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Entrepreneurs are invited to the 424th FREE online 1Mby1M mentoring roundtable on Tuesday, November 20, 2018, at 8 a.m. PST/11 a.m. EST/5 p.m. CET/9:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious...

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Stoop is looking to provide readers with what CEO Tim Raybould described as “a healthier information diet.”

To do that, it’s launched an iOS and Android app where you can browse through different newsletters based on category, and when you find one you like, it will direct you to the standard subscription page. If you provide your Stoop email address, you’ll then be able to read all your favorite newsletters in the app.

“The easiest way to describe it is: It’s like a podcast app but for newsletters,” Raybould said. “It’s a big directory of newsletters, and then there’s the side where you can consume them.”

Why newsletters? Well, he argued that they’re one of the key ways for publishers to develop a direct relationship with their audience. Podcasts are another, but he said newsletters are “an order of magnitude more important” because you can convey more information with the written word and there are lower production costs.

That direct relationship is obviously an important one for publishers, particularly as Facebook’s shifting priorities have made it clear that they need to “establish the right relationship [with] readers, as opposed to renting someone else’s audience.” But Raybould said it’s better for readers too, because you’ll spend your time on journalism that’s designed to provide value, not just attract clicks: “You will find you use the newsfeed less and consume more of your content directly from the source.”

“Most content [currently] is distributed through a third party, and that software is choosing what to surface next — not based on the quality of the content, but based on what’s going to keep people scrolling,” he added. “Trusting an algorithm with what you’re going to read next is like trusting a nutritionist who’s incentivized based on how many chips you eat.”

So Raybould is a fan of newsletters, but he said the current system is pretty cumbersome. There’s no one place where you can find new newsletters to read, and you may also hesitate to subscribe to another one because it “crowds out your personal inbox.” So Stoop is designed to reduce the friction, making it easy to subscribe to and read as many newsletters as your heart desires.

Raybould said the team has already curated a directory of around 650 newsletters (including TechCrunch’s own Daily Crunch) and the list continues to grow. Additional features include a “shuffle” option to discover new newsletters, plus the ability to share a newsletter with other Stoop users, or to forward it to your personal address.

The Stoop app is free, with Raybould hoping to eventually add a premium plan for features like full newsletter archives. He’s also hoping to collaborate with publishers — initially, most publishers will probably treat Stoop readers as just another set of subscribers, but Raybould said the company could provide access to additional analytics and also make signing up easier with the app’s instant subscribe option.

And the company’s ambitions go beyond newsletters. Raybould said Stoop is the first consumer product from a team with a larger mission to help publishers — they’re also working on OpenBundle, a bundled subscription initiative with a planned launch in 2019 or 2020.

“The overarching thing that is the same is the OpenBundle thesis and the Stoop thesis,” he said. “Getting publishers back in the role of delivering content directly to the audience is the antidote to the newsfeed.”

Sramana Mitra: In the last example, you have talked about protocol and security in the context of the developed market and one of your hotshot investments. What about the application side of the...

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Ahead of Airbnb’s expected initial public offering next year, the home-sharing startup announced more than $1 billion in revenue during Q3 2018.

Airbnb says this was its strongest quarter to date, where it saw “substantially more” than $1 billion in revenue.

Airbnb, however, has been without a permanent chief financial officer since February, when Laurence Tosi left the company amid tension between him and Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky. Since then, Airbnb Head of Financial Planning and Analysis Ellie Mertz has been serving as the interim CFO.

According to CNBC, Airbnb is on track to be profitable for the second year in a row on an EBITDA basis.

“Airbnb’s mission is to create a world where anyone can belong anywhere and we will continue to offer updates regarding our work in the weeks and months to come,” Airbnb wrote in a memo today.

Adding comments to your code is nothing new. But what if you could @-mention your co-workers and start a thread about a specific part of your code? Meet CodeStream, a Y Combinator-backed startup that wants to do just that.

The best way to discuss some content is right next to the content itself. That’s why Google Docs annotations, PowerPoint comments and Word revisions are so useful. Slack shouldn’t be the home to all discussions.

And yet, collaboration between two developers too often start with a private conversation on Slack. CodeStream doesn’t want to replace git commits or native comments in your code. But it adds a useful conversation layer on top of your code.

If you want to involve someone else, you first select a text and start a discussion. It creates a thread with your coding block as the original post. If you link CodeStream with your Slack instance, it starts a thread in the right Slack channel. You can @-mention someone, copy and paste a few lines of code and more.

If a developer gets mentioned, they can click on the thread and CodeStream opens up the right file at the right line. Even if two developers aren’t on the same branch, they’ll both be looking at the same line of code — even if there’s some new code in one branch.

Months later, if your code base evolved, your conversation threads will still be there. At any time, you can look at past conversations and understand why something has been done this way.

Right now, CodeStream supports VS Code. After installing CodeStream, you can split up your IDE in two columns with your main coding window on the left and CodeStream threads on the right.

In the future, the company plans to add support for more IDEs, such as Visual Studio, JetBrains editors and Atom. CodeStream is still in beta so it’s free for now.

The company recently raised a $3.2 million funding round from S28 Capital with PJC also participating. Additional investors include Y Combinator, Steve Sordello, Mark Stein and David Carlick.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk a little bit about how you operate. If you put in $25,000 to $50,000, do you operate with a syndicate that would bring in the rest? Do you lead a syndicate? Do you follow...

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Todd Greene: From Athenahealth all the way to New York Presbyterian Hospital are built on PubNub. Our technology helps them create ways for doctors and patients to collaborate within a chat...

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This week, Qualtrics International ditched its IPO plans and agreed to an $8 billion acquisition by SAP. Qualtrics was bootstrapped for ten years before it raised venture funding. With this...

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TechCrunch is in the heart of Japan and we’ve been hearing from some of Tokyo’s brightest entrepreneurs competing to win the Battlefield startup competition here. We’ve whittled down the group of 20 startups that have presented onstage for our judges, and we’re proud to announce the winner of TechCrunch Battlefield Tokyo 2018.

The winner is Musca!

The startup is looking to leverage the simple housefly as a solution to the global food crisis, helping curb starvation by creating high-quality organic fertilizer and animal feed in a manner that’s much quicker than existing methods. The company’s secret weapon is a breed of flies that the company claims is more resilient and more effective. The larva help break down and dry out animal excrement, which is used as high-grade fertilizer, while the larva are used as feed for birds and fish. This process takes just a week, compared to the 2-3 months other solutions take.

Musca was selected after impressing our expert judges in their first round of presentation before being selected for a second round alongside the teams from Job Rainbow, Kuraseru, Aeronext, Pol and Eco-Pork.

Musca will take home a check for 1 million yen and bragging rights as one of the top young startups in Japan.

Kenya’s Twiga Foods has raised $10 million from investors led by the International Finance Corporation to add processed food and fast-moving consumer goods to its product line-up.

The startup has built a B2B platform to improve the supply chain from farmers to markets. Twiga Foods now aims to scale additional merchandise on its digital network that coordinates pricing, payment, quality control and logistics across sellers and vendors.

CEO and co-founder Grant Brooke sees “a growth horizon…to build a B2B Amazon,” with produce as the base.

“If we can build a business around fresh fruit and vegetables, everything else after that is much simpler to add on,” he told TechCrunch.

“Fresh food and vegetables gives you clients that are ordering every two days, and now that’s paying for access to vendors and a proper way to be on every street,” said Brooke.

“It’s now much easier to lay things over that that would have been very expensive to get to end retailers.” In addition to the processed food FMCG it will add now, CEO Grant Brooke named household goods, such as light bulbs that stock and sell in lower volumes than produce, as something the startup could include in the future.     

The $10 million IFC-led investment — co-led by TLcom Capital — comes in the form of convertible notes, available later as equity, according to Wale Ayeni, regional head of IFC’s Africa VC practice. As part of the deal, Ayeni will join Twiga Foods’ board.

Of the decision to fund the startup, Ayeni indicated IFC likes what the company’s already done in “figuring out a way to service a mass market with a digital platform focused on food in a sector that’s not really been touched,” he said. Another factor was Twiga’s prospects to create additional revenue by improving B2B supply chain for FMCG and other consumer products.

Co-founded in Nairobi in 2014 by Brooke and Kenyan Peter Njonjo, Twiga Foods serves around 2,000 outlets a day with produce through a network of 13,000 farmers and 6,000 vendors. Parties can coordinate goods exchanges via mobile app using M-Pesa mobile money for payment.

The company has reduced typical post-harvest losses in Kenya from 30 percent to 4 percent for produce brought to market on the Twiga network, according to Brooke.

“That’s savings we can offer the outlets and better pricing we can offer the farmers,” he said.

Twiga Foods generates revenues from margins on the products it buys and sells. As an example, the company could buy bananas at around 19 shillings ($.19) a kilo and sell at 34 ($.34) shillings a kilo.

“Our margin is how efficient we are at moving products between those two elements,” and the company purchases from farmers at roughly 10 percent higher than Kenya’s traditional produce middlemen, according to Brooke.

Agtech has become a prominent startup sector in Africa. A number of companies, such as Ghana’s Agrocenta and Nigeria’s Farmcrowdy, have raised VC for apps that coordinate payments, logistics and working capital across the continent’s farmers and food markets.

In 2017, Twiga Foods raised a $10.3 million Series A round lead by Wamda Capital. Earlier this year the startup partnered with IBM Africa to introduce to its network of vendors a blockchain-enabled finance working capital platform.

With the new investment and product expansion, Twiga Foods will explore offering to its client network additional financial services. The startup doesn’t divulge revenue information, but “profitability is on the horizon for us,” said Brooke.

Twiga Foods will maintain its focus primarily on Kenya, but “we’re starting to research and dabble in Tanzania,” according to Brooke.

The startup doesn’t plan to move beyond B2B to direct online retail. “I don’t think B2C e-commerce is viable on the continent once you factor in job size and cost of acquisition versus lifetime value,” said Brooke. He also named the high cost of marketing: “In B2C e-commerce space you really have to be in the advertising space. Our clients are ordering every two days with no marketing budget,” said Brooke.

So for the time being, Twiga Foods aims to stick with improving the supply chain for products between Kenya’s buyers and sellers.

Anyone who has experience in the service or retail industry knows swapping shifts can be a logistical nightmare that leaves employees in trouble with management or stuck working during a friend’s birthday party. As a former Old Navy “sellebrity” myself, I can confirm there’s a huge need for an efficient tool to solve this problem.

That’s where Shyft, a Seattle-based startup that helps connect shift workers, comes in. Using Shyft, employees can message each other, pick up each other’s shifts and ultimately earn more money by picking up available slots that might have otherwise gone unstaffed.

The startup has raised a fresh round of funding — a $6.5 million Series A co-led by Ignition Partners and Madrona Venture Group — to continue developing its workforce management tool. As part of the financing, Ignition managing partner Bob Kelly and Madrona managing director S. Somasegar will join its board of directors.

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Shyft co-founder and chief executive officer Brett Patrontasch got the idea for the web and mobile app for workers from his last company, called Scholars at your Service, which employed 250 students-turned house painters. The students had no way of messaging or communicating with one another aside from their personal phone lines.

“It kind of seemed obvious that enterprise social should extend to shift workers,” Patrontasch told TechCrunch. “We are trying to bring a really consumer-friendly mobile experience to the front lines. [Employees] need products that solve their problems and we are really dedicated to helping that worker.”

So far, Shyft has partnered with Gap Inc. to provide the service to workers at its fleet of retail stores, which include Old Navy, Banana Republic and Athleta. Patrontasch says Shyft works with a “handful” of other national retailers, too.

Shyft, a Techstars accelerator graduate, previously raised $1.5 million in seed funding from Madrona, Flying Fish Partners’ co-founder Heather Redman, former Seattle Seahawks offensive lineman Russell Okung and former Major League Baseball player Edgar Martinez.

Ten years ago the iOS App Store launched — and the mobile revolution was off. Entrepreneurs everywhere rallied to take advantage, building category-defining consumer companies like Twitter, Uber, Lyft and Square, among many others.

There’s no better time for an entrepreneur to start a company than when a new platform like mobile emerges. The rising tide in these moments becomes a tsunami: Eager customers descend on services through word of mouth and new acquisition channels; there’s outsized press interest; and sales take off in part due to growth of the platform itself.

Now is not one of these periods. Mobile appears mature, and the next great enabling platform is still just past the horizon. That’s why many early-stage VCs have shifted their focus away from consumer and to other new enabling technologies, such as autonomous vehicles, blockchain and AI/ML.

I have a different view. I think now is a great time to build consumer companies, even without a new platform. There are three reasons for this. First, the internet has created big problems for humans, organizations and society, which entrepreneurs can attack at scale. Second, the first wave of mobile-enabled companies have laid a foundation — including processes, seasoned executives and business models — that new entrepreneurs can borrow. And third, mobile technology is still changing and evolving.

Let’s take a closer look at all three.

Solving big problems

The last wave of breakout companies created interactive platforms (Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, etc.) that have entertained many. They didn’t solve big societal problems. There’s now a big need — and big opportunity — for companies that can help people save time, money and sanity, even as they build great businesses.

Most of us now realize the major problems that a connected, mobile, always-on world has wrought. These include:

Income inequality. Lower-income Americans are struggling more than ever. Entrepreneurs should be thinking of ways to help folks where they need it the most: the pocketbook. That might mean unlocking found money, ensuring that available financial resources are being used wisely or saving consumers from the growing number of “gotchas” imposed by financial institutions.Too many choices. When you can buy or choose anything, it’s hard to pick what you actually want. There are wide-open opportunities for concierges, curation and trusted guides.A lack of intimacy. With everything online and available at the touch of a keypad, genuine human interaction has become more rare. There’s a need for companies that can provide real care and curation for matters that affect our daily lives.

Newly available resources

After a decade of building companies for mobile, there are now untold stories, battle scars and people available for future companies to learn from. This makes it easier for startups to assemble playbooks and experienced teams. It also reduces the downside risk for investors, opening new paths to capital for companies that need it.

For instance, it’s now clear that consumer brands must define, own and curate an end-to-end experience. A great new example is GOAT, the online sneakerhead marketplace. Faced with a sneaker market full of rampant knock-offs, the founders invested in a capital- and time-intensive process to manually inspect every shoe for authenticity. The result is an experience that every sneakerhead loves and a breakthrough consumer brand.

There are also lots of executives and teams that know how to lead and manage complex operations, especially on the ground. This is crucial to scale logistically complex ideas like Opendoor, Instacart and others.

The other thing needed to help scale these companies is capital. And right now, there are two particularly relevant new kinds of investors: 1) mega equity funds like SoftBank Vision Fund, and 2) alternative lending funds that provide non-dilutive capital to companies to finance the acquisition of traditional assets. Those capital sources enable companies like Opendoor (disclosure: I’m a personal investor) to own and manage a truly delightful end-to-end experience.

Mobile today is not mobile tomorrow

Mobile devices have come a long way over the last decade. And there will be many more meaningful improvements in the near future, allowing for new uses and new companies.

I anticipate breakthroughs that will boost the ability of the chips and subsystems on a phone to perform optimally for far longer. Right now, these are throttled due to heating issues and other problems. As companies solve these issues, they’ll create order of magnitude improvements on what our phones are capable of, bringing technologies like VR and AR, to take two examples, far forward into everyday use.

On the network side, 5G and subsequent buildouts will meaningfully change what kinds of bandwidth we can handle, enabling even more data and compute to be in the cloud.

Mobile today is about one-to-many broadcast platforms like Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. Tomorrow’s great consumer companies will leverage a better vector: one-to-one customer intimacy. Companies like Grove Collaborative (disclosure: Mayfield is an investor) are experiencing hypergrowth in part by using real people connecting with consumers over text to bring a curated, personalized experience to shopping for household staples. I expect this to be a major trend, with the companies that earn the right to communicate more with customers the ones that win.

Building a breakout consumer platform will be more complex, more challenging and often more capital-intensive than it was for certain titans of the prior generation. But for those with the vision and substance to bring a valuable service to the world that solves real problems, the resources and emerging technologies will be there to help create the next groundbreaking consumer brand.

Sramana Mitra: What about infrastructure in the developing world? Brock Pierce: Access to capital is one of the main challenges that governments have around the world. They have to use their balance...

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FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb has revealed his plans to combat underage use of e-cigs and nicotine, which has grown 78 percent among high school students from 2017 to 2018.

The commissioner today announced a plan that would remove all flavored electronic nicotine delivery system products — with the exception of tobacco, mint, menthol or non-flavored products — from any store where children under the age of 18 can see them.

So what does this mean for Juul, a company that reached a $10 billion valuation 4x faster than Facebook and currently owns more than 70 percent of the e-cig market?

One result is that Juul Labs is likely now just as desperate for minors to quit vaping as the FDA. The commissioner has made it abundantly clear that if he doesn’t see a significant decrease in underage use, he’s willing to pull the plug on the e-cig industry.

“I could take more aggressive steps,” Gottlieb said in a written statement. “I could propose eliminating any application enforcement discretion to any currently marketed ENDS product, which would result in the removal of ALL such products from the marketplace. At this time, I am not proposing this route, as I don’t want to foreclose opportunities for currently addicted adult smokers. But make no mistake. If the policy changes that we have outlined don’t reverse this epidemic, and if the manufacturers don’t do their part to help advance this cause, I’ll explore additional actions.”

Yes, it seems remarkable that we may live in a world where cigarettes, the country’s leading cause of preventable death, are available at grocery stores but e-cigarettes, which are said to be 95 percent less dangerous, are illegal.

But that’s exactly what might happen if the government, e-cig manufacturers and consumers don’t work together to end underage use of nicotine.

Though some critics would argue otherwise, Juul has maintained that it never intended to sell to minors. Which doesn’t change the fact that the company’s revenue is largely dependent on the nicotine addicted as a category.

The American economy was essentially created upon the back of Big Tobacco. And 50 years ago, the industry got away with marketing to young people and creating several generations of addicted adults to what may have been the most successful consumer product ever. To say that it was lucrative would be an understatement. It still is.

Fiscally, would Juul enjoy being the next Philip Morris? Undoubtedly. But it would rather be the next Nicoderm CQ or Nicorette than be illegal. Hell yes! Right now, the company is still hanging in there. But the only way to prevent the company from being officially banned in the U.S. is to find a way to get kids to stop vaping.

For this reason, Juul Labs is going a few steps further than the FDA’s new policy. Not only is the company removing non-tobacco flavors from convenience stores or other stores where people under 18 can shop, but it’s also removing all non-tobacco flavors from vape shops and age-restricted specialty stores. From here on out, the only place to buy Cucumber, Creme, Fruit and Mango (the most popular flavor) Juul pods is on the Juul website.

The company will also increase its secret shopper program from 500 visits/month to 2,000 visits/month at the more than 90,000 stores where Juul products are sold.

Juul’s plan, announced Tuesday, also includes removing the company’s Instagram and Facebook channels, and limiting its Twitter account to non-promotional information.

Alongside cracking down on flavored ENDS products, Gottlieb is also looking into banning from the market combustible menthol cigarettes and all flavored cigars. Mint and menthol ENDS products could also be on the chopping block.

“I’m deeply concerned about the availability of menthol-flavored cigarettes,” said Gottlieb in a written statement. “I believe these menthol-flavored products represent one of the most common and pernicious routes by which kids initiate on combustible cigarettes.”

Not only does the masking effect of menthol make combustible menthol cigarettes more attractive to youth, but Gottlieb went on to say that “they exacerbate troubling disparities in health related to race and socioeconomic status” and “disproportionately and adversely affect underserved communities.”

For these reasons, the FDA is taking a hard stance on menthol combustible cigarettes and flavored cigars, a move that will surely mobilize big tobacco in yet another battle in their decades-long war against regulators. Until restrictions can be enforced on these combustible products, however, the FDA is allowing menthol and mint-flavored ENDS products to be sold in convenience stores as well as vape shops.

But Gottlieb will be keeping a close watch on it:

“I’m also aware that there are potentially important distinctions even between mint- and menthol-flavored e-cigarette products,” he wrote. “I’m particularly concerned about mint-flavored products, based on evidence showing its relative popularity, compared to menthol, among kids. So, I want to be clear that, in light of these concerns, if evidence shows that kids’ use of mint or menthol e-cigarettes isn’t declining, I’ll revisit this aspect of the current compliance policy.”

In response to the FDA’s announced plan, a Juul Labs spokesperson had this to say:

Commissioner Gottlieb has made it clear that “preventing youth initiation on nicotine is a paramount imperative.” As we said earlier in the week, the numbers tell us underage use of e-cigarette products is a problem that requires immediate action. That is why we implemented our action plan. We are committed to working with FDA, state Attorneys General, local municipalities, and community organizations as a transparent and responsible partner in this effort.

The FDA statement, which is more than 4,000 words, thoroughly explains that the agency is trying to strike a balance between ensuring adult smokers have an alternative through ENDS and protecting a generation of young people from becoming addicted to nicotine.

In light of the FDA’s opposition to menthol, Gottlieb addresses the distinction between allowing menthol/mint and tobacco-flavored ENDS into convenience stores opposed to other flavors:

This distinction among flavors seeks to maintain access for adult users of these products, including adults who live in rural areas and may not have access to an age-restricted location, while evidence of their impacts continues to develop. It also recognizes that combustible cigarettes are currently available in menthol in retail locations that are not age-restricted. This approach is informed by the potential public health benefit for adult cigarette smokers who may use these ENDS products as part of a transition away from smoking.

As far as online sales go, the FDA is looking to ensure that all flavored ENDS products sold online go through a rigorous age-verification process.

Gottlieb also addressed the potential for new products to reverse the growth of underage ENDS use, and said that the agency would work to make the application review process more efficient.

“In the coming months, CTP plans to issue additional policies and procedures to further make sure that the process for reviewing these applications is efficient, science-based and transparent,” said Gottlieb. “We’ll also explore how to create a process to accelerate the development and review of products with features that can make it far less likely that kids can access an e-cigarette.”

Juul Labs has briefly discussed its vision for a next-generation e-cig, which the company has been working on for a year. The device would incorporate Bluetooth, letting users monitor and control their nicotine intake. However, Bluetooth might also allow for geofencing to prevent kids from using the product at school, as well as a smartphone-based lock that would only allow the Juul to be used by someone who has verified they’re over 21.

Manik Gupta got his first taste of solving logistics nightmares when, fresh out of college, he was delivering Palm Pilots around Singapore. He’d started a precursor to Groupon called BuyItTogether. “We were a full-stack marketplace where we were also delivering the goods. That’s what caused us to not have good profit margins. Actually, zero profit margins,” he recalls with a laugh.

His new gig isn’t earning profits either. Uber lost nearly $1 billion last quarter. But the company sees Gupta’s experience with delivery and maps as crucial to building an app that caters to people’s every desire so they never stray and keep earning it money. That’s why today Uber announced that it’s promoted its VP of maps and marketplace Manik Gupta to become its new chief product officer.

“We look at ourself at Uber as the starting point of all your transportation needs” Gupta tells me. “Here’s a company that’s causing this interesting change in user behavior. With my own knowledge and capability, I thought I could help the company get to the next level of understanding the real world, which is very different from digital habits.” His first big projects will be augmenting GPS for more accurate pickups and making Uber’s new rider and driver loyalty program work in every market.

From entrepreneurship to the massive supply chain of HP, to the top of Google India and now at Uber, Gupta is one of those technologists who lives to eliminate frustration. He framed nearly every question I asked him in the sense of problems and solutions. In the messy physical realm of clogged streets, that mentality goes a long way.

“I grew up in India and things weren’t always very structured” Gupta says when asked where that philosophy came from. “I learned to manage uncertainty and the importance of having a Plan B at a very early age. I faced a lot of real-time micro-problems needing micro-solutions and I guess I’ve honed this skill over time.”

Back in 1999 with BuyItTogether, there were no logistics networks. “We couldn’t get the retailers to do the delivery themselves. So we had to do it,” Gupta remembers, seeming like he’s still a bit exhausted by the experience. He eventually sold BuyItTogether to a Norwegian company called CoShopper and spent a few years bringing the service to Europe. “That was my first foray into doing things in the real world and being focused how we can move things from point A to point B as fast as possible.”

From there he joined Hewlett Packard as it struggled to match Dell’s direct-to-consumer sales model, which he says “required building tons of muscles for HP.” After getting an MBA, he joined Google India in Bangalore. “My first week, my manager asked me what are the things I’m interested in, and told me ‘There’s something called Maps that no one seems to be owning. Do you want to work on that?'”

That opportunity would set him on the path to Uber. He launched Google Maps in India and managed MapMaker, the crowdsourcing tool that gave Google feet on the ground in tiny towns around the world. Gupta moved to Mountain View in 2011 to oversee Google’s push to make its own maps, which after seven years at the company set him up to join as Uber’s VP of maps and marketplace in 2015.

Now after nearly three years, and spending the last five months filling in since Uber’s VP of Product Daniel Graf left, Gupta is in the top product spot at Uber. Its previous CPO Jeff Holden who’d focused on flying cars left in May. Gupta is humble about the new gig, repeating “I’m here to help,” rather than to lead or become some tech luminary. He seems happy leaving that to Uber’s CEO Dara Khosrowshahi

Knowing that Uber is spread across so many culturally distinct places, Gupta wants his teams to build what’s right for the world around them rather than trying to make Uber the same everywhere. “One of the things I learned back at Google is that you really have to empower teams that are locally situated.” For example, the India team was fully responsible for the development of its new Uber Lite app for emerging markets with slow connections and old phones.

One thing I hope he develops a coherent cross-border strategy for is helmets. With Uber’s bikes and scooters proliferating, people around the world are increasingly hopping on and hopping off. But the spontaneous nature of the experience means many riders aren’t wearing helmets. If that practice continues, major injuries will stack up. Not only is it a moral imperative that Uber develop a helmet solution, like something collapsible or that attaches to the vehicle between rides, but its relationship with local governments will depend on keeping citizens safe.

As for Gupta’s personal roadmap, he’s concentrating on rolling out the Uber Rewards rider loyalty and Uber Pro driver loyalty initiatives. “Both of these programs are just getting started, so I’m focused on getting them installed in the communities we serve.”

Drawing on his Google Maps experience, Gupta is developing a new way to make sure drivers and riders can always find each other. “We’re rethinking GPS to solve a major pain point for riders and drivers: pick up location. These locations are particularly tricky for GPS to find when they’re in “urban jungles” or areas with a lot of tall buildings” Gupta explains. “The technology we’re piloting in a handful of cities improves GPS performance in these cities by using maps and satellite signal strengths to help drivers find pick up points more easily.” The means you might not have to run across four lanes of traffic to get to your ride.

But knowing Uber’s history of culture issues, Gupta wants to ensure his team lives by Dara’s new mantra of ‘Do the right thing. Period.’ “This is a super important topic as well. I believe that the way you set culture starts at the top. Dara has been a phenomenal agent of change within the company. Over the course of this year we have attracted excellent talent for the product team — from the Facebooks and Googles of the world. We have this melting pot of people from all different backgrounds.” To build for everyone, he knows each of those voices must be heard.

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Waikit Lau was recorded in June 2018. Waikit Lau,...

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