Lingjuan Peng

At Uber, we build with heart. I’m with Dara - that might be my favorite cultural value. I’ve been a part of building shared rides products with a tremendous amount of heart and passion for much of the last decade, ever since I helped start UberPOOL in 2014 and Uber Shuttle in 2019. I had the honor of being a part of our recent annual Go/Get event in NYC, where we shared exciting updates on both of those product lines. I'm thrilled that we’re continuing to lean into shared rides, even while other companies are leaning out. Shared Rides are critical for unlocking rideshare affordability and unbundling personal car ownership, because splitting the driver and vehicle cost is the highest leverage way to structurally drive prices down. Even in an autonomous world, the future of cities will be brighter with fewer vehicles and less congestion. How many text messages do you send a day now vs when they cost 50 cents a piece? How much traffic does the highway have after a lane is added vs before? That’s what economists call ‘induced demand’ - and it will apply to the world of lower cost AVs too. But on-demand shared rides growth has always had the headwind of a tradeoff paradox between efficiency vs predictability. The discount is largely funded by creating a product with a lot of uncertainty - how long you’ll wait before you get picked up, where you’ll walk to, and how many stops you’ll make on trip, because the uncertainty is what unlocks more efficiency. But this lack of predictability limits rider opt-in and therefore how many people we have to match with and the subsequent quality of those matches. Scheduled shared rides solves this problem! By getting the rider intent in advance, we have more time to make higher quality, more efficient matches and fund deeper discounts. AND we can offer predictability by giving more certainty around pickup and drop-off times and route before the trip begins. It’s a path to growing shared rides by offering both affordability AND predictability. Another vector of sharing efficiency is capacity - more seats. I helped launch Uber Shuttle in Cairo in 2019, and we’ve been iterating on our high capacity vehicles platform ever since. And as we shared at Go/Get, after expanding to more markets in India and a number of employee transit use cases, we’re ready to bring Shuttle to riders directly in the US! Soon you’ll be able to take a Shuttle to and from concerts and events at number of US stadium partners as well as directly from city centers to the curb at a number of major US airports. The future of transportation is bright. The future is shared. And if you want to build with heart alongside me, I’m hiring :) If you didn’t see it, check out the replay of our Go/Get event here:

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Time flies, and with the blink of an eye, it's been more than 5 years since joining Amazon and working with a group of wonderful folks on the Amazon Shipping team. It's bittersweet to share that it's my last day on this team and I will move to another team effective Monday. I truly enjoyed the last 5 years and had amazing support from folks all around me as I learned my way around a corporate environment after spending nearly two decades in academia. I am also very fortunate to witness Amazon Shipping's tremendous growth in the last 5 years (scaling the business from UK to other EU markets, launching/re-launching in US, US tech team growth from a handful of engineers to 70+ strong across the org in Bellevue and Nashville). To former and current forecasting/voyager, account management/onboarding, and costing/negotiation teammates, y'all have delivered so much in the last few years and I am proud of the work we were able to accomplish together. I want to thank each of you for your support and hard work, and making coming to work each day something to look forward to. To all of my managers and leadership team, thanks for your continuous support (even after I shared that I am moving out to try something new 😀 ), and the trust all of you have given me since day 1. As I shared the news with many of you in the last few weeks, one very natural and common question I got was, "why leaving and why now?" (I guess two questions 😂). The honest answer is the same as what I shared 5 years ago when I joined Amazon and was asked "why did you decide to leave academia?", which is "I am getting too comfortable and need to try something different". I am looking forward to starting a new chapter of my career at Amazon. I will be leading a team that works on supporting the LLM service stack development. It's exciting and with a lot of unknowns (to me at least, but that's the exciting part). Thanks again!

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Come and build a smart shopping assistant designed to answer customer questions, guide product discovery, and tailor search results. Combine the power of AlloyDB, Gemini (Large Language Model) and Vertex AI Agent Builder to quickly bootstrap an intelligent conversational assistant.

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Check out Google AI Essentials course if you want to learn more about AI!

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The common trait between start-up founders and product managers is that both are driving the agenda of customer success forward across so many stakeholders and teams. This unique position means balancing multiple perspectives – often with a bit of tension – to ensure the customer’s needs remain front and center. At Amazon, we recognize that some friction between teams is actually productive. Think of it like the strings on a bridge: a bridge remains strong only if the strings have just the right tension. If they’re too loose, the bridge wobbles; if they’re too tight, it risks snapping. Similarly, a bit of push and pull between teams can lead to sharper decisions and raise the bar. One of the ways Amazon embraces this healthy tension is through the “Hotly Debated Topic FAQ.” Rather than letting debates stay in side conversations, this FAQ process brings key discussions to the forefront. Teams document points of contention, laying out context, pros and cons, and even arguments challenging the dominant perspective. This creates a living resource that aligns everyone on critical decisions, ultimately helping product managers and founders maintain a clear focus on the customer. For startups, adopting a similar FAQ can be a powerful way to bring clarity and alignment, especially when it comes to critical customer-centric decisions. By encouraging structured debate, you ensure that every decision is rigorously considered and built on diverse insights. As you push the customer’s agenda forward, how does your team handle debates and disagreements? Could a structured FAQ help your organization stay aligned? #StartupCulture #ProductManagement #Founders #CustomerFocus #TeamAlignment #HealthyDebate #DecisionMaking

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Last week, we shared our second annual Responsible Business Practices Report, highlighting Meta’s efforts to maximize the positive and minimize the negative impacts of our business on society. I am incredibly passionate about this work and how it helps bring our mission – of building community and bringing the world closer together – to life.   A few of the highlights from the report include:  * Launching the AI Alliance to accelerate responsible AI innovation, in collaboration with more than 50 companies and organizations * Expanding parental supervision tools globally to Facebook, Messenger and Horizon Worlds * Continuing to focus on building a diverse workforce that reflects and supports our ability to serve billions of users around the globe * Maintaining net zero in our global operations, and establishing a science-based emissions reduction target and decarbonization roadmap to systematically transform the way we do business You can read more about this year’s report on our responsible business practices website: https://lnkd.in/eVKZDwfE

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For the builders and cloud developers, you don't want to miss this ... perhaps you want to impress your boss 😉 Would you be interested in starting leveraging AI with confidence? https://eqix.it/3UpVGLM JJ Asghar is hosting a hashtag #DemoDay session to help you engage in AI from an hashtag #OpenSource Standpoint. Jump in to set your reminder so you don't miss out. 🤩 For more info ⤴

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Amazon Haul is Live with 50% Off for Our First "Hauliday" Season! Last week, we launched Amazon Haul, a new shopping experience designed to help customers find ultra-low-priced items. Today, we're announcing our first "Hauliday" season—offering 50% off all items at checkout! The journey to this Hauliday season began for me in April 2023, when a small team across three continents was tasked with creating a solution to help Amazon offer even lower prices to customers. After months of iterations, in August, we proposed a new supply chain model and shopping experience that lowers prices by reducing risk for sellers and encourages shoppers to order product Hauls, rather than individual items. We were told to explore other options and the band broke up! Some of us went back to our core roles, one started his own company, and others kept tinkering with the idea. A few months later, a new team revisited this idea, and it took off from there. By April 2024, over 100 people were working together to make it a reality for the 2024 holiday season. This bring us to today, 19 months later. Amazon Haul is here and you can shop a store full of lifestyle, home, electronics, and many more items, all under $20 and currently 50% off! If you haven’t yet, be sure to check out Amazon Haul by searching for Haul or clicking a link to the store in your Amazon app. https://lnkd.in/g_Sy5J_Y Shootout to the original band, Marie Mulot Greg Bastin Harish Eshwar Tania Caldu Swati Saraswatula, the group that brought it to life and brought me back to help launch the experience, Varun Gulati Kelly Von Zup, the leaders that supported the work, and the many others that worked on it.

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Come and build a smart shopping assistant designed to answer customer questions, guide product discovery, and tailor search results. Combine the power of AlloyDB, Gemini (Large Language Model) and Vertex AI Agent Builder to quickly bootstrap an intelligent conversational assistant.

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Come and build a smart shopping assistant designed to answer customer questions, guide product discovery, and tailor search results. Combine the power of AlloyDB, Gemini (Large Language Model) and Vertex AI Agent Builder to quickly bootstrap an intelligent conversational assistant.

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🚀🚀 Exciting news! 🚀 🚀 I left Google two months ago to start a new company - Aligned Labs - with Tyler Garvin At Google, I had the unique opportunity to work at the intersection of product, design, and strategy for our large language models, like Gemini. This experience made one thing crystal clear: data makes the difference. As we push the boundaries of AI capabilities, we're rapidly depleting our sources of unique, high-quality data. This isn't just a speed bump—it's a potential roadblock for the entire industry. At Aligned, we're not just collecting data—we're curating a first-of-its-kind team of the world’s leading domain experts and educators. Our mission is to create top-tier, unique datasets for training large language models. Our goal? To ensure AI outputs align with our expectations of highly intelligent thought partners. We're crafting datasets for every stage: pre-training, instruction-tuning, fine-tuning, and evaluation to empower our clients to unlock the full potential of their models and applications. I'm dedicating the rest of my career to this for three critical reasons: - The data crisis is real and imminent. Without a solution, LLM performance will plateau, stalling AI progress. - As models advance, they require increasingly specialized data. We need to tap into expert knowledge across various domains, but no one has cracked the code on how to scalably attract and retain this talent. Companies like Scale AI have done an amazing job of building a workforce of cheap educated workers but what you really need for the next level of performance are domain experts that can train and impart their expertise and knowledge into these models. - Frontier model builders like Google, OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic understand this problem and are making massive investments, there's a huge opportunity in specialized data. That opportunity goes beyond the Google’s and OpenAI’s of the world. High-quality, unique datasets can dramatically improve AI applications in specific industries, making them perform better and more cost-effectively. We're here to unlock this potential, helping companies of all sizes harness the power of tailored, premium data to build superior models and applications for their specific needs. We're incredibly excited about the potential of our work to dramatically improve AI models and help companies across industries harness the power of truly intelligent AI. Are you passionate about the future of AI? Let's connect! Whether you're a potential client, an AI enthusiast, or a domain expert interested in contributing to the next wave of AI advancement, I'd love to hear from you. Head over to https://www.alignedhq.ai to connect! #AIStartup #MachineLearning #DataQuality #FutureOfAI #AlignedLabs

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Day 5 - On rules and chaos theory. The perfect way to start your Monday https://lnkd.in/gpeBPFnz

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I recently had the privilege of representing Microsoft Shopping at Rakuten Optimism 2024 and came away with a lot of positive outcomes. To me, conferences are a lot about creating meaningful connections and learning. It was great to connect with our brands, agencies, partners and other publishers and learn from their journey on building value in the affiliate marketing ecosystem. Here are the 3 things I learned that I want to share 1)     Don’t treat what others have tried and failed as mistake – instead you can still attempt to do it using what they learned 2)     You learn a lot from those who compete in the same space. See how you can leverage each other for the greater good of the ecosystem 3)     When you are doing something right, everyone notices it and will come and tell you that

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Ever felt like your knowledge base is a black hole where information goes in and never comes out? 🕳️✨ In my blog, "Enhancing IVS Customer Success with Generative AI: Leveraging Amazon Q with Slack" I thought to share a journey on how an internal chatbot helps to tap into our vast knowledge-base with Amazon Q and Slack. #GenerativeAI #AmazonQ #SlackBot #AmazonIVS

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Earlier this year I brought the Google Operations Center leadership team together to talk about navigating the year ahead. Now more than ever, we find ourselves looking more critically at how we maneuver the healthy tension between creating stability and supporting our employees while continuing to innovate, adapt, and evolve our business. On the surface it may look like these scenarios are always a zero sum game, but they don’t have to be. As leaders we have the ability to be the bridge between our people and our partners, wielding the wisdom and patience to find the path that best supports everyone's needs. By fostering open communication, aligning incentives, and finding creative solutions, my team is aiming to build a foundation for mutual success. It's not always easy, but does this group look like they’ll give up easily? 😉 Has there ever been a time in your career where you took on the role of bridge builder? #peoplefirst #partnerships #bridgingthegap #holisticdecisionmaking Google

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The journey of growth and learning is a winding road, not always a straight path. Valuable insights often arise from the process of iteration—experimenting, facing setbacks, refining, and persevering. In my professional experience, I've learned that embracing iteration, whether in leadership approaches or product advancement, fosters resilience and flexibility. Success isn't about achieving perfection immediately; it's about improving continuously with each iteration. #CareerGrowth #Iteration #ContinuousImprovement #LeadershipDevelopment Read more about the importance of iteration in fostering real growth: [Link to Forbes article](https://lnkd.in/eEEKfqdB)

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Incredibly proud to announce LearnLM: a family of models optimized and evaluated for learning based on educational and participatory research. Read more in our tech report (https://goo.gle/LearnLM) and see how we're bringing it to learners everywhere using YouTube, Gemini, and other Google products (https://lnkd.in/eGNEt3-Y)! While we're excited to get LearnLM into the hands of more students, we know there is still room for continued research and learning. Let us know if you're interested in working with us to define educational benchmarks, improve academic capabilities and explore the possibilities of advancing AI for education: goo.gle/LearnLMinterest

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Gemini Live is … live! 🚀 So many incredible people from across Google came together to build something that lowers the barrier of entry for anybody to use AI … now you can just be yourself and talk. Whether you want to ideate, practice, learn or even rant, Gemini Live is there for you. https://lnkd.in/gdtpB8gY This week at the Made by Google event, we launched Gemini Live and gave press and tech influencers a chance to try it. We were blown away by the response… 🔥 “Gemini Live is the best AI feature I've seen so far from Google.” - TechRadar 🤝 “Google's Gemini Live AI Sounds So Human, I Almost Forgot It Was a Bot” - Wall Street Journal 💬 “I tried Gemini Live, and it was so good that it was kind of scary. It turns out that chatting with Gemini Live really is like having a conversation.” - Android Authority 💪🏽 “Gemini Live: I got to use it before you and it's the biggest threat to ChatGPT right now” - Mashable 👋 “Say Goodbye to Google Assistant and Hello to Gemini Live Gemini Live promises to deliver on all the ways you wanted to interact with the Assistant but couldn't before.” - Gizmodo 🎧 “Gemini Live in the Pixel Buds Pro 2 is the AI audio integration I've been waiting for” - Soundguys ------- Oh, and soon you’ll be able to show Gemini Live the world around you and ask it to take actions - getting us closer to our vision of building you the most helpful AI assistant … 👀 https://lnkd.in/gDVSMEcQ

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