20VC: Uber President on The Untold Uber Stories: Travis, China and Self-Driving | Why Autonomy Is Existential | How to Beat DoorDash to #1 in Food with Andrew MacDonald

Andrew Macdonald (Mac) is the longest-serving employee at Uber. Today, he is the President and COO. No one on the planet has spent more time mastering ride-sharing than Mac. Uber now does 300M rides per week, has 200M users, and is one of the most recognised brands on the planet. Mac never does interviews and so this was a rare look behind the scenes at the Uber machine. AGENDA: 05:39 – How was Mac the only survivor from the Travis era? 10:39 – How does Uber decide what to include in Uber One membership? 11:45 – How does Uber decide which new products to pursue? 16:08 – What does Uber need to do to reach 500 million users? 20:37 – Why Uber was right to focus on its core business and divest autonomy? 24:08 – Why India and Brazil will delay Uber's autonomous future? 28:34 – The craziest story from Uber's battle in China 29:27 – Why Travis Kalanick believed money was the moat? 31:17 – Was Uber structurally disadvantaged in China from day one? 35:48 – Inside Uber's SWAT team of its 30 best AI engineers 37:55 – How companies need to extract real efficiency from AI? 42:00 – Will Uber have more or fewer employees in five years? 43:52 – Will companies that do not work with frontier models be disaggregated? 46:02 – Will AI agents disaggregate Uber's interface and customer relationship? 48:26 – Why Brian Chesky was right: chat is not the best interface for everything 55:52 – Why it is bullshit to say DoorDash would not be number one if Travis were still CEO 59:13 – The single biggest lesson from Travis Kalanick 1:00:07 – The second biggest lesson from Travis Kalanick

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  We're doing like 300 million trips a week. We were burning 52 million a week in China. We were competing in China with one hand tied behind our back. Autonomy is as bad as it's ever going to be today, right? And every single day it's going to get better. In the end, distribution wins. We could do everything we do today with less people in five years because of the power of AI. No one's been at the company longer than me at this point.

• 0:23Harry Stebbings?

  This is 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and I'm so excited to welcome one of the greatest operators of the last two decades to the hot seat, Andrew McDonald. He's the president and COO at Uber, where he leads all businesses initiatives for the company across mobility and delivery. He is Uber's longest tenured active employee. And today Uber's an absolute monster. They have a market cap of 160 billion, revenues of 52 billion in the full year of 2025, on over a quarter of a trillion in annual gross bookings. They have 200 million consumers that use the app monthly. This was a behind the scenes on Uber like we haven't seen before.

• 1:05Harry Stebbings?

  Mac was one of the greatest operators that I've been fortunate enough to have on the show, and I think that really comes out in this discussion. But before we dive into the show today, founders face a different set of challenges at every stage of growth. For Sid Shait, co-founder and CEO of Dematrix, JP Morgan delivered the guidance and expertise to help navigate what came next. He credits JP Morgan's high-touch approach with supporting Dematrix as it grew and expanded internationally. Whether you're in the early days or expanding into new markets, JP Morgan helps startups navigate complexity with real confidence, offering personalized guidance and deep sector expertise.

• 1:46Harry Stebbings?

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• 2:31Harry Stebbings?

  With Asana, your whole company can work on the same plan towards the same goal, whether you're a team of 10 or a team of 10,000. Asana, where humans and agents workflow together. Try it at asana.com. That's A-S-A-N-A.com. While Asana aligns the roadmap, Base44 helps you build faster. You have the idea, but with most AI tools, you hit a wall. The setup, the config, the gap between what you pictured and what you actually ship. Well, Base44 is where that wall disappears. You describe it, yeah. Base44 builds it. Apps, websites, AI agents, real working products built in minutes using nothing but plain language. And it's all batteries included. The backend, the database, the authentication, the hosting, the heavy lifting is handled.

• 3:15Harry Stebbings?

  So you just really stay in the flow. This doesn't just take the busy work off your plate, but it gives you an advantage and pushes you past what you thought you could build alone. So in this market, fast is the baseline. To win, you just have to be first. Base44 is that edge, the move that skips the troubleshooting and gets you straight to the breakthrough. Build your next thing at base44.com. That's base44.com. You have now arrived at your destination. Mac, I am so excited for this, dude. I've wanted to make this happen and we've been DMing for like a long time. It's so good to do it in person.

• 3:50Speaker 00

  So great to be here. And you're right, I remember the first Twitter DM from you and I was a bit of a fan from afar, as you probably hear often, but great to be here now and so glad to do it in person.

• 3:59Harry Stebbings?

  So I spoke to Dara before the show and I said, what's his superpower? He's been here for over a decade, whatever 12, 13 years.

• 4:07Speaker 00

  14 years, be 15 in May. No one's been at the company longer than me at this point.

• 4:12Harry Stebbings?

  My God. I said, what's his superpower? And he said, oh, very simple. People really like him, but he is an execution machine and he is very good at driving people. And I suck at that. So can you, no, seriously, how do you do that but retain people liking you?

• 4:28Speaker 00

  I get the question in the context of career advice. People start, they join Uber, they say, you know, you've been very successful at Uber. How do I, how should I be successful here? What did you do to get successful? It's hard because like every formula is different, but there's a couple of things I say. One is, and I think the most important thing is, if you genuinely are just trying to do what you think is the right thing for the company, and that is your filter, and you build trust that that's what you're optimizing for all the time on every decision, big decisions and small decisions, that you are using the lens of what is the best thing for Uber. You're not always going to get the decision right, but if people know that you're filtering on that, then I think that builds followership and trust over time. And then you can move people because if you're pushing on something, they know it's because you genuinely think it's the right thing to do.

• 5:13Speaker 00

  And then if you pair that with a deep knowledge of the business, and I've grown up in this business, so I know, especially ride hailing, like I know that better than anyone in the world at this point. Those two things together, I think are pretty powerful.

• 5:23Harry Stebbings?

  You do literally know it better than anyone else in the world.

• 5:26Speaker 00

  It's hard. I mean, it's only been around since 2009. I've been working on it since 2012 and, you know, most folks from that time period are not working on it anymore.

• 5:35Harry Stebbings?

  You said, when you genuinely believe it's the right thing for the company.

• 5:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 5:38Harry Stebbings?

  What did you genuinely believe was the right thing for the company? And it turned out you were wrong.

• 5:44Speaker 00

  I mean, the first thing I say is like, I am wrong every single day. Big things and small things, right? I actually love the, I think it's a Bezos quote, which is if you want to be right most of the time, you got to change your mind a lot. Or it's something, something to that effect, right? Which is effectively like, you're going to be wrong a lot. And actually, the people who are successful over time are willing to change their mind. So I think that's true. So I'm wrong a lot. I think that this is probably the most common running debate that Dara and I will have as I think of his tenure as CEO, which is, and thematically, it's like the tension between short-term levers and long-term levers for the business. So like a short-term lever for ride hail is like price, right? Every dollar that we can put back into lower pricing, I think is valuable.

• 6:26Speaker 00

  Even if long-term, there may be other things you want to do like acquire new users or build a membership program or build new business units. You should be weighing those investments versus I could just put a dollar back into price. I think I have been too short-termist on certain issues like membership. Uber One, for example. I was running the mobility business. You're smiling, so I suspect you maybe thought, I don't know, like.

• 6:53Harry Stebbings?

  Well, I'm smiling because I said to Dara, what is the single biggest disagreement that you've had with Mac that comes to mind first? And he's like, say it's from me, say it's from me. Normally people like anonymize this. Say it's from me. He was reticent about membership programs and I think now he's changed.

• 7:10Speaker 00

  Totally. And I've turned out to be wrong. I mean, the reason I've changed is because, first of all, Uber One is, I think, on many metrics, one of the more successful membership programs in the world. I mean, we're not at like Amazon Prime or Costco levels, but we're getting to within spitting distance. And from a company lever perspective, it's highly efficient. And when we look at efficiency, we usually look on like, if I put a dollar in, you know, what am I getting back in terms of top line? And it's one of the best levers we have. And the longer out we can measure it, the more efficient it gets and the better it stacks up versus other levers. So you're like, okay, Mac, well, like, how did you get that wrong? Like, if that's what the data showed you, then why weren't you just sort of all in on membership? And when he says like, when I say I wasn't all in on membership, what I mean by that is like,

• 7:52Speaker 00

  you know, I would constrain the capital envelope that we would have in the mobility business to invest in this. So if I had 40 million bucks next quarter to invest, you know, my gut was always like, put as much of that into pricing as you can, or put as much of that into driver supply to prove the health of the marketplace so that service is more reliable. Because like ride sharing at the end of the day is price, reliability and safety. That's all it is. That's what it was 10 years ago. I think that's what it's going to be 10 years from now, even when it's autonomous vehicles. It's like price, reliability, safety. And putting money into something like membership where people get a suite of benefits, part of which is price, but a whole other host of things, you're explicitly choosing not to put that dollar back into price. And that's just the tension. And I probably was short-termist in my thinking there.

• 8:35Harry Stebbings?

  You said there about dollar leverage, putting in dollars to what you get out. What is the single most efficient dollar in to dollar out business for you today?

• 8:44Speaker 00

  I think membership is the most efficient long-term consumer lever that we've got. And the reason for that is like, ultimately, we are looking at like IGB as a critical input metric for any dollar I deploy.

• 8:59Harry Stebbings?

  What is IGB?

• 9:00Speaker 00

  Incremental gross bookings. Think of it as incremental revenue. If I put a dollar of incentive into the market, if I give Harry a dollar and I give a million other consumers a dollar discount, how much incremental revenue do I get back at that? And by the way, like the ROI on that is different because ROI is like, if I get $2 of revenue back from Harry by offering you a dollar, you might be like, okay, that's great. That's a, you know, a two to one ratio, but actually we only make seven and a half percent of your dollar from a profit margin perspective. So you're still negative ROI, but you make those sorts of investments to grow the platform over time because, you know, I've increased Harry's engagement and then your LTV goes up over time. So we're typically looking at like a very baseline IGB type or incremental revenue type metric for any, any dollar we're putting into the marketplace. Membership just gets better over time.

• 9:45Speaker 00

  The reason it gets better over time is, you know, if Harry becomes a member, not only do you ride more next month, but actually that cohort of members we acquired in that month tends to ride more over time. And part of that is because they're consolidating more of their mobility business onto Uber. Part of it is because actually that you get some Uber Eats benefits with your membership program too. So now you start using Uber Eats instead of DoorDash or Deliveroo. And so the LTV of Harry just goes up over time with membership. You're less likely to churn, you're more resilient from a market share perspective. Like there's all these downstream long-term impacts that sort of multiply the value of that first dollar I put into membership. With shorter term levels like price or promotion, there's some tail. Like, you know, if I give you a dollar to take a trip next week,

• 10:30Speaker 00

  there's some value in the following weeks, but it tends to sort of dissipate faster. And so that's often the debate.

• 10:36Harry Stebbings?

  You said it's not quite Amazon or Costco, say, in terms of membership dominance.

• 10:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:41Harry Stebbings?

  I think that's fair. They've had a little bit more head start than you. When you look at that chasm between you, what do you not have that you would need to have to reach their dominance?

• 10:50Speaker 00

  From my perspective, we need to put more consumer value into the membership program. So today, I think especially if you're a mobility rider. So typically on mobility, you're getting like 5% cash back, right? Is our standard standard sort of offer. The consumer comprehension of that is still relatively low. Like for a membership program as big as we are, I think there's still a lot of people who have Uber One and don't actually fully realize the benefits they're getting on mobility. The other thing we need to do is like, we're looking for features that are high perceived value, low cost, right? Like, that's the sweet spot of any membership type program or rewards program, for example. With our business, that's tough because I don't have a lot of free to give away on the platform, right? If I want to give you a ride because you're a loyal member, either through a membership

• 11:35Speaker 00

  program or a rewards program, I still got to pay the driver to provide that ride. It's not like a hotel where you might have excess inventory and so your marginal cost of giving away a room night is pretty low. The beauty of our model is we're primarily a variable cost model. Means when demand drops, great, our costs scale down with it. But it also means that we just don't have a fixed capacity to give away. And so it just makes the challenges for building a membership or rewards program a little tougher for us.

• 11:59Harry Stebbings?

  What line of revenue do you not have today that will be very significant in five years' time?

• 12:04Speaker 00

  I mean, hard, right? Because significant for us is really fucking big at this point, right? So we're approaching a quarter billion dollars in GB, right? So if you think about that top line metric, what is our GMV or GB number? We're not far off from being a $250 billion company. So for anything to pass the like significance test, it has to be a multi-billion dollar business in terms of transaction volume, right? So I'm thinking of a new product, I want to stand up and it's a mobility service that we're going to offer through the Uber app. For that to even be interesting, I have to see a path within a few years to multiple billions of dollars of GMV. And it just actually constrains your thinking a little bit.

• 12:45Harry Stebbings?

  Do you worry that that prevents you trying new things?

• 12:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally, totally.

• 12:49Harry Stebbings?

  Do you do like a Google Labs? Like, go on, try Gmail, Paul Buckeye, do you know what I mean?

• 12:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, we do. We try to set up structures to solve this problem. I mean, it's like a classic innovator's dilemma problem, right? Which is like, the thing you've already built is so big that it just swallows up your organizational capacity to do anything else. And even if you're able to stand up other businesses, it's impossible for those businesses to get the resourcing, attention, distribution, marketing dollars, engineering capacity, whatever it is, it just gets swallowed up by the whole. And part of it is just even management focused, right? Like, it's very hard to focus on the new thing when you've got this like $225 billion blob that you've got to manage over here. So how do you solve that? I mean, we run a program called Growth Bets, which is, you know, intended very much to incubate new businesses within Uber.

• 13:36Harry Stebbings?

  How does that work?

• 13:37Speaker 00

  So basically, what we try to do is, A, create dedicated resources. So, you know, if I've got, made up number, but 2,000 people that work on our mobility business, I want to try to have 100 to 150 of them working on the new stuff, the small stuff, the stuff that we don't have product market fit or unit economics figured out, but that could be a big future business. But it requires like dedicated capacity and thinking. If you try to do it like as 5% of your job, like, you know, I run the marketplace for Uber X in the US, but I'm also trying to incubate this other thing with 2% of my time, it's really hard.

• 14:11Harry Stebbings?

  Do you know who the best in the world is at this? Nick Storonsky from Revolut.

• 14:15Speaker 00

  Oh, interesting.

• 14:15Harry Stebbings?

  I've interviewed 1,000 founders. He's the single best founder I've ever interviewed. And it's because he runs 26 product experiments at once. He gives them $2 million, tells them to run for a year. Every single week, he chats in for 20 minutes with each of the leaders. And then he determines whether to fund their next round or not.

• 14:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, I love that. I mean, we have a version of that. It's not the, I love the cadence of that, by the way, the 20, like, operating on weeks, not months or quarters, is how a new business should run. I think also having to sing for your supper, like, come back and ask for money. Like, the challenge, again, the other challenge of standing up a new business with a big company with a big P and L and a big balance sheet, is people just get fat on the resources, right? And so you don't build it the way you would build it if you were a startup, because you just have more resources. So you end up moving slower, consuming more cash, like, getting more heads than you otherwise would if you were actually starting up from a zero to one. And as a result, like, it's not that you necessarily build something better, you just are slower and you're constantly actually chasing the people who are doing it from first principles. And so I think that's hard. Now, we should, you have advantages.

• 15:16Speaker 00

  We have distribution. Distribution is-

• 15:18Harry Stebbings?

  Which is the mother of advantages.

• 15:20Speaker 00

  Hundred percent. And so if you can actually build something interesting and then plug it into 200 million consumers who use our app monthly, you're just going to be able to scale way faster than anyone who's doing it without that distribution advantage. And even figuring out how to do distribution right, like, the 200 million number is attractive, but even within that 200 million, of course, there's tons of internal discussion and debate around how we spend our pixels, right? Every new product wants CRM support. Every new product wants to be featured on the masthead of Uber Eats or wants to be in the product selector for rides. And so like, how you make those decisions as an organization is tough, but you still have this built-in distribution that is super interesting. And so it's an advantage, but you've got to figure out the other stuff, which is like, how do you stand up new products in a company?

• 16:04Harry Stebbings?

  Other than time, what is the one inhibitor to getting to 500 million users? You mentioned 200 million.

• 16:10Speaker 00

  I would say, like, our IR team is not going to love this answer because, I would say, price. And the reason our IR team won't love that answer is because when you start talking about price in the context of public markets, people are like, oh, you're going to get into a price war and like margins are going to come down and like it's a less attractive business. But that's not really what I mean. What I mean by price is, when you think about the businesses we operate, primarily, you know, mobility and delivery, the vast majority of the transactions in delivery of things or the vast majority of the transactions in transportation broadly, happen at a price point that is like way lower than our core products. Like, taking an Uber X to and from work every day in New York City for like 35 bucks a direction, that's still a luxury product, right?

• 16:55Speaker 00

  The vast majority of transportation in New York City is not happening at that price point. And so if we want to get to 500 million users and we want to go from people using us on average six times a month to using us on average 25 times a month, that average cost of that transaction has to come down. And so how do you get that down? There's all sorts of ways in doing that. You have more modes that are cheaper, you can get trains on Uber here in London, you have alternative modes like bikes and scooters, et cetera, because once you deconstruct car ownership, it's not just about Uber X, it's about all the other things you do. But you have to get price down.

• 17:30Harry Stebbings?

  À la pubel, I fucking hate these bikes that litter the pavements. Oh my God, they're so annoying.

• 17:34Speaker 00

  You do.

• 17:35Harry Stebbings?

  Oh my gosh, I'm an old man.

• 17:36Speaker 00

  You know, Londoners love them generally. London is such a significant market for micro mobility.

• 17:40Harry Stebbings?

  I know, I know, it's why I don't get out much.

• 17:43Speaker 00

  Would you rather have more cars on the road?

• 17:45Harry Stebbings?

  Would I?

• 17:45Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:46Harry Stebbings?

  To be fair, I live around the corner. But to be fair, I use Uber as an argument every single day because I don't have a driver's license because I have Uber.

• 17:53Speaker 00

  I love that.

• 17:53Harry Stebbings?

  And my girlfriend has a car that's what, 20 grand and then insurance is three or four? And I'm like, do you know how many Ubers I'd have to take to get to 24 grand?

• 18:01Speaker 00

  Totally. I mean, the individually owned car is the most inefficient asset that anyone owns and certainly at any level of price point, right? It sits idle 98% of the day.

• 18:10Harry Stebbings?

  Depreciating.

• 18:11Speaker 00

  It's depreciating. The ongoing operating costs are actually high, even if you're not driving it, you're paying for that insurance clip, which is why I do think in some future world, maybe not five years, but 15 or 20 years, everyone's going to be like Harry. Nobody's going to own a car, nobody's going to have their driver's license because you'll be able to get around. And I think bikes and scooters will be part of that, autonomous vehicles will be part of that, I think public transportation will be a big part of that. But I don't think you need to own a car.

• 18:35Harry Stebbings?

  One way to bring down price is to remove cost. And one way to remove cost is to think about robot taxis autonomous. You said before it was existential. Why is it existential? And how do you think about that and how it changes the business forever?

• 18:50Speaker 00

  I mean, it's existential because at the end of the day, it's a better product than our core product in many use cases. And I think those use cases grow over time and eventually it's better in all use cases. You can quibble along the edges on like current autonomous vehicle experiences, right? In most cases, it is going to be slower than a human driver. The pickup point may not be right in front of your door as you would get with a human driver. It's not going to work in all weather conditions, all geographies, all pickup points. Like, you can quibble on that today, but I think increasingly over time, autonomy is not only going to be safe, it's going to be safer, and I think it's going to be a better experience because people like the in-car experience.

• 19:29Speaker 00

  The in-car experience of having privacy and being able to work or sleep or talk with your partner or whatever it is you want to do, like, that is better and people prefer that for the most part. So when you have a better product that is only going to get better over time, and autonomy is as bad as it's ever going to be today, right? And every single day it's going to get better, then that's going to be the business and that's going to be how people get around. And if Uber doesn't have autonomy in our platform, and we will, we are investing actively and aggressively to bring it to market, but if we didn't, then it certainly would be existential for our core business.

• 20:04Harry Stebbings?

  Is it the largest investment that you make?

• 20:06Speaker 00

  It is. I think it kind of depends how you define it a little bit. Like, if you look at our autonomy investments, we are making a mix of equity investments in companies, purchase commitments, building out autonomous infrastructure, building out data collect fleet. Like, there's a lot of different ways we're spreading the dollars and we're pretty confident in the ROI on those dollars long term. So yeah, it's the largest single sort of standalone investment we make. Now, don't be, you know, don't get me wrong, at a P and L our size, we're moving billions of dollars around every month, but yes, it's the largest single area of investment.

• 20:36Harry Stebbings?

  I'm a venture investor also.

• 20:38Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:38Harry Stebbings?

  Which means I love to pontificate and I also say I love to say I told you so.

• 20:42Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 20:42Harry Stebbings?

  You and Travis kind of went down this road already. Do you look at that with annoyance that you stop-started? And would you be materially ahead had you just been able to continue as planned?

• 20:53Speaker 00

  First off, I'll say when we started our autonomous efforts, you know, this was a secret project within Uber. I was not involved in starting that. I don't want to take any credit for having that foresight because I think it was foresight.

• 21:06Harry Stebbings?

  This was 2016?

• 21:08Speaker 00

  No, well before 2016. You know, I think Travis had, I don't want to get it wrong, but years earlier than that, knew that this would be the future. And like many sort of visionary founder types, he could see ahead of where the rest of us could see and started taking the company in that direction. So, you know, this would have been, you know, 2013, you know, 2012, 2013, 2014, we would have quietly started working on this and I wasn't involved in it at all. And at that time, like autonomy, the narrative was ahead of the reality by a lot. Right? I mean, you can go back and read various prognostications and not just from Elon, from many people in the industry saying, you know, next year, next year, next year. And it was never next year.

• 21:51Speaker 00

  But I, look, I think it would be rose colored glasses to say, oh, see, if we just stayed in the game, we'd have the leading autonomous vehicle company and this existential threat for us wouldn't, wouldn't exist or we'd completely control our own destiny. I mean, when we ultimately divested ATG, which was our internal autonomy group, we were in the depths of COVID. Our mobility business had lost 84% of our top line in three weeks. The company was burning billions annually. We didn't have a core business producing cash. It wasn't, the billions were not coming from investments and other stuff. Our core was burning money. We did not believe we were leading in autonomy at the time. We were trailing. You can debate about whether we were trailing the field or whether we were just trailing Waymo,

• 22:35Speaker 00

  but we were, we were not in the pole position. And Uber had a lot to prove that we could just lead and win and make money in our core business. And so we divested ATG. We turned the core businesses into cash flowing machines. We took the company public. We've grown the value, grown the business. Almost any metric you pick from that point in time is up and to the right. And so on all those dimensions, I think the sort of focused strategy played out. But yes, of course, today, do I wish we, if you could sort of snap your fingers and say, ATG would turn into one of the leading autonomous players globally and we completely control our destiny? Yeah, I think that would be a good thing for us.

• 23:15Harry Stebbings?

  Can I ask you, when you fast forward five years' time, what percent of rides will be human driven versus robotaxi driven?

• 23:23Speaker 00

  It's so hard to predict. I mean, for a few reasons. One is our, the denominator is huge here, right? We're doing like 300 million trips a week on our core platforms. That is just massive scale. So we do a few million trips in AVs on that platform today, a month. But it's just such a small part of the business that it's going to grow triple digit percentage months on months and months and months. And it will still be a relatively tiny drop of the overall bucket. The second thing is, makes it hard to predict is our human driven business is going to keep growing. And so like even in the largest AV markets where today we don't have AVs like San Francisco and LA, our human driven business is growing faster than the rest of the US. So it's hard for me to know what the, it's a moving target.

• 24:08Speaker 00

  The third piece is Uber's so global, right? In mobility, we operate across 75 countries. Two of our large, three largest countries by volume are India and Brazil. You know, the average fare in Brazil is like 3.54 bucks USD. In India, it's 2.53 bucks or something like that. It's, it's going to be decades until the cost of autonomy compresses to the point where it compete with that cost of human labor. And those markets make up the majority of our trips. And so if you want to say, when will the majority of trips at Uber be autonomous? I can't tell you because I can tell you it's probably not going to be until autonomy gets to Brazil and India. And I can tell you that's going to be a long time.

• 24:43Harry Stebbings?

  So what's really interesting there is actually it could still be a very low volume of trips. But in terms of dollar amount, it could actually be significantly higher.

• 24:50Speaker 00

  Dollar amount, yeah. Cause if it's in the US and if it's in the largest cities in the US, then like that's where the rubber meets the road. So that, that's the, for sure, that's the counter to what I'm saying. You know, I'm saying, oh, it's going to be more complex and we have all this other. But yes, of course, if autonomy starts to make up the majority of markets in San Francisco, LA, DC, Miami, New York, Boston, that's a big chunk of our bookings. That's a big chunk of our dollars. And so that's kind of the ultimate question.

• 25:17Harry Stebbings?

  Who do you think is a bigger threat, Waymo or Tesla?

• 25:20Speaker 00

  That's, yeah, I mean, I don't know how many spicy takes I want to have here, but I think there's going to be more than two winners. Do I think Waymo and Tesla will ultimately be winners? Yes, I do. I don't know who, who's going to bet against either of those, but I think there will be more winners. I also think even in a world of strong winners, like a very natural question or often feedback we get from investors or smart types who follow our business is like, so yeah, I believe that there will be a few players that get to autonomy. And I think they're ultimately going to work with you guys, but they're going to have such strong leverage in the market that your share of every dollar is going to get squeezed. And so I just don't know, even in a world where you have access to autonomy, like, how are your margins going to look? Because today you guys benefit from fragmentation and that's true.

• 26:03Speaker 00

  I think it's a true statement, but there's a couple of counterpoints to that. One is if you look at delivery as a comparable vertical here, McDonald's and Starbucks also are strong leaders in their individual verticals. They've spent billions building out fixed assets in terms of stores and that, all the infrastructure that goes into their supply chain. They have 1P channels, walk in the front door of McDonald's, get ordered through the McDonald's app. But they also ultimately work with the marketplaces. And we're able to come to a good economic agreement that works for both sides. Cause at the end of the day, they have expensive fixed assets and you want to drive as high utilization as possible. And whether that's a store or a car, I think that's going to be true. And so I think whether Waymo or Tesla ends up being the bigger threat, I don't know.

• 26:47Speaker 00

  I think ultimately it's in both of their interests to put their vehicles on our network, even if they have their own robotaxi apps or their own 1P apps, even if they work with our competitors on the rideshare side or on the delivery side. I think everyone will work with us because ultimately we have distribution and ultimately they have expensive fixed assets that need utilization.

• 27:07Harry Stebbings?

  What's interesting there is you say then that distribution is more important than superior technology.

• 27:12Speaker 00

  I think in the end, distribution wins. And look, of course, if only one player gets to the finish line on the technology side, then that is a problem for us. But that is not the future that I think, we think will exist. And even if you look at what's happened in China, there's not one AV company that is emerging as a winner there. There are already four or five. So I don't know why China would have four or five, which by the way, will over time become eight or 10 and the rest of the world would converge around one player. I just don't see it emerging that way.

• 27:46Harry Stebbings?

  You were at Uber when you did Uber China, no?

• 27:48Speaker 00

  I was, yeah. We exited our China business in 2016.

• 27:53Harry Stebbings?

  You've got kids, right?

• 27:54Speaker 00

  I do, I have three daughters.

• 27:56Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, so with kids, you tell them story time?

• 27:58Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 27:58Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah.

• 27:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 27:59Harry Stebbings?

  I, I pretend like, you know, it's story time. What's the wildest story from Uber China?

• 28:05Speaker 00

  So I was only like sort of over China for a few months before we ultimately did the deal with Didi. And like even just those few months were like, I felt like I lived years, right? Just seeing the deal process play out, all the regular emotional highs and lows that come with the deal process, but also then the specific, you know, China specific, Travis specific, like it was just crazy. And ultimately we got a successful outcome that I think, you know, folks would say like most Western companies did not have this, even though we didn't win, even though we took the silver medal in China. I think we got a better outcome than the vast majority of Western companies and vast majority of Western technology companies that try to do business in China.

• 28:42Harry Stebbings?

  Do you have a crazy story?

• 28:43Speaker 00

  So in China, the crazy thing was you'd be negotiating, to be clear, like others were running the negotiation. We were running the business, but the, the sort of mandate behind the scenes of the negotiation was like, we've got to push on investment because like it gave you leverage at the table, right? So if, if one side saw the other was gaining share as you were negotiating this deal, it kind of gave you relative strength. And this was happening like day by day and both sides were just so well capitalized, right? I mean, Travis used to have a saying, which is like, we need to raise more money than all our competitors in the world combined because the basis for competition for rideshare, which is like product market fit was clear. So it was just a land grab at that point and money helped you solve the land grab.

• 29:26Speaker 00

  And so we had raised immense amounts of capital. On the other hand, like so had Didi, right? And the notion that we were going to be able to raise more than everyone in the world combined, it was just never going to happen and pass a certain point because you had players like SoftBank investing in the market as well. And you remember those days, like that was free money era. And Uber was best in the world at capitalizing the free money era, but there were many others that were good at it as well and ran the same playbook as us. So all that is to say, I remember the last few weeks in the negotiation, we were burning 52 million a week in China just on price subsidies because there was this heated behind the scenes battle happening

• 30:08Speaker 00

  to get to the best economics and the ultimate sort of surrender or ultimate sort of truce. So that was crazy. Another story I heard, which I thought was nuts, and this was not an Uber story. But you know, before, when Uber and Didi did our deal, we were the two largest players. But before there was a third player, I think it was called Quati. And Didi and Quati merged and they sort of merged the companies. They did a deal, you're combining HR systems. And they realized that like of like the 2,000 employees here and the 2,000 employees here, there were like 200 employees that were on both payrolls. And so you sort of had this dynamic where you sort of like realized like, oh, okay. Like, you know, this, this is, this is like real deep competitive.

• 30:53Speaker 00

  gnarly like you have employees that are wearing both hats. Which was crazy to me to hear because that notion just in like competing in the US. It's not something that in a million years I could see happening.

• 31:05Harry Stebbings?

  It was like a frontier AI.

• 31:07Speaker 00

  Wild, wild. And so there was all sorts of stuff like that. I mean, remember, like, we were we were competing in China with one hand tied behind our back. We because of the nature of the sort of investor bases in each company. You know, at one point, we were not able to operate on the WeChat platform. Like trying to compete in China and not having access to WeChat. You know, it's like trying to compete in the US without like email or a phone number. Like, it's very difficult to run your business. But we did have our own local partners that were helpful.

• 31:35Harry Stebbings?

  Were you pleased to get out?

• 31:37Speaker 00

  I mean, look, nobody, you're never pleased to take the silver medal. I don't think it was plausible that we were ultimately going to be the market winner. I mean, even for geopolitical reasons alone, like the notion that a US tech company would ultimately be the largest mobility service in China. I just don't think it's something that was ever plausible. And so it was always going to be about some exit to a local player. And I think all things considered, we got a pretty good exit.

• 32:02Harry Stebbings?

  I don't think Xi Jinping is going to give you employee of the month awards, is he?

• 32:05Speaker 00

  No, it's hard, right?

• 32:07Harry Stebbings?

  Very hard.

• 32:08Speaker 00

  And like, I think like, the hardest part of exiting, not the market opportunity, that was obvious. Not the growth, because that was something that was exciting in our business, but was also heavily subsidized. But like, the Uber China team, like, these were people who bet on Uber. Who joined Uber, I'm sure, and many of their friends and families are like, what are you doing? Like, don't don't join those guys. They were like heart and soul Uber employees. And I think one of the awesome things we did at the time was we tried to give as many of those folks who wanted it roles in the global machine. And many of those folks, and there are still some that are at Uber today. But that was that was hard. And like Travis is actually a pretty loyal guy for people who are like all in on the company. And our Uber China team was all in on the company. And so that was a hard moment for us.

• 32:52Harry Stebbings?

  Be wild, fricking time.

• 32:54Speaker 00

  Wild.

• 32:54Harry Stebbings?

  Wild.

• 32:55Speaker 00

  Wild.

• 32:55Harry Stebbings?

  It makes today with AI look less wild.

• 32:58Speaker 00

  It's all relative, right? When you're in it, like, some of these things, when you're in it, it's just like your reality. And so you don't quite realize, but then you have the benefit of like 10 years of hindsight. And you're like, that was crazy.

• 33:08Harry Stebbings?

  Speaking of wild and crazy and like China letting US companies do well, China competing. You blew through a year's budget for AI in four months.

• 33:22Harry Stebbings?

  Sorry, I'm just loving this. You go to this meeting and you're like, so how's the budget going?

• 33:28Speaker 00

  Well, first of all, it's not like that is like a big spreadsheet reveal and you're like, oh, it's gone. I think like budgeting for new stuff is tough, right?

• 33:36Harry Stebbings?

  Me and my mother in Chanel, I'm like, oh, that one's gone.

• 33:40Speaker 00

  I'll stay away from that.

• 33:41Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, terrifying. Is that evidence of incredibly effective tools? Or is that evidence of a desperate need for guardrails?

• 33:49Speaker 00

  I firmly believe multiple things can be true at once, so let's come to that. Let me give a little bit of backstory on this because Uber had two big AI headlines in the first half of this year. I think both of which caught at least the people involved by surprise. One was Praveen was speaking at an event and, you know, generated this headline by saying we were through our our AI budget in the first few months of the year. Praveen's our CTO. And then I did another podcast and said, it was hard to draw a direct line from our AI spend through to useful consumer features. And both of those comments caught fire in a way that I think neither of us expected, right? Praveen wasn't making a comment about like runaway spend, like we're going to bankrupt ourselves. He was just saying like, effectively, like, it's hard to predict usage. Usage has been more than I thought. We've been trying to drive usage.

• 34:34Speaker 00

  And here we are blowing through a budget, but you're setting a budget number in like November for a tool that's growing vertical in terms of usage. Of course, it's hard to like pinpoint where you're going to be. And then my comment, honestly, first of all, it wasn't insightful at all. Like, it was like held up as this insight, either as if you, it sort of showed to me the power of people reinforcing their preconceived notions, like taking a statement which is fairly innocuous on its surface and either using it to prove their point on one side or the other. So on the one side, it was kind of like, I think AI skeptics were sort of like, see, the Uber COO is saying there's no return on AI, which is obviously not what I was saying. On the other side, there was sort of this like, if you were like a fundamentalist AI evangelist, you were saying, this guy has no idea what he's talking about.

• 35:19Speaker 00

  They're obviously doing it wrong because AI is God. And like, I don't touch my computer without engaging AI, right? And obviously, like, there's just nuance in the middle that is true. So the point around like ROI, for me, it's a couple of things. One is, at the end of the day, we do want to get efficiency or we want to get new and cool stuff built. And we are seeing examples of that every single day. We have stood up a pod of 30 of our best AI engineers that are partnered with business people or partnered with folks in the GNA functions to go in and go process by process and start sort of ground up with AI. How do you improve that process?

• 36:02Speaker 00

  And if you can take like a capital allocation process, like every week we are allocating pricing dollars across thousands of markets globally. And I can take that from being a 15 hour process to a two hour process, which is what we've done. That is tremendous tangible ROI because now you get two days of someone's time back. If you're able to take a forecasting process, which our finance team is constantly reforecasting every inch of our business. And you're able to turn that from eight hours of work into two hours of work. You're able to now do that not only with more precision because you can add an additional layer of nuance into those forecasts. But you're just able to have your folks do other stuff. There's clear ROI there.

• 36:43Speaker 00

  If you're able to take marketing QA from two weeks to two days, like, there's so many examples of that that we see. And then the way we've done that again is by pairing the business folks with the AI engineers.

• 36:54Harry Stebbings?

  But are you actually seeing that today? Because Alex Karp came on CNBC or CNN and said like, no, the ROI question is still there. To validate what you said, to be clear. Outside of coding and customer support with the greatest of respects, I think anyone who runs a budget in a large enterprise day would say, yes, it's still not material at best.

• 37:14Speaker 00

  I think it's just hard to know, like, these things are just hard to quantify. And so you do have to be a bit top down and belief based about it, right? I think like the three examples I just gave there, assume there are dozens of more of those. The natural question is, okay, great, like, how many of those people can I take out of my organization so that I get the cost back and that flows through to the bottom line? Or I can put it into other things. But formulaically, doing that is really hard because guess what? The eight hours of value that was created or the eight hours of excess time gets filled with some other activity, which is also like presumably high value. And maybe before wouldn't have got done to or wouldn't have been done to a level of precision. So it's just very hard. So I think the way companies ultimately have to extract AI efficiency,

• 37:56Speaker 00

  at least from like a pure OpEx perspective, is just in your target setting, hold the constraints tighter. If we really believe that AI is making our employees 10% or 20% or 30% more efficient, then next year we should just not increase headcount. Or we should increase it by 2% instead of 10%. Or we should decrease it by 5% and say, you all should be getting more done with less. And here are all these subexamples of people doing that. But drawing the direct line between I transform this process and therefore like I need two less operations analysts is really tough to do. So I do think there's ROI there, but to be able to like precisely quantify it is challenging.

• 38:34Harry Stebbings?

  How do you think about effective budgeting then? Having been through what you've been through with this kind of blowing through it in four months, with the difficulty of budgeting and us both acknowledging that?

• 38:43Speaker 00

  Well, I think what you have to do is you have to create combined pools of budgets and then let the people that you trust allocate where they see high ROI. So if you're talking about our CTO, I think it would be totally reasonable for Dara to say, your headcount budget is X, our compute budget is Y. Just add X and Y together and then spend it as you see fit. And so if you want to spend relatively more more money on compute, on inference, on whatever, because you believe that's the highest ROI, do that, but it means you have less for heads. If you actually think it's more efficient to just add more engineers because there's sort of a compounding value to the new and novel products they will build or it's not just about throughput, then do that.

• 39:27Speaker 00

  But like, if you combine the pools, I think that's an interesting approach. The other thing I'd say is like, remember, like, even at the beginning of this year, the idea that you would be doing things like smart routing internally in terms of which models you're using for which tasks. The idea that you would like not only publish a AI usage leaderboard, but also a associated cost leaderboard, just so people were aware. The idea that you might choose different models for different tasks from the outset or give different levels of employees, different models for different tasks from the outset. Like, all these things were not really happening.

• 40:02Harry Stebbings?

  Do you work with providers like Fireworks to enable efficient routing?

• 40:06Speaker 00

  Yes. So we work with external providers. We also do some of this internally. We've done things like build dashboarding so folks are aware. I mean, we have an internal.

• 40:14Harry Stebbings?

  Is that helpful? Like, usage and costs, like, I might be brilliant, but I'm number one on the cost and I feel a bit guilty. And I'm using an intense amount of compute. Is that good or is it bad?

• 40:25Speaker 00

  Well, I think at some point it's wasteful. I mean, you do not need the latest and greatest model from Anthropic or OpenAI to ask like, you know, tell me who the president was in 1945. And then like, run that again for the next five presidents and then run it again for the next five. You know what I mean?

• 40:42Harry Stebbings?

  But I did the leaderboards help, I didn't understand the point of them. Why would I create them?

• 40:46Speaker 00

  I definitely think visibility helps for both the usage and the cost side of the equation, right? So if I literally Really, you know, imagine a counter in the top right of whatever I'm tool I'm using. They're just showing me the equivalent cost of what I'm doing and ask that scales. That will make you more cognizant as a user, right? If you're at the, if you're at the grocery store.

• 41:06Harry Stebbings?

  Do I wanna be number one or do I wanna be bottom?

• 41:09Speaker 00

  Well, I think either extreme is probably wrong at this point, right? Because it's a question of how much value you're creating. And that's, that's where human judgment still matters.

• 41:16Harry Stebbings?

  Well, then there's a bad leaderboard, man.

• 41:18Speaker 00

  Well, I do agree that like sometimes tools can be so blunt as to become useless because folks are optimizing for the metric versus the outcomes. I do think, though, there is value in everyone in our organization using the latest in grading greatest tools in their, in their specific domain, right? I don't need every person in the company using Claude code. Not, not every, you know, customer support rep needs to be doing that. But for the AI assistant agent that is helping them be better customer support agent, I want every single agent using that tool. And so an adoption leaderboard for that is helpful, right? And if you're not, I wanna ask the question as to why.

• 41:56Harry Stebbings?

  When you think about size of company, say, in terms of people, will you have more or less people in five years?

• 42:02Speaker 00

  It's interesting because I am tempted to say I think we'll have less. And I think one of the reasons I'm tempted to say that is when you look at the largest teams from like a numbers of people perspective, you do have disproportionate headcount in like more producing type functions, right? Whether it's customer support, sales or content production or analytics where you're producing reports and dashboards and these sorts of things. And I think, you know, those sorts of functions lend themselves well to first augmentation by AI and eventually, I think, at least partial replacement by AI. And so I'm tempted to say less. The reason I won't emphatically state that is because I think that's sort of been proven wrong the last few years

• 42:47Speaker 00

  as AI has rolled out and employment in companies continues to grow and.

• 42:51Harry Stebbings?

  Does it? I don't mean it really does it. Like if you look at your Shopify's and the generation that you're in, actually it hasn't had count stayed flat and the companies have just become much more efficient.

• 42:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, I think you could probably find examples to prove any point that you wanna believe, right? I mean, I'm not an AI doomerist from like an economy perspective, right? Like, I think there's gonna be like productivity benefits, but I also think there's just be a whole new industries and fields stood up that we can't predict today, just like every other industrial revolution that's happened. But I can't tell you exactly what that, what that's gonna be. So within companies, I think if you thought, if you took everything Uber does today and held it static and said, in five years, you're gonna need more or less people. I'd say, well, we could do everything we do today with less people in five years because of the power of AI. But we're gonna be doing a whole bunch of new, interesting stuff. And so maybe we need more employees to do that stuff.

• 43:40Harry Stebbings?

  You said about the AI ROI question, and that was one thing that Alex Karp mentioned. The other thing that he mentioned in this kind of very pertinent interview was that the biggest companies would be nervous to work with Frontier Labs. Do you agree with that as someone who runs the P and L for one of the biggest businesses in the world?

• 43:58Speaker 00

  I mean, we, we work with the Frontier Labs, you know, I think I watched some of the same.

• 44:03Harry Stebbings?

  He's brilliant to watch.

• 44:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, amazing and I think insightful. And one of the risks that I saw him highlight was this notion that, you know, you feed all of your data to the Frontier Labs and then they stand up a competing product effectively. And so you're sort of, what's the expression like?

• 44:19Harry Stebbings?

  Nervous of getting cannibalized.

• 44:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, you know, the, the fox in the hen house, like you're sort of opening the gate. For us, like our experience of working with the Frontier Labs has been great. And I think we have experimented on multiple fronts. We are moving from experimentation to implementation and scale on a bunch of areas where we're seeing ROI. So I haven't seen that yet, but I certainly get that argument. And I think there are companies that have fallen victim to that and he gave a bunch of examples.

• 44:43Harry Stebbings?

  I totally get it. I think you put Uber in the less penetrable by Frontier Labs. I would really.

• 44:48Speaker 00

  Look, I mean, we, we have this like physical world component to our business that, that makes it challenging to do that. Like I, I don't know that I see OpenAI launching a ride sharing service anytime and going around to tens of thousands of cities around the world and getting locally licensed and then putting boots on the ground to run a physical world service. I, I think, you know, many of the places we play, it's just, doesn't lend itself well to that extensibility of their model.

• 45:11Harry Stebbings?

  See, I disagree. I, I've always known that Dario in particular was very passionate about last mile delivery in Barcelona for convenience food.

• 45:18Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 45:22Speaker 00

  Well, then I'll have to be on the watch out for that.

• 45:23Harry Stebbings?

  AGI and refreshments in Barcelona.

• 45:26Speaker 00

  No, look, the physical world aspect to our business is like hard, but also, it also means like, I think some of the worst prognications haven't come true, right? I mean, even the transaction level, right? The, the big conversations we were having in our leadership team eighteen months ago is like, what's gonna happen to the consumer front end? The disaggregation risk on both delivery and mobility is that people wanna start their Uber ride with a plain language query and like.

• 45:52Harry Stebbings?

  Where do you land on that? Like, cause I, I was speaking about this with really smart people and they talk about kind of agents and how agents will route you to provider and you have no customer loyalty. How do you think about the disaggregation of UI and an agent led decision making?

• 46:07Speaker 00

  So this is, this is where I think there's some interesting questions about what information do you provide to the various consumer front ends, either from the Frontier Labs or others? Because at some point, maybe you're giving away that front end of the consumer experience in a way that is non-strategic. So I don't wanna be aggregated on price. You know, we've not participated historically in the aggregation apps where, you know, somebody will come to us and pitch and say, hey, you know, give us APIs that give us real time info on every car, every Uber car in the network, what the price of that ride is, whatever other characteristics you can feed us. And, cause we're gonna build an app and then we're also gonna put Lyft in there. We're gonna put other providers in there and then that'll be incremental business for you. I've been against that. I mean, I, I wanna be the front end.

• 46:50Speaker 00

  I want people to start at the Uber app for the Uber experience. And I think today we, we win that first look with two hundred million consumers and growing every month. So there's a real question there, like, and, and we were, we've been worried and discussing like, hey, you know, if I, if, is somebody gonna just put into ChatGPT or Claude? Like, get me my usual Uber. And I could imagine a world where like the query starts there. The challenge is like, we have a very managed transaction.

• 47:16Harry Stebbings?

  Does that damage your business though? Get me an Uber transaction, so you.

• 47:19Speaker 00

  It doesn't damage the business and I would of course fulfill that query, right? There's a question as to compare the prices of Uber, Lyft and Waymo and get me the cheapest one. Does that damage my business? Well, no, if we're winning on the cheapest price every time. But if today eighty percent of people just start with Uber, do I want them to migrate over to a service where they say, they go to a comparison app, whether that's a.

• 47:44Harry Stebbings?

  Or they just say, get me a car and.

• 47:46Speaker 00

  Get me a car and then they're indifferent. Yeah. I think the challenge though is that like it's a managed transaction, both on delivery side and on the transportation side. All the little things that happen between saying, get me an Uber and you being done that ride that go wrong, the interaction between the driver and the rider, the visual experience of the pickup experience, I left something in the car, your payment credit. Like all these pieces that you sort of take for granted, that needs to be figured out, right? This is not a e-commerce transaction where you sort of set it and forget it. You don't think about it until the package is on your doorstep. It is a managed transaction. And so that sort of worst fear hasn't played out yet. And I'm not saying it won't. I mean, Brian Chesky got kind of roasted, but I thought it was an insightful point when he said,

• 48:27Speaker 00

  it's not clear to him that like the, the right interface for hotel booking is a chat interface. And he was kind of called a Luddite and this and that. But like, I think he was right, like some experiences are more visual, some experiences are more managed.

• 48:40Harry Stebbings?

  But I think it depends if it's transactional.

• 48:42Speaker 00

  It depends.

• 48:42Harry Stebbings?

  Right, which is like, hey, get me a hotel for my trip to London to see Harry. You probably don't care about it having a sea view and being romantic for you and your wife. But you want it close to the office and efficient from a pricing perspective and compliant with your HR.

• 48:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 48:59Harry Stebbings?

  That denigrates the market.

• 49:01Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 49:01Harry Stebbings?

  And like, you know, I, I host a show, which is very popular, actually, with two other investors who are much more insightful than me. And they talk about the fortnite-ification of markets, which is just like the shrinking of markets.

• 49:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah.

• 49:12Harry Stebbings?

  And like, don't get me wrong, Airbnb is an amazing business.

• 49:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, I think.

• 49:15Harry Stebbings?

  But if you remove the transactional booking travel, well, then it just becomes experiential booking travel.

• 49:21Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 49:21Harry Stebbings?

  It's more.

• 49:22Speaker 00

  No, I think it's a reasonable perspective.

• 49:24Harry Stebbings?

  What, what do you do then to get ahead of it?

• 49:26Speaker 00

  A, like, I, I wanna be where the consumers are. So like ultimately, we've chosen to participate.

• 49:32Harry Stebbings?

  Participate with the like OpenAIs.

• 49:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, but, but like really any of the large companies, if they wanna do something interesting with us on the consumer front end, we'll have that conversation.

• 49:41Harry Stebbings?

  Can you participate though if you won't give them the data?

• 49:44Speaker 00

  Well, I think that's always a negotiation and discussion around like, how much do you need? Where does the trend like, there's fifteen different flavors to this, right? The transaction can originate in different channels and then end in the Uber app. You have to define who has responsibilities for things along the way. What is the consumer? So if you if you go into chat G P T and say, or even this hotel booking example, what happens if the hotel needs to send Harry a message because you asked for early check in and they can't give it to you? Is that back through the A I? Is that coming directly from the hotel? Who bears the cost of that? Like, these sort of like, there's operational elements to the experience that needs to be sorted. And I'm not saying this can't get sorted, but it's not as simple as the you shouldn't picture the experience that goes right as the sort of archetype of what this usually looks like,

• 50:29Speaker 00

  because it's the experience that goes wrong or requires some level of management that needs to be solved for.

• 50:33Harry Stebbings?

  One of my very dear friends is CEO of one of the largest airlines in the world. He says, you have no fucking idea how hard my business is. If your baggage is twelve minutes late, I will have fifty fucking emails and I do five thousand flights every single day.

• 50:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, totally. And I'm not like, you know, I'm not like, we're not naive or being like, no, no, our business is different. It's hard, like, every business is hard, but I do think these things need to be sorted out.

• 50:56Harry Stebbings?

  Gosh, you won. You bought delivery hero. I know Nicholas really well, interviewed him, really like him, brilliant guy, know Oscar Wa from Glovo, really like him. Why buy it, not just dominate? Is it not just like a market maturation question and you will slowly crush over time?

• 51:12Speaker 00

  So first I'll say like, Uber has been on this journey, right? I often get asked the question of what business is going to be bigger long term or like, where's their larger TAM? But like.

• 51:22Harry Stebbings?

  Or food or mobility?

• 51:23Speaker 00

  Food or mobility? Yeah. Because, I mean, even this sort of like, the existential questions we get about A V tend to ignore the fact that we have basically an equally sized food delivery business that's in market leading positions in most of our markets around the world. We get almost zero credit for that. But putting that aside, delivery has also been growing faster, right? So it's almost as big as mobility, been growing faster and has been more constrained from a country's perspective, right? We actually did some rationalization of our country portfolio. We didn't launch as many of the frontier markets or emerging markets. We're more capital constrained when we were scaling delivery. And so delivery hero, I think, presented a unique opportunity to, in one fell swoop, expand our geographic footprint. And it's not that we could never go launch and scale new markets.

• 52:08Speaker 00

  You know, we have been launching new countries in delivery, but it takes a lot of time. Like, it just takes time and it's sort of back to what we were discussing earlier, like, what's relevant scale? Like, how quickly does it take for a new business line or a new country to get to a relevant scale that matters for Uber? The other thing is, delivery hero has built a lot of local brands that are really strong, right?

• 52:30Harry Stebbings?

  And they have exclusivity and lock-in.

• 52:32Speaker 00

  Well, whether that's true or not, they have consumer mind share, right? And they've built Argentina, Korea, the Middle East, like, these are the leading brands that consumers identify with, have high household awareness and are not like easily supplemented. And so I think there's value in those brands. They've also localized their services really well. I think the combined mobility delivery offerings will now be able to offer in those markets is going to be really compelling for consumers. So it's scale, it's it's some of the local brands that they've built, it's the platform. And for us, like, when this deal, you know, we have to go through the the sort of requisite regulatory and shareholder processes, but delivery will be a much bigger business for mobility and that's an exciting version of Uber for sure.

• 53:16Harry Stebbings?

  Are you more passionate about one than the other? I know it sounds weird.

• 53:19Speaker 00

  Like, do you, which of your kids do you love the most?

• 53:22Harry Stebbings?

  The oldest one.

• 53:26Speaker 00

  Actually, my baby right now, she's the most daddy's girl of our three, so she's got a special, special heart. She's eighteen months.

• 53:33Harry Stebbings?

  Okay, so she's doing one sleep?

• 53:35Speaker 00

  Yes, one nap a day right now.

• 53:37Harry Stebbings?

  Like a venture investor. About two P M, call it siesta. Welcome to Europe, Mac.

• 53:43Speaker 00

  Hopefully less grumpy. Look, I grew up in the mobility business. From two thousand twelve to two thousand twenty five, I spent ninety percent of my waking hours and most of my sleeping hours thinking about mobility and rideshare primarily, but all the other mobility verticals we built. As I said, I don't think there's anyone in the world who's spent more hours thinking about rideshare. Delivery, I've kind of managed teams over the years that have serviced the delivery business. It came into like my portfolio, quote unquote, fourteen months ago. Actually, for the last couple of months, I've been directly running the delivery business. We had our leader of the delivery business left. I took her role and I've been doing sort of two jobs, my day job and my night job. I literally had to have had to schedule an evening shift because there's just no way to fit my operating cadence in.

• 54:27Harry Stebbings?

  Are you just a machine? You aren't efficient, I executed. And even the way that you present, it's like, it's efficient.

• 54:33Speaker 00

  It's it's, well, look, I mean, everyone is like struggling to find enough hours in the day and Uber right now, like, the teams are pushing hard. And I'm worried that like some of our teams are going to run out of gas. Like, you know, you can only push above the red line for so long because, you know, we just have a lot of opportunity, but also a lot of challenges. And we're best in a crisis, we're best with the challenge in front of us, we're best when we feel like we're up against the world a little bit. That's our D N A. And so I'm kind of inspired by that, but it's hard right now. And personally, I'm, as I said, I'm working sort of two jobs. But back to your like, which is your favorite business? I'm working in the delivery business and directly pulling the levers myself for the first time ever in my tenure at Uber and I'm really enjoying it.

• 55:14Speaker 00

  It's a very complex business, three sided marketplace versus two. I think much more complexity in terms of what the consumer actual values, the inputs that matter, you know, the speed, the sort of price, reliability, safety on the mobility side, it's a longer list on the delivery side of things that you have to nail. And so it's interesting, it's hard. We are not number one in the U S, which also makes it harder because I think operating from a position of strength just gives you a nice tailwind. And so we're having to play the challenger role, which we relish, but it also changes the game a bit.

• 55:46Harry Stebbings?

  Some of my friends who are old Uberites, who I'm sure you know, but I'll keep them out, say, if Travis were here, we'd be number one in food. Not true? I love Dara, I love Dara.

• 55:57Speaker 00

  No, no.

• 55:57Harry Stebbings?

  I don't know Travis.

• 55:59Speaker 00

  No, and look, like, the reality is, I think anyone who operates anything that says, if X were this, this would be different, like, you know, it's a little bit of that, like, in the arena quote, like, if you're not in the arena, it's easy to sit on the sidelines and say, oh, if if I were in the arena or if so and so were in the arena, it would be different. And it's fair to have that opinion, but when you're operating a business, it's hard and you have trade offs to make and you get things wrong and you get things right and you don't get credit for the things you get right. You certainly feel the blame and take the blame for the things you get wrong. So I don't know that there's an alternative history, like DoorDash is an excellent company. I think Tony's a tremendous entrepreneur and founder. They operate really well, they move quickly, they're aggressive, they take risk, they're

• 56:44Speaker 00

  well capitalized, like, we have lots of competitors.

• 56:48Harry Stebbings?

  Did you ever have the chance to buy them?

• 56:49Speaker 00

  You you hear things, as I said, I was on the mobility side of the business. I don't know if that was ever a realistic possibility or not. Of course, there's always speculation, but I don't, I don't know.

• 56:59Harry Stebbings?

  Do you know one of the best answers I got advised on? Dear friend, Shakil Khan, who is Daniel X. right hand man.

• 57:05Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 57:05Harry Stebbings?

  He says, ever you get a question you don't want, just go, hey, mate, that's above my pay grade. I'm just, I'm just a podcaster, mate.

• 57:13Speaker 00

  That's a good way to handle it.

• 57:15Harry Stebbings?

  It's just like, mate, nah.

• 57:16Speaker 00

  No, I mean, I honestly don't know the answer to that question.

• 57:18Harry Stebbings?

  Was Postmates a good acquisition? Because that seemed like a bit of a nuts one, to be honest. They were running out of cash, it was a challenged business. When I saw that, I was like, whoa, they've got balls at Uber.

• 57:29Speaker 00

  I mean, look, I think it's, in my opinion, I think we probably get a harder rep on M and A than than is deserved because in many cases, a deal that from the outside, like, you question or you're not sure what you got out of it, like, actually leaps forward internal capabilities that you didn't know. You learn things from the acquisition, you get good talent, you see where you have gaps, et cetera. I think in the case of Postmates, and again, this is where I like, I'm a sideline observer, right? I could sit here and tell you that was the greatest deal in the world or no, we shouldn't have done it, but the reality is like, I wasn't in the game at that time on the delivery side, so I don't actually know the answer to that. But Postmates has a strong brand, a strong follower, a followership and some strong geographic pockets, and I think we've been able to build on those.

• 58:08Harry Stebbings?

  Are you ready for a quick fun?

• 58:09Speaker 00

  Sure, let's do it.

• 58:10Harry Stebbings?

  Otherwise, I'm going to get in trouble from nerve taking too much of your time and you actually have to be productive in London. What have you changed your mind on most significantly in the last twelve months?

• 58:18Speaker 00

  I mean, I'm a humanity bull and I'm really sort of becoming more interested and obsessed with longevity. And I actually do think we're going to solve all of human disease at some point. And the idea of, I don't know if live forever, but live a very long time is going to be a possible thing. And I've gotten more conviction there over that.

• 58:37Harry Stebbings?

  I saw the whoop. OpenAI or Anthropic?

• 58:40Speaker 00

  OpenAI. For me, I use both. As we were chatting about earlier, I use voice so much. Like, it's my single most used AI feature by a mile, probably 50x anything else, is I record notes, emails, thoughts, lists. Like, I'm constantly working via voice. And I find OpenAI's voice engine incredible.

• 59:03Harry Stebbings?

  I write my investor updates by voice. Yeah, I totally agree with you. Okay, what's one thing that you most took from working with Travis? Like, single biggest lesson?

• 59:12Speaker 00

  I want to give you two. He's a problem solver. Like, he will define what he is and what he looks for in others as creative problem solving. The ability for him to walk into any meeting on any topic, ask a few pointed questions, float a few ideas, and in 15 minutes, sort of change the minds, or change the thinking, or evolve the thinking of the people in the room who have spent like weeks as experts on this topic, is amazing. And to then go through every day, every week, half an hour, half an hour, half an hour, into the evenings, and just like do that muscle over and over and over again is so value add. And so I think if as leaders, we can play that role on, like, do a microcosm

• 59:56Speaker 00

  of that, maybe not that good, you can move the ball forward a lot. So it's sort of creative problem solving is as a skill that is valued in an organization is probably the top thing I took. I think the second is, and I think back to sort of the all hands that he would host, where he would not only give an answer to a question, but he would explain his thinking on why that was the answer. I think that's exceptionally valuable in leaders. To take people through why what you say is, and it helps them, it creates many versions of yourself. And so I think if you can do that across your organization, where you tell people how you got to an answer, you're amplifying the power of the organization. So the way I try to do that is by setting down principles, right? For having principles for how I want

• 1:00:39Speaker 00

  to think about a given problem, a given solution area, or whatever. And then having my people try to use those principles as they think about the problem themselves.

• 1:00:48Harry Stebbings?

  What's your biggest takeaway from working with Dara on the flip side?

• 1:00:51Speaker 00

  I think the most impactful quote I've heard from Dara that I think speaks to who he is, is, "Management comes from an org chart, leadership comes from the heart." And what he means by that is, we can create rules and structures and hierarchy, and we can try to follow what the bureaucracy says. But at the end of the day, we have leaders at all level of the company that are the ones who actually push the company forward. And those are the people who are leading with both the head and the heart. And those are the people that build followership. And that's exactly who Dara is. He will not ask you to do anything he wouldn't do himself. He's the first one over the fence. He's the first one on the plane to go where the company needs him. Low ego, lots of heart, he pushes.

• 1:01:36Speaker 00

  But it generally comes from a good place, which makes people want to be successful for him, and makes people want to say like, what do you need me to do? And that's really powerful.

• 1:01:45Harry Stebbings?

  You worked with both. We both know the politics that was around. Very few people were able to work with both. And they were like, I'm a Travis or I'm the Dara era, with the greatest of perspectives. And they didn't want to get in. What made you able to be an OG with both?

• 1:02:00Speaker 00

  For me, like, first of all, I think they're both excellent in their own domains. And I think Dara was exactly the right leader for Uber when he came in, and continues to be exactly the right leader for the company today. And they're different, but it's not any easier. You know, for me, it's like, it kind of comes back to where we started, like, almost your first question in the interview, which is like, when times have been hard at Uber, I've not wanted to leave because I didn't, I felt like it was the wrong thing for Uber. I'd be leaving my team base behind. And it just didn't feel like the right thing to do. And then when times are good at Uber, I want to stay because this is fun. We're building, we're conquering the world. And so it's been hard for me through the worst

• 1:02:41Speaker 00

  times and the best times to ever think about leaving. And that's true regardless of who the CEO has been. I also firmly believe that you, like, people need to take what they can get from their leaders, from their managers, from their boss. And you're not going to get everything from any one individual. And so I've been able to learn a lot from both of them. And I think that's been really great.

• 1:03:02Harry Stebbings?

  Final one for you. What's the best piece of advice you've ever been given?

• 1:03:06Speaker 00

  We hired a woman, Rachel Whitstone, to run our communications and policy team, let's say around 2015 or 2016. And she sent the speech of a commencement address she gave to the whole company in her first week. And in that, the sort of central thesis was, always say yes. Just jump at the next adventure. And it really resonated with me because I think you can always analyze a career opportunity. Should I tackle this problem? I'm being asked to do X. I'm not sure if I'm going to be good at it. Seems like there's a lot of risk. And I always just tell people, just say yes. Because A, bet on yourself. You're going to get in there. It's going to be hard. You're going to figure it out. You're going to be better off for it, and the company will be better off. Or maybe it will be too much for you, but you'll learn a lot from that failure. And you'll just be a better version

• 1:03:51Speaker 00

  of yourself. So I think just say yes.

• 1:03:53Harry Stebbings?

  Honestly, dude, I really so enjoyed this. Yeah, I do lots of shows and episodes like this remind me why I love what I do so much. So thank you so much for doing it.

• 1:04:02Speaker 00

  I appreciate that.

• 1:04:03Harry Stebbings?

  For being so brilliant. Honestly, amazing.

• 1:04:04Speaker 00

  Thank you. Awesome. So great to be here.

• 1:04:08Harry Stebbings?

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• 1:04:52Harry Stebbings?

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• 1:06:19Harry Stebbings?

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