Onwards and Upwards

Some personal news! After over a half-decade at Uber, and nearly four years since founding Elevate, it's finally time for my next adventure. I could have never predicted the incredible journey that would follow after Jeff Holden, Mark Moore, and I first pressed publish on the Elevate Whitepaper in 2016. I am deeply proud to have been part of the journey since and continue to remain humbled as I watch entrepreneurs across the UAM industry go on to finally bring the ever-elusive flying car to reality in this decade.

There are so many people who made my time at Uber special, and I can't possibly thank everybody. I'm forever grateful to Jeff Holden and Travis Kalanick for taking a bet on a 25-year-old with some crazy ideas, Neil Kamireddy and Yuhki Yamashita for first teaching me the ropes, my Elevate co-founder Mark Moore for an incredible and unexpected partnership I'll never forget, and Eric Allison & Dara Khosrowshahi for carrying the Elevate torch forward.

To all of the pioneers who took a leap of faith and decided to help fundamentally transform cities with us -- thank you. From the visionaries who took a chance in early days when urban air mobility was little more than an idea, to the ones who became our very first teammates -- John Badalamenti, Wyatt Smith, Tom Prevot, Celina Mikolajzcik, Jon Petersen, Stan Swaintek, Ian Villa, Adam Warmoth, Matt Wing, Matt Devlin, Akshay BD, Janie Gu, Luke Fischer, Arianna Churchill -- and to the inventors who became loyal industry and government partners over time — Ross Perot, Mike Berry, Seleta Reynolds, JoeBen Bivert, Paul Sciarra, Antonio Campello, Parimal Kopardekar, Scott Drennan, Ivo Boscral, Tine Tomazic, Pat Romano, Cyrus Sigari, Ben Marcus, Michael Linse, Dan Elwell, Josh Connor, Jaiwon Shin, David Josephson, Kurt Carlson, Shan Hall, Bilal Zuberi, and Mayors Garcetti, Rawlings, and Price, just to name a select few who helped get the UAM flywheel started....thank you.

From hosting three Elevate Summits to sharing our Elevate vision with leaders and partners around the world, I'm incredibly proud of everything our extended team was able to accomplish while remaining scrappy, indefatigable, and relentlessly focused on improving the fabric of transportation across and between cities globally.

It's been the absolute honor of my career to learn alongside each of you over the years, and I'm very fortunate to carry these lifelong friendships with me as I continue to root for Uber, the Elevate team, and urban air mobility from the sidelines. I absolutely cannot wait to take my first ride in an eVTOL over the Bay Area traffic!

So, what’s next for me? A few things... 

First and foremost, a break — I’ve already started to enjoy some much-needed time off since I stepped down to recharge and prepare to take on the next chapter of my career. I'm currently surrounded by good friends and red rocks in beautiful Sedona, Arizona!

Next, I’ll never lose my drive to help make cities smarter, better, more efficient places to live — so I’ll be staying close to the industry. I’ve already started advising and investing in some of the most incredible entrepreneurs in the urban mobility space, and I’m excited to partner with them as they build & scale world-class products globally.

And finally, if Uber taught me anything, it was that although you can’t believe in magic, you can occasionally make it…so I’ve decided to build something new, and I’m lucky to have assembled an incredible team of new and former colleagues to make magic with. I haven't been this excited about an idea and opportunity in a while, and we're already hard at work building. More to come on that front soon!