SMU Alumnus Leandre Johns ’02 Talks Uber Career And Detours Along The Way

A passion for innovation drives Leandre Johns ’02, general manager of Uber Technologies for North and West Texas. Johns returned to the Hilltop to discuss his trajectory from SMU student to tech executive in a conversation with Thomas DiPiero, dean of Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences, April 28.

Johns, a native of Garland, Texas, was a Hunt Leadership Scholar and active in the campus community while earning a bachelor’s degree in psychology from SMU. He encouraged students in the audience at Dallas Hall’s McCord Auditorium to take advantage of as many opportunities as possible while they are undergraduates.
“Test yourself. Make the most of it. Get involved,” he said. Learning to deal with so many different personalities in a variety of situations as a student “made me a more dynamic person.”
While at SMU, he thought he had his future mapped out. During an SMU Abroad semester in Copenhagen, he was involved in children’s cancer research, which shaped the next phase of his education. He graduated from SMU determined to help cure cancer and pursued a master’s degree in public health at the University of Chicago. As a graduate student, he interned for UnitedHealthcare, then spent three years with PricewaterhouseCoopers in Chicago as a healthcare and financial consultant.
“I got to meet a lot of strong-minded business people, but I learned that I wasn’t going to be as innovative in healthcare as I had hoped to be because it moves slowly,” he explained.
So he took a detour, switching his focus to finance and earning an M.B.A. from Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management.
“I was doing marketing, finance and business and that drove me to venture capitalism,” he said. Over the next few years, Johns worked in venture capital as vice president for a healthcare technology and media portfolio company in Chicago.
When Uber popped up on his radar, he was ready for a change. “It was an interesting risk to take,” he said, “and I ended up moving [back to Dallas].”
Launched in 2009, Uber is one of the world’s fastest-growing technology companies. The transportation service connects riders and drivers through its mobile applications. Uber is now available in more than 200 cities in over 55 countries.
In the early days of the company, Johns hit a few roadblocks. “It was rough. It was me and two guys sitting in a small closet trying to start a business,” he recalled. “We used to go to bars and tell people they should take Uber. And they were like, ‘What is You-ber?’ We had to do a lot of grassroots marketing.”
Watching the enterprise thrive has been “one of the happiest things about my job,” Johns said.
It’s an exciting time for Uber, he added. Restaurant partnerships, a carpooling service, expansion into aviation and the use of driverless cars are just a few of the new avenues the company is exploring.
“People see what we are do and that we’re open to new things,” he said. “That is going to push our transportation and tech model to an interesting place. We are moving very quickly.”
Johns has become a familiar face in Dallas. In 2014 D Magazine named him one of Dallas’ “10 Most Eligible Men,” noting, “Leandre’s responsible for some serious transformation in the Dallas social scene.”
Even though his career took a different turn, Johns remains committed to helping children. He is a former board member of Common Threads, a program that teaches children of low-income families how to cook healthy and affordable meals. He said he looks forward to one day having a seat on the board of a Dallas-based charity for kids.
“Getting into philanthropy was a natural thing for me. I am focused on charities around cancer and children,” he said.
As he surveys the route he has traveled, Johns said he wishes he “had known the path I would take while at SMU.” He urged students to take full advantage of all the University has to offer to jumpstart their careers.
“There isn’t a better situation to be in than where you are now,” he said. “The tech space and venture capital space are hard to break into as a minority, but I’m not the exception. You have to have the mindset to succeed, and you have to start now.”
– Leah Johnson ’15