Ex-Meta, Uber policy lead on leaving Big Tech

Jena Wuu pioneered safety programs at Uber and media literacy initiatives at Meta. Today, she's changing things from the outside, and finding a voice of her own.

The last time I saw Jena Wuu was at The Hague in the Netherlands. We were part of a scrappy team of young women representing Uber at a summit about reducing violence against women.

Jena always struck me as different from other colleagues. She was passionate—not just about tech—but about people and society. After a long career at Uber launching the service in Europe and then advocating for safety to become a bigger priority at the company, Jena went on to Meta, where she built out a program to elevate content that had been vetted by experts, for the health of the company’s information ecosystem.

But ten years later, Jena may be done with Big Tech. She’s now working with non-profits and information platforms from the outside to ensure our digital information ecosystem provides us with accurate information from real experts–across areas like health and politics. And now, after years handling policy work behind the scenes for corporations, she’s finally creating content of her own.

Jena and I re-connected over TikTok and then LinkedIn, where I saw some of her posts about identity and work.This week, I sat down with Jena for Hard Reset. We talked about safety and content moderation at tech companies, her unconventional trajectory at Uber and Meta, her decision to leave behind the safety of “fancy titles” and big companies to become a creator, and the narratives we tell ourselves about our own value within the constructs of those companies.

I found our conversation to be an important glimpse into why people are conflicted about whether to stay in, or leave Big Tech, with a lot of insight into what might be waiting for people on the other side.

Ariella Steinhorn: Jena, I met you in the middle of your six-year Uber career. But you always struck me as someone who had so many interests. What were you doing before tech, and how did you find yourself in the tech space?

Jena Wuu: I come from a Taiwanese family that's loving but has traditional expectations. They're all scientists, doctors, and engineers -- and had very specific ideas as to what kind of career is a “good” career.

I joke that it was our great family scandal that I went to a liberal arts college and majored in German. My dream was actually to be an academic, I thought I was going to travel the world writing and educating the next generation.

But when I was a senior in college, my professors intervened. They said, we don’t think you should go to grad school, because you’re romanticizing academia too much. It broke my heart at the time, but looking back, they were right. There were fewer and fewer students learning German, and it was becoming harder to get tenured positions at universities.

I kept thinking, what is the “right” and responsible career path? I had a college boyfriend going to grad school in Texas, and I got a fellowship from the Bosch Foundation to work in Germany for a year. The plan was to get the wanderlust out of my system and move back to Texas, but I loved Germany too much. My priority at that time remained traveling on my own and having adventures—I wasn’t actually career-focused.

Eventually, the intrusive thoughts about needing to be responsible and stable kept creeping in. I didn’t want to go back to Alabama, where I’m from. So I joined my sister who lived in the San Francisco Bay Area, and got a job in venture capital to help foreign entrepreneurs go through an acceleration program.

I really wasn’t a tech person—I just needed a job. I never had a smartphone until then. But here I was working with tech startups and helping founders.

One day, someone mentioned in passing a new app called Uber, where you push a button and get a black car on demand. I was hearing so many pitches at that time, it didn’t stick with me. I never used black cars, I didn’t need to arrive in style. I just needed to arrive.

The next day I was reading TechCrunch, and saw that this startup Uber had launched their second market outside of the U.S. (first was Paris, they had launched London). I randomly guessed the CEO Travis’s email address and sent him an email, letting them know that if they were interested in the German market, I had experience and language skills. Ryan Graves, the COO at the time, responded in minutes—asking if we could meet the next day.

Two weeks after that meeting I left for Amsterdam. I launched Amsterdam, then Germany.

For me, it wasn’t about tech, it was more personal. It was difficult for my family when I majored in German, and I had internalized that it had been an irresponsible decision. So I viewed the job as a challenge and a way for me to prove that learning a new language and culture is valuable in a way that society deems as valuable.

AS: So what were those first months like at Uber, what were you doing?

JW: I was a launcher. It was such an intense experience, and we were under a lot of pressure to launch very quickly. With Amsterdam, we took some time to get cars on the road and launched in two months; but with Berlin I was working alone and got everything up and running in 12 days. There was so much external buzz around the company, it was becoming one of the most highly valued companies at that time. And there was of course lots of press around public policy.

It was exciting, but also lonely. I was very protective of Uber, and it was my identity— us against the world. My friends and my family knew about the company because of the external commentary, but I felt that the only people who truly got it were the people inside the company with me.

We had no marketing budget, so marketing was all about going to events and making friends with influential people, to build this aura of coolness. The work was recruiting drivers and local staff by day, and by night doing word-of-mouth marketing at events and parties. And beyond that, there was regular stuff like making pricing models and I manually translated the Uber app into German. It was fun but exhausting.

Uber told me to take the job knowing that burnout was likely after a year. I lasted in the launch role for 1.5 years. After that, while most launchers went into operational roles, I pitched a role for myself in public policy. Uber at that point mostly had lobbyists and government relations people—but I wanted to do more “public affairs” work with stakeholders and NGOs, and ended up covering Europe, the Middle East, and the Asia Pacific region.

I was flying to Brussels, Paris, Helsinki, Sydney, and Hong Kong—and eventually, I moved back to SF.

AS: Why do you think you chose public policy while the other launchers chose operational roles?

JW: My background was really different from most launchers. They mostly came from finance and consulting, while I’ve always been into culture and society. Dealing with a tech product that was also physical was a very interesting puzzle. The work allowed me to dig into the socio-anthropological aspect.

The use case for Uber's product was so different in each city. In Amsterdam, it was mostly used to supplement the existing transportation network, as a last-mile option. In more car-dependent places like Nashville, it helped curb drunk driving.

In general, I found it really thrilling. This was the age of the “deBlasio view,” when the company showed NYC long wait times for Uber should deBlasio’s proposal to regulate the company come into play. It was really existential for the company.

One of the challenges we had within Uber was to drive understanding among the business leaders that reputation was and is important. For a long time, the metrics were for growth—new sign-ups and low wait times. Then it shifted to prioritize driver background checks and safety.

To do that, GMs literally had to see a dashboard showing costs from insurance payouts and litigation. After we built that in, safety became an investment and priority.

AS: You seem very socially minded, interested in the bigger picture and sociology as you mentioned before. Did you clash with colleagues who saw things solely through a legal or business lens rather than a cultural one? Were you bothered that safety was only considered as a business priority?

JW: When I started at the company on the operations side as a launcher, there was only one non-US lawyer. But once you enter the 'scale up phase' and start bringing in a more robust policy, comms, and legal team—they “clean up.”

As a result, there can be cultural tension between the “OGs” (I hate this term) and the new people. Multiple colleagues and friends of mine were personally affected—even arrested for “running illegal taxi services”—and when you go through something like that, it's understandable to look at new colleagues criticizing that period and think: yes, this bad thing happened—but you weren’t there when we had to make the hard decisions and build the company. If we hadn't gone through that, you wouldn’t have this company to work for.

For me, as I started to work in safety, it was a challenge. Because of my operations background, I knew the driver and rider side of the business incredibly well. As a result, I took safety incidents personally and deeply.

As the company grew, there were some people who’d say—well there are 1 million rides a day, the 'one in a million' bad thing is bound to happen. It’s impossible to stop every incident from happening in this type of environment.

Sometimes, though, I felt like it was my fault that someone got hurt, because I didn’t advocate for more safeguards hard enough. If we went X direction instead of Y direction, maybe this could have been hindered? Any incidents involving kids affected me in particular. But at the same time, what can the company do if a minor (or their parent) chooses to violate the T&Cs?

I don’t know that I would blame only myself instead of the systems and incentives in place. But in addition to whatever the policies were, yes.

AS: When did you leave Uber, and why?

JW: Well—I started to call Uber my “bad boyfriend.” We have a lot of history, I loved it so much, and so much of my identity was connected to it.

But it made me sad most of the time, and I knew there was no future. Not just in terms of upward mobility at Uber, but also little opportunity for me to grow and learn or expand my subject matter expertise. And I was also tired. I was so used to working in a hyper-intense “Uber way.” What productivity meant to me in that context was not healthy.

So I impulsively applied for a job at Facebook. Uber’s former head of comms and policy Rachel Whetstone had gone to WhatsApp, and I admired her a lot. So I thought, well if she thinks this is a great company, I’d like to go where she goes.

Meta was a much bigger company on a scale unfathomable to Uber. This was 2018, and I had this notion that the people from the big tech companies were the best talent. People coming from big companies seemed to really have their shit together, compared to our startup scrappiness. Big Tech offered huge salaries and fancy perks, they could hire whomever. The people at Google, Facebook and Apple were the creme de la creme, I thought— and those were the people who came to develop the leadership team at Uber.

It’s interesting, because in hindsight, these are just narratives we tell ourselves about tech.

AS: Yeah, in many ways they want us to think that there is no other option, or we’re somehow not as intelligent if we’re not in the companies? Okay, so now you’re at Facebook. What were you working on?

JW: I had this nebulous title in social impact, focused on public policy programs. There wasn't a lot of structure, which gave me room to make it what I wanted it to be. And I pretty quickly recognized a gap where I could fill in.

In the social media industry, policymakers were talking about misinformation, with a focus on content moderation and fact-checking. This was important, but incomplete as a solution on its own.

The reason: this framework was reactive, relying on misinformation to crop up in order to get removed. If we’re making this a good space by removing bad content, there’s an assumption that good content will be there to bubble up to the top. That wasn’t always the case, especially for minority languages and communities.

What I pitched was a proactive programmatic lever that would focus on broader issues like information quality, access, and media literacy, not just misinformation. At some point I got connected to Mark’s personal comms team, and we were granted pilot funding to expand the program. My focus was on improving information quality, so that institutions and true subject matter experts could create better content and distribute it ahead of the upcoming 2020 US Presidential election.

Around that time, Covid hit. Because we had already built the infrastructure, our program became the backbone for crisis response, as misinformation was becoming an increasing acute threat for public health. Mark announced a commitment to give the World Health Organization as many free ads as they needed to amplify accurate information about Covid public health. And our program became the vehicle to deliver on that, helping public health authorities from government, the UN, and nonprofit sector create content, translate to appropriate languages, and deliver it on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.

Similar to my time at Uber, I felt a personal responsibility for the results of these programs. I remember at one point during the beginning of the pandemic, I had left SF for Germany to be with my partner. I was panicking on the flight thinking, people are going to die during this twelve-hour flight if I can’t approve this back-end thing to get the ads up and inform people about social distancing.

AS: Certainly there is only so much an individual can do at a gigantic company. Why do you think you have always felt such an inherent personal responsibility?

JW: Probably childhood trauma, existential guilt, and dread. Haha. I’ve always had a strong sense of personal accountability.

Also, the work reminded me of the adrenaline at Uber. It was high stakes. I was in the weeds, managing lots of people round the clock.

Over time though, one of the challenges of the program was that it was a large centralized program and budget. Once Meta entered the “year of efficiency,” things with big budgets and centralized power came under question.

When the year of efficiency was announced, I thought, no problem. This program is so efficient. It’s centrally run. We have all the global partnerships streamlined. What I did not account for was that, when cuts happen, you enter a massive political battle.

When you’re facing cuts, everyone’s just doing their best to survive. For us, it came down to a centralized policy model versus a regionalized model. And central lost out.

My hope was that I could keep doing this with less people and less money. But it didn’t end up working out.

AS: Do you see Meta having changed the blueprint of its public policy team to regional structures today?

JW: Yes. I was focused on core policy principles and the company was prioritizing government relations, which is a fundamental shift in philosophy.

When a company takes a more political strategy, it's more about building relationships with governments in power—more fluid than an approach driven by public policy and policy development.

AS: So were you not surprised by Meta/Zuck’s allegiance to Trump?

JW: Actually, I have been surprised by how publicly Mark wants to align himself with a political figure. When I was at Meta, there was a lot of focus to avoid perception of political bias.

AS: What’s going on in your life following these experiences at Uber and Meta?

JW: The first work day after I left Meta was my 40th birthday—and I started a wine certification course in France. I've been studying wine as a hobby for the last few years. I’ve also been doing more nonprofit work, joining the Board of a media literacy organization that I funded while at Meta.

There was a time where I had that feeling again: “I'm being irresponsible and need to do the right thing.” I spent a few months interviewing for jobs, thinking I should just go back into big tech. There is really interesting work happening within companies, and I thought that I couldn’t continue my misinformation work if I wasn’t at a large company. How can I say I work in this field if I’m not at a company like Meta?

But in those conversations—especially when it stopped being about the issues and more about things like levels, teams, and scope—it felt like more of the same. I didn’t feel like there was much opportunity to learn something new. What was I doing this for? Did I really need a fancy title from a fancy company to validate my credibility?

My body also appeared to physically reject the idea of me joining another tech company. I started to feel dread before dialing into those calls. My stomach hurt, and I was fatigued. I decided to just stop interviewing, and work on the thing I’m really passionate about: the information ecosystem.

Around this time, I met someone new whose experience is also around information quality, and our one-hour chat made me feel so energized—it was the opposite of how the company conversations made me feel. Even talking with my wine classmates, it was so clear to them how much passion and perspective I had for it. That confirmed to me that I was on the right path.

Getting more exposure to a totally new and different industry -- in my case, wine -- also helped. It taught me how unimpressive my resume and career is when it's taken out of the tech construct. I found myself saying “I started Uber in Europe!” to try to convince my classmates that I have some worthwhile skills, and they could not give fewer shits about it. There’s something really refreshing and wonderful about that, how much of a construct all of this is.

Today, I’m still thinking about: where do people get their validation from? And is our sense of what credibility looks like still relevant?

We're living in a time when multiple revolutions are happening at once. Public trust in institutions is going down every day, the government and legacy companies are failing workers, and layoffs are happening that run counter to what these organizations are meant to serve. More and more workers are starting to realize that the orgs they committed to are not what they appear at face value. And of course, there is this backdrop of AI inevitably accelerating content production and the fragmentation of media.

I’m working today to advocate for a culture of participation online by subject matter experts—mostly as individuals but also institutions—as a form of information preparedness. Especially as the media ecosystem fragments into smaller, more curated spaces, the only way to sustain quality in public knowledge is if we are actually present in the places where people spend time. Not being there cedes space to misinformation and bad actors.

One thing I’ve started is writing a Substack and making content on LinkedIn and TikTok. Having worked for so long in policy and comms, I’m not used to being the principal or the one on the camera. And most experts spend years honing rigor, not trying to self-publish or make posts online. So it’s a new muscle to exercise for all of us—and I'm practicing what I preach, walking the talk myself. It's actually been fun to put myself and my ideas out there. I'm learning a lot.

From a personal validation perspective, it's so important to have something for yourself. And both tech advances and social norms are making it easier to have side hustles. Building a body of work that's yours, whether it's posting more on LinkedIn, writing a newsletter, or whatever, is necessary -- not just from an information perspective, but also for your own career development and quest of building your sense of personal expertise and credibility.

I can’t say I’ll never go back to big tech—never say never. But right now, I can’t see it. I’m enjoying myself and I feel so productive and engaged, my brain is on fire.

AS: Are you happier?

JW: I am so much happier—and healthier. I just feel empowered. Although it’s vulnerable, it's incredible to do something for yourself, to speak with your own voice.

I am speaking as myself for the first time, far more than when I had the Meta or Uber title (which I still have by the way, I'll always have that experience under my belt). Now I’m getting direct feedback on ideas that are mine, not just talking points.

I've let go of the idea of perfection. I put stuff out there because I think it's worthwhile, not because it's perfect or trendy. It's about iterating and learning. And that’s something really liberating.