Dara Khosrowshahi - Uber's Bet on AVs, AI, and Building a Super-App - [Invest Like the Best, EP.476]

My guest today is Dara Khosrowshahi, the CEO of Uber. Before Uber, Dara ran Expedia for thirteen years. We start with why he took this job in 2017, and a big part of that story is Daniel Ek, who told him that life is not about happiness, it is about impact. We talk about what the chaos felt like on day one, and how his family leaving Iran when he was nine shaped the way he handles pressure today. We spend most of our time on autonomous vehicles and Uber's role as the demand aggregator in a world of physical AI. Dara explains why Uber is a supply-led company, what it will take to win, and why he expects many winners in AVs rather than one. We also discuss Uber's $10 billion in free cash flow, the push toward a single app for everything, and what he has learned from Allen & Co, Barry Diller and Reed Hastings. For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. ----- Become a Colossus member to get our quarterly print magazine and private audio experience, including exclusive profiles and early access to select episodes. Subscribe at ⁠colossus.com/subscribe⁠. ----- ⁠Ramp’s⁠ mission is to help companies manage their spend in a way that reduces expenses and frees up time for teams to work on more valuable projects. Go to⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠ramp.com/invest⁠⁠ to sign up for free and get a $250 welcome bonus. ----- Trusted by thousands of businesses, ⁠Vanta⁠ continuously monitors your security posture and streamlines audits so you can win enterprise deals and build customer trust without the traditional overhead. Invest Like the Best listeners get a special offer of $1,000 off Vanta when you go to ⁠vanta.com/invest⁠. ----- WorkOS⁠ is the infrastructure B2B and AI-native companies use to sell to enterprise. It covers everything enterprise security requires: SSO, SCIM, RBAC, Audit Logs, AI governance, and more. Trusted by 2,000+ fast-growing companies, including OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, and Vercel. ----- Rogo is the AI platform for finance. They're building agents for Wall Street that are trained to understand how bankers and investors actually do work: from diligence and modeling, to turning analysis into deliverables. To learn more, visit rogo.ai/invest. ----- ⁠Ridgeline⁠ has built a complete, real-time, modern operating system for investment managers. It handles trading, portfolio management, compliance, customer reporting, and much more through an all-in-one real-time cloud platform. Visit⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ridgelineapps.com⁠. ----- Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://thepodcastconsultant.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠). Timestamps: (00:00:00) Welcome to Invest Like The Best (00:02:29) Intro to Dara Khosrowshahi (00:03:37) How Daniel Ek Convinced Dara to Take the Uber Job (00:06:54) Bringing Order to Chaos (00:09:20) Managing Stress as a Leader (00:11:22) The Chip on His Shoulder (00:12:53) Parenting Lessons (00:17:01) Mandate for AI Adoption (00:21:21) Uber's Role in Physical AI (00:22:48) Winning the AV Demand Race (00:27:41) Partnering vs. Competing with Waymo (00:32:05) AV Success Unlocks New Markets (00:35:09) Why Drones Haven't Arrived Yet (00:36:27) Regional AV Rollout Differences (00:37:35) Uber Eats International Winning Formula (00:39:44) Key to Aggregating Supply Well (00:44:34) Adding Hotels to Uber Platform (00:50:46) Lessons in Marketing at Scale (00:52:59) Apps vs. AI Agents in Seven Years (00:54:08) What Dara Learned from Barry Diller (00:56:52) What Dara Learned from Allen & Co (01:00:09) Buybacks vs. Growth Investing (01:04:17) Lessons from Reed Hastings (01:05:49) The Kindest Thing

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

• 0:01Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

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• 0:42Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

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• 1:30Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Hello and welcome, everyone. I'm Patrick O'Neal, and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories, and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. If you enjoy these conversations and want to go deeper, check out Colossus, our quarterly publication with in-depth profiles of the people shaping business and investing. You can find Colossus, along with all of our podcasts, at colossus.com.

• 1:54Speaker 01

  Patrick O'Neal is the CEO of Positive Sum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Positive Sum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of Positive Sum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit psum.vc.

• 2:22Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  My guest today is Dara Khosrowshahi, the CEO of Uber. Before Uber, Dara ran Expedia for 13 years. We start with why he took this job in 2017. And a big part of this story is Daniel Ek, who told him that life is not about happiness, it's about impact. We talk about what the chaos felt like on day one and how his family leaving Iran when he was nine shaped the way he handles pressure today. We spend most of our time on autonomous vehicles and Uber's role as the demand aggregator in a world of physical AI. Dara explains why Uber is a supply-led company, what it will take to win, and why he expects many winners in AVs rather than just one. We also discuss Uber's $10 billion in free cash flow, the push towards a single app for everything, and what he has learned from Alan and Company, Barry Diller, and Reed Hastings. Please enjoy my great conversation with Dara Khosrowshahi.

• 3:09Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  So I think I have to begin with the story you were just telling me about how you took the job here, how you heard about it. And the reason I start there is because I want to know what the company felt like to you when you showed up, how that's evolved, and then, very importantly, what the current moment feels like, which I think is the most interesting question for the business possible. But I love the origins, so I would love to hear, how did you hear about this job in the first place? What was the backstory?

• 3:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I've been at Expedia for 13 years, CEO, working with Barry Diller, and loved the experience and I loved where I was. At the time, like Uber was in the news all the time, right? It was in the business news, if you're interested. So obviously, I was reading about the situation at Uber. It seemed pretty chaotic and pretty difficult. And then a headhunter called me out of the blue and said, are you interested in the Uber CEO job? And at the time, I said, you know, no effing way. Who would even think about it at the time? And I had a considerably lower profile, as you can imagine, so I kind of blew it off. I was at the Sun Valley Conference, Alan and Company Conference, and was having a drink with Daniel Ek and my wife.

• 4:17Speaker 02

  And Daniel said, hey, Dara, did a headhunter call you? I recommended you for the job. I thought you'd be great for the job. And I was like, oh, that's why it happened? Like, what, are you crazy? And he said, well, I think you'd be great for the job. And I said, listen, I've been at Expedia for 13 years. I'm so happy with what I'm doing. And I remember Daniel looks at me and is like, Dara, since when is life about happiness? Interesting comment. He's like, it's about impact. Uber is a company that has impact on the world. It's important. It's in trouble. Why wouldn't you take a shot at this? I think you'd be great. I think a lot of people come to Uber because of the impact that the company has in our world. We are shaping how the world moves. We're a huge part of people's lives.

• 5:01Speaker 02

  We've got over 10 million couriers and drivers on the platform. And I just wanted to go to a place where I could make a difference. And I wanted to go to a place that was making a difference. When I started investment banking at Allen and Company, it was amazing. It was the best company in the world. But I was like, investment banking is really changing the world. So for me, it was about having impacted a company that was having fundamental impact in how people lived. We'd had a couple of beers and my wife was there, Sid, and she'd had a couple of beers and we talked about it. And the next morning, actually, in the parking lot, I remember calling the headhunter and I said, tell me more. So that's how it all started.

• 5:38Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Wow. Okay, so you show up, there's a process. What is the impression on day one through 10 or something like this? Like, what did it feel like?

• 5:45Speaker 02

  Complete chaos. Travis had not been at the lead of the company for some period of time. And there was a group of executives, a committee, if you want to call that, who had been running the company for a few months. And obviously, the company was in the public sphere in many, many bad ways. So lots of things going on, both internally, externally. And the business itself was very dynamic, hugely competitive. So it would have been difficult enough if there weren't any of the external distractions going on, coming into the business, which I think fundamentally was strong, but was going through a lot of change. It was just a lot of chaos, both in terms of the board and what the board wanted, in terms of the stability of the management team,

• 6:30Speaker 02

  and then getting structure around the business as well. But with time and with a lot of work and working with my team, we were able to bring some order to the chaos, both externally and internally. And it's turned out to be a great ride.

• 6:47Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  How did you do that? You were teaching a college seminar or something, an HBS seminar on a leader. Bringing and establishing some order and structure in a chaotic situation. What is the how?

• 6:59Speaker 02

  The most important how is simplifying the situation and breaking down what seems like an unassailable problem into its component parts. Vector mathematics. If you have a three dimensional, complex interaction, you can just break it down to each dimension. And if you solve each dimension and you bring it all together, you can actually solve pretty complex issues and equations into its component parts. And the same is true in business. When I got into Uber, there were very distinct areas that I had to take care of. One, at the board level, the board was fighting for control. And you had a board that was focused on who's going to control the future of the company versus what the future of the company was going to be. And so, for example, we brought in a new

• 7:44Speaker 02

  chairman, Ron Sugar, who has become my partners through all of the years and really brought the board together. This isn't about who controls it. This is about the fate of the company. I think the company lost trust with stakeholders, with regulators, with the public. So we went out and first went on a listening tour to understand what the issues were and then started listening, started acting based on that impact and started communicating both internally externally, which is the concerns of stakeholders externally were just as important as our own concerns as well. And then with employees is putting together a team. And there was a lot of talent inside of Uber, but there were some folks who kind of were stuck in their old world who had to get off.

• 8:29Speaker 02

  And then there was an incredible talent base. Andrew McDonald, who is our president and C O O, predated me and has come through many, many years, which many others have been with me since before day one. And then bringing in new management members like a Tony West as well, who's been with me ever since. So I think if you focus on each distinct problem, what seems like chaos can become small, surmountable problems that you take on. You set initiatives against each of them and over a period of time. You can't control what gets solved when, but over a period of time, things get better. And I think things got better.

• 9:09Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  In situations like that, and I'm sure there's been many others at Expedia and Sense, what have you learned about managing your own stress so that you don't get personally overwhelmed by chaos?

• 9:19Speaker 02

  I think I'm lucky Sid, my wife, calls me a robot, which is I don't get stressed out by situations. We lost everything when we came here from Iran. And I saw destroy my father.

• 9:30Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  How old were you?

• 9:31Speaker 02

  I was nine years old. My father built, along with his family, an incredible family business. We came here, we lost everything. But then we rebuilt. And I think for whatever reason, it just doesn't help. Overthinking things doesn't help. It only makes things worse. And I'm able to approach things kind of from an engineering mindset. I studied engineering school, which is what are the problems? Let me list them and let me have an approach to solving each of them. Test and learn. And not everything improved in a linear path. But being stressed out, like, what's the point of it? Who cares?

• 10:06Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Can you say a little bit more about what that experience was like? Like watching your dad go through that at that young age?

• 10:11Speaker 02

  For us, we came to the States. We got to stay with my uncle Nasi. The adjustment for us was not very difficult. But as I grew up, I observed my father, who, when I was a kid, he was kind of a giant of a man, become less trying because I was getting bigger as well. And he just lost that spark. He wasn't able to begin again here in the US. He did his very best. He was an entrepreneur. He tried his hand at a lot of things. And I think that, one, it drove myself and my brothers and my family to rebuild. You know, many immigrants have a chip on our shoulder and I had a particularly big one. But at the same time, I didn't want to be in the same situation, which is

• 10:52Speaker 02

  for work, for fortune, to break me as a person. So I was able to separate the two, which is, yeah, do I want to do well? Absolutely. Am I going to give it every inch that I've got? Absolutely. But in the end, I know who I am. And I'm always going to be that same person. I'm not going to let the chaos of the world affect me mentally.

• 11:14Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  What have been the chapters of the chip? How has the chip on the shoulder evolved? Like, what's satisfied it early on? And how has what satisfied a change? Or is the chip still?

• 11:22Speaker 02

  It's never satisfied. I don't know what it is. I always wanted to do well in school, sports. For me. I just believe in being all in in anything that you do. When I'm with my kids, I'm with my family. I don't have this thing around. I'm not checking messages. I'm not getting distracted. I believe in if you're going to do something, whether that's work, whether that's sports, whether that's personal life, just go all in. Get rid of the distractions and I think you'll lead a happier, more effective life.

• 11:54Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Do you think that chip is roughly the same today as it was when you were in high school?

• 11:58Speaker 02

  It's core. I don't know whether I would have been the same person, you know, the counterfactual if I were in Iran, but I know my family is awfully competitive. A lot of Iranian immigrants have come here to the US and many parts of the world have been extraordinarily successful. And yes, of course, starting from behind and knowing that you're starting from behind and having the desire to get ahead again, it absolutely plays a part in your life.

• 12:28Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  And the selfish question, because I have kids, you know, they're growing up fast. How do you think about your kids? My guess is you wouldn't press the red button to undo the experience you had because it made you who you are.

• 12:39Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 12:40Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  And so I think about this a lot as it relates to kids that maybe are not going to have an experience like that, that might shape them in a similar way. How do you think about that as a dad?

• 12:48Speaker 02

  I'm figuring it out as we go. I think being a parent is so humbling, but I think we're doing our kids a disservice by giving them too much, being around too much. I don't know about you as a kid, but on the weekends, my mom would be like, get out of here and come back for dinner, figure it out. And I think this, the helicopter parenting, being around your kids all the time. You want to love your kids. You want to know that they're absolutely loved and appreciated, but it's the challenges in life that form you. And it's the overcoming of these challenges that give, I think, humans a profound satisfaction. And if you as a parent are overcoming these challenges for your kids, you're actually doing them a disservice long term, whereas short term, you think that you're doing them

• 13:33Speaker 02

  a favor, you're giving them an easier life. A happy life is not necessarily an easy life. And so for me, it is a challenge. Because I love my kids. Sid and I co-parent in a way, which is we're not going to do everything for the kids. They come home, they're responsible for their homework, where they've got to learn how to make it in this world themselves within a scope of family, which will prepare them for the outside world, which, as you know, can throw you a lot of curveballs.

• 13:58Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Yeah. Speaking of curveballs and challenges, if we zoom all the way to today, it's got to be, I'm curious if you think so. It seems to me from the outside like the most interesting time to be running this business.

• 14:07Speaker 02

  Oh, my God. Yeah.

• 14:08Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Because their opportunity is so massive, the threats are real, the new entrants are fascinating. AVs, we'll talk a lot about, I'm sure. What does it feel like? Ground us today. What feels like the central question to answer as the leader of the business?

• 14:22Speaker 02

  I tell you that every single year that I've been in Uber has been a challenge and there have been so many answers to question and we interact with the world in so many ways. Obviously, the challenge and opportunity now is the rise of AI, both as an internal tool as to how we build. And what's different about Uber than many other companies is we don't just exist in the digital sphere. Our experiences encompass digital first in terms of your interaction with our platform, but then they are delivered or fulfilled in the real world where all kinds of things happen. So you've got kind of a determinative structure in terms of the interaction with the app, but then probabilistic outcomes. And we always have to deal with those outcomes and the things that go wrong in the real world. Traffic, driver cancelling, your food being late.

• 15:08Speaker 02

  But we have always used in that probabilistic world, AI tools to build out our system for much longer than most companies out there. But now with the onset of AI, both in the digital world, the ability to build much larger models that know much more about you, can anticipate what you want more accurately, can really drive utilization and can drive people work and make an engineer into super engineer. To then the rise of physical AI, autonomous vehicles, drones, how they are going to change how we interact with consumers in the real world. I've never, ever seen a pace of change so fast and it's incredibly exciting.

• 15:48Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

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• 16:32Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

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• 17:16Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  What's your mandate to your team, given how fast things are changing and how much more each person can now do?

• 17:22Speaker 02

  I'm not a top down driver, so to speak. We have a bottoms up culture, which is I want people inventing all over the company. I don't want to be that single point of failure. Obviously the CEO is important for the company. So I hesitate to draw mandates and I would tell you that. AI adoption of the company, just because we are the AI native company or ML native company in terms of where the technology has come from, it's been occurring all parts of the business, whether it's engineers and how they scope projects, how they build, debugging, platform migrations. All of that now has enormous AI adoption to our legal team, to our marketing team. So it is happening everywhere.

• 18:05Speaker 02

  Where I come in is then pushing the teams to fundamentally use the power of AI to rebuild systems and processes from the bottoms up. And by the way, it could be a decent first step to take a process and have AI optimize 20% of it, 30% of it in terms of speed or effectiveness or cost. But to rebuild it from the ground up, that's much harder. And that's where I'm coming in and really pushing the teams to think about processes from a first principles standpoint and the impact of AI on those.

• 18:36Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  What's the most amazing thing you've seen someone do with the technology at Uber?

• 18:41Speaker 02

  The most amazing thing that I've seen is I'm seeing the impact show up in all kinds of random corners of the company. What we're seeing now is we've got devs in India who all of a sudden are driving 10x the code commits that they used to. They're using autonomous agents all over the place. So the uptake of the tools that we're seeing is not at all predictable in terms of who is racing ahead with this new technology versus what we typically saw. And so I think you're going to have very, very unpredictable patterns within the company. It's up to us to find it and it's up to us to kind of promote those individuals who are kind of the rebels inside the company. We want the rebels to win here.

• 19:23Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  One of the interesting questions today is what is the actual latent demand for intelligence? Like, it's a weird question.

• 19:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:29Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I'm curious if you've had an experience like me where at first you're like, tell your team, burn tokens, like, let's use as much intelligence as possible. And then there's a moment where you're like, wow, this is expensive. Intelligence is expensive.

• 19:38Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 19:39Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  How do you think about the trade off between, it seems like an unbridled good to have more intelligence, but right now it's quite costly?

• 19:46Speaker 02

  We're dealing with an L. I actually blew through our AI budget in a quarter for the whole year, essentially. And it is forcing us to adjust. You know, we are going to meet or headcount increases because to the extent that my engineers are getting much more efficient, their throughput is increasing, they're becoming superhuman in terms of their output. There's a cost to that and it's a significant cost. And at the same time, we're metering the increase in heck count. So my view right now is drive adoption, encourage usage across the company. We do believe in efficiency here. We've got over $10 billion in free cash flow, which is great, but it's on well over 10 billion trips a year.

• 20:29Speaker 02

  So we are not a high margin business. We want to really drive efficiency in order to lower prices for riders, to give more earnings to our earners, et cetera. So I do think it's a combination for us right now of encouraging adoption, but then driving efficiency. And the way that I put it is we're using the more expensive models to explore. Hey, let's try a new interaction here. And obviously these frontier models, whether it's an OpenAI model or a Claude model, they really are terrific and they're great to experiment against. Once we scale some of these experiences and interactions, we'll look to bring in more efficient models that are more efficient on a token basis or open source, again, lower cost.

• 21:12Speaker 02

  So exploration is go, go, go. But then efficiency and scaling is something that we're also talking about.

• 21:19Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  So you're one of a few companies, many of them amazing companies with amazing leaders that are in this sort of like AI meets the physical world zone, where you've got a scaled brand and distribution. You're an aggregator of demand in many ways. And I have so many questions about this, but I guess the first one is just what that is like? How you think about that challenge, that problem, that opportunity as one of the small handful of companies that has the right to win? And how that new technology links up to the physical world?

• 21:47Speaker 02

  I think the first is there's an enormous opportunity in just it's boring, but it's wonderful boring, which is just building larger models. So building our models in terms of our feed models or search models now are probably 10,000 times bigger than our older models. And they're just able to take much more data about you and make predictions about what are you going to search for? Now we have universal search, for example. If you search for something, it's not just classified as rides or eats or grocery. We can show you everything that we have available across our services. First is just like the tooling has gone better, the capabilities have gone better. And today, we can guess when you take an Uber ride, three quarters of the time, we can guess where you're going. And it's just a one tap interaction.

• 22:30Speaker 02

  That can only improve based on these larger models. And as it relates to the real world, we can anticipate what's happening in the real world much more effectively now. And then the form factor with which you operate is going to change as well. And more and more, and it's going to take a while. You'll have drones getting your food to your home, or you'll have AVs delivering you from place A to place B. So everything is changing about it. Some of it is immediate opportunity now, but we think there's a ton of opportunity going forward.

• 23:03Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  What do you think has to be true for Uber to win the demand aggregator, you know, top slot in AVs specifically?

• 23:10Speaker 02

  Supply. So we are a supply-led company. The more drivers we have in the marketplace, the more restaurants that we're wiring up for you. A more latent demand that we have, and it's one of the lessons that I learned when it came from Expedia to Uber. At Expedia, we were really focused on demand, how many consumers can we get to the website, et cetera. And we were a demand-first company, and then we would build out hotel inventory and flight inventory in response to demand. At Uber, everything is upside down. One of our very, very significant growth opportunities right now is building on our surface, not just in the big cities, but in the sparse markets, in all of the suburbs of the world and smaller cities of the world.

• 23:52Speaker 02

  Not the top 10 cities in a country, but the next 50 cities, the next 200 cities in the country. What the first thing we do is actually go out and recruit drivers, recruit merchants in restaurants, groceries, couriers. And then just the demand shows up. I don't mean it's not that easy, but the biggest opportunity and challenge we have is making sure that we secure every single supply, every single car out there that's going to take you from point A to B, every single restaurant, every single retailer, every single grocer. If we do that, the demand will take care of itself.

• 24:26Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  In AVs specifically, what does that feel like? It feels obviously like we're just at the very early, early part of the S curve. I'm sure that if the answer is supply, you want to just be the demand aggregator with the most supply. What does that feel like? Like, what does the state of AVs feel like to you?

• 24:42Speaker 02

  It's very early, but it's moving very fast. So we've got over 30 partnerships now with incredible partners like A Waymo, to a Neuro and Lucid, to an Nvidia that is building not just compute and sensors, but also a software driver now to companies like Wabi and Wave, WeRides of the world, Pony AIs of the world. Just like you're seeing in the foundation model space, there isn't going to be a single winner. There are going to be many players in the foundation models. There'll be open source models as well. We're seeing the same kind of acceleration in the development of Baby. And as a result, we want to be your go-to-market solution for companies that are building out these digital drivers.

• 25:26Speaker 02

  What we're allowing these companies is to really focus on building the driver. We are building services around them. We're going on a securing depots and charging in cities in which we see kind of the regulatory landscape moving in the right way. We're working with fleet partners. We're securing financing. We just announced a billion-dollar financing line with Santander for EV fleets and AV fleets. We're working on autonomous insurance as well. So we're building the entire ecosystem. So someone who builds a driver can get those cars in the road. And then we have all the supporting infrastructure. We are collecting data as we speak in the streets that we can feed to the model. And then when they hit markets, we've got instant demand for them.

• 26:11Speaker 02

  And what we're seeing is consumers love the product. And AVs that are on our network are 30% or more busy than, let's say, 1P AVs who aren't using our network. That 30% in terms of trips per vehicle per day, in terms of revenue per vehicle per day, can make a huge difference in terms of your ROI of investing in these expensive cars.

• 26:33Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  What has surprised you most so far about the product of AVs? Like, you get to see all this interesting, the 30% thing makes me wonder about this question. What is interesting to you about the nature of the product and the physical cars themselves and the consumer experience versus the more traditional experience?

• 26:50Speaker 02

  So the one thing that is surprising in a different way is how quickly Magic turns to normal. When I first experienced Uber, it was in New York City. I was at Expedia, I'm like, oh my God, this thing is absolutely magical. Push a button and a car shows up in five minutes.

• 27:08Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I say, you're like, where's my damn car?

• 27:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. You're like, it was six and a half minutes. I can't believe that. How dare they? And with AVs, you get in them and it's magical. Cars are nice. There's a sense of privacy, peace. You play your own music. And for the first two minutes, you're like, oh my God, this is amazing. Look at what's happening. Minute three, here you are, doing the same thing. So I think what's incredible is what's magical now is going to seem normal to all of us 10 years from now. And then it's about getting you from point A to B safely, efficiently, affordably. We want to make sure that these AVs aren't just available for rich people in the middle of cities. We want to make sure that they're available everywhere. But I think this technology, the speed to market is going to be fast and the interactions are going to normalize faster than you think.

• 27:54Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I'm so interested by the whole like build, partner, buy decision that I'm sure you're making a million ways every day. You've got these advantages. You've got all this capital, all this free cash that you can allocate, all this infrastructure and of course, the demand aggregation that you've already built, which are huge advantages for creating liquidity, et cetera. How do you think about partnering with companies like a Waymo or something that you could certainly see being a competitor in part of what you do? If they get a big enough network and the service is good enough, you know, people are always going to buy for huge markets. What is that like navigating in that specific example or in general right now with AVs? Partnership versus having your own fleet?

• 28:28Speaker 02

  It's a coexistence that frankly, I'm quite used to coming from the travel business. If you think about OTAs, these online travel agents, they compete with a Marriott, they compete with a Delta for the consumer, they compete with a independent hotel as well, all of whom are building a direct channel for the consumer, many of whom have loyalty programs. But at the same time, they want incremental consumers coming from the platforms because they have a big box to fill and they want to drive as much utilization of that box as possible. And the returns for a hotel that has 70% of its rooms filled versus 90%, it's nine in. Day, you will take the ninety percent every single day. The same is true, for example, in Uber Eats.

• 29:11Speaker 02

  It's we work with McDonald's, we work with Starbucks, we work with Chipotle. All of these companies, to some extent, also compete with Uber Eats as well. And the same will be true of a subset of AVs, which is a Waymo. Of course, they want to build their own brand and their own channel. But at the same time, we are able to drive more utilization for them. When their cars are on our network, the same will be true of Zooks. The same will be true of Neuro, et cetera. So we're going to have some players. For example, a wave who's focused on building one end to end model that they license to OEMs. And we will be responsible essentially for all the demand.

• 29:53Speaker 02

  So there are going to be lots of bottles, but I don't think it's going to be black or white, which is, do we only compete or do we only work together? We think there's going to be an amalgamation of business models. There already is in travel, there already is in food. Same thing will happen in transportation.

• 30:08Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  What's your pre-mortem for this going wrong? If it's five years from now and Uber has screwed up this opportunity, what do you think the most likely reason for it is?

• 30:15Speaker 02

  I don't think it's necessarily Uber thing. A big question for the industry. You've seen how powerful AI is, but at the same time, how unpopular it is with the general public. And folks like you and me in the corporate world, we're just amazed that we're driving utilization. The way that these AI models interact with the average person is, yeah, search got a little bit better. But if it's driving up or I think it's going to drive up my electricity costs or if it's going to cost my cousin's job, that doesn't feel that good. And I think the same will be true of AVs, which is it's terrific technology. It is going to be safer than human beings. But how does it interact with emergency service providers?

• 30:59Speaker 02

  How do we make sure that the technology is available to everybody, not just the wealthy? We've got to have these dialogues with regulators, with real people living in cities, with our drivers, whose earnings may get affected. Now, drivers in Austin and Atlanta where we Have two big partnerships with Waymo. Drivers on the Uber platform, they're making more money. The number of drivers joining the platform is increasing because it looks like AVs are actually adding incremental demands of the platform. So we have good news early, but we've got to communicate and we've got to go at the pace that society is prepared for us to move. Otherwise, there will be a backlash and you're kind of seeing in some of the public perception out there.

• 31:42Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I'm sure your answer is something like, not on my watch, but if I were to assume that the public out of your control thing is solved. Can you imagine what the same pre-mortem answer would be through something that you do control?

• 31:54Speaker 02

  I think it's what I said, access to supply. And that's why we have a partnership with basically every AV provider, whether it's in mobility or delivery or even freight. We need access to supply and we're investing time, we're investing capital. And I think we're in a great position to make sure that we are the largest amalgamator of AV supply. Just like we are the largest amalgamator of transportation services around the world.

• 32:20Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  We now assume that the success scenario where Uber is the clear demand aggregator winner of AVs. What does that unlock, do you think, on the other side of that? Whether that's consumer experiences or other things that aren't currently possible.

• 32:33Speaker 02

  We think it's another trillion dollar marketplace. We think that over a long period of time, as we see the cost of AV software come down. And usually we see the cost of hardware come down. This is universal, but usually 30 to 40% per generation. We think the Lucid midsize that they are building for us and neuro together, it'll be $60,000, $70,000 car. At those kinds of prices, you can actually bring the cost of transportation down for the population. And what we see is as we bring the cost of our services down, demand goes up. Uber was introduced early on. People were sizing the market based on the taxi market. We're multiple times bigger than the taxi market. And I see the same potential with AV,

• 33:18Speaker 02

  both in terms of the cost of transportation, reliability, safety, all of which are going to improve. And then think about delivery. If delivery is done with a drone and instead of a 25 minute to 30 minute delivery, you get habituated. The magic is a 10 to 15 minute delivery. Cheaper, faster, better. It will change how society operates.

• 33:43Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Do you think there should be some sort of Foxconn-like business for AVs? The stat I heard in San Francisco, someone asked me the quiz question of, how many Waymos do you think are driving around? And I overestimated it by some crazy percentage. I was really surprised by that. And so it seems like you can be hyper-efficient with these things, which is cool. But the downside of that is maybe you can't hit your amount of production to get this cost down and all this sort of thing. Should there be a Foxconn contract manufacturer type thing for AVs?

• 34:09Speaker 02

  It's happening as we speak. Any of the OEMs, the traditional OEMs that we're talking to, are now seeing that L4 driving is absolutely a reality that is much closer than they think. And in seeing the services and how popular they are with consumers, they are investing in L4-ready systems. So I think you'll see the traditional players get there over the next two to four years. Right now, the cars are being manufactured in the hundreds and the thousands. It'll get to the tens of thousands. It'll get to the hundreds of thousands. Each of these vehicles probably drives three to four times what a human does. So the efficiency and efficacy of one AV vehicle

• 34:51Speaker 02

  is substantially higher than a human based on how much humans drive as well. And then we are seeing newer generation companies coming in. All the Foxcons now. The Foxcons exist in China. The Chinese players in terms of their capabilities and bill of materials is incredibly, incredibly impressive. And we need that kind of a low-cost player in the Western Hemisphere. It's being worked on, but we're not there yet. The Chinese capabilities. In terms of manufacturing, both in terms of quality and cost at this point is unrivaled.

• 35:24Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Can you teach me about drones? I'll never forget that Amazon video from like 10 years ago, where it feels like, oh, my God, the future is happening. It's coming. My drone is going to be my sandwich in five minutes or whatever, and no drone has yet to show up at my house. What's the story with the technology? I've watched ZipLine very closely. I think that's a really interesting company. It seems obvious, and yet it hasn't happened. And I'm curious if you could teach us why that is.

• 35:47Speaker 02

  The biggest issue is battery density and the ability of essentially battery to lift itself and then lift the payload and what that payload looks like. And then the requisite range and recharging needs of those drones as well. Jobia is building drones for people. That's happening. And I think drones for food and other grocery are going to start hitting real scale over the next two to five years. It is going to cost more than a human delivery to start with. But the ramp of the technology in terms of payloads being larger, in terms of being able to operate in whatever weather there is,

• 36:27Speaker 02

  and then being able to very, very accurately get you a payload right in front of your house, all of it is moving in the right direction. So is it going to be a big part of our lives two years from now? No. But five to 10 years from now, it's going to become more and more normal.

• 36:42Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I'm always really interested in the regional differences as well. I'm curious what you've learned watching AVs start to happen in the US versus Europe versus the Mideast and anywhere else that you've had the experience. What is regional differences teaching you?

• 36:53Speaker 02

  Middle East is going fast. So the Middle East, especially if you look at Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Saudi Arabia, they are on it. The regulators are very entrepreneurial. They want to lean into new technology. So you're going to see those services. They are happening today. No vehicle operators in Abu Dhabi, Dubai. The US is certainly happening, the Californias of the world, Texas's of the world. But we want to make sure kind of the right discussions are happening at a regulatory level. It's going to take longer in New York. It's going to take longer in a Boston, for example. And Europe is starting to have. Happen. We are starting commercial robot taxi in Europe, and I think we will have pilots,

• 37:34Speaker 02

  for example, in London before the end of the year. So Europe is starting to recognize that they can't be left behind. European OEMs certainly are a huge player in terms of manufacturing capability and employment in Europe as well. So Europe is catching up.

• 37:50Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Another interesting like US versus international story with Uber has been as you've gone international with Uber Eats specifically.

• 37:56Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 37:56Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  You've actually won or gotten to the number one position more often. I'm curious what the US experience in that category has taught you that's impacted how you approach strategy when going to an international market.

• 38:09Speaker 02

  The basics are the same. You've got to get selection right. You've got to sign up your merchants. And when I look at the serviceable, addressable market in the cities in which we operate, probably signed up around forty to fifty percent of the restaurants and or merchants that can be on our platform. So it's about getting a selection and then making sure that you've got the right reliability. Every time when you order something, we get it right. We don't make mistakes. We deliver it to you within thirty minutes. And for us, our magic sauce is cross-platform. We started with mobility and we are now able to increasingly upsell the mobility customer, the delivery product, whether or not they want to use it on Uber Eats.

• 38:51Speaker 02

  Or they actually, when you open your mobility app now on Uber, you're going to see eats right there. And about thirteen percent of eats bookings are actually coming from the mobility business. In larger international markets and the US, you've got to get the basics right. But the platform for us is a structural advantage we have versus other model line players. We get a bunch of free customers from our mobility business. And then we have an Uber One membership program, fifty million members now, growing fifty percent year on year. Every company has a membership program, but the way I look at it is we're kind of like Netflix. For the same price, you get more content than anyone else. You get discounts on mobility, you get search protection, you get free delivery, you get no fees on groceries $60 or more.

• 39:36Speaker 02

  Now you're getting 10% back on your hotel. So if we can build this loyalty program that is just bigger than anyone else's, and we have this cross-platform magic, we think we can get to the number one position and at the same time have higher margins than our competitors. And we're proving it out in market after market after market.

• 39:56Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  So much of the story is being good at getting the supply. What does excellence look like there? What makes the best parts of Uber that do this the best? What makes them stand out? What is the key to being great at aggregating supply?

• 40:08Speaker 02

  I think honestly, we're okay at it. I think we can get a lot better at it. I think one is I want to get more of our team members to put themselves in the shoes of our suppliers, to drive more, to go stand behind the counter of a restaurant. All of our employees are crazy users of Uber Eats and Uber Rides, but we don't put ourselves in the shoes of our merchants. After COVID, partially because I was going freaking crazy at home, but partially because I wanted to understand, well, what does a driver courier experience feel like? I bought an e-bike and started delivering food in San Francisco. And our drivers and couriers and merchants are on our platform much longer than the typical consumer.

• 40:53Speaker 02

  Typical consumer, you're in, you're out, maybe use us once a day, twice a day, hopefully three times a day. But the interaction is like a 30-second interaction. A driver will have our app open six hours, eight hours, 10 hours a day. And as a result, the premium that we have to put on quality, making sure everything goes right. Like a P95 bug happened to consumers once a month, maybe for a loyal consumer. A P95 bug is happening every single week for a driver who's on the app six hours a day. We are getting much better. We've got to put ourselves in the shoes of our merchant partners, of our delivery partners. I learned so much delivering food those couple of years in San Francisco, driving people in my Tesla in San Francisco.

• 41:37Speaker 02

  I think that's what it takes to be a better builder and be better at amalgamating supply, so to speak. We have a value at our company, which is building with heart. I'm an engineer at heart. I'm very numerical in how I look at things. But there's a craft to building. There's a humanity in our service and we have to make sure that we keep building with heart and I think we can get better there.

• 42:01Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  What surprised you most when you were doing the deliveries, all that experience?

• 42:04Speaker 02

  How hard it was. Going into the restaurant, figuring out where to pick up, making sure that you got your orders right. About 50% of our orders are batched. So actually you pick up two deliveries, sometimes at the same restaurant or another restaurant. And just making sure that you get everything right. There's a reason why things go wrong in the real world. There's a lot to process for couriers, for drivers, and then you have to deal with real world traffic as well. So just all of the things that you have to process for a consumer. You push a button, car shows up, you push a button, your food shows up. It's all easy, but for that driver and courier, there's a lot more going on and processing everything can be a challenge.

• 42:41Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  The thing that you said is interesting is the membership concept, 50 million people. It feels like this is the feature every big business with lots of people on it would want. And some of them have been great stories in business history, Costco and Amazon. What does each side get out of a great membership program? And how much do you have to tweak and design that thing versus it being kind of straightforward of what people want?

• 43:01Speaker 02

  We've been at it for a while. The ideal membership program is one where essentially you have a fixed cost base. So a Netflix is investing a certain amount in programming. And the cost of selling a membership is customer acquisition. And there is no cost for the services that you render. There's no variable cost for the services you render. The benefits of membership programs, travel membership programs are often Upgrades the rooms that were empty anyway, or upgrades the seats that were empty anyway. So those membership programs are ideal, and that's why membership started in the travel business and entertainment, for example, as well. Cable is a membership program, if you want to call it that.

• 43:44Speaker 02

  It becomes much more challenging if the cost to serve is a variable cost. And I think Amazon is the first one that took that on, which is the cost of an Amazon Prime membership is higher the more you use that membership. And Amazon was able to walk through this valley of despair as many people in the public markets didn't understand what it was doing, and the losses kept increasing. But they understood the unit economics of membership, and they stuck with it, and they were able to brave through those early days. And I took a lot of inspiration from that example in the early days of Uber One. And when we acquire a member, you're less profitable. We're essentially trading. We're making a prediction, which is you're going to spend more on our platform,

• 44:27Speaker 02

  even though your first transaction, second transaction, third transaction is going to be much less profitable because we're giving you back a bunch of money. Over the lifetime, you will be more profitable, and we're seeing that. So the membership program took some time to get up to speed. It is solidly profitable now, but the first year of membership is the year where we lose money on you, but we're going to make money on you two, three, four years from now.

• 44:49Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  The next leg of hooking this platform up to the entire world is hotels. It's so interesting that you've gone full circle. Walk us through the decision logic here. I have a question behind the question, which is how you decide to do these big things in the first place? We started the conversation with, we used to have this bets board at Spotify. There's all these different ways that capital allocators decide what to bet on. I'd like to talk about that strategy as well. But starting with hotels, why do it in the first place? What was your thinking?

• 45:15Speaker 02

  We tend to be pretty data oriented. And what we've seen, and it's relatively obvious, is that people who travel a lot tend to use Uber a lot. We're available in over 70 countries. What's the first thing that you do when you land at an airport often? Is you open up your Uber app. Just last year, we completed one and a half billion trips for people outside of their home city. About 15% of our Trips are to and from airports. So we can identify travelers. It was a use case that was a headline use case. And we started thinking to ourselves, hey, what more can we do for the travelers? And what differentiates Uber from some of the other places? Again, it's not just about the booking experience, but it's about delivering that experience in a reliable way in the real world.

• 45:59Speaker 02

  We also go much deeper into the fulfillment stack than that's a the typical online travel agent. We decided, as you're able to target more, et cetera, let's look at other travel products. We started with trains. We've launched it in the UK and Spain. And we saw the same thing that we see over and over again, which is the more you interact with our platform, the more services you have, the more you interact with those services, the more you come back. So more content meant more retention. And so we said, well, what content can we find in travel? It was very natural for us to go into hotels. It's a high value decision that you're making. We went out there, talked to the various travel companies to make sure that we had the best supply in the business.

• 46:41Speaker 02

  And we happened to make a deal with Expedia, my old company. And we're essentially giving the vast majority of the economics of that deal back to Uber One members. The design spec of hotels is, again, how can I make sure that as a person, your life is more deeply integrated with our services? 10% off hotels, 20% off, 10,000 hotels. That's a great deal that you're not going to find elsewhere. And it's another reason for you to join Uber One.

• 47:09Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  What's the idealized end state of that part of your business? Five years hence or 10 years hence?

• 47:13Speaker 02

  For me, the idealized end state is obviously we want to bring a lot of value to you as it relates to the booking experience. But I want the value to carry into the market. You book a hotel in San Francisco. We go through your email if you open up for us and we already collect your information on your flight. We pre-book an Uber to the airport. We pre-book an Uber from the airport to your hotel because we already know where you're staying. And ideally, when you get to the hotel, we know you're approaching the hotel. Either we give the front desk a heads up that you're going to be there. Patrick is going to be there. Be there and know you, or we allow you to completely bypass the front desk, go to your room, maybe you can use your Uber app as a key.

• 47:55Speaker 02

  I want to bring some in-market magic to you as part of your travel experience. We're already part of your experience in city. The richer we can make that experience, the better. We're starting with a booking, we've got to start someplace. But that's the Uber magic I want to bring to you.

• 48:10Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  The same pre-mortem question, which was if this doesn't work, why would that be the case? It would have to go wrong.

• 48:15Speaker 02

  I'd say two things. One is we have debated in the past whether or not people's interaction models with their service can change from on-demand to planned. People get very wed, like our brand has always been known as on-demand. Push a button, get a car, push a button, get your delivery. There was a question mark, could we go from on-demand to planned? And we started moving in that direction with actually Uber Reserve. In the olden days, Uber Reserve, actually, we allowed you to reserve a car, but it was kind of a on-demand dispatch to try to get you that car when you expected it to be there. We have changed the backend to really drive reliability 99%. So we're pre-booking with the driver, the driver accepts,

• 48:58Speaker 02

  make sure the driver is there before Reserve, et cetera. And Reserve now is over $5 billion run rate. It didn't exist five, six years ago. If we gave a tangible benefit, in this case, higher reliability for higher price, clearly we were able to move both demand and supply. Drivers won't pre-commit to your trip. So that gave us the opening to say, wow, this pre-commit thing is another angle that we can explore and travel became natural for us. So I think the question is, is reserving your ride just fundamentally different from thinking about your vacation two or three months from now? Can we stretch that pre-commit and can we stretch your brand in that temporal direction?

• 49:43Speaker 02

  I think it's an open question. I think we can. We're giving you great deals to make that plan on Uber, but it's not a slam dunk.

• 49:50Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  What have you learned about marketing excellence? Two sources of the question, one is just marketing Uber in general. But the second is, as you do more and more stuff. Making sure that even your customers know that it exists.

• 50:02Speaker 02

  It's such a frustration.

• 50:04Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I didn't know that this was a thing that existed. So it's an interesting question about how you do both the brand, staying top of everyone's mind, but also the very tactical, specific, we have this cool new thing now that you should try.

• 50:15Speaker 02

  Totally. The surface that we have on this phone is very limited. And I've changed my mind on this. Originally, I had the hypothesis, which is the marketing team's job is to get as many people onto the apps as possible. And then it's a product team's job to surface the right product to you at the right time. And a small example of that is with Reserve, now we offer the ability for you to order hot coffee. And the driver goes out and picks up the coffee wherever. And then it's kind of cool. You have a cup of coffee if you're on the way to the airport. The goal isn't to get you coffee on that ride. The goal is to make you understand that you can get coffee on Uber and/or other stuff.

• 50:59Speaker 02

  It's not about the ride. It's about the lifetime value, the interaction, the introduction of a new service. Not in a way that feels like an upsell to you, but feels delightful. This is really cool. Uber knows me. Why not do more with them? All of the different interactions that you can drive on the app. I have always been much more product led. Let's build this from a product led standpoint. And the job of marketing is just to get people to the app. But my marketing team, who told me I was an idiot, and I loved it. They are building out storylines. Uber teens, getting your kid from their game home and the human interaction of when your kid comes home, either if they did well in that game or not well in that game. There are very human stories that are part of Uber in every way.

• 51:44Speaker 02

  Our marketing team are telling the stories about teens, about a reserve, about grocery delivery and the convenience then. And those stories are helping people realize that Uber isn't just about getting a ride. It's about giving you your time back across a broad array of services on a local basis.

• 52:04Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  What do you think is more likely in seven years? Did I do that, whatever the next great version of that coffee thing is? Or did I just type into my Uber text, I want a car at this time and I want a coffee?

• 52:14Speaker 02

  I think you'll be talking to Uber, right?

• 52:15Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Have apps in seven years?

• 52:16Speaker 02

  I think you're going to have apps because there are many circumstances where. The communication back to you is much more efficient in the written word or in pictures. It's not compelling, say, your Uber is six minutes away, seeing the picture and being able to track the car. So I think the inbound interaction is going to move more and more away from apps. I think people are going to use apps, but the inbound interaction is going to be much more unstructured. And AI makes it possible. You historically built UIs for a specific interaction based on optimizing for the overall average. Our booking experience on Uber, it may not be optimized to you exactly, but it's optimized to overall averages through lots of iteration, lots of testing. And there's only one way in. Now, we're going to personalize it.

• 53:00Speaker 02

  So when you land in a city, Uber is going to be different for you than when you're going to work. But the interaction that agents are going to make possible through AI and through words are going to be incredible. Thinking about the people that have influenced you the most, what did you learn from Barry Diller? He's incredible. He's been my business mentor and in many ways a personal mentor as well. I'd say that the thing that I learned from Barry is the value of getting the truth from the source material. The way that I first met Barry, I was a analyst at Allen and Company working on the LBO model for Paramount. There was a hostile tender offer, Viacom and Paramount. I was building out the LBO model, right? Yeah, exactly.

• 53:42Speaker 02

  And Barry didn't want to talk to the MD or the VP or the associate. He's like, who built the model? I'm going to talk to that guy because if I'm going to raise billions of dollars in debt, I want to know I'm good for it. And I just remember I was like sweating. I was so nervous. I'm like trying to print out this model and I took him through it. And he wanted to hear straight from the source. And every time I've witnessed them and I worked for him for 20 plus years, it's the filtering that gets the edge out of the story or out of the situation. And it's often the edge that gives you an edge. Not the average. Everyone is going to have the same reaction to the average. It's what's that 20%? What's that P95 situation?

• 54:25Speaker 02

  So Barry always insisted on going to the source, getting unfiltered data. It was sometimes unpleasant. It took more time. But getting to the ground truth would help his decision making and would allow him to give that edge to kind of. Go against the grain. And I've taken that with me. I've seen in larger companies, most people who run companies, they're smart, they're capable, they're driven. And the failure most that I see with most companies is that the higher up your organization, often you get a very thin layer of what's going on. Yeah, and everything has been processed for you. Like my schedule today, it's determined by a bunch of well-meaning people who want to give me the best information and have me

• 55:09Speaker 02

  use my time in the best way. But it's processed. And so it's very important for you to cut through that process sometimes and get to that ground truth. You've got to create some randomness in your interactions and your information flow. And Barry, often painfully, drove to that source. And it's always for me been a very, very important part of how I manage, which is the best way to get to the truth is first of all, as a leader, tell the truth. I'm brutally frank with my team. What's going on? What's a good? What's a bad? What's okay? Where do I not know the answers? And that helps me then get that truth back from them. Sometimes requires me to dig, and that can be unpleasant, both for me and the team.

• 55:52Speaker 02

  But getting to the ground truth, I think, is something that I learned from Barry. And it's always stuck with me.

• 55:57Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  What did you learn from the Allens? Both the second and the third?

• 56:00Speaker 02

  Herbert Allen, very, very early on, he always told me that he makes bets on people, not companies. And you see that with Allens. Like, they're so loyal. They build friendships and then they stay with those friendships. And Herbert always told me, companies can do well during periods, or companies can do poorly during periods, but great people always stay great. And I'm gonna make a bet on people. And I'm like 20-something. I'm like, yes, sir, Mr. Allen. It's a great learning that has kind of soaked into me 30 years too late. Regardless of the circumstance, I made a bet on Barry. I was going to stay at Allen and Company for all my life, but he was the one guy that I told myself, if I have an opportunity to work with that one person, and it was nuts. My salary was gone. I went through this, but completely entrepreneurial, new entity that he was building.

• 56:45Speaker 02

  But I'd bet on a person. And in my life, my bets on people and those personal bets are probably the best ones I made.

• 56:53Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Daniel Ek has this thing that he's famous for, which is that he would go shadow, I think he might still do it, go shadow CEOs of companies for long periods of time and watch how they operate and work. So if I were to go ask the same question I'm asking you about Barry and the Allens, but ask the question about you, what do you think if I were to shadow you for a couple of weeks, I would take away from how you prosecute your life? What do you think the ingredients that I could take away for my own recipe? What do you think I'd write it down?

• 57:19Speaker 02

  I think number one is the transparency that I talked about. I want the truth from everybody and I tell the truth. I'm very, very open to the company, whatever level that I talk to. I have a lot of fun working with our product leads and engineers. That is the best part of my job. The last that I say is you see a lot of random interactions. I don't want to have too structured a day. I don't want to meet with just my direct reports. I build out random interactions within the company so that I get that information as well. There's a saying that I say like, I look for the troublemakers in the company. As companies get larger, there's always this incentive for people to get along. You have a single culture. Everyone is true to the culture of the company.

• 58:03Speaker 02

  There are processes that get built. There are certain ways of interacting and certainly the troublemakers often get chased away. I want to find those troublemakers and I want to bring them in because every company is like an organism. Organisms evolve by mutating and companies that don't mutate, that just sit and with a single process, with a single information flow, those are the companies that die. So I'm looking for those mutations. I'm looking for those troublemakers constantly and that requires random interactions that are less efficient than the structured processes that have been put in front of me. But it's those random interactions that often give me the best signal that sometimes I may not act on it, but I'll take it in. At some point, if the signal becomes strong enough, I'll move.

• 58:47Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  That's a cool idea that the troublemakers are the mutations.

• 58:50Speaker 02

  Companies need to change. And by the way, with AI now, the rate of change inside companies in terms of how information flows, in terms of how we work every single day, the rate of change has accelerated by 5X and it's the companies that are comfortable with that change, that are going to adapt to this new reality. And the companies that are like, hey, we do things a certain way, they're going to have a hard time.

• 59:14Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  One of my favorite charts from this era of business has been the time series of CapEx of the big technology companies, where it all looks like this, except for Apple, that just looks like this. They basically haven't changed. They've decided not to play the specific game. And the debate around Uber early on was like, will these guys ever make any money? They're losing money on all these rides, blah, blah, blah. Now you've got $10 billion plus free cash flow. So you're a capital allocator and you have to make a decision of what to do with this money in this high rate of change environment. How do you prosecute that decision? You've done big buybacks. You've authorized really big buybacks before, which traditionally have done really good things for shareholder value and things like this through business history. But now you have all of these opportunities to spend money, to expand demand, to get new supply, to use these new technologies.

• 59:58Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  How do you weigh the trade off between old school stuff like buybacks and free cash flow generation and share reduction, things like that? With just, wow, this is the most interesting investing. I guess I'm asking, are you Amazon or are you Apple?

• 1:00:09Speaker 02

  Somewhere between. And I'd say capital allocation, I think is more of an art versus a science. You can read papers on it, but I think you have to use your judgment in real life. And my view is that my priority is first organic investment and growth. Uber Eats, when I joined, was doing under $1 billion in gross bookings. It's over $100 billion now. That took an enormous amount of organic investment. Now the company has cash flow beyond that organic investment. And the math is simple, which is you want to make sure that your costs grow slower than your revenue and good things happen over a long period of time. And I think for me, because I came from banking, I'm very comfortable with the power of compounding.

• 1:00:54Speaker 02

  And so the first thing is you just have to get your core metrics right, starting with the user metrics, get to the financial metrics, make sure your expenses, unless there's a long-term benefit, are growing slower than your revenue, duh. And when it comes to excess capital, today, our priorities are going to be, keep building the services that we're building now, invest in algorithms, invest in more engineers we are hiring, and then really invest in the new realities of. AV, whether it's investments in our partners or it's making commits to tens of thousands of AV vehicles. Those commitments will be financialized. We just announced the deal with Santander, for example, to finance both EVs and AVs.

• 1:01:39Speaker 02

  But we've got to be the ones developing the market. So we are going to make those capital commitments. And the fortunate thing in all this is we've got plenty of cash left over for buybacks. But I prioritize growth. I prioritize innovation over buybacks. If you're building the company right, you'll do both.

• 1:01:59Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  You strike me as a very confident but not cocky person and leader. What, if anything, are you insecure about in the business or as a leader right now?

• 1:02:09Speaker 02

  I'm not insecure, so to speak, but I'm curious. Again, I'll go back to Barry. I found in my life that the more successful you are, the more you tend to talk and the less you tend to listen.

• 1:02:22Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  Totally.

• 1:02:23Speaker 02

  I see executives who they don't want to be talked back to because they view, don't you know who I am? I've got authority and authority doesn't mean that you're right, but so many people do. And Barry's the opposite. If you get into an argument with him and oh my God, it's going to be unpleasant. But you bang it out and at the end of that conversation, minority of time, but sometimes it happens. He realizes he's wrong. He's delighted. He lights up because he just learned. What kind of a world is an interesting world if you're right all the time? The magic happens when you learn. So for me, it's not that I'm not confident. I'm confident. I'm comfortable in my own skin, but I'm a learning creature.

• 1:03:03Speaker 02

  And for me, the delight comes from learning and often that learning has to come with pain and the pain of being wrong. The pain of hearing something that you don't want to hear, the pain of something unexpected happening today or tomorrow or the next day. That's what gets me going. And if I'm not wrong, if I'm not making mistakes, it's just not very interesting.

• 1:03:22Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I've loved the Barry story so much. Is there anyone else that comes to mind as someone that's just heavily influenced your way of thinking or behaving?

• 1:03:30Speaker 02

  I'm a bit of a student of business, came from my investment. Some banking background. I just love how companies shape themselves. But I'd say one CEO who I really admire is Reid, who built Netflix into the company that it is. He is so logical. I think I watched him talking with you a while ago. He is so logical and structured in his thinking. But at the same time, he's an engineer, but then once in a while, he's a gambler. And some of those don't work. Like he was talking about some of the gambles that didn't work. So I find that there's a superpower in being structured in your thinking, but then not too structured in that you're always going with a flow. To be able to, again, listen to the troublemakers and have those wild ideas

• 1:04:16Speaker 02

  outside of the conventional wisdom, those two often go together. You need a crazy scientist to do so. Reid is anything but a crazy scientist, but he has innovated in a very structured, deliberate way. And I love what he did with his company and as a person, I just love how he thinks.

• 1:04:32Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  So you're a student of businesses and I think Uber is just one of the most interesting business stories. By all accounts, the way that Travis willed this thing into existence.

• 1:04:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, amazing.

• 1:04:41Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  As just like a break down walls entrepreneur. And then the way that you've matured it into this behemoth of a business and all these exciting new things. It's so cool to hear about firsthand. I love doing this with you. When I have these conversations, I ask everyone the same traditional closing question. What is the kindest thing that someone's done for you?

• 1:04:57Speaker 02

  I guess it's Sid, my wife, taking me in. We talked about my origin, where I came from and having a chip on the shoulder. And until I met her, I was always living the life that I thought I was supposed to. And I was always the person who I thought you wanted me to be. When I met her and observed her, she was always the same person with me, with the kids, with her friends, or the Sun Valley Conference, where there are like these unbelievably accomplished billionaires around. She was always the same core person. She never changed who she was. And meeting her and seeing her operate, I think finally allowed me to be the person I want to be versus the person I thought I was supposed to be.

• 1:05:40Speaker 02

  And that was a gift and a kindness that I could never replace.

• 1:05:44Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  I have a shockingly similar experience with my wife. It's a beautiful place to end. Thanks so much for your time.

• 1:05:49Speaker 02

  You bet.

• 1:05:51Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

  If you enjoyed this episode, visit colossus.com. You'll find every episode of this podcast complete with hand-edited transcripts. You can also subscribe to Colossus, our quarterly print, digital and private audio publication, featuring in-depth profiles of the founders, investors and companies that we admire most. Learn more at colossus.com/subscribe.

• 1:06:30Patrick O'Shaughnessy?

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