Dear Analyst #122: Designing an online version of Excel to help Uber China compete with DiDi on driver incentives with Matt Basta Dear Analyst

There are only so many ways to make Excel "fun." If you've been following this blog/podcast, stories about the financial modeling competition and spreadsheet errors that lead to catastrophic financial loss are stories that make a 1980s tool somewhat interesting to read and listen to. There are numerous tutorials and TikTok influencers who teach Excel for those who are actually in the tool day in and day out. Meet Matt Basta, a software engineer by trade. He published a story on his own blog called No sacred masterpieces which is worth reading in its entirety as its all about Excel. In this episode, we discuss highlights from Matt's time at Uber, how he built a version of Excel online to help Uber China compete with DiDi, and how Uber completely scrapped the project weeks later after DiDi acquired Uber China.















Business intelligence at Uber through the eyes of a software engineer







I don't normally speak with software engineers on the podcast, but Matt's story during Uber will resonate with anyone who works at a high-growth startup and lives in Excel. Matt's story has everything. Tech, cutthroat competition, drama, and of course, Excel.















Matt has worked at a variety of high-growth startups like Box, Uber, Stripe, and now Runway. He joined Uber in 2016 and worked on a team called "Crystal Ball." The team was part of the business intelligence team. The goal of this team was to create and develop a platform that analysts and business folks could use to figure out how much to charge for rides, how much incentives to provide to drivers, etc. All the core number crunching that makes Uber run.







As per Matt's blog post, employees were working on one of two major initiatives at Uber in 2016:









* Redesigning the core Uber app







* Uber China









As Matt told his story, it reminded me of all the news articles that came out in 2016 about Uber's rapid expansion in markets like China. The issue is that a large incumbent existed in China: DiDi. This comes up later in Matt's story.







Getting data to the city teams to calculate driver incentives







From the perspective of the Crystal Ball team, all they wanted to do was set up a data pipeline so that data about the app could be shared with analysts. Analysts would then download these files and crunch numbers in R and this process would take hours. In 2016, Uber was competing directly with DiDi to get drivers on the platform. The city team would use the data provided by the Crystal Ball team to figure out how much of an incentive to offer a driver so that the driver would choose to drive with Uber instead of DiDi for that ride.







Source: Forbes







The problem was that the city team in China was using these giant Excel files that would take a long time to calculate. In order to compete with DiDi, Uber China would need a much faster way to calculate the incentives to offer drivers. This is where Matt's team came in.







The only other "tool" the city team had at their disposal was the browser. The city team still wanted the flexibility of the spreadsheet, so Matt's team strategy was to put the spreadsheet in the browser. Now at this point,