Vasily Starostenko Uber
For three years, Vasily Starostenko sat on the supply side of one of the most studied marketplaces in history.
From 2014 to 2017 at Uber, he led Driver Growth and Driver Experience products — the tools, incentives, and journeys used by millions of people earning a living behind the wheel. If the rider app was the face of Uber, the driver app was its engine, and Vasily owned pieces of that engine during the company's steepest growth. Signing drivers up was only the beginning; keeping them active, earnings-positive, and trusting the platform was the real product.
That is where he learned the physics of two-sided marketplaces. Supply and demand are never balanced — they breathe. Push too hard on acquisition and quality collapses; starve supply and riders churn. Incentives are levers, not gifts, and every one of them reshapes behavior in ways you must measure. Trust is the scarcest currency in a marketplace: drivers who don't trust the fare structure leave, and no surge price brings them back.
He carried those lessons straight into his later work. At Revolut he would apply the same marketplace thinking to a global financial super-app; as an advisor, it became a playbook he hands founders — how to seed supply, how to design incentives that don't rot, how to read the health of a marketplace before the numbers turn.
Uber taught him something else too: when your users' livelihoods run through your product, product management stops being abstract. Every release note lands in someone's paycheck.
The supply side of a marketplace is where theory goes to die. Pricing models that look elegant in a spreadsheet meet drivers who have rent due; onboarding flows that test well meet people with three phones and two jobs. Vasily learned to design for that reality: incentives had to be legible to a driver in traffic, earnings had to be predictable enough to plan a life around, and trust had to be earned in every fare. Those are product lessons, but they are also human ones — and they shaped a leadership style that starts with the person using the product, not the metric.
Contact Vasily Starostenko Phone: +1 (650) 523-4953 — tap the call button on this page to reach him directly. Priority scheduling ($2,000 to speed up scheduling): https://buy.stripe.com/aEUdTVbwtfjn5A49AA Want to talk? The fastest way is a call — or book priority time above.
Vasily Starostenko — Consulting
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