#27 - Mini (Best Of): Alyssa Pollack, Early Uber — Do Whatever It Takes | The Early Podcast

🎯 Mini (Best Of) Episode that's under 30 minutes. In time for summer travel... we're curating some of our most popular episodes, now condensed into a fast, no-filler cut.

What does it really take to build a startup from scratch? In this condensed “Best Of” episode, Alyssa Pollack shares raw stories from her early days at Uber — onboarding drivers one by one, running seven-day-a-week ops, and doing whatever it took to keep the system running.

Alyssa also opens up about:

✅ Facing stage 4 cancer as a teenager and the resilience it built

✅ The grind of scaling UberX in Chicago — Google Sheets, late-night driver calls, and all

✅ Why “doing things that don’t scale” is the only way to find product-market fit

✅ Her journey from Uber operator to CEO of Fellow, a peer-to-peer support platform

Whether you’re an early employee, founder, or just love startup stories, this episode is packed with lessons on grit, resilience, and building something that matters.

🎧 Full episode here → Links below

📺 More clips + episodes → youtube.com/@UCzvF8vzXF4QaTkCWFRtV20g

#Uber #startups #entrepreneurship #TheEarlyPodcast #earlypod

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🎙️ ABOUT THE SHOW:

The Early Podcast is where host Max Crowley, Uber’s #25 employee, sits down with the earliest builders behind today’s most iconic companies. No fluff, just the raw stories of what it’s like in the trenches when your startup could still fail tomorrow.

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