A Simple Tweet Made Uber’s First Employee A Billionaire

And here’s how this happened!

The power of social media is undeniable.

It helps us land jobs, spread the word, share our thoughts, seek advice, offer solutions, and whatnot.

The story of Ryan Graves, Uber’s first employee, is strongly influenced by this cool social media platform, Twitter.

And this all started in January 2010, when Uber was not even a year old. The start-up’s CEO, Travis Kalanick was posting on platforms like Craigslist, Twitter, etc. searching for a smart folk to up the Uber game.

One day, he took to Twitter and posted, “Looking 4 entrepreneurial product mgr/biz-dev killer 4 a location-based service.. pre-launch, BIG equity, big peeps involved — ANY TIPS??”

Ryan Graves, working as a manager in a management training program at General Electric then, came across Kalanick’s tweet, and responded to it in a crisp manner, “Here’s a tip. email me :) graves. ryan[at]gmail. com”. And that was it!

This response caught Kalanick’s attention and made Graves the very first employee at Uber.

Graves referred to as the ‘Mr. Nice Guy’ joined the company on March 1, 2010. During his tenure, he worked as CEO for around one year and further served as Senior Vice President of Global Operations for around 7 years.

In one of Kalanick’s blog posts in 2010, he wrote, “From the day he got going, we spent about 15–20 hours a week working together going over product, driver on-boarding, pricing model, the whole nine. He learned the startup game fast and worked his a** off to build the Uber team and make the San Francisco launch and subsequent growth a huge success.”

Graves became a billionaire within 5 years of joining Uber, thanks to the perfect timing to join, and his equity held in the uber-cool company. He was announced as the 12th wealthiest entrepreneur under 40 in the year 2016.

According to Forbes, his net worth was around $2.1 billion in 2021. When working with Uber, he played an important role in formulating the company’s core values, such as ‘super pumpedness’. Thanks to his out-of-the-box strategies, the company entered global markets and made itself a household name worldwide.

After contributing to Uber’s success for almost 7 years, Graves announced his resignation from the company in August 2017.

This was almost two months after Kalanick‘s resignation as CEO when there were several controversies (sexual harassment, strategies to avoid law enforcement, and a trade secrets lawsuit against Google) going on regarding Uber’s work culture.

After Kalanick’s sudden resignation, Graves decided to stay on the Board of Directors (until Uber found a new CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, in 2019) and handled the operations of UberRUSH and UberEats.

While parting ways with Uber in 2017, Graves launched Saltwater Capital, a private holding company, that invested in budding businesses following specific investment criteria.

What we can learn from Ryan Graves is that you just have to put yourself out there in a way that you stand out from the crowd. Your single post, tweet, or story can be the real game-changer.

From landing jobs, and learning new skills, to making money, the internet offers infinite opportunities to unlock.

You can reach out to millions of people around the world with just one click. So, don’t hold yourself back, and shine through social media.