Driving Uber
Salle Yoo (’95), general counsel at Uber, talks about strategy, plans, and why her first four hires were women.
Salle Yoo (’95) is not one to let boundaries hold her back. As the general counsel for online transportation network company Uber, Yoo, who joined the company in 2012 as its first lawyer and 102nd employee, played a key role in the creation of a regulatory framework that allows Uber to enter markets and introduce new products. From her vantage point, she has helped to disrupt the transportation industry and spur a fundamental shift in the way people get from point A to point B.
The status quo prior to Uber, says Yoo, had people driving their own cars, which she calls “assets that are generally at rest 95 percent of the time.” The leap ahead lands on the Uber model, one that in her words “connects consumers to affordable, on-demand transportation providers, provides millions of flexible earning opportunities, and via its uberPOOL and uberCOMMUTE products, reduces the need for personal automobiles.”
The company claims that in the first seven months of 2016, it eliminated approximately 312 million automobile miles—that adds up to 6.2 million gallons of gas and 55,560 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions.
Uber—the German word means “over” or “beyond”—has come to epitomize not letting boundaries hold you back. The six-year-old company’s ability to get over and beyond traditional business models and mind-sets, regulatory hurdles, and lawsuits has helped to make it the world’s most highly valued private company, with an estimated worth of more than $62 billion. Uber now operates in more than 425 cities in 72 countries, where its smartphone app connects riders with drivers that show up within minutes and generally charge less than taxis.
Uber is Yoo’s day job. On her own time, she helps erase the barriers that prevent women, and minority women in particular, from scaling the partner ranks of law firms, barriers that have, according to the National Association of Women Lawyers, limited the number of female managing partners in the country’s 200 largest law firms to three. Yes, three.
Yoo got over the invisible professional ramparts and made partner at one of those firms, Davis Wright Tremaine LLP, before jumping to Uber. Today, the Uber legal department numbers more than 200 lawyers and legal professionals working from over 20 offices around the world. The company has faced more legal tests in a shorter time than any corporation in America, battling challenges from cities, states, transportation authorities, and customers and in the courts. The litigation battles include claims by drivers that they are employees of the company rather than independent contractors and cases involving the adequacy of background checks that drivers must pass before being allowed to accept ride requests.
Last year alone, more than 50 lawsuits against Uber were filed in US courts, as well as more in the United Kingdom, France, Spain, and Brazil. And yet, Uber continues to grow. The company reports that it provided 62 million rides in the United States in July alone.
Bostonia met with Yoo at her San Francisco office, where she talked about helping her company break new ground.