“As a consumer of Uber, I find the product to be magical,” Saint John says. Hornsey, who joined Uber without any hesitations, emphasized the company’s work on an international level. “There’s no other company like Uber in the world solving the problems we are, and doing it on our same scale,” she wrote in an email. Even Frei — who had no plans to take leave from her full-time role as the Senior Associate Dean for Executive Education at Harvard Business School — has been surprised by the reality of walking the halls at Uber every day: “I was expecting to be fist bumped and slapped on the back and I found mostly really intelligent, earnest people wanting to do the right thing and really open for change and help.”