Experience speaks: How startups like Uber, Airbnb master art of business

The companies are armed with centralized knowledge and act consistently based on those experiences.

Startups and tech companies such as Uber, Airbnb, Gojek, Bird and Compass operate in many cities and often multiple countries, and they typically have a repeatable playbook for each time they arrive in a new place.

What Gojek, the food delivery and rides startup in Southeast Asia, learns about optimal pay for couriers in Jakarta can translate, at least in part, to Ho Chi Minh City. Airbnb’s experience in navigating local bureaucracies has been honed from its experience in hundreds of cities around the world.

That’s not necessarily true for the people, industries and policy makers with whom these companies