Uber COO says there's a downside to being at the top

Uber COO Andrew Macdonald said large companies with new ideas move more slowly than startups as employees get "fat" on the resources.

Zed Jameson/Bloomberg via Getty Image Uber is one of the largest ride-hailing companies in the world, with more than 200 million users.

Uber COO Andrew Macdonald said that kind of scale makes innovating at the company harder.

The executive said Uber has a program called "Growth Bets" to incubate new business ideas.

At the top, it's hard to know where else to go.

In an interview on Harry Stebbings' 20VC podcast published on Monday, Andrew Macdonald , Uber's chief operating officer and president, said that finding new businesses can be challenging when the company's core business is already so large.

Call it the "classic innovator's dilemma ," he said.

"The thing you've already built is so big that it just swallows up your organizational capacity to do anything else," Macdonald said.

"And even if you're able to stand up other businesses, it's impossible for those businesses to get the resourcing, attention, distribution, marketing dollars, engineering capacity — whatever it is, it just gets swallowed up by the hole." Macdonald said Uber is close to $250 billion in gross bookings on an annualized basis.

At that scale, he said, a new product would need a plausible path to becoming a multibillion-dollar business before it's compelling enough for the company.

"It just actually constrains your thinking a little bit," Macdonald said.

Uber is operating at a formidable scale.

The company reported $58 billion in gross bookings in its most recent quarter and $14.2 billion in revenue.

Uber said the platform averaged 208 million monthly active platform consumers.