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Scott Belsky on what he learned from Garrett Camp coming up with the positioning for Uber

January 21, 2025

Scott recalls working on his startup Behance while doing some product advising for Garrett Camp who had just re-acquired his company StumbleUpon from eBay in 2007.

“We’re sitting down and StumbleUpon and Behance are doing a partnership. [Garrett] whips out this notebook, and he’s like ‘I’m working on this side project that helps people summon a limo car.’ And I’m like: ‘You just bought your company back from eBay! You’re an entrepreneur. Aren’t we supposed to be focused on one company at a time?’”

But Garrett had this vision for a company he called UberCab. And Scott remembers in the early days that Garrett was having a hard time figuring out how to position it.

“He was thinking about whether the brand narrative should be ‘Everyone’s taxi’ or ‘Everyone’s private driver.’”

Ultimately they went with the “Everyone’s private driver” positioning. They wanted it to be an aspirational good and positioned it as something only rich people could afford.

Scott believes there’s a valuable product lesson here:

“I believe we as consumers always want that. We always want special treatment. We always want to feel special. We want to be known. When you come into a restaurant and they remember your favorite drink or they remember your allergies, that’s an amazing sensation.”

He points to the hospitality industry as a space where creating an experience like this is a huge part of the value proposition. And it’s now becoming possible for all companies to offer an experience like this with AI.

“We have this opportunity now today with agents, modern browsers, and AI to be known wherever we go. The fact that we go to a website that still asks our gender and what size our shoe is and all this stuff is just crazy to me. Why would we not be known everywhere we go? The information’s there, and in fact, I want everyone to know my shoe size if they’re in the shoe business. And I want every restaurant to know that I’m a vegetarian… I think there’s this opportunity to have a hyper-personalized world… and a lot of the great brand moments are feeling special as a service.”