처럼 완전한 '만능 앱'이 될지는 미지수입니다. 하지만 이번 대담에서 우버의 사치 칸살(Sachin Kansal) 최고 제품 책임자(CPO)는 테크크런치(TechCrunch)와 함께 회사의 금융 서비스 야심, 웨이모와 점점 복잡해지는 관계, 새로운 AV Labs 데이터 운영, 그리고 AI가 승객과 운전자가 실제로 체감할 수 있는 방식으로 어떻게 나타나고 있는지 설명했습니다. 이 인터뷰는 길이와 명확성을 위해 편집되었습니다.
TC: 올해 초 호텔, 보트 대여, 그리고 더 많은 쇼핑 기능을 발표했습니다. 이 목록은 어떻게 결정되었으며, 제외된 것은 무엇인가요?
SK: 매년 우리 팀은 분명히 많은 것을 구축하고 있으며, 그중 일부는 가장 큰 무대에서 세상에 공유할 가치가 있다고 판단합니다. 올해 우리가 자연스럽게 이끌린 주제는 바로 '여행'이었습니다. 매년 우버 플랫폼에서 발생하는 15억 건의 이동 중 실제로 사용자의 거주 도시 밖에서 일어납니다. 따라서 여행이 우버 사용자에게 매우 일반적인 사용 사례라는 것을 알고 있습니다. 이번 우리의 주요 발표는 익스피디아와의 파트너십을 통해 우버에 호텔을 도입한 것이었습니다. 하지만 여행은 그보다 훨씬 더 광범위합니다. 공항에서 호텔로 이동하는 차량이 필요하고, 음식도 필요합니다. 많은 사용자로부터 룸 서비스를 이용하는 대신 우버 이츠(Uber Eats) 앱을 사용하고 있다는 얘기를 들었습니다. '대신 쇼핑하기'의 목표는 해당 매장의 전체 카탈로그가 우버 이츠에 없더라도 지역 상점에서 물건을 살 수 있도록 지원하는 것이었습니다. 제 생각에 여행은 진정으로 의자의 세 번째 다리 역할을 합니다. 우리는 차량 호출이 있었고, 그다음 배달을 추가했으며, 이제 여행을 추가하고 있습니다.
우버는 아시아의 '만능 앱'처럼 자체 금융 서비스를 제공하는 방향으로 나아가고 있나요?
금융 서비스는 우리에게 소비자는 물론 운전자, 배달 기사, 상인 등 여러 주체에 걸쳐 있습니다. 당사에는 오늘날 주로 운전자와 배달 기사에 초점을 맞춘 여러 제품이 있으며, 이를 통해 우버 프로 카드(Uber Pro card)라는 것을 제공하여 이를 직불카드로 사용하고 모든 수익금을 이체할 수 있습니다. 현재 전 세계 특정 지역의 상인을 대상으로 이러한 제품 중 일부를 실험하기 시작했습니다. 소비자에 관해서는 장기적으로 우리에게 의미가 있을지 지켜봐야 할 것입니다. 현재 소비자가 사용할 수 있는 화폐가 있는데, 우리는 이를 우버 크레딧(Uber credits)이라고 부르며 이는 멤버십 프로그램과 연결됩니다. 예를 들어 호텔의 경우, 회원은 1,000달러 거래에 대해 10%의 캐시백을 받습니다. 즉, 100달러를 크레딧으로 돌려받아 차량 호출과 배달에 사용할 수 있습니다.
우버가 자체적인 '선구매 후지불(Buy Now, Pay Later)' 제품을 출시할 가능성도 있나요?
확실하지 않습니다. 전문가는 전문가의 일을 하게 두고 싶기 때문입니다. 우리는 이미 해당 서비스를 제공하는 업계의 다른 기업들과 파트너십을 발표했으므로, 결제 시 해당 옵션을 사용할 수 있습니다. 일반적인 제품 전략 측면에서 우리는 모든 사람을 위한 모든 것(everything to everyone)이 되려고 하지 않습니다. 유럽의 보트 대여 서비스는 탭을 누르면 사용자를 다른 서비스로 연결해 줍니다.
Uber has spent the last year quietly pushing beyond the two businesses most people associate it with. There's ride-hailing, of course, and delivery, but spend time in the app and you'll now find hotel bookings powered by Expedia, "shop for me" concierge features, and boat rentals in Europe. Under the hood, so to speak, there's also a lot happening. Think debit cards for drivers, a data-labeling side hustle for these same earners looking to make more moolah, and a six-month-old, business unit called AV Labs , which is developing a fleet of sensor-equipped vehicles that's separate from Uber's regular driver network and designed to gather ever-larger amounts of driving data. Uber frames the initiative as a way to strengthen its relationships with autonomous vehicle partners, several of which it also holds equity in, but it sure looks like a hedge, as well. Uber competes directly with some of those same partners, with Waymo chief among them, and owning the data layer gives Uber both some leverage and optionality. Whether Uber becomes a full-blown "everything app" similar to some Asian super-apps like Grab, remains an open question. But in this conversation, Uber Chief Product Officer Sachin Kansal walks TechCrunch through the company's financial-services ambitions, its increasingly complicated relationship with Waymo, its new AV Labs data operation, and how AI is starting to show up in ways riders and drivers will actually notice. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. TC: You unveiled hotels, boat rentals, and more shopping features earlier this year. How did that list get made, and what didn't make the cut? SK: Every year our teams are obviously building a lot of stuff, and a subset of that we decide is worth sharing with the world on the biggest stage. This year the theme that we gravitated towards was really travel. 1.5 billion trips on the Uber platform every year actually happen outside of a user's home city, so we know that travel is something that's a very common use case for Uber users. Our headline announcement this time was actually introducing hotels on Uber as a partnership with Expedia. But travel is so much more than that — you need rides to go from the airport to the hotel, and you need food. We heard from a lot of our users that a lot of them had stopped using room service and were just using the Uber Eats app. With "shop for me," the goal was for us to enable you to shop from any local store even if that store is not available on Uber Eats with the entire catalog. Travel really is, in my opinion, the third leg of the stool — we had rides, then we added eats, and now we are adding travel. Is Uber moving toward offering its own financial services, the way "everything apps" in Asia do? Financial services for us cuts across multiple different entities — consumers, but also drivers and couriers, and merchants. We have multiple products today focused mostly on drivers and couriers, where we have what we call the Uber Pro card, which they can use as a debit card and transfer all their earnings onto. We are starting to experiment with some of those products for merchants in certain parts of the world right now. As far as consumers are concerned, we'll see if that makes sense for us in the long term. Right now there is a currency for consumers to use — we call them Uber credits — and this ties to our membership program. On hotels, for example, members get 10% cash back on a $1,000 transaction, that's $100 back as credit that you can then use on rides and eats. Would Uber ever offer its own buy now, pay later product? I'm not sure, because we want to make sure that the experts do what the experts do. We already have announced partnerships with others in the industry who are already providing that service, so that at checkout you have the ability to do that. In terms of our general product strategy, we're not trying to be everything to everyone. With boat rentals, in Europe, tapping the tab hands users off to a partner's own booking flow rather than checking out inside Uber. Is that handoff model a template for what's coming? Definitely there are some instances, especially when we are doing something new, for us to rely on our partners, because a two-way integration just does take a lot of time, and in some cases it's good for us to try before we integrate deeply. In the case of Expedia, we decided it just makes sense to integrate deeply — we built the entire UI on our own in partnership with Expedia. But in some cases it may make sense for us to hand off the rest of the experience to the experts in that field, and if you get great traction, we can always integrate them deeply. Your Uber One membership product now has 51 million members and accounts for roughly half of bookings. Do you have data showing the cross-sell actually works — that a delivery user later starts taking more rides? On the delivery side, it takes you two to three orders for you to break even the monthly fee that you pay. As members get more habituated to the program, it's increasing their frequency within the line of business they are already using. And it's also leading to more usage of the other sides of the business — we are seeing people who are mobility only also start to use delivery, and people who are delivery only also start to use mobility. Delivery has been one of the hardest businesses in tech to make profitable. Is Uber Eats still leaning on ride-hailing to stay healthy? During the early years of Uber Eats it was not profitable yet, but over the last several quarters, Uber Eats has been independently a profitable business for us, and generating a lot of profit. A story I wrote this spring framed Uber as unexpectedly competing more directly with Airbnb, which is now offering airport transfers through a partner. Do you see it that way? Who are you most focused on? There's no dearth of competitors — Lyft in the U.S., Didi and 99 in Latin America, Bolt, Ola around the world, and on delivery, DoorDash, Delivery Hero. But I only spend a very small percentage of my time thinking about that. The bigger percentage of my time, or what keeps me up at night, is are we providing our users all the value that we can provide. You recently wound down the Waymo pilot in Phoenix while scaling elsewhere. How do you keep the experience coherent when you're partnering with — and in some cities competing with — the same supplier? Phoenix was the first city that we launched with Waymo, with about a dozen cars, but our scale launches have been in Austin and Atlanta, where we have hundreds of cars with them. When we recently looked at the Phoenix pilot, we mutually decided that it doesn't make sense for us to continue. Waymo is an excellent partner of ours, but in many cities they're also a competitor. We are not in the race to be an L4 autonomy provider — what we are focusing on is laying down the race tracks so we can work with multiple players. We believe in the hybrid network, human drivers as well as autonomous vehicles in the same city, because it allows us to balance demand and supply. Regarding AV Labs, what can Uber offer autonomy partners that they don't already have? We are going to be equipping hundreds of cars with sensors, deployed through our fleet partners, and through that we'll be collecting millions of miles worth of driving data. That really helps with the long-tail problem — you want to see all the edge cases, not just the P95, P99 level. Beyond the data itself, there's so much know-how from our 10 million earners in terms of how pickups and drop-offs work. We handle 25 million lost items every single year — how do you operationally handle that in the world of autonomy? That's the kind of operational expertise we can bring. Is Uber selling driver and rider data to Gen AI companies? I would divide this into two parts. In terms of Gen AI companies, we are able to label data for them using our earner base, or through audio collection, and yes, we have co