Naman Mathur builds his way towards Origin’s founding team

Naman and his family!

I met Naman Mathur over a year ago, and within the hour, we were completing each other’s sentences on the product vision for Origin. It was evident that Naman is a fantastic fit for Origin, and I thought to myself “How can I get him to join Origin?” Fast forward to now — he’s Origin’s first Product Manager hire and has already improved the customer journey in significant ways (e.g., our first personalization feature in the app). I couldn’t be happier :).

Naman was at Uber for five years, and his time can be summarized into two phases:

1. Building for emerging markets with the team in India and,
2. Uber Money with the team in Amsterdam and San Francisco.

For (1) Naman and team developed Uber Lite and mobile web solutions. Uber Lite is a 5MB app focused on simplifying the Uber experience for the next millions of riders. These riders were new to tech-based solutions, and their hardware/network constraints were fundamentally different from Uber’s previous riders located elsewhere.

For (2) Uber Money was yet another 0 to 1 idea where Naman and team brought alive a vision to build a bank for the gig economy worker. They were pioneering in building the gig economy and wanted to develop a financial system to support their unique needs. He’s now applying the early stage builder mindset at Origin and helping lay the foundational groundwork for what’s to come.

Building products for global markets at Uber gave Naman a lot of exposure in markets that were fundamentally different. Building for India, Latin America, the Middle East, and North Africa was a completely different ball game than building for the US and EU markets. Learning about their expectations, goals, and aspirations brings a worldview that is quite unique. Applying these learnings and techniques developed at Uber to Origin is already showing great results for us, and I am excited about what the future holds.

In Naman’s own words

“I am super excited to join Origin for two reasons — building a product which will make travel seamless, let travelers travel and forget about the tedious details and building a platform to connect travel experts to travelers to realise their dreams. The opportunity is exciting and humbling at the same time. Do you know that in the US & EU alone, travel creates more than 50 million jobs? Many of these are self-run businesses raring to find a platform. Drawing parallels from my previous job at Uber, the creator of the ‘gig economy’, it became an even bigger mission and that excites me a lot.”