In praise of friction

“Tap a button, get a ride.” We repeated it like a mantra in the early days at Uber. Every metric we obsessed over was in service of that sentence: cancellation rates, two-minute ETAs, requests-to-completed-trips. On promo days, you could tap the button and get kittens. It felt like magic, which was the point. And like all magic, it required an enormous amount of unglamorous labor arranged just out of frame: engineers, drivers, ops people, all making sure the car came. And if we could deliver a car in a few minutes, why not dinner? I joined the founding team of Uber Eats and spent years explaining to restaurant partners what the magic required. We were maniacal about pickup times. Fries had to be in a bag within 10 minutes or the whole chain broke. We obsessed over alert systems, delivery time, and how many pickups and drop-offs a driver needed per hour to be “productive”—meaning they hit an earnings target we’d floored at roughly minimum wage. When my team was spiraling because delivery times were running eight minutes long, I’d remind them: Guys. We’re just delivering burgers. We were, but it didn’t feel like it. We were also building a frictionless world, though nobody in that r…