EP 113: Dara Khosrowshahi (CEO, Uber) Lays Out the Path to Autonomous Vehicles

Dara Khosrowshahi runs one of the most complicated businesses in the world, Uber. Since taking over in 2017 Dara has led the company to profitability against all odds. In this episode, we touch on a number of things including Uber’s position on the future of Autonomous Vehicles (AVs), the challenges that were overcome in making Uber profitable, and some of the operating principles that have stuck with Dara since his days at Expedia. (00:00) Intro (01:49) Uber's Economic Resilience and Consumer Trends (04:40) The Future of Autonomous Vehicles (14:27) Strategic Decisions and the Advanced Technologies Group (31:01) Uber's Expansion and Competitive Landscape (38:01) Living in the Suburbs: Practical Insights (39:23) Cultural Reset at Uber: A Necessity (42:39) Operational Efficiency: Lessons from Uber (46:56) Global Adaptations: Uber's Local Innovations (48:58) Leadership and Mentorship: Personal Reflections (51:32) Career Path: From Finance to CEO (01:00:14) The Importance of Constructive Conflict (01:04:47) Long-term Strategy and Board Governance (01:07:07) The Impact of Uber: A Global Perspective (01:08:54) Conclusion and Farewell Executive Producer: Rashad Assir Producer: Leah Clapper Mixing and editing: Justin Hrabovsky Check out Unsupervised Learning, Redpoint's AI Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@UCUl-s_Vp-Kkk_XVyDylNwLA 🎥 Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCugS0jD5IAdoqzjaNYzns7w?sub_confirmation=1 Follow on Socials 📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theloganbartlettshow 📱 X - https://twitter.com/loganbartshow 🎬 Clips on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@theloganbartlettshow About the Show Logan Bartlett is a Software Investor at Redpoint Ventures - a Silicon Valley-based VC with $6B AUM and investments in Snowflake, DraftKings, Twilio, and Netflix. In each episode of The Logan Bartlett Show, we sit down with the people behind today’s most important startups and extract the tactics, lessons, and frameworks they’ve learned the hard way. Conversations span hiring to GTM, product, growth, fundraising and everything in between - collectively forming the ultimate playbook to make you a better CEO, investor or board member. Tap follow and enable notifications to stay ahead of the game.

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

• 0:04Logan Bartlett?

  Welcome to the Logan Bartlett Show. On this episode, what you're going to hear is a conversation I had with CEO of Uber, Dara Khosrowshahi. If this is your first time tuning into the Logan Bartlett Show, I have discussions every week with different founders and executives, as well as investors in technology and beyond, about their scaling of businesses or investing in different companies, and what it's like growing into the leaders that they are today. In this discussion with Dara, we talk about a number of different things, including coming off of their earnings, what he's seeing from a macroeconomic environment, as well as any potential data related to a recession that might exist and show up in Uber's business today. We also talk about the state of autonomous vehicles, as well as Dara's decision to shut down the Advanced Technologies Group, and the decision to partner with Waymo. We discuss

• 0:48Logan Bartlett?

  where long-term value might accrue in the stack between Uber and autonomous driving fleets. We also talk about Tesla's initiatives in this market. Finally, we discuss lessons that he learned from his longtime mentor, Barry Diller from IAC. A really fun conversation that you'll hear with Dara now. Dara, thanks for doing this.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  Happy to do it. Thanks for having me.

• 1:07Logan Bartlett?

  Welcome to my humble apartment here.

• 1:10Speaker 01

  It's pretty sweet. Not so humble.

• 1:12Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, not so humble. This is a new apartment. We're supposed to grow into this apartment over time. But no, I appreciate you doing this. So, earnings a little bit ago, and congratulations. Seems like it went well. I guess there's a lot of recession fear permeating the markets right now. And you guys are kind of a bellwether for economic activity, at least in some ways. Was there anything that came out of the earnings, or what you're seeing in the data, that maybe foots with concerns or optimism?

• 1:48Speaker 01

  I think we're not seeing any signs in terms of the weakening of the consumer. And we're a pretty big service that about $40 billion in gross bookings, and the growth rate of bookings has been about 21% for the last, this quarter, or last quarter as well.

• 2:06Speaker 01

  Profitable profitability continues to improve and we've been looking honestly, based on everything that we read about, looking for signs of weakness and we just haven't found it yet. Now, I personally have a hypothesis, which is coming out of COVID, spend on services continues to grow faster than spend on retail. So if you think about personal consumer expenditures on services versus retail, service spend is still not where it was pre-COVID. So I do think that there is some kind of tailwind as it relates to people going out, people traveling places, still going to concerts, et cetera, that we're benefiting from. And then I do think also,

• 2:50Speaker 01

  the Uber customer tends to be a bit of higher earning consumer is urban, younger, et cetera. And I think that's definitely benefiting us. And our driver supply now is we've got 7.4 million people earning on the platform, up over 20% on a year-on-year basis. So in a market where the job market gets weaker, our supply improves. As our supply improves, ETAs come down, surge comes down, service level actually improves. So there's this countercyclical element in our business, which is helping us. So I think, put it all together, team's executing well,

• 3:35Speaker 01

  and I think for us, we're definitely continuing to benefit from the spend on services that should continue for some period of time.

• 3:42Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, well, it's great to see and hopefully that's an indication for the broader economy, although maybe just a discrete data point of a well-run business.

• 3:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, and listen, and we also look like, what about the higher-income consumer versus lower-income consumer? And both for a mobility business and our delivery business, the lower-income consumer is actually increasing spend faster. And when I listen to some of our partners, when, you know, you listen to the news, it seems like the bigger worry is a lower-end consumer. We're not seeing it as of yet, and hopefully we won't see it for a while.

• 4:17Logan Bartlett?

  The other topic du jour, I guess, as it relates to your business is autonomous vehicles. And it's a, it's a, did you, interesting sort of philosophical debate of where AI is going to go in society. But this has been one we've been talking about for a while. I guess one question at a more philosophical level.

• 4:37Logan Bartlett?

  What percentage of, or how much more safe do you think autonomous vehicles need to be for people to accept them in society versus a human driver?

• 4:48Speaker 01

  Thank you for asking the most difficult question to.

• 4:50Logan Bartlett?

  It's hard. It's, it's, it's a human, I mean, how many people die in the US by car accidents?

• 4:54Speaker 01

  So, so that, that's actually where, where I was going. So about 40,000, over 40,000 people die by car accident per year.

• 5:01Logan Bartlett?

  And, and, and mostly healthy people, like.

• 5:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I have a measure whether they're healthy or not, but yeah, you, you would assume that they are.

• 5:09Logan Bartlett?

  I, I looked at a lot of data during COVID and you were sort of looking at the driver fall off. Or people in car accidents versus, you know, others in the population. And I think it was more younger, healthier individuals that didn't have comorbidity or something, right?

• 5:23Speaker 01

  Yeah. And they probably, those are the people who get out of the house more often, right?

• 5:26Logan Bartlett?

  Totally.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  They travel more, et cetera. So, so if you do the math, like that's call it 1,100, 1,200 people

• 5:35Speaker 01

  dying, sorry, probably on a daily basis, 100 to 120 people dying every day. Right? As a result of, of accidents. So if you get into a situation where you have robot drivers that are 10 times better than human drivers. Right? On a good day, robot drivers will be responsible for five fatalities versus a bad day when they'd be responsible for 20 fatalities. And. That's unacceptable, I think, to society, right? And those are robot drivers that are 10 times better than human drivers. And I just think that society accepts human fallibility quite readily,

• 6:20Speaker 01

  but definitely does not accept, call it, um, robot, uh, or companies making mistakes, et cetera. There's, there's a much, much higher bar. So, you know, logic would dictate that if robots are twice as good a driver, or three times as good a driver as humans, that should, that's good for society going forward. But I honestly don't know if society is ready to accept that.

• 6:43Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. So it might need to be 100 times better or something.

• 6:47Speaker 01

  It might, but I think that's up to regulators. And, um, I think that kind of ground is yet to be, uh, developed. And, you know, ultimately we are going to do whatever regulators think is the right thing. But the safety question is, logic would dictate society letting it happen sooner. But I think that humans are emotional animals and aren't always logical.

• 7:10Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, I, I think anytime there's a major technological shift or transportation-related shift, this, like this happened with trains way back in the day, and it happened with airplanes. And so it, it's some form of just like social acceptance. And it's terrible to say, like, we're talking about death, but it's, it's human nature to feel uncomfortable about it.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  100%.

• 7:31Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. Now, is there anything interesting on a usage side or from a behavior standpoint that you've seen in the early data around people using autonomous vehicles?

• 7:40Speaker 01

  I, I think that's the, what we're seeing is, first of all, never underestimate the power of human laziness, which is, we have a, uh, dynamic dispatch layer that will dispatch a particular ride to a human or a robot, depending on pickup, drop-off points, et cetera. And even in a situation where you have to walk two blocks to go, to go get your car, a surprising number of consumers are like, oh, no, thank you. I'll take a human, et cetera. So people, one of the reasons why people come to Uber is they value convenience and they value their time.

• 8:16Speaker 01

  At significant levels, which is why they're willing to pay for for the service. So I do think the pickiness of humans and wanting to get things just right isn't is incredibly important. Generally, we're seeing that when someone is offered, one of our customers is offered an autonomous ride, about half the time they say, yeah, that'll be really cool. Half the time they say, no, thank you. I'd rather have a human. I think that's going to improve over a period of time. But I think the experiences are delightful experience. Robot drivers aren't quite as good at human drivers in terms of ratings right now. And maybe because people like to rate people at higher levels or, you know, they're going to be less. They're going to be tougher on robots than than humans, etc.

• 9:01Speaker 01

  But I think people are trying to get from point A to B. And for us, it's about driving perfection in every case. And, you know, giving people the convenience of their time back.

• 9:13Logan Bartlett?

  The consideration of rolling out the new GOs, how do you sort of think about like going from Phoenix Scottsdale to a broader market, either within Arizona or coming to New York, hopefully soon?

• 9:26Speaker 01

  Well, I think for us, the good news is we're in discussions with multiple AV partners about bringing their content on to our platform as long as that content is safe, etc. What we bring is we're already operating in all these markets. So we understand what the pickup points, the drop off points are, when you should operate, etc. We've built out all that infrastructure. Then an AV player can come and essentially instantly monetize with demand already spoken for. So we're absolutely going to look to expand as quickly as possible. You've got to do it the right way. You've got to do it with regulators coming along for the ride, so to speak. And, you know, I think the promise is very, very significant going forward.

• 10:09Logan Bartlett?

  There's this adage of people underestimate what can be achieved in a year.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:13Logan Bartlett?

  Or overestimate what could be achieved in a year and underestimate what could be achieved in 10. You're seven years in now. I think when you took the job, there was a lot of, the advanced technologies group was going and Uber was trying to develop these capabilities internally. I think people probably projected, there's a lot of commentary that I've seen to this effect, that there'd be some broader impact of autonomous driving at this point in 2024, seven years later. As you look out seven years from now, or whatever point in the future you can look towards, is there any projections or considerations that you sort of have around autonomous usage?

• 10:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I hesitate to project when every person's projection has been incorrect here.

• 10:52Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, wrong.

• 10:53Speaker 01

  But I do think that the, I think the adage is correct, which is if you think long-term autonomous is going to have a very, very significant positive impact on society, on safety, and we think for our businesses, it's going to make transportation and mobility available for a lot more people in a safer way, should bring prices down pretty significantly. Now, I do think that these technologies and how quickly they get into prime time depend on hardware versus software cycles, right? Software obviously can scale much more quickly.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  Virtual goods usually are much more consistent and uniform versus our business, which is a hyper, hyper-local business. Every single market is different. Often we're regulated not on a country basis, but on a state basis, city basis, even airport basis, et cetera. So it's much, much more idiosyncratic in nature, which makes the scaling harder to come by. And then this ultimately is going to be quite hardware-dependent for the business to be economically viable or as promising as we expect it to be. So kind of one construct that I look at is EVs, right?

• 12:10Speaker 01

  EVs, it was a technology, actually. I think Tesla, for example, introduced their first model in 2008, right? Fast forward to 2023, 15 years later. And EVs account for about less than about 20% of cars sold. So that was a technology that was kind of ready to go. Technically, it was ready to go in 2008. It took 15 years to get to 20% of the marketplace. I'm hoping AV doesn't take as long, but I do think because of hardware cycles and the idiosyncratic nature of the regulatory pie, it's not going to be seven years. It's going to be more than that 10 to 15 years from now. I think it's going to be a real part of our business.

• 12:55Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, there's some, there's some value props outside of the societal benefit of lower death and stuff like that. But I, I just remember Minority Report, if you ever saw that movie. And there was a lane in the highway of people going 150 miles an hour because everything was, you know, programmed in. And so the cars didn't need to react to one another and all that. So there are some of these like benefits that the individual user can feel even outside of the supply dynamics and the, the access and all of that stuff. And so I'm hopeful that people will see the opportunity sooner rather than later. Now, will governments do the same? It's hard to say, but.

• 13:31Speaker 01

  Governments are going to work at their pace and, and the safety issue is a big one. That societal safety issue is something you can't take shortcuts to, so to speak.

• 13:39Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. Logan here, interrupting this conversation. This is not an ad, as everyone I think knows, we don't run ads on this platform, but would like to do a quick call to action for everyone to please share with anyone that you think might find this conversation potentially interesting. We are always trying to continue to grow the podcast so that we have more people listening and we're able to bring more great guests onto the show. We'll get back to the conversation now with Dara. So when you took the job, how long after, until you sold Advanced Technology Groups?

• 14:09Speaker 01

  So it was after COVID hit us. So my guess is it was three and a half, four years in. Originally, obviously ATG was a part of the business that we were developing, but then once COVID hit, we had to make some hard decisions as far as what businesses we stayed in and what businesses we got out of. And we got out of ATG, which in hindsight. Was absolutely the right decision, but it was a really tough decision.

• 14:32Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, I'm curious. I mean, I want to talk about it being absolutely the right decision. But in making that decision, it wasn't in a vacuum. Obviously, COVID was happening. And there was a couple of other decisions that you guys made strategically to sort of streamline the business. How do you go about making a decision like that? Where you spent, I mean, how long was that? It was a six and a half year initiative, maybe something like that?

• 14:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it was a very, very important initiative that the company undertook. You know, to some extent at the time properly, because there was a hypothesis that there was going to be a winner take all on this marketplace. Didn't turn out to be, and I don't think there will be, but it was a big part of the company's efforts.

• 15:07Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. And so how do you go about making that decision? Something that's like so.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  So I don't think there's like a general construct to make those kinds of decisions. Because hopefully you, you don't make many of those decisions in, in your career. Like if you're making those big decisions every single week or every single month, you're going to be in trouble. Like, you know, you're not actually running a business. But I do think for, for me, as it relates to those kinds of large strategic decisions. One construct that I really think about is that there are certain times when it makes sense for you to bring in your whole team and kind of manage by consensus, make sure you get everyone to agree, et cetera.

• 15:50Speaker 01

  But I think when it gets to those big strategic decisions, those are decisions that are lonely decisions.

• 15:57Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 15:57Speaker 01

  You have to be willing to make the unaverage decision, so to speak. Because usually by consensus, you get to the average decision. If you're going to strategically shift, you have to be willing to make decisions that are outside of, let's say, the average of everyone's thought process. So I do think, you know, during those times, you spend a lot of time alone. You start, you talk to a lot of people, but ultimately you've got to go forward with the fact patterns that you see and then your own instinct. For us, what really shaped my decision was, was twofold, which is.

• 16:35Speaker 01

  You know, this was a kind of side project for us. The mainline business was building a network and algorithms, pricing, matching algorithms, et cetera. It was, I think, Tobia Shopify called it, you know, a side quest, so to speak. So, running a side quest for a big company is hard enough, but running a side quest in a type of business, which is hardware, which is so different from software for us, makes it doubly hard. Like, running a side quest that's very similar to your base business, maybe you can succeed in. But we, at a core, are a software company. We run hard, we go

• 17:17Speaker 01

  fast, we make mistakes all the time, test and learn, et cetera. The pace at which a company goes is something that I love. Hardware, the cost of making mistakes are huge. So, you almost have to like, you, you, you have two completely different businesses coexisting within one culture, one way of doing things, and it became very, very difficult to be successful of both. Like, there are very few companies like an Apple, who is both good at hardware and software. But even there, you know, their pace of software development, you can argue, is slower than, let's say, a pace of a Google, or a Meta, or some of the other players. So, ultimately, the side quest nature and the different pacing of

• 17:59Speaker 01

  those businesses led me to say, hey, it's time to cut loose. We're not going to do ATG. We're going to partner in this area with companies who, all they're doing is hardware, so to speak, and all they care about is AV. That's their passion. We want to work with them rather than try to compete with them.

• 18:16Logan Bartlett?

  What, I, I assume COVID forced prioritization and considerations like this. Did you, was this in the back of your mind before COVID, that, hey, this might not be the long-term strategy for, for Uber?

• 18:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was an open question for a long time, and the cultures of the two businesses were very, very different, right? The mainline business at the time was fighting lots of battles out there. We were competing with Didi. Competing, you know, there's a lot of capital in the marketplace. Lyft was a very, very big and fundamental threat for us. And at the same time, we were working on the AV on this on this other side. And those two teams didn't work together that much. Partially because we also want to partner with other AV players. So we almost had to treat ATG to some extent as a third party within the same company, and that was really tough to pull off.

• 19:10Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, got it. And so you you said it in hindsight is proven to be the right decision. I guess, can you walk through if there was a skeptic thinking about how this market could play out? And we'll get to a, we can talk about Tesla in a second. But if if someone were a skeptic and saying, hey, at its end state, autonomous vehicles will accrue a lot of the value. And the network that sits in between might just be an intermediary that should be disintermediated at at some point. What would you say to to the skeptic around that?

• 19:43Speaker 01

  I guess to some extent, I would tell the skeptic that they're right, which is why I think we've made the right decision. Which if you think about our mobility business, you know, on average, our take rate is about 20%. 80% of the value goes to the driver, pays for insurance costs, et cetera. So that 80% our our mobility business did about $20 billion in bookings this last quarter. So that's $80 billion on an annual basis. 80% of that, $65 billion, $64 billion is available to our AV partners and or drivers. So this, you know, we want to run this marketplace at a low take rate.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  If your take rate is 20%, you have to be able to drive about 20, 25% higher utilization of an asset. And based on the data that we've seen, we're able to drive well in excess of that 25% utilization premium, so to speak. So ultimately, that's why it worked. If the majority wasn't going to the AV provider or the driver, we might have undertaken a different model. But at this point, the AV drive, the AV player can take the majority of the economics. It will expand the marketplace and you know the for the 20% take rate we built a global marketplace, pricing, matching, routing, technology unlike anyone else and AV player can just plug

• 21:13Speaker 01

  in instantly and get instant demand from all of our marketplace, which we think works for both players.

• 21:18Logan Bartlett?

  It kind of dovetails into some of the stuff with regard to Elon Musk and Tesla and I think after Q1 of this year, they said they were going to release a preview in August, as we sit here in August, of a summon, which I think they showed a screenshot at some point. What complexities do you think are not fully appreciated by someone that's, you know, very bright, but making a car company and all the network considerations you've had to factor in?

• 21:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, listen, to some extent, it's a it's a repeat of people say history may not repeat, but it rhymes like Dimer BMW, they tried to set up their own networks as well. But it's a really, really different business, you know, it's what I was talking about hardware to build a 20,000 or a $50,000 piece of hardware from driving, you know, over 30 million transactions every day than on a revenue basis you make $2 off of. It's just a very, very different business. Everything that you have to build in terms of the matching stack, the pricing stack, all the things that can go wrong. In a lot of markets, people want to pay with

• 22:35Speaker 01

  cash, the accidents that happen in a car, people getting sick, people losing items. We talked about this just during our earnings, you know, we actually find 25 million lost items in a car. All of these little

• 22:49Logan Bartlett?

  Responsible for disproportionate amount of those, by the way. A lot of those were were me.

• 22:55Speaker 01

  Well, you know, we try to help you.

• 22:56Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, you've done a great job, actually. A taxicab, I had that happen recently in New York. I forgive me, but I called a taxicab because of

• 23:04Speaker 01

  You can call a taxicab through Uber.

• 23:06Logan Bartlett?

  I hailed it. That unfortunately, if it had been through Uber, I would have been able to find my item. Instead, I was going through White Pages, uh, trying to get the medallion. Uh, and finally, actually, I got ahold of them after, uh, two days of panic.

• 23:18Speaker 01

  You're a determined fellow.

• 23:20Logan Bartlett?

  It was a jacket that I had just purchased, and so the, uh, the consideration set was high for me to get it back. But it is much nicer to be able to hail the Uber and pay the fee that they, uh, you know, that goes to the driver.

• 23:30Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. So I think all of those considerations, we've, you know, we've had to learn to build out a system that's able to,

• 23:39Speaker 01

  make the, everything work for both the rider and the driver with economics at work. It's taken us 15 years. It's taken us tens of billions of dollars of capital, and we can provide that instantly to a partner. Uh, and you know, hopefully Tesla will be one of those partners. You never know.

• 23:55Logan Bartlett?

  It's, and there's, there's all the different regulatory considerations as well at a service level, right? In addition to figuring out all of the, the human behavior things, but then there's all the government considerations.

• 24:07Speaker 01

  Different pickups, drop offs, airport pickups, drop offs. And listen, it's also not clear to me that the average person, you know, Tesla owner or owner of any other car is going to want to have that car be ridden in by a complete stranger.

• 24:24Logan Bartlett?

  Which, which by the way, uh, for people that don't know, that's the current plan is, and there's, I think he said, hey, and it markets that there aren't enough, uh, supply. They will also put cars on the road, but the plan would be, hey, Logan owns a Tesla. It sits out there idle 23 hours a, a day. And so do you want to use it for a third of the eight hours a day just to go around and pick people up?

• 24:43Speaker 01

  Exactly. And it, it, it just so happens to that probably the times at which you're going to want your Tesla are probably going to be the same times that, uh, ridership is going to be at a peak, right? There are these peaks and valleys in terms of supply, demand. Uh, and we are able to essentially balance supply and demand or position supply on a temporal basis when you need the supply or in certain places, if there's a concert, et cetera. But because essentially drivers who are part-time are part of this ecosystem, we only have to pay for that supply when we use it. If you have a fleet that essentially you've got to use 100% of the time, or you've got to drive utilization 100% of the time,

• 25:26Speaker 01

  you're not going to be able to work the peaks and valleys the way that a hybrid network that's going to have both humans and robots on it are going to be able to do. So I think there's a lot that we bring to bear. And by the way, I don't think it's a zero-sum world, right? There is a world in which 1P and 3P work together. And if you look at food, for example, you've got McDonald's, Starbucks, Domino's, every single major player out there has a direct channel to consumers. But as they try to maximize the utilization of their restaurants, et cetera, they have come to the conclusion that they should work with marketplaces. I think the same is going to be true of cars. If you want to drive utilization of that asset,

• 26:11Speaker 01

  you're going to want to engage definitely 3P. And if you want to develop your own 1P channel as well, that can be true. It doesn't have to be either or.

• 26:20Logan Bartlett?

  You've successfully gotten Uber into a number of, I guess, adjacent revenue streams. Advertising, was advertising in place when you?

• 26:28Speaker 01

  No, no, it wasn't.

• 26:29Logan Bartlett?

  Got it.

• 26:29Speaker 01

  That was actually, for me, it was pattern recognition, which is at Expedia, we'd actually built a big advertising business. Hotels could bid for placement to move themselves up in the stack. A lot of tourism companies advertise as well. And we saw the same thing with eats, which is now restaurants can essentially bid for placement. They can provide sales, what we call merchant-funded offerings that are increasing significantly year-on-year to drive their business in kind of a variable way. When they need demand, they can advertise or make offers. When they don't need the demand, they don't have to.

• 27:05Logan Bartlett?

  And that's a billion-dollar revenue?

• 27:07Speaker 01

  It's a billion-dollar revenue business. It's a little more than 1% of gross bookings. We think that it can be 2-plus percent. We're also building an advertising business with a grocery retail business as well. And then actually on rides, too. We're being very, very particular in terms of the brands that we work with, et cetera. But we will put some brands in front of you when you're waiting for your driver, et cetera. So it's a billion dollar business. There should be multiples of that in the coming

• 27:36Logan Bartlett?

  And I assume pretty good profit margins.

• 27:38Speaker 01

  Advertising is a wonderful

• 27:40Logan Bartlett?

  It's an amazing business.

• 27:41Speaker 01

  Business. It's magical compared to our base business.

• 27:43Logan Bartlett?

  Yes, yes, yes. So, so we might talk one to 2% on a bookings basis, but on a flow-through basis, it's probably.

• 27:49Speaker 01

  Definitely. And I think one of the tricks for commerce companies, because advertising with a high margins, et cetera, can be quite intoxicating if you want to use the term is, you have to make sure that it doesn't hurt the base product and the base experience. So we constantly have holdout groups. We could be driving our advertising business and growing it much faster than we are, but we don't want to succumb to that kind of temptation. You know, once you do it, it's very difficult to pull back. So we're going in a kind of determined, measured way to make sure the customer experience doesn't get hurt.

• 28:26Logan Bartlett?

  Yes. You don't want to be the fourth search ad on the results when you're going down the pages. It's hard on mobile. And data labeling is another business that you guys have.

• 28:35Speaker 01

  Very small business that we're working on now. And for us, our hypothesis there is, you know, if you think about Uber to some extent, you could argue that we're a labor platform, a platform for flexible work, right? There are 7.4 million earners earning flexibly on our platform. They earn almost $18 billion just this last quarter, growing over 20%. And you could argue that the first kind of flexible work that we've introduced has been transportation. So are there other kinds of flexible work that we can introduce? We first started doing it internally, map labeling, data labeling, et cetera, for machine

• 29:16Speaker 01

  learning algorithms. We're now opening it up to third parties. And in many cases, it's their drivers who they may drive during the day and at night they go home and then they label. And they do some of this work. The economics have turned about really good. The quality has turned out to be excellent and it's more ways for our earners to make a living, which is very, very cool. So very promising, but small part of our business right now.

• 29:43Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. Yeah. Well, how does something like that come to be? Like, is that, does that bubble up at a grassroots level? It sounds like advertising was maybe top down consideration.

• 29:51Speaker 01

  Very, very much grassroots and, and we started doing it internally. There's a team that we have in India who is, does a bunch of this, this work internally. And we often compare them to external benchmarks. And they just, this team is extraordinary. They keep just beating the crap out of external benchmarks. So we said, well, if you beat external benchmarks, well then why don't we compete against these external benchmarks? So we built a very, very small sales staff and they're doing pretty well. And they've earned themselves some engineering bandwidth and some sales bandwidth, but teams gotta, gotta perform.

• 30:30Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 30:30Speaker 01

  As they deserve more.

• 30:31Logan Bartlett?

  Listen, if, if scale AI is any indication, I think there's a, there's a good big market to go after in some of these.

• 30:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, that's, it's a great company. It's something.

• 30:38Logan Bartlett?

  It's really, it's really impressive what they've been able to do. So we, we touched on Uber Eats and I guess maybe as you think about Uber Eats and DoorDash is obviously a, a big competitor and other player in, in the market. For people that don't know the evolution of Uber Eats and how it came to be, it was very, it was a, an adjacency to the existing Uber business. And so it sort of grew up in cities and a much more urban business. Can, can you, can you speak to, I guess, a little bit of the history and maybe contrast that with DoorDash and then where we are today in the, in the eats market?

• 31:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely. I mean, I, this was before my time, but I actually think the first iteration of Uber Eats was drivers kind of loading up burritos in their trunks and driving around, you know, the kind of instant, you know, push a button, get your food in, in five minutes. And, and it did start in the cities. So our strength has always been urban centers and we're growing outside of those urban centers into the suburbs. DoorDash to some extent is opposite, which is they have, they made a bet in the suburbs and it's an effective bet. And as it turns out in the U S, actually the suburban market for food is larger than the urban market for food.

• 31:50Speaker 01

  So in the big cities, we have a big advantage, which is we have a lot of liquidity in terms of drivers. One of the advantages that we have is our mobility business is a huge customer acquisition channel for our delivery business. We have one membership program, Uber One, where you get benefits on both free delivery and then you get cash back on mobility as well. So cities have been a real strength for us. We are expanding into the suburbs. And I think DoorDash is trying to defend their turf. You know, they're a good, strong company. And then when you look from a geographic basis, we are much stronger internationally. I think one of the really good bets that Travis and teammate early on was expanding the company very, very quickly internationally.

• 32:35Speaker 01

  When one could argue that the economics weren't proven out, turned out that the economics, you know, eventually did prove out. So I think the international footprint that we have is an asset that is a very, very substantial asset. That I think puts us in a better position than our competitors, whether it's DoorDash or any other local player.

• 32:53Logan Bartlett?

  If you could wave a magic wand, and I realize this is a very US centric question, but is, is the, is what you're working on in Uber Eats to continue to up level? Is it, is it, how much of it's brand versus supply versus, I don't know, any other product related considerations?

• 33:10Speaker 01

  I, I think that certainly selection is an area that we're working on, our selection. You know, we've added, we've got about 1.1 million merchants on the platform. It's growing 13%. We're not even close to be fully penetrated there. And I think our selection outside of urban centers can improve and needs to improve very, very quickly. And then for us as well, a lot of the algos that we have built are highly optimized for urban centers. Smaller distances, very high efficiency routes, et cetera. Suburbs and less sparse areas are just different.

• 33:52Speaker 01

  And so whereas we had a hypothesis, which is to some extent, the same algorithms could learn how to operate in highly dense environments versus less dense environments. We're having to make some, some fundamental. Changes in the algos that operate in less dense areas or the nature of our business in those less dense areas. And, you know, I think we've got a long way to go there, but the opportunity for us is significant as well. So it is, you know, we always try to have one single global tech stack as much as possible. But I do think that especially in less dense areas, we're going to have to tune our tech a little bit more than we have done historically.

• 34:31Logan Bartlett?

  I I shift the gears a little bit to more of the operating rhythm of the business. I would, I think Uber is one of the more operationally complex businesses out there. At least there's there's businesses with maybe more full-time employees. There's businesses with more revenue, but like the number of strategic considerations or operational considerations you have to factor in at any point in time, I think is on a short list.

• 34:56Speaker 01

  Hyper, hyper local business.

• 34:58Logan Bartlett?

  Hyper local. It's it's human intensive. There's a lot of strategic, you know, moves that you need to think through at any given time. And so I realize we're coming off of earning season. So so maybe the answer is is a little different right now. But in general, like, how do you think about organizing your day or your time in such a I'm sure there's infinite number of things you can go spend time on. And so how does it get bubbled up to you to orient around?

• 35:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not necessarily organizing a day, but I do have an operating rhythm in the business. And and I do believe like businesses having a rhythm that that they move off of is very important. So we have regular, you know, monthly business reviews, technical reviews where we go full stack, everything that we have shipped or shipping, etc. That's the rhythm that keeps the business going, weekly staff meetings around that. And then outside of that kind of skeleton, that just that machine that keeps going, I have certain areas that, you know, I deep dive on. AV is one, for example. Now, the suburbs in the US is is another one. Earners and are becoming

• 36:06Speaker 01

  much, much stronger business for earners or better product for earners coming out of COVID was another one. So then I'll pick a couple of different strategic areas that I go in very deeply, usually a weekly and or again, monthly cadence with a team. And then I do spend a lot of time on one on ones, not necessarily with my directs, but especially skip levels, one or two levels down. To get a better sense of what's going on in the business, build relationships with with the teams, because I found that with companies, companies or CEOs often, the trouble that they run into isn't with the things that they see coming, but it's with the things that they don't see coming. And the, this operating rhythm kind of has, it's a set of metrics that we're all familiar

• 36:51Speaker 01

  with, that we're all trying to drive as one team. And then I'm constantly meeting with lower levels of the organization to get a sense of what's really going on, what their opinions on, what's happening in parts of the organization that I don't necessarily have a view to on a regular basis.

• 37:09Logan Bartlett?

  How, so famously, David Kay was an Uber driver in, in San Francisco, right? For a while, you were going around and was it David Kay? Was that your name?

• 37:18Speaker 01

  David Kay, I was, I grew up being a Mets fan, so it's Dave Kingman.

• 37:22Logan Bartlett?

  That's funny.

• 37:23Speaker 01

  You know, where Dave Kay came from.

• 37:25Logan Bartlett?

  That's funny. So, so that's one example of going deep. I'm sure that helped inform a lot of your earner perspective. I mean, probably the totality of the business, but earner specifically was probably informed by that. On some of these other areas, like going into the suburbs, I assume, I don't know, do you live in the suburbs or are you in the city?

• 37:41Speaker 01

  I live in the suburbs now.

• 37:42Logan Bartlett?

  Okay, so, so now you're, you're.

• 37:44Speaker 01

  You kind of see it.

• 37:45Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, exactly. You're living it, living it out there. Are there other ways that you found at like a practical level, kind of going into each of these areas and learning, I don't know, AV or something and really getting a feel for what that's like? Do you go spend a month in Scottsdale and ride around for a while? Or like, is there anything?

• 38:01Speaker 01

  You know, I, I don't spend, I'm certainly not spending a month in Scottsdale, but, but I would say that I do take meetings, especially with companies that are smaller companies that I would say under normal course, if I had a perfectly logical hierarchy of where I should be spending my time, someone might consider, hey, that's a waste of time. And again, it's a way for me to keep in touch, to understand what's happening technically in the world out there. And, and. I'd say eighty, ninety percent of the time, it is a waste of time. But there's that twenty or twenty percent of the time where those treasures come in.

• 38:41Speaker 01

  Uh, and, and you get significant benefits in, in terms of what decision you make next.

• 38:47Logan Bartlett?

  The, the cultural reset that happened when you took over as CEO is, is well trodden ground. But I'd heard you say something recently about actually, you went through a values exercise then.

• 38:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:59Logan Bartlett?

  And it was more listening oriented, sort of distillation of the existing values within the company and sort of shining a light on the ones you wanted to magnify and, and, you know, maybe, maybe forcing out some of the ones you didn't. More recently, you went through another exercise of resetting it. So I guess that's two in seven years, once every seven years or so. Um, how do you think about values within Uber? And how do you think about the two different approaches you've taken to what you did then versus what you've done more recently?

• 39:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I, I think what I did very early on was to some extent a necessity because everyone, uh, thought and knew that we needed a cultural reset at the, at the company. So if you need a cultural reset, you got to redefine the culture. Um, I'm a big fan of Jeff Bezos and there's a quote that, that he, uh, that he spoke about, which is to some extent the culture or values of, of the company, they, they set themselves. It's not up for management to kind of say thou shalt X. The company defines its own values, which then management, um, articulates, uh, to, to the company. So early on, as an outsider who didn't really understand Uber,

• 40:11Speaker 01

  I just didn't think I would have a right to come and say thou shalt have this value, et cetera. It wouldn't speak truly to the company. So we ran an exercise that seemed like a good idea at the time, which is we asked a bunch of employees, what are the values that they think the company should represent, both old and new? Um, we surfaced all that stuff up to senior management and we picked and chose the ones that we liked, but it really reflected a bottoms up, I would say, sentiment in terms of, in terms of culture. It served its purpose, but it was boring, right? It was the typical stuff that you would see like, you know, what company doesn't believe in teamwork or something like that.

• 40:56Speaker 01

  It was, it was boring. It was, I found it to be at the time relatively uninspiring. There was one cultural norm that I pushed from the top down, which is we do the right thing, period. That is the one that stuck. Four, five years later, I thought that finally I'd gone to know the company. I had been a part of the shaping of the culture of the company and I thought that I had a right with my team to talk about how we saw the company and, and what made the company different culturally than other average companies. So we came up with a new set of norms, you know, go get it, which is about like, yeah, we are aggressive as a company. We are going to go get it. It's during good days, bad days, et cetera.

• 41:41Speaker 01

  We believe in going after, having a big target and going after those targets. We talk about being trip obsessed, which is we're not customer obsessed. The magic of Uber happens when a rider and a driver both meet and you have a success. And so there's a certain negotiation that has to happen between the two in order for that magic to happen within that trip. So the set of norms that we have, the values that we have, I think are much more reflective of the company. They reflect what's different about us. And I think it's a great set of values that we live by, you know, you know, every day, hopefully at all levels of the company.

• 42:17Logan Bartlett?

  In terms of operating, you've, you've very successfully gotten the company profitable over the course of the last, the last couple of years. And it's, it's amazing. It was something that I think a lot of people didn't think was entirely possible. And so you've, you've clearly showed that. As, as we've moved to the more of this world of balancing efficiency and, and growth and more of a measured balance between the two versus maybe where we were a couple of years ago, are there any operating lessons or tactics that you took in that that might be more broadly applicable, not necessarily shutting down, you know, X, Y, Z business or something like that?

• 42:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think if, if there are a couple of little lessons that, that I would push forward is, you know, I actually think that. In hindsight, the availability of ridiculous amounts of capital for Uber and/or tech in general created a circumstance where the hard work of optimizing a business or the hard work of like retraining a model and driving two or three percent more efficiency out of the model wasn't rewarded because a competitor could just throw a bunch of pile of money against a certain market and drown the hard work of a team of 10 engineers

• 43:32Speaker 01

  who had spent six months doing something. So I do think that there is the efficiency or the need to be able to do more with less, the discipline of not throwing a bunch of bodies at a problem actually helps you do better work. So it's very, very tempting to go and chase, you know, big targets, big numbers, et cetera. And sometimes it is appropriate to throw a bunch of capital at an opportunity, but you've got to be very careful when the abundance of capital actually takes away from the hard work to build a really, really great service. And that was happening, you know, I think in the technology

• 44:15Speaker 01

  sector, et cetera. And once the capital became scarce, the premium went to people who were building great tech, great code, et cetera. And frankly, that's an area that I'm a lot more comfortable with. It's something that I enjoy much more than raising a bunch of money and throwing it into marketplace. So I think there's that caution, which is focus on the real work. And sometimes money gets in the way. And sometimes it's necessary. You've got to be able to tell the difference between the two.

• 44:41Logan Bartlett?

  Did that lead to culture or consideration of, I don't know, measure twice and cut once or hire, like a more measured hiring approach and being more disciplined on that side?

• 44:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely. I mean, we, I do think that I see this in companies all the time. We were guilty of it, which is To some extent, management sometimes measures their self-worth based on the number of people on their team.

• 45:07Logan Bartlett?

  Sure.

• 45:08Speaker 01

  Uh, we, we actually, we talk about, and I try to stop, like, actually prevent this, which is, you look at someone's promotion, you know, how many people are reporting to, to that person? Terrible. It's the worst thing that you can do because then it becomes in the interest of the person to hire more people.

• 45:22Logan Bartlett?

  Sure.

• 45:23Speaker 01

  Uh, so we actually, we've been flat, flattish headcount for the past three years. Um, we're encouraging managers, the heroes are the ones who keep their headcount flat and do more with flat headcount, et cetera. So it's been a redefinition of the heroes and other people who have big teams, other people who actually have smaller teams. Uh, and it's driven an operating discipline. I think the company's accomplished a lot more than we thought we could collectively, and it's been really, really cool to see.

• 45:53Logan Bartlett?

  I- i- in terms of actually operationalizing that or codifying it into the organization, like, do you, do you do any tactics to allow that to manifest in terms of like not showing uh, how many direct reports exist within an organization or celebrating, I guess, to that point, like, hey, you know, Tim's doing this, uh, but has kept the organization flat in doing that, or are there any?

• 46:14Speaker 01

  I mean, I, I hate to say it, uh, which is sometimes you just have to do dumbass things, which is, don't even come to me asking for more headcount.

• 46:20Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 46:21Speaker 01

  And then, you know, I'm going to demand more from every single team. And somehow they've, they have, uh, delivered. So it's great to see what people are capable of once you force it. And sometimes you gotta force it.

• 46:32Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. Um, Uber obviously operates, as we mentioned, it's a local business that's operating globally. Um, have there been any interesting examples or things that stand out in your mind about, um, how Uber gets utilized in different cultures or countries or different product level considerations?

• 46:48Speaker 01

  Oh, ton, tons of stuff. I'd say like, for example, in India, um, auto tuk tuk's these three-wheelers. They're getting wired up all over the place. Like, that's one of our fastest growing parts of the business. And that led us to starting to test two-wheelers. You know, Uber motorcycle, would you take a Uber motorcycle?

• 47:06Logan Bartlett?

  I would, uh, if my wife did not know. I was, uh,

• 47:09Speaker 01

  There you go. Um, it can be our secret.

• 47:11Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, exactly. You, you and me and, uh, you know, everyone listening.

• 47:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. So those three-wheelers turned into two-wheelers and it's turned out to be the, our fastest growing segment of the business. You know, two-wheelers in Brazil. On a standalone basis, we'll be like our fifth or sixth largest country in the world. It's extraordinary how.

• 47:29Logan Bartlett?

  So, so quite literally, if I'm in Brazil, I'm getting on, strapping on to.

• 47:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you're zipping through traffic, etc.

• 47:37Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, wow.

• 47:37Speaker 01

  And it's forty, fifty percent cheaper than an Uber X and it's just caught on fire.

• 47:42Logan Bartlett?

  Wow.

• 47:42Speaker 01

  There are all these really cool learnings that we learn from one market to the other. You know, one, one area that I'm very excited about is actually high capacity vehicles called Uber Bus. Um, we launched it in Egypt originally, actually pre-COVID, had to close it down with COVID. But the idea of getting, you know, either share or getting fifteen, twenty people into a vehicle to help out with congestion, really lowering the cost of our service is also super, super interesting to me. And it's working in Mexico, Egypt, India, a bunch of markets. There's a lot to do in terms of the unit economics, but the promise, I think, is really, really exciting for us.

• 48:21Logan Bartlett?

  Super cool. Um, eh, from a, from a leadership standpoint, now Uber is how many people at this?

• 48:28Speaker 01

  About thirty thousand.

• 48:29Logan Bartlett?

  Thirty thou- I apologize for asking that question. I knew it's a bad, uh, headcount is not a proxy for.

• 48:33Speaker 01

  It's been flat for a while.

• 48:34Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, flat for a while. That's good. Yeah, congrats. Um, so, uh, in terms of like leadership style, how, how do you feel? How would you describe how you are as a leader?

• 48:43Speaker 01

  It's, uh, I'd say the one thing that I would characterize about myself is that I really believe in transparency. Um, I'm a very open leader. I will tell the company, you know, all hands, like exactly what's going on. And, and I've, I've been, you know, there have been people who follow me on it. Well, what if there's a leak? And, and for me, I will take the risk of there being a leak in order for me to be truthful to my team. Because I think people are better, kinda.

• 49:16Speaker 01

  They're better sensing bullshit than you think they are. And if they see their leaders bullshitting them, they're just gonna bullshit the leader right back.

• 49:25Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 49:26Speaker 01

  And I think the danger, you know, the higher up you go in an organization, the less you really know what's going on in the organization. I still remember like when I was young and I was getting promoted, these friends of mine, we were working together. I got promoted, all of a sudden they're like talking to me in paragraphs. There's like a beginning, a body, a conclusion, and they all of your communication changes. You have, when you have staff, like they try to control who gets access to you, et cetera. It's a little bit what I was talking about, like I'll take random meetings, cause I want random input coming, coming into me. And for me, if you want an organization that is truthful, that's being frank, it's gotta start at the top. So I'm very transparent and, and you know, part of transparency is like when there's good news, you give them the good news.

• 50:10Speaker 01

  But when there's bad news, when there's effed up stuff, you just say it. And I think people really appreciate hearing it and it creates a model that then they bring into their everyday life. Uh, if they're talking to a compatriot or they're talking to their boss, et cetera. That transparency for me is just, that's more fun.

• 50:28Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 50:29Speaker 01

  Like it's not fun BSing people and like, you know, reading from a prepared script. So it's, it's, it's how I like to operate. It's the kind of person I wanna be and I'm kinda that person at work and I like it more.

• 50:41Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's hard to remember if you're, uh, I, I don't have the best memory. And so if you need to shape some version of truth, it really does. I'm not a great liar.

• 50:50Speaker 01

  You just gotta say what, what's going on.

• 50:52Logan Bartlett?

  I have, cause I'll inevitably get caught in a lie if I, if I don't say the honesty thing.

• 50:56Speaker 01

  That's a good lesson.

• 50:57Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, it is. It's, it's a forced one for me, cause I just can't, uh, I can't lie from it.

• 51:02Speaker 01

  It's a good one to live your life by.

• 51:03Logan Bartlett?

  Are you a, are there any ways at which you're a different CEO or leader today than you were at Expedia?

• 51:10Speaker 01

  Uh, I think that I am more technical. Uh, you know, I, I came from a finance background. I was an engineer. Uh, and, and I do think that when I was at Expedia originally, I was running the hold co. Uh, and then I had to take over Expedia.com and I had to actually run the operations. Cause I hired the wrong president and it didn't work out. So I actually had to get into the, the business and I realized just how important, um, code base, the technical basis of any company is, it should be obvious. I carried that over to Uber now, so I spent a lot of time with my teams, not just kind of at the UI level

• 51:51Speaker 01

  or even kind of marketplace algorithmic level, but at the very base of like, what are the, you know, open source databases that we're using here or there? Because if you build that technical stack in the right way, if you hire really good, uh, engineers, product managers, et cetera, it makes everything else in the business a lot more easy. So I, I just spent a lot more time at that part of the business than I used to.

• 52:16Logan Bartlett?

  Hmm. Is there, so, so you started your career at Allen and Company, uh, obviously technical degree from, from Brown originally. So, so, um, but, but Allen and Company, and then you went straight to IAC after that, right? And rose up within finance.

• 52:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was a, I was a deal person and then I became CFO.

• 52:33Logan Bartlett?

  Yep.

• 52:34Speaker 01

  And then eventually became the CEO of Expedia.

• 52:36Logan Bartlett?

  Was there a point in time along that journey that you realized, uh, maybe being a CEO would be something that you wanted to do?

• 52:41Speaker 01

  Not really, like I'm, I'm not a big planner. The, the reason why I got out of finance was because I like working on teams and I wanted to work at a company and I want to build something. So Barry Diller was a client and I always thought like, if there's one person I want to work for, it's Barry Diller. Extraordinary person, great mentor of mine. So he was at HSN, he was buying USA Networks, he needed a lot of help. And he offered me a job and I took it. And increasingly, I just became more interested in the operational side of the job. But it wasn't like, I want to be X or Y. It was just, what is it that interested me?

• 53:25Speaker 01

  And kind of moving one step forward to an area of interest. Actually, one of the pieces of advice I give to young people, now that I'm an old person, is like, don't overplan your career. I see people making mistakes all the time when they're like, I need to make this much money, or I need to be this title by X time. And if, and, and humans are always looking for signal that agrees with the bias, kind of the established path that they have. And they ignore signal that doesn't agree with it. And so by being so focused on going in this direction, you're going to miss all this other opportunity that was presented to you. So for me, like, you know, I thought I was going to be a banker for life,

• 54:10Speaker 01

  but I saw this person I wanted to work with. I was lucky enough for him to give me an opportunity. It's never been about my wanting to be a CEO. Like, I kind of stumbled my way there. It's been a great stumble, don't get me wrong. I loved the job, but it's never been kind of a planned activity for me.

• 54:25Logan Bartlett?

  Did you, what time horizons do you think you're able to think in, in terms of like the career considerations and things like that? I'm sure it changed from early to later.

• 54:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, for me, it's just generally, what is it that interests me? Like, for me, it was, I was an engineer, I wanted to get back to engineering. I was really interested in technology. Originally, I was a media banker, but we saw things moving to the technical side. Barry really believed in e-commerce. So I just kind of like, you know, and again, I didn't put a timeframe on it. It was actually not defined by time, but it was defined in direction. And ultimately, it took me. You know, it's where I am today. Thank God.

• 55:03Logan Bartlett?

  I get the feeling, one of the points in listening to old interviews when you left Expedia, one point of pride, I think, and appreciation from the aforementioned Barry Diller was that you left the ranks with capable people that were going to be able to take over your role and responsibility, I guess. One, is that a fair characterization, something that you were proud of within Expedia? And then two, how do you think about mentorship and development of leadership ranks?

• 55:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, listen, the test of a CEO is often not just how the company performs when they're CEO, but how the company performs afterwards. So there's a great Expedia alumni network. We're friends, etc. There are tons of people who've done extraordinarily well, both at Expedia and outside of Expedia. And the same is true with Uber as well. I tell you, like, I don't, I'm not a big believer in formal mentorship programs. I think people learn by doing. You can read all you want. You can take courses, etc. You learn by doing. And for me, giving people opportunities to make a mark, to be ambitious, to stretch

• 56:16Speaker 01

  themselves beyond where they thought they were going to go, that's what gives me satisfaction and also works out for the people who I happen to quote unquote mentor, I guess.

• 56:25Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah. How do you think about the balance then in that case of empowerment?

• 56:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:33Logan Bartlett?

  And also the flip side, which is like, I don't know, your decisioning or your ownership of individual things?

• 56:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm a big believer in empowerment.

• 56:41Logan Bartlett?

  You are.

• 56:41Speaker 01

  So I empower teams now. I empower teams and then I measure. So I'm very numerical and I insist on teams to measure themselves based on KPIs, etc. You don't want KPIs to get in the way of common sense, but as long as you're hitting your KPIs and as long as you're thinking not just about optimizing your own part of the business, where you're able to under-optimize your own part of the business to optimize the full business, you're able to make those kinds of trade-offs, I'm going to let you run until you need some help.

• 57:19Logan Bartlett?

  For a fairly gregarious leader, I think you I've heard you describe yourself as introverted.

• 57:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm gonna go lock myself up.

• 57:28Logan Bartlett?

  I appreciate you doing this. I you can you can lay down after this. We'll let you take a nap. I guess you do a great job of rallying to the occasion on this. Is that something that you've had to train and learn over time? Or is it something that you were just naturally able to flip the switch on when the lights came on?

• 57:50Speaker 01

  I think that one thing that I'm good at is focus, right? If when when I'm working, I'm all in on work. I don't get distracted. When I'm at home with the kids, I'm with the kids. I'm not constantly checking my phones, etc. So like, the thing that I believe in, if you're gonna do something, like, go all in. Don't half ass it. And the fact is that as a leader, whether something public like this, maybe public like this, or when you're getting up in front of your employee base, don't half ass it. You only get so many chances. So I'll go all in. And then, you know, if I need to lock

• 58:28Speaker 01

  myself up afterwards, I will. It is taxing for me, so to speak. But it's part of the job. And I do get satisfaction from a job done well, so to speak. So I go all in. Whatever I do, I go all in.

• 58:44Logan Bartlett?

  Are you any tactics or anything you do with so you're not checking your phone all the time? Or is there anything that I mean, do you do you have any methods for people that maybe are addicted to their phones in some ways?

• 58:57Speaker 01

  You know, it's funny, I actually think it was it was a byproduct. When I was working at Allen and Company, originally, my first job was at a trading desk.

• 59:06Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 59:06Speaker 01

  And then when I become a banker, the trading desk, kind of the action around and understanding what was going on the markets, it was fun. And it gave me a little bit of differentiation against these other banks who are quite bankers who are quite academic. So I stayed on the trading desk. And so I had to do all the spreadsheet work with these traders like yelling around me and throwing things at me, etc. Because I was being hazed, of course, in those days. It was kind of what you did. So it just forced me to really focus. So it just like, it's, I don't know how you do it. It's necessity is usually the mother of invention, I guess they say. And for me, it's just something that I grew up with. You know, I don't know how to recreate it, sorry. Go work on a trading desk and quote on a trading desk.

• 59:50Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, let them shout over you and all that. We've referenced Barry Diller a few different times on this. I guess, I'm sure there's countless lessons that you've taken away or things you sort of learned from him along the way. Is there anything that particularly stands out as a lesson that you took from Barry?

• 1:00:08Speaker 01

  I think for me with Barry, and I kind of learned everything in my career from him. I'm incredibly thankful to him, but the thing that stood out, has always stood out to me with Barry is that I've never seen anyone who is as interested as he is in getting to the right answer versus being right. There's nothing that he enjoyed more than being challenged. Like if he had one viewpoint, you came in, you pushed him hard, he would push back really hard. You know, people, I find that people who are like really accomplished in life, they tend to talk a lot more. Barry's an unbelievable listener. And there's nothing that he likes more if you prove him wrong, and he's gonna go at it.

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  It is not gonna be fun for you to prove him wrong about that. By the way, most of the time he's right. But his ego and his value is about getting to the right answer, not about being right. And I think that is so valuable. You know, he's a person who's reinvented himself over and over and over again. And it's because he's a great listener and he wants to get to the right answer. And so it's really taught me, like, I, I love being wrong. Because it means that I'm learning something every single time. I like having people in my organization who sometimes are troublemakers. You know, like, organizations are very, very hard-coded to get along.

• 1:01:38Speaker 01

  And...

• 1:01:41Speaker 01

  That temptation causes organizations often to reject people who are contra thinkers, et cetera. And people confuse the idea of agreeing on a cause versus agreeing. They're two different things. You and I can disagree about something and we can have a really, really rough time going at it, but we're united in a cause. We're trying to get to the best idea there. And what Barry was always willing to live with is a lot of constructive conflict, sometimes pretty unpleasant conflict, but it got you to the right answer. And that's something that I've taken through my career in terms of how I operate. But it's also created a circumstance where at work, I don't want

• 1:02:26Speaker 01

  a bunch of people who agree with each other. It's boring, but often you don't get to the right answer. And it can create more difficulty. Like there's this, these studies done, which is diverse teams tend to perform better, but they don't think that they're performing better because it's not fun. It's not fun arguing, pushing each other, et cetera. But you do get to the right answer. And it's a long-winded way of saying Barry's obsession with the right answer despite or sometimes because of conflict is something that's been just a huge learning for me.

• 1:02:59Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, conflict is very, humans are wired to avoid conflict, I think.

• 1:03:05Speaker 01

  And organizations, you can have individual humans, the humans that like conflict, they tend to be lone wolves, et cetera. They don't tend to operate better in larger organizations. So the larger the organization gets, we're 30,000 people, the more easier it becomes to create like-minded areas that avoid that kind of conflict.

• 1:03:27Logan Bartlett?

  Are there tactics that you use to tease out some of that intellectual rigor now today? Like I assume, I don't know, one of them in a room speaking last or something. But do you ever try to steel man the other argument or pro people to make the counter to points? Is there anything you can do to manifest some of these things?

• 1:03:45Speaker 01

  You know, one is that. Within our org and a lot of orgs, when people are having disagreements in big groups, it's like, hey, let's, let's, uh, take it on the side. Let's have another.

• 1:03:55Logan Bartlett?

  Take it offline.

• 1:03:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, take it offline. Thank you. No, you actually want to model it in front of, in front of the group. It's harder to do. People don't like it. Uh, but I try to push it like, no, no, we're going to have a conversation right here, right now. Let's do it. And then the other that I was talking about, which is doing these skip levels, et cetera.

• 1:04:12Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:12Speaker 01

  It creates trust.

• 1:04:13Logan Bartlett?

  Sure.

• 1:04:14Speaker 01

  You tell people what's going on and I'll tell them everything. Um, and they tend to tell me what's on their mind as well. And that helps me kind of set the stage as to what my next agenda is.

• 1:04:25Logan Bartlett?

  Uh, for folks that don't know, Ron Sugar is the chairman of Uber?

• 1:04:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:04:29Logan Bartlett?

  And can you give his quick background? And then I'd be curious, same question of what you've learned from, from him.

• 1:04:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, he, uh, was CEO of Northrop Grumman, uh, defense company, uh, incredible company.

• 1:04:42Logan Bartlett?

  Very, uh, how big is Northrop Grumman now? A hundred billion dollar plus or something? I mean, it's huge.

• 1:04:46Speaker 01

  It's huge.

• 1:04:47Logan Bartlett?

  Two hundred billion.

• 1:04:48Speaker 01

  Huge. And he's on the board of Amgen, uh, Apple, um, uh, Chevron, incredible exposure to first rate companies. We're so lucky that he wanted to be the chairman of, or accepted to be the chairman of Uber as well. And for me, you know, I had worked, when I was working in Expedia, Barry, I had worked at a control board. Um, and Ron has really taught me the importance of board governance and also kind of thinking long-term. Uh, as it relates to how you build a business, even within the circumstances of Uber, which is, you know, has had so many ups and downs through the years, just solid, solid person. Hey, don't worry about what's happening next month.

• 1:05:32Speaker 01

  Let's talk about what's going to happen the next three to five years as it relates to strategy and the board.

• 1:05:36Logan Bartlett?

  Huh. Yeah, it's impressive to be able to think that far in advance.

• 1:05:39Speaker 01

  Well, you know, he's, he's a little more removed from the daily operations of the business and that has its benefits.

• 1:05:45Logan Bartlett?

  Do you guys still talk every week?

• 1:05:46Speaker 01

  Every week.

• 1:05:47Logan Bartlett?

  You have a scheduled standing hour long talk?

• 1:05:49Speaker 01

  That's what I was talking about, the, the rhythm of the business. There's, there's a rhythm that I have with Ron. Uh, I'd say. Probably two thirds of the time it's just he's giving me advice on what he thinks. And then one thirds of the times where he shape. How we're going to communicate to the board, what's the next agenda, etc. So most of the time he's giving me and then. I'll feed him a little bit too.

• 1:06:10Logan Bartlett?

  Well, I probed on on Twitter for questions before before this and one of the. One of the ones I got, which I thought was an interesting one is so you're seven years in. You've stabilized the business. It's grown in well past Bill Gurley's prediction of what did he say a hundred billion dollar. Valuation in the next couple of years. I maybe was off on the time he predicted, but it's gotten there.

• 1:06:35Speaker 01

  Gone there.

• 1:06:35Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you've proved at the fullness of time, you've proven Bill correct on that. I guess what keeps you doing this now, seven years in?

• 1:06:44Speaker 01

  Oh, just for me. And I think. Almost anyone who comes to Uber comes because of the impact that you can have on. How people live every day in the city and in the cities of the world, right? It's this is a company. It's a verb. It's so much a part of. How we move around our lives, what we eat, etc. That impact on the real world is something that I find incredibly satisfying. And then to the discussion that we were having earlier. Building global technical platforms. That can scale, but can adjust to all the complications of real life. It's just.

• 1:07:28Speaker 01

  The prom space, the technical spaces is just so freaking cool. So I just, when I'm geeking out with engineers or the marketplace engineers, like I am so happy. I remember a friend of mine is like, are you having fun? I'm like, no, I'm not having fun. It's too hard a job to have fun. And I guess in some ways like, once the job becomes fun, I think I'm out of here. It's really hard. It's really demanding. But the impact that we're having on the world and the way people care about the company is something that. Feeds me. And I'm just really lucky to be here and hopefully they'll keep me around for a while.

• 1:08:03Logan Bartlett?

  Would Barry now admit that you made the right call?

• 1:08:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think so.

• 1:08:07Logan Bartlett?

  Seven years later.

• 1:08:09Speaker 01

  You know, he was actually, I'll tell you a little story.

• 1:08:12Logan Bartlett?

  He was supportive, right?

• 1:08:13Speaker 01

  He was, he helped me. Like, I don't think he wanted me to leave, at least that's what he told me. So I hope that's true. But as a friend, he was helpful in my consideration on what to do. And it just goes to, you know, the kind of person that he is.

• 1:08:30Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, very magnanimous.

• 1:08:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, amazing.

• 1:08:32Logan Bartlett?

  Well, Dara, thanks for doing this.

• 1:08:33Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me.

• 1:08:34Logan Bartlett?

  It's great.

• 1:08:34Speaker 01

  It was really cool.

• 1:08:38Logan Bartlett?

  Thank you for joining us on this episode of The Logan Bartlett Show with Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. If you enjoyed this conversation, we'd love for you to subscribe on whatever podcast platform you're listening to us on, as well as share with anyone else that you think might find it interesting. We'll see you back here with another great guest next week on The Logan Bartlett Show. Have a great weekend, everyone.