love & honor BY JOS H C H AP I N ’ 02
THE ‘FIGURE-IT-OUT GUY’ Always the innovator, Marshall Osborne ’13 helps others find their own ways
Miami is a magical place that appeals to Marshall Osborne’s mindset.
As a student in Miami’s San Francisco Digital Innovation program (SFDI), Marshall Osborne ’13 quickly had an epiphany: Uber was the place he wanted to be. So, Osborne lived up to the program’s billing — he innovated. Calling fellow Miamian Ryan Graves ’06, Uber’s first employee and former CEO, Osborne made his pitch for an internship at the ride-hailing giant. The response? We just don’t have a need for interns right now. Dejected but not deterred, Osborne began to formulate another plan to find a way in when fortune smiled in the form of another connection at Uber — and a meeting with Ed Hubbard, the company’s vice president of business development. “We had dinner a couple of days later at some Italian restaurant on North Beach, and we just sort of jelled,” Osborne said. “We hit it off, and he hired me. I was sort of his ‘figure-it-out guy’ for a long time.” Osborne is still figuring things out, this time as head of business development and experiential marketing at goPuff, an app-based delivery platform operating in more than 500 U.S. cities. He’s helping other Miamians figure things out, too. Osborne has established the Uber Alumni Digital Fellows Fund to support Miami students who demonstrate financial need and show a strong
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entrepreneurial spirit. Osborne’s hope is that a more diverse set of students may participate in programs such as the one in San Francisco. Miami’s SFDI program was so influential on Osborne that he never left San Francisco, not even to return to Oxford to resume on-campus studies. Faced with coming back to Miami or seizing an opportunity to continue working for Uber, he innovated — again. “I didn’t feel like I needed to be in Oxford for four years to get the most out of Miami,” he said. Others agreed. With the help of faculty and staff, he was able to finish his final year entirely online. “He got this offer from Uber, and we were like, ‘Yeah, you have to take that,’ ” said Glenn Platt, Miami’s C. Michael Armstrong Professor of Network Technology and Management. “We were able to thread a needle in our curriculum and show we are committed to student success, period. We weren’t going to let something like coming back to Oxford get in the way. “It was two sides of the coin. We bent over backwards to do what we could to help him finish his degree, and, at the same time, he’s bending over backwards with that workload. He was one who knew what he wanted to do and wanted to be. It took both sides to get him where he ended up going.” It wasn’t always easy. Osborne often worked well into his evenings, including a particular night where he passed the 2 a.m. hour while still at the Uber office. Returning from a late dinner, Uber co-founder Travis Kalanick found him toiling away on schoolwork.
