👋 Hey, it’s Sundar! Welcome to a  paid subscriber only article of experiMENTAL: a weekly newsletter on B2C Marketing & data science how-to guides, frameworks, and stories from 15 years including early Uber. Free tier subscribers can continue reading for limited preview of the article.

Why being data driven isn’t enough

The phrase data driven appeared in the early 2010s as companies collected more data and realized they could make more informed decisions from it.

But it’s so mainstream now that it’s in the Oxford Dictionary.

In 2024, being data driven is no longer enough.

With the pace of innovation across generative A.I., cloud services, and other contributing factors, people are able to replicate technologies faster than before.

Here’s a great example:

Klarna, a large enterprise fintech announced it was rolling off Salesforce and Workday, two popular and entrenched SaaS companies. That’s likely $50M+ in savings.

This is the first point in history where Klarna can be bold enough to make this decision whether it goes through with it or not.

This means that companies must go back to the root of every good business:

Understanding their customers.

A company’s advantage can’t be tech alone but an obsession with collecting and analyzing data to identify patterns.

To optimize every touch point and create better margins.

That’s why being data driven needs to be replaced with data obsession.

To understand the difference between driven and obsession, I’ll share how Uber operates at a level that only a handful of companies in the world are at.

How Uber enabled data obsession

Data obsession starts at the top.

And at the top of Uber was a visionary leader named Travis Kalanick.

I’m not going to get into the type of person he was or the controversies around him.

From a professional perspective, this man was a genius.

Yet, so many people look at him and think he had an unstoppable ego.

But to be data obsessed (or even data driven), you have to be ego less.

By definition, you let insights drive your decisions and not your own perspective.

I’ve never seen anyone be better at this than Travis Kalanick and his leadership team.

The formula at Uber was simple:

1. Hire smart people

2. Provide access to data

3. Make smarter decisions

4. Repeat

Here’s how Uber did that.

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