The Joby-Uber-Blade Trifecta Partnership
One of the earliest lessons I learned in business was deceptively simple: don’t use the word partnership loosely. We throw it around as though any handshake, press release, or co-branded event counts. But most so-called partnerships fail. They collapse under the weight of vague intentions, asymmetric incentives, or the simple absence of value creation.
A true partnership, I’ve found, requires a clear intersection—at least one, ideally more—between the parties. That intersection tends to fall into three categories:
New revenue: money that neither side could have made alone.
New markets: customers or geographies unlocked by the collaboration.
New features or functionality: capabilities that improve the product in a way one company couldn’t have achieved solo.
And woven through all three, there must be reciprocity. If the value flows only one way, it isn’t a partnership—it’s a subsidy.
That’s the filter I’ve used across my career, and it clarifies more than it complicates. It separates partnerships that exist to generate headlines from those that exist to generate durable value.
Take a recent example that caught my attention: Joby Aviation’s announced partnership with Uber and Blade. At first glance, it looks like another glossy future-of-transportation deal—renderings of sleek eVTOLs gliding over traffic jams, logos aligned in optimism. But if you parse it through the framework, it’s more than hype. It’s a trifecta.
New revenue: Each party taps fresh income streams. Uber expands beyond car rides into air mobility, adding another reason to open the app. Blade sees ridership growth by offering lower-cost eVTOL flights compared to traditional helicopters. Joby unlocks utilization rates that make its aircraft economics viable.
New markets: Blade accesses new demographics—commuters who balk at the price of helicopters but embrace a quieter, cheaper air taxi. Uber inserts itself into short-haul aviation, broadening its identity as a mobility platform. Joby doesn’t just sell planes; it inserts itself into medical transport and high-traffic corridors through partners with real estate and user bases already in place.
New functionality: Blade’s aging helicopter fleet can be swapped out for Joby’s advanced aircraft, improving safety, reducing emissions, and lowering noise. Functionality here isn’t an incremental feature—it’s the core of the product, rewritten.
That’s the trifecta: revenue, markets, functionality. It’s why this deal stands out in a landscape littered with “partnerships” that never make it past the press cycle.
The Joby-Uber-Blade example also hints at a deeper truth about partnerships in the innovation economy: they’re increasingly about system design, not just company strategy. No single firm can bend the arc of transportation, or energy, or health care, on its own. Infrastructure, regulations, user adoption—all are collective challenges. That makes true partnerships more valuable, and more necessary, than ever.
So my advice, to founders and executives alike, is simple but stringent: before you ink the deal or draft the press release, ask where the intersection lies. Is there new revenue? A new market? New functionality? And is the value truly reciprocal?
If not, what you have isn’t a partnership. It’s wishful thinking.
